Romeo and Juliet Reflection

     In Act 5, Scene 3, Lady Capulet is going through some extreme emotional turmoil. She thinks that her daughter is dead, only to arrive at her tomb and find that she was actually alive, but has now killed herself. She had to experience the death of her child twice, which is an incredibly horrific thing to go through. She is experiencing shock, grief, and pain beyond imagine. Although at the beginning of the play, she is more of a secondary, supporting character, by Act 5, Scene 3, she has developed into an extremely emotionally complex person. I definitely wanted to convey this in my performance of this scene. Although I only had two lines, I did my best to bring out the emotions she was feeling at the time.
          I think overall, my group did a very good job in our performance. I think we were all conscious of making sure to  face the audience. I also know that a lot of us worked on projecting our voices so that everyone could hear what we were saying, because we knew that that had been an issue for some people in the scenes before mine. I think one thing that I could have improved during my performance was my facial expression and composure. I fidgeted a little bit during the scene as well, which was definitely something to fix. In addition, if I could have changed anything, it would be the amount of practice time my group got. We were a pretty large group, so it took a lot of effort (and yelling!) to get everyone quiet and in the same place for long enough to run the scene. Also, the scene was very long, containing a few monologues and lots of lines. This all meant that we got to do very few full run throughs, which would have been extremely helpful in terms of blocking and interactions with other actors.
          I definitely feel like I have learned a lot from Romeo and Juliet. It was a text that challenged me in a brand new way, because it was something I had never been exposed to before. Shakespeare was a new experience for me, and I have been able to take so much away from it as a reader. I have learned to place sentences and lines into context, reread to help me understand, and look up challenging words or references that I may not understand. I used all of these strategies to "decode" the old english used in Romeo and Juliet. I think that those methods will definitely help me in high school ELA, because I now know how to conquer a difficult text, and improve my reading comprehension by using reading strategies to help me better understand the text. All of the acting lessons helped me with visualization, which is also very helpful when trying to understand a scene and interactions between characters. I think Romeo and Juliet was a very important book in terms of preparation for high school english classes.