Your Commonplace Book

Early Modern scholars and artists often collected fragments of things that interested them, ideas, and quotations in journal-like collections called Commonplace Books: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html

see http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2010/04/the-glass-box-and-the-commonplace-book.html

for an explanation of the uses of the Commonplace Book. 

Also, 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

For this class, you will start one of your own. It can be analog (in a journal reserved for the task) or digital (in a blog format so you have some creative freedom), but the idea is to start keeping scraps, bits and pieces of quotations, ideas that others generate, or things that strike you as interesting from this Class on Shakespeare. 

You may wish to start with some thematic interests; your first assignment will be to identify some of the motifs, ideas, or themes you have run across in Shakespeare's work that you find compelling. Then begin collecting text, even drawing things, musing, charting, etc. 

The Commonplace Book will become a record of your hunches, ideas, and theories in this class, and you will use it later to generate critical writing. 

These will be due on Thursday every other week, starting on the 23rd of January.