Another assignment i would give to my students

William Shakespeare's famous poem "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" is regarded as novel for it makes fun of the courtly love tradition in poetry. During the 17th Century virtually every poem followed the courtly love tradition and had a blazon. Here, he makes fun of this by creating a parody. It is still wonderfully written and existing on it's own, is quite romantic, but on another level is mocking and poking fun at the other notable writers of the time. I recently came across something that i mentally linked with what Shakespeare has done. There are a lot of parodies out there, and most are done by professional comedians or for a skit like SNL or Mad TV. But this is an artist, parodying another artist, and i find that supremely interesting. Like Shakespeare, here, Alanis Mourissette, makes fun of how generic hip-hop videos have become, along with making a direct parody of an extremely popular song, "my humps." Click here for the Alanis video(parody), and here for the original black eyed peas song.

ok this is a rough draft, i have no idea where i want to take this, i just got the idea and put it in text. I like the idea but i think i have to provide more parallels between Shakespeare parodying another poet compared to the video parodies. I was going to use Sir Edmund Spencer's "Epithalamion." Look below if you are reading this, that was a great idea for an assignment. I have to get back to Mukherjee's Jasmine.