Reflection post 4

During the course of this assignment marking up the jests has really enhanced my knowledge about the jests. I am now able to connect the jests in a way in which I can comprehend Tarlton’s jokes and stories. The jests have a more natural flow as you read them with an understanding of them rather than just reading it. Having the ability to work in class with my peers was definitely beneficial for me to be able to learn and decide with one another on which words should be tagged and the category in which they were tagged. If I had to work on the entire project by myself I would’ve struggled to identify which specific words to tag and how to categorize them. We were able to decide the tags and categories by taking a class vote by the majority vote of the way the class felt. For example, we needed to decide on what to classify what  a gentlewoman was and the class decided it was a role and its role was categorized as class. Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 9.53.26 PM

I found the role that the people in Tarlton’s jests played to be most helpful when identifying what was going on in the jests. The role of the people helped identify their class occupation and often helped identify whether it was in the court city or country.  This also helped identify certain trends in Tarlton’s jokes. It was apparent that Tarlton was very vulgar and sexual in certain jests and he mixed up his jokes depending on who he was making the jokes towards. The role of a person helped me identify who he was making his jokes too which helped me identify his trends of his jokes. Learning about Tarlton through these markups has revealed to me that he is rather clever and doesn’t really care who he is making fun. He just mixes up his jokes based off of who his audience is. He relates his jokes to the respective social level of the class in ways that they would understand it. Lastly, reading my markups in the digital edition has revealed to me that something that could look so simple can actually be really complicated behind the scenes. Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 10.26.20 PM