Month: December 2017

2017: In Bed With Shakespeare

What I read in 2017, what YOU should read in 2018, and what to avoid like, ahem, the Plague …

BH Hathaway bed

Announcing my Ponytail Shakespeare read-through back in January did something to me; maybe several things.

Firstly, it made a public commitment. I’m just a bloke, and a busy one at that, being an English teacher, but I am still following the schedule – albeit several paces behind.

It also made me realise that however confident I might be, there was/is an awful lot I don’t/didn’t know for someone who enjoys being the ‘go-to’ at work for all matters Shakespearean – those ‘known unknowns’ were simultaneously a cause for embarrassment and a spur to do better.

These two ingredients combined to make me jump into bed with Shakespeare in 2017 …

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Quote of the Week: 25 December 2017

In this resolutely non-celebratory Christmas post, would I admit to getting ANYTHING out of it?

Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole ChristmasChristmas seems increasingly meaningless to me.

There, I said it …

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PTS 08/047: Cheats Never Prosper?

Near misses, and fascinating Misses – Luciana’s journey continues …

BH why-do-women-cheatPonytail Shakespeare read-through:  The Comedy of Errors, Act III

We’ll come to the idea that ‘cheats never prosper‘ in a while.  It’s a busy act.

In the meantime, sometimes the margins in comedy and tragedy are very, very fine. Exactly like in real life, actually …

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PTS 08/046: A Tale of Two Sisters

Doormat or A-dor-ably Feisty? Luciana and Adriana swap roles in Act II …

BH Sisters
Who needs a man when you have a sister?  Adriana, that’s who …

Ponytail Shakespeare Read-Through: The Comedy of Errors, Act II

Aha!  A single woman in a Shakespeare comedy – what she needs is a HUSBAND, I thought, my Jane Austen goggles firmly on.  In this, I was egged on by Kent Cartwright, as I mentioned in writing about Act I, and who colluded with Jane and my previously-held assumptions.

And what a catch Luciana appears to be for our unreconstructed EMP man!

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Quote of the Week: 18 December 2017

The more things change, the more they stay the same …

BH neale coverNeale, JE:  Queen Elizabeth I (Pimlico:  London, 1998)

Once again, I’m minded to say that we continue to study EMP Literature because whilst times and technology have undoubtedly moved on, human attitudes and the situations we face remain broadly the same.

Endemic Xenophobia?  Check.

Effemination of rival men who dress too well?  Check.

Aristocratic disdain for ‘upstarts’?  Check.

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ as Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (another foreigner*, dammit!) might say …

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Seventy-Five

So many books. So little time …

BH 75 mugInspired by some course or other on children’s literacy, I’ve been keeping a ‘reading river‘ since January 2013.  It sounded infantile, but I’ve kept to it remarkably more faithfully than logging my reading on Goodreads, or anything else.  It’s become a diary, of sorts, something to idly flick through and recall times, places and people, such as the stay at my parents’ when I devoured all the Earle Stanley Gardener and other Penguin Green Series crime paperbacks I could find on my dad’s shelves in a matter of days.  That year, coincidentally, I read 75 books.

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Quote of the Week: 11 December 2017

We only want to be kings because we don’t fully understand what it involves?

BH Lee_1603Christopher Lee, 1603 (Review:  London, 2003)

Not THAT Christopher Lee, obviously!

In class, we’ve seen it in Edward II and, I think, Richard III.  There are hints of it for my younger students in Macbeth.  But I see it everywhere: in Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI.

 

In Twelfth Night, Malvolio tells us:

“be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em” (II.v)

Quite simply, the message I consistently get from EMP plays is that greatness – in this case being monarch – is never, ever, all it’s cracked up to be …

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Bye bye Britain, Britain bye bye …

The consequences of people feeling there is no legal, peaceful alternative might be grim … Shakespeare shows us that  in Titus and elsewhere.

BH bye bye britain
Thanks to the Bay City Rollers for this classic …

 

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.  (PRINCE HAL:  1 Henry IV. I.ii)

I’d love to ascribe these lines to our leaders, but I reserve them for myself today …

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Yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday …

What’s not to like about spreadsheets? Except they make clumsy timelines …

 

BH nicholson joker

It feels like it needs a little refinement, but the future is here!  And I feel like my friend’s daughter when she spots a park from about half a mile away! PLAYYYYYY!

For some considerable time, I’ve been known as someone who guiltily, geekily enjoys spreadsheets and will create one at the drop of a hat.  I mean, what’s not to like? Especially when I get going on conditional formatting and things like that – you should see my school mark-books!

But there was one area where I felt Excel (or Numbers, actually) was letting me down.

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The ‘Punatomic’ Particle

By 5:15 we were all questioning whether we actually existed …

BH punatomic particle

Like Dante, as the Inferno unfolds, I found myself at a crossroads on St Andrew’s Day, and the way forward was unclear.  I had a little time to kill: I could walk round the block, or dive into a pub.  Within minutes, I was soaking up the warmth in The Bluebell, a decent pub I’ve not been to in several years.

The place was almost deserted.  For the rest of the world, it was that limbo between going home for tea (those who had already been drinking), and going to the pub for a couple after work.  For various reasons, I fell between both those stools.  So it was me, a pint of Titanic‘s Plum Porter, Aidan behind the bar, and Jamie – who had a bus to catch. 

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