Category: Arden Editions

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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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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PTS 08/045: Oh, no it isn’t! Oh, yes it is …

You just can’t tell some people that you wouldn’t HAVE Blackadder without Shakespeare …


Ponytail Shakespeare read-through The Comedy of Errors: Act I scene I

‘Which is it today?’
‘The Comedy of Errors.‘
‘Ugh!’
‘It’s about two sets of twins, separated at birth, who find themselves-‘
‘Stop! Enough!’
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New Books, New Shelves!

 It felt like cheating, it felt like a betrayal, but it also felt like the right thing to do …

BH library laddersWe’re now 66, without my Ardens, and probably need to announce an extension to the library …

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PTS07/044: RIP, Buckers …

Buckingham wants, needs, perhaps even deserves, a lover’s farewell …

BH buckingham executed

This is All Souls’ Day, fellow, is it not?

Why then, all Souls’ Day is my body’s doomsday.  (Richard III – BUCKINGHAM:  V.i.10-11)

 

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To buy, or not to buy …

lego_WS_firestar

Students, people who know me, or indeed regular visitors will know I have a bit of a fetish for Lego …

Just to be clear, I don’t play with it, but I do collect some of the minifigures, photograph them – sometimes for classroom posters, or just because I generally like them.  My Schemes of Work for school, like the one on Conan Doyle‘s The Sign of Four, is full of Lego pics.  I buy plenty of minifigures.

Imagine, though, the situation …

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The Bookshelf just keeps growing …

Books in the vault, Deck C, Folger Shakespeare Library, 9/11/09
image courtesy Folger Library

Soon there won’t be much room for customers at The Boar’s Head.

… although it still isn’t keeping pace with my book buying.  Buying books and reading books operate in entirely different dimensions, as my overflowing bookshelves will tell you.  When I hit 100 books, which isn’t far off, if you include the Arden Third editions of the plays themselves, I may have to employ an orangutan to take the bookshelf into L-space.  (GNU  Sir Terry Pratchett)

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Quote of the Week: 11 September

BS compleatgentleman2_lg

BATE, Jonathan: ‘Introduction’, in Titus Andronicus (The Arden Shakespeare: London, 2003)

Some students see value in Literature as an end in itself.  Others need a bit of persuading about why they have to study poetry, novels, and of course Shakespeare in particular (sigh).

‘What’s Shakespeare got to do with me?  I want to be an air hostess!’

I was asked by a Year 9 pupil a few years ago.  Henry Peacham, via Jonathan Bate, has an answer.

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PTS 06/035: The Rally of Revenge

BH brady-ping-pong-850x478
Titus decides to deploy his ultimate weapon …

Titus Andronicus, Act III

Bear with me on this: I’m an English teacher, and I talk – no think – in similes and metaphors.  “It’s what I do!”, as David Mitchell might say in BBC‘s Upstart Crow.

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‘We’re gonna need a bigger shelf …’

BH library ladders

The Boar’s Head Bookshelf reaches the dizzy heights of 53 volumes today, not including my Arden Third Edition copies of the plays themselves …

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