Will the real Richard III please stand up?
The differences between our screen Shakespeares can be easily as great as those between Thomas More‘s view of him pitched against Sir Horace Walpole in the fascinating book, The Great Debate.
This essay explores how Shakespeare’s script has been interpreted to portray our tragic hero …
‘I’ll show you mine; you show me yours …’
‘Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.’ William Ewart GladstoneThis post came out of a discussion on Reddit where I asserted that we weren’t seeing enough Shakespeare shelf-porn. SHAKESPORN, in fact. Yup. You heard me. So in the spirit of ‘I’ll show you mine; you show me yours‘, here’s a tour of my Shakespeare bookshelf: MY ‘delightful society‘ …
Thankfully, we can’t have a third series of The Hollow Crown, but what about adaptations of the Roman plays?
If there’s one thing my (currently stuttering) Pony Tail Shakespeare read-through project has given me so far, it’s a greater love for the History Plays. Once the project is (eventually) finished, I’m looking forward to reading them again merely for pleasure.
Continue reading “Quotation* of the Week: 13 August 2018 (#53)”
Having fun exploring the role of literature in preserving an unfair system …
Last week finished with me in full theatrical mode, pacing the classroom like a restless, caged predator, declaiming at full volume (and probably decreasingly coherently), on the likely politics of Marlowe and Tennyson. That’ll teach my Y13s to ask for some ideas on Marxist Literary Criticism (AO5, folks), during Period 6 on a Friday …
Nothing compares to WHO?
Today marks two year since Prince died. It’s not that long ago that I confessed that his was one of the very few celebrity deaths that have personally touched me. Step aside, Princess Diana! People have got tired of me saying he was the ‘effing Mozart of his age‘, I think.
This weekend is a busy one – or should be. One of my favourite watering holes, Beerwolf, are hosting a live music tribute on Sunday afternoon, marvellously entitled ‘Prince you’ve been gone‘. I suspect this might put a dent in my Sixth Form marking – sorry, people.
Whilst there’s an argument to be made that Shakespeare himself was a multi-faceted genius, you know me by now: I started thinking about who the Shakespearean ‘Prince’ might be. These were my criteria …
Putting Shakespeare in students’ mouths is often as much fun as feeding a baby – the faces they pull!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act I
Shakespeare’s language lives in the mouth, not the ears or eyes. It needs to be tasted, and one of the advantages of living alone is that I can pace up and down my flat’s lengthy corridor reading tricky lines out loud, or just playing with the inflections of favourites:
I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
I WASTED time and NOW doth time waste me.
I wasted TIME and now doth TIME waste ME.
And so on, like the celebrity skit in the BBC’s Shakespeare400 celebration. You get the picture.
If it needs to be tasted, it also needs, I suppose, to be CHEWED. That’s what we often do in the classroom …
Where is the ‘son-in-law’ material in LLL?
Love’s Labour’s Lost: Act IV
My life has been filled with obsessions, and for reasons too complex to go into here, about twenty-five years ago, one of them was Scottish history. With no knowledge ever completely wasted, it’s contributed to where and who I am today, struggling with this play, and especially to find any kind of empathy with its male characters.
Put simply, if I had a daughter, none of these men would be son-in-law material …
Continue reading “PTS 09/055: The Rough Wooing of the Monstrous Regiment”
Sometimes the smoke is easier to read than others …
Love’s Labour’s Lost – Act III
Inspired by Ursula K Le Guin and The Pet Shop Boys, I picked this up again with a steely glint in my eye. I’ll read. I’ll gloss. I’ll conquer!
Near misses, and fascinating Misses – Luciana’s journey continues …
Ponytail 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 …
Claiming ‘Shakespeare was this or that’, or worse, ‘Shakespeare did not write the plays’, does NOT entitle you to a mic-drop. It just shows your intellectual bankruptcy …
I’ve written elsewhere about the Rally of Revenge – about my unease that once you abandon all faith in ‘due process‘ or ‘justice‘ (either earthly or divine); once you understand that inequality is endemic, you have nothing left to lose – if you are already losing – so keep raising the stakes until someone has to leave the game. If it’s uncomfortable, perhaps it’s also sometimes necessary, to affect change of a fundamentally broken system. You might not see the benefits yourself. Hey, if you have to leave the game, then so be it: losing can become preferable to playing along, eventually.
There are always other games, other paths, whilst we are still alive – experience has taught me that, even if Shakespeare hasn’t.
And that’s where I find myself, professionally, this weekend. Approaching change, but ready for it, and maybe, in some ways, relieved that an unhappy stasis has broken. There are always other games.
There is a third way – for revenge – I’ve not written about before. The poet George Herbert (1593-1633) suggested that:
Living well is the best revenge.
And I’ll embrace and adapt that, in a ‘standing on the shoulders of giants‘ sense.
Living well equals happiness. LAUGHTER is the best revenge.
Today, I intend to laugh at someone. Long, and hard.
Let’s get moving, shall we?
Continue reading “Shakespeare’s Sister says: ‘YOU’RE HISTORY!’ …”
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 