Category: Dracula

Brașov your Shakespeare …

BH carpathian-mountains-large-view
It really WAS like this!

(with apologies to Cole Porter.  This is my all-time favourite bit of Shakespearean fan fiction – take a look here to see why …

It turned out that as well as simply bringing along the June 2017 Ponytail text – Two Gentlemen of Verona – I had packed the Complete Works with me for my trip, in my mind, at least. The plays haunted me wherever I went, fighting tooth-and-nail (if you’ll pardon the pun) against the constant impulse to declaim lines from Dracula in my best Bela Lugosi Romanian accent, to make even worse puns than the one I’ve just used, and to call my other half ‘Nadia’ (until she lost patience).

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What country, friends, is this?

BH castle-dracula
The hotel didn’t look like this in the brochure … !

Subtitled:  Vampire hunting in Shakespeare …

Five down, one to go.  The end of the penultimate half-term of the school year brings a sense of giddy euphoria.  And, just for once, I’m actually having a holiday … I’ll be spending next week in Transylvania.  This is the final instalment of a ‘Dracula’ pilgrimage which has seen me move eastwards: from actually being quite scared at the Bram Stoker museum in Dublin; to standing in schoolboyish excitement on the beach at Whitby, on the spot where the Demetr would have grounded, vomiting Dracula onto the shore in the form of a huge black dog; and now to the Carpathians …

Has this got anything to do with Shakespeare?  Shouldn’t I just blog about this somewhere else?

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PTS01/006: Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus

bh-serge-and-jane-terry-oneill
Serge and Jane:  detail from image by Terry O’Neill.  Looking not dissimilar to Suffolk and Margaret, methinks …

Henry VI 1:  Act V

[subtitled: “It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch out for.”]

As I finished the play, it occurred to me that women play a much larger role than I might have guessed back in the heady days of January, when I started seriously thinking about this project.  Perhaps I might refine that to say that French women.

What was/is it about the allure of French women to English men?

Continue reading “PTS01/006: Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus”