Category: Henry IV Part 1

PTS 04/018 It’s Not You … It’s Me

BH christopher sly

The Taming of the Shrew (Induction)

For a while now, it’s been a vague ambition of mine to catalogue, mind map, or in some other way classify Shakespeare’s comedy, both in the comedic plays and elsewhere.  In doing so I AM mindful (for those who know their SF) of the Asimov short, ‘Jokester’ (1956), where finally getting an answer as to why humans laugh results in humour dying forever …

Still, I’m always and increasingly drawing intertextual links between and beyond Shakespeare’s plays, and this is what strikes me about what Arden calls the ‘Induction’ – the Christopher Sly frame.  It’s a cousin, maybe an ancestor, of the Rabelaisean idea of ‘Carnival’ that appears later on in:

Continue reading “PTS 04/018 It’s Not You … It’s Me”

The ‘Sleepy Hollow’ that is Eastcheap

BH Boarshead Eastcheap

I’ve made a small addition to my ‘Thy name?  Thy quality?’ page recently, talking briefly about my choice of the tavern’s name for my site title.  In the course of this I was wonderfully surprised to find …

Continue reading “The ‘Sleepy Hollow’ that is Eastcheap”

Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)

BH Elizabethan Underworld

‘Elizabethan London was livelier, noisier, smellier, probably more dangerous and certainly more colourful than the city we know today.’  

Gamino Salgãdo, The Elizabethan Underworld, (The Folio Society, London: 2006)

Just another Saturday night at The Boar’s Head, Eastcheap?

I needed cheering after going back to school today at the end of the Easter Holidays.  And, look what I collected from the Post Office on the way home …

Continue reading “Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)”

#MYSHX400 (Happy Birthday, Will)

BH MySHX400-OG

So.  I owe the inspiration for this post – wanting to do something to celebrate the birthday – to ohforamuseofire, who herself got the questions from Folger Shakespeare Library project.  I wonder how, if at all, my answers might change over the next few years, as the PonyTail Shakespeare project progresses …

What does Shakespeare mean to you?

Continue reading “#MYSHX400 (Happy Birthday, Will)”

PTS 02/013: The Force is strong in you, young Skywalker

BH anakin
What country, friends, is this?

subtitled:  The Middle Child, and Darth Vader

It seems an eternity since that I fell into this play, full of fears for my adopted country, and so it has been. My views on how work has impacted on my ability to blog over the last month or so probably need to wait until I’m not feeling as ‘wasp stung and impatient’ as Harry Hotspur. Anyway, as we hit the end of this play my fears for England have receded, at least. In fact, I’m struggling to feel fearful at all. I’m a spectator, but a fully engaged one.

Continue reading “PTS 02/013: The Force is strong in you, young Skywalker”

This is my birth-day; as this very day Was Cassius born

BH Ali

And so it is, no fooling …

Coincidentally, WordPress informs me that it’s my 50th post at the Tavern, too.  Double cause for celebration then!

Continue reading “This is my birth-day; as this very day Was Cassius born”

PTS 02/009: England – A Nest of Hollow Bosoms

BH HVI II Eleanor and Margaret
This country ain’t big enough for the two of us … bitch!

 

What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do,

Were all thy children kind and natural!

But see,thy fault France hath in thee found out,

A nest of hollow bosoms.  (CHORUS, Henry V:  II.0.18-21)

Henry VI II:  Act I

It’s a strange thing, patriotism. 

I’ll try to make this the final time I mention how I don’t feel especially patriotic towards England as opposed to Britain, but the beginning of the play causes me to examine my attitudes again.  It probably says something about my pedantic nature that I can’t simply conflate the two.  Or maybe it’s simply the fact that my Welsh girlfriend would probably dump me!  Either way, I suddenly became acutely aware of an inchoate fear for the country.  Ye-e-es, there was some fear for Henry, about to be eaten alive by his Queen like a hapless spider, but the sympathy I felt for Henry as a child effectively evaporated in the white heat of his ineffectuality.  It facilitated of the betrayal of my new Shakespearean heroes, the Talbots, and so isn’t easily forgiven or forgotten.  So it wasn’t what Margaret might or might not do to Henry that worried me.  It was how she might treat England …

Continue reading “PTS 02/009: England – A Nest of Hollow Bosoms”

PTS 01/007: HVI (1) farewell …

bh-hvi-1-david-nordahl
Image:  David Nordahl

I wanted to reflect on the play as a whole, looking back to my ‘Expectations’ back at the end of January.

Good literature is like a magic trick.  It makes you believe you are in a different time and place, and care for characters who are constructs, and react to their (also fictitious) actions as if you were a participant. 

Continue reading “PTS 01/007: HVI (1) farewell …”

PTS01/005: Where’s a night-tripping fairy when you need one?

bh-talbot-in-battleO, that it could be proved

That some night-tripping fair had exchanged

In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,

(KING HENRY IV:  Henry IV 1, I.i.85-87)

Henry VI 1:  Act IV

Talk about someone having ‘greatness thrust upon them’!

O, Henry, Henry, Henry … Continue reading “PTS01/005: Where’s a night-tripping fairy when you need one?”

Exit, pursued by Redditors

bh-all-wrapped-up
Reddit’s not ALWAYS like wearing this to the zoo …

I find it interesting that many students are aghast when I tell them that whilst I don’t do Facebook, I DO spend some time on Reddit.

Usually, it’s the more sensible ones who register the most shock.  It’s not the horror of having someone as old as their dad (increasingly I seem to be older, actually), trying to be ‘down with the kids’ – they seem more worried that I’m entering the big cat enclosure in the zoo wearing one of those outfits that seem to be made entirely of slices of bacon …

Continue reading “Exit, pursued by Redditors”