Category: Shakespeare

PTS 13/078: Homophone fun with King John

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image:  History Notes.  The guy on the left is asking the king if he can go to the toilet …

King John, Act I

Having broken out of my Romeo and Juliet-induced enervation, I approached King John with a sense of excitement bolstered by my positive experiences with the Henry VI plays.  Unusually, maybe impatiently, I skipped my Arden’s introduction and got stuck in after finding these hopeful signs elsewhere:

“a neglected play about a flawed king” [a]

and

“King John has all the beauties of language and all the richness of the imagination to relieve the painfulness of the subject.” [b]

So, what did I make of Act I?

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PTS 12/077: Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack Album

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There’s an irony that the PTS read-through project has significantly slowed when dealing with the plays I know best.

Mostly, I think it’s because I’ve had too much to say, and been unable to stick to a post-per-act; a post-per-scene is a killer.

So, at least for the moment, I’m moving on from Romeo and Juliet: there’s plenty of room for future posts if I want to revisit it, but I’m hungry for my next new play.

That leaves one thing to do before I move on, and that’s produce the now-traditional soundtrack album.

The eternal question is, of course: WHAT’S MISSING?  Drop me a line and let me know …

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Christmas 2018 Book Haul

 

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image: Nina Matthews

 

If I asked you, dear reader, to congratulate me on my restraint at October half-term,  you might commiserate this time round …

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2018: Shakespeare’s Lepidopterist

butterfly swarm

“There is differency between a grub and a butterfly;
yet your butterfly was a grub.” (Coriolanus, V, iv [a])

It would be too easy to blame my changed reading habits in 2018 on professional busy-ness, or on my health, but there’s no escaping a startling and depressing fact …

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QotW (#62): 03 December 2018

Telling stories ABOUT stories seems to be my stock-in-trade when it comes to teaching Shakespeare.

10th circe campfire stories

Unusually, I’m going to start with the quotation of the week, from Stephen Greenblatt, rather than work towards it:

Humans cannot live without stories. We surround ourselves with them; we make them up in our sleep; we tell them to our children; we pay to have them told to us. Some of us create them professionally. And a few of us – myself included – spend our entire adult lives trying to understand their beauty, power, and influence. [a]

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QotW (#61): 12 November 2018

BH ken dodd
Ken Dodd (and his infamous tickling stick):  ‘I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law in eighteen months.  I don’t like to interrupt …’

You probably know my taste for puerile humour by now.

This joke (and there are many versions of it knocking around) has been a favourite since before I got married, a good twenty years ago.  You can imagine how well it went down, the first time I used it on my (rather fierce) ex-mother-in-law.  I received what we might call an ‘old-fashioned look’, with added chilli.  Nowadays, poking fun at someone’s verbosity is also self-referential, because, yes, I unashamedly like to talk!  In my defence, it’s because I ‘live’ in 1592.

Which leads me nicely to this week’s QotW …

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We HAVE remembered them …

hedd wynn
Aerial image of Hedd Wynn at Colwyn Bay before the tide rolled in …

Fittingly for the 100th anniversary, today was the most affecting Remembrance event I’ve been to.

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QotW (#60): Monday 29 October 2018

Elated, Validated, or just Deflated?

BH magic eye
image: wiki commons .  Now you see it …

This post forms part two of my Standing on the Shoulders of Giants debate … IS it possible to have an original thought about Shakespeare?

But first, a digression back to the early 1990s …

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Half-Term Book Haul

An almost ascetic book haul this time out …

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Sure, it’s only a week away from school, and I ought to be able to control myself.  Many of you will also have a handle on the state of my bookshelves – I have no space for these, and yet.  Half-terms are an opportunity to catch breath in more ways than one.

Some would suggest I oughtn’t to have bought anything; I like to think of this as a fairly restrained Book Haul, all sourced from the second hand bookshop about 300 yards from ‘her place’.  So, what and why …

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Forensic Friday (#11)

Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it infamy …

BH frankie howerd
Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii (1971): “You’ve seen the ring she had on? Well, allegedly, that was given to her by her fiancé when she was eighteen, and he jilted her, and she hasn’t had it off since!”

Maybe it’s growing up in the 70s, but I enjoy an infantile dirty joke as much, if not more, than the next fellow.  They don’t always work in the plays, or perhaps audiences are now vastly more sophisticated: I can imagine that even the weakest ones would have had them rolling in the aisles at The Globe.

This week, I decided to work my favourite Shakespearean knob-gag … ooh err!

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