Category: Shakespeare

PTS 12/075: Veni, Vidi, Basiavi

I came, I saw, I kissed …

High Five Business people
… palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

PTS read-through:  Romeo and Juliet:  Act I sc v

And so we reach that eighteen-line sequence …

These famous passages become a little daunting, because hey, what can you say that hasn’t already been said in the past four-hundred years?  Yet, as an educator, you have to step up to the plate: after all, this is what I encourage, almost demand, my students to do, isn’t it?  We give them something which is one of the foundations upon which our literature and culture is built, and entice them with the promise of better marks for originality.

So here are some personal views on Romeo and Juliet’s meeting, and then I look for something else to say on pieces of this short scene that receive somewhat less attention.

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Quotation of the Week: 20 August 2018 (#54)

Marlowe didn’t join them; he wanted to beat them, I think …

BH marlowe malcontent

Marlowe increasingly seems a malcontent, fringe figure, occupying some very liminal spaces indeed on the shadowy edges of society …

Three weeks ago, I suggested that Marlowe had ‘learned too much at school‘,  contributing to his generally accepted ‘atheism’.  This week’s quote follows that, to consider his attitude to class … it also provides another useful adition to our store of understanding of why EMP writers wrote in the florid (at least to modern ears) style that they did.  Getting to grips with this is, I maintain, key to deciphering the texts.

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PTS 12/074: Carry on, Nurse (and Mercutio) …

BH carry on nurse
I see Queen Mab has been with you …

PTS read-through:  Romeo and Juliet: Act 1, scenes iii and iv

Why is R&J funnier than Love’s Labour’s Lost, or the Comedy of Errors?

Whilst Jonathan Bate tells us that Shakespeare:

borrowed certain techniques of dramatic cross-dressing and comic overhearing from John Lyly [a]

the spine of the comedy here is firmly character-driven, by Juliet’s Nurse and Mercutio. That’s why …
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Crimes Against Shakespeare: 013

Lear and Trump ARE very similar – just not the way you think they are, Mr Carr …

BH Howie_Carr_and_Trump
To cater to the sensitivities of readers, Mr Carr’s erection has been cropped out of this picture …

What is it with Donald Trump supporters?

First Alan Futerfas.  Then Rudy Giuliani.  And now …

Step up to the podium, Mr. Howie Carr.  Radio host, Boston Herald Columnist, and ironically, the author of a book called Kennedy Babylon:  A Century of Scandal and Depravity.  Which I suppose makes him a specialist on Scandal and Depravity, right?  No wonder he is a Trump supporter.

He’s also the man who had this to say about Barack Obama:

‘this country handed everything to Barack Obama. He didn’t have to work for anything. Just because of the color of his skin he was given everything. And he still hates the country.’ [a]

Disgusting racism aside, I seem to remember that Donald Trump was ‘given everything’, and has managed to squander quite a bit of it.  Anyway, you get the picture.  So, what’s Mr Carr done to upset William Shakespeare?

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Quotation* of the Week: 13 August 2018 (#53)

Thankfully, we can’t have a third series of The Hollow Crown, but what about adaptations of the Roman plays?

Great Performances: The Hollow Crown - The Wars of the Roses: Henry VI Part 2

 

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.

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PTS 12/073: A Truth Universally Acknowledged

with apologies to Jane Austen …

BH netherfield ball

… that, perhaps, a single GIRL in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband?

PTS read through:  Romeo and Juliet, Act I, sc ii

Hmmm, what to make of this scene?

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Nicholl: The Reckoning (review)

Our victim was brash, talented, and stabbed just above the eye before his 30th birthday …

BH the reckoning

Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (Vintage:  London, 2002)

– – –

‘I am not trying to argue that Marlowe’s death has to have a meaning.  My reading tends only to a more complex kind of meaninglessness than that of a ‘tavern brawl’.

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QotW: 06 August 2018 (#52)

Gifted, abominable, yet capable of producing ‘the mighty line’ …

BH perfume
Ben Wishaw and Karoline Herfurth in Tom Tykwer‘s 2006 film

It’s episode 52 – not a continuous year (the first post is here), but a year nonetheless, so I’m going to indulge myself a little this week.  Will you be able to tell the difference, I hear you ask!

Bear with me whilst I tell you a story:

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name – in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fouché’s, Bonaparte’s, etc. – has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent. [a]

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Continuum of Plausibility™

‘You will, generally, be rewarded for originality, but the crazier your argument is, the better your reasoning should be’.

Continuum of Plausibility.001

Originally intended as a confidence-builder for the chronically-tentative, it’s become a cliché in my teaching that ‘in English, there’s no such thing as a wrong answer’. Increasingly, though, and especially at A Level, I’m finding it necessary to qualify that empowering notion.  Perhaps students were getting a little too emboldened, as we’ll see below.  Just as Squealer in Animal Farm reminds us that ‘Some animals are more equal than others’, some answers are – obviously – better than others. [a]

Almost organically, as I refined the concept, it came to be known as The Continuum of Plausibility™.  I’ve been using the term here, off and on, for a while now without properly explaining it, so here goes.

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Cultural Capital 07: Tragedy

We loved a fall from grace as much then as we do now …

BH travolta tragedy
For Christ’s sake, can’t you see I’m busy, Ophelia? Get thee to a nunnery!

[this article first appeared in the in-house magazine I edit for our sixth-form English students]

Tragedy!  When the  feeling’s gone and you can’t go on …

It’s not that long ago that I appalled a class by stating that whilst the death of a pet dog might be ‘quite sad’, it definitely wasn’t ‘tragic’. ^

I definitely spend too much time in the late 16th century!

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