Category: Shakespeare

Forensic Friday (016): 1 Henry IV, I.ii

celebrate-thumbs-up
Never mind the students – today’s the year’s climax for the TEACHERS!

By the time you read this I will be gone.  Long gone.  And I won’t be back for, ooh, six weeks.  School’s out for summer!

Well, we got no class
And we got no principals
We ain’t got no intelligence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes [a]

I can almost hear Falstaff singing this, not Alice Cooper …

Don’t knock teacher holidays until you have tried the profession for a few years.  You’ll soon realise that half-term weeks are misnomers, and should be labelled ‘admin / sleep’ weeks, and large chunks of the longer holidays are eaten up by marking or planning.  We’re not actually that much better off than other professions when it comes to quality time pretending your job doesn’t exist.

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QotW (#82) Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them

eye of sauron

Consider Frodo Baggins …

As comfortable middle age approaches, he’s broadly minding his own business, apart from the desire to perhaps go on a few more foreign holidays.  Sure, he’s a little eccentric, and keeps a more eclectic circle of friends and acquaintances than many.  But fundamentally a ‘nice, well-spoken gentle-hobbit‘, as Gaffer Gamgee might say.  Looking forward to not much more than another 50-60 years of smoking his pipe on the doorstep of Bag End; hiking through the Shire at night; writing; and keeping out of the way of those dreadful oiks, the Sackville-Bagginses.

Adventures?  No thank you.

All is well, until that meddling magician, Gandalf arrives …

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Three: it’s the magic number …

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image:  The Globe.  Excitement:  it’s all mine!

It’s been a long, hard year, and I need a real treat …

Whilst it’s not all been bad news, Spring Term was dominated by an insidious, invidious, but ultimately innocuous illness that lingered like an unwelcome guest at a party, refusing to take all the hints I could throw at it that it needed to exit stage left.  Summer Term replaced that with a series of professional setbacks and niggles that have led to my heavy-hearted decision to leave a school I always thought I would (eventually) retire at, and where I work daily alongside some of my closest friends.  ‘You do the math‘, as Shakespeare never said.

I’m currently open to offers inside and outside the profession, by the way …

Continue reading “Three: it’s the magic number …”

PTS 015/091: The Man of a Thousand Faces

lon chaney
Lon Chaney jr trailblazes Bilbo Baggins, Sherlock Holmes, Pennywise, and Forrest Gump

1 Henry IV Act I scene ii is, really, all about that devastating soliloquy in which Hal channels Lon Chaney jr.

But before that, I want to have a word about … EXPOSITION.

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Forensic Friday (015): 1 Henry IV: I.i

subtitled:  “don’t shoot the messenger, please …”

Welsh Women Dress
Bronwen and Ffion played it cool whilst Myfanwy reached under the table for her specially sharpened sugar tongs …

Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever,
Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound
That ever yet they heard.  (Macbeth, IV, iii)

It’s a small episode, a tiny mouthful in the gargantuan feast that is 1 Henry IV.

But somehow the sexual disfigurement of the bodies of dead soldiers sticks in my mind, jostling for position amongst the bawdiness and burlesque, the heroics and hubris, the pathos and the pageantry.

It felt like a suitably challenging subject for this instalment of Forensic Friday, as I move away from exam texts for a while …

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QotW (#81): 01 July 2019

legophthalmos
image: legophthalmos

Never mind having a MONTH named after you – you’re nobody, in the grand scheme of things, until you have your own Lego figure …

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[book review] Anna Castle: Murder by Misrule

cover-murder-by-misrule

Subtitled – ‘when Bacon goes bad‘.

Back in those heady green and salad days of my teaching career, I devised a mark-scheme for a favourite class which was, improbably, based on food … Continue reading “[book review] Anna Castle: Murder by Misrule”

QotW (#80): 24 June 2019

happy couple

Honour, riches, marriage-blessing,
Long continuance, and increasing,
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings upon you.

(The Tempest, IV.i)

It wasn’t just Twitter’s #ShakespeareSunday that was focused on love and marriage this weekend … if last week gave me an opportunity to reappraise Father’s Day from different perspectives, then Saturday’s wedding of my eldest has given me something else to think about …

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PTS 015/090: Crusade My Arse

henry iv jeremy irons

1 Henry IV:  Act I, scene i

It’s almost impossible to check in my earlier hostility to Henry Bolinbroke at the door; I take grim satisfaction at the suggestion that he’s ‘shaken’, or ‘wan with care’ as the play opens. [a]  He deserves it.

Not that I believe him …

Actually, looking back, I promised to crucify you (Henry) at the end of Richard II … OK, here goes.

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Forensic Friday 014: 3 Henry VI (III,ii)

skywalker-4

To understand Richard, Duke of Gloucester, you must know him.  Really know him …

And to know him, I think it’s essential we don’t look at his eponymous play in isolation.  Think of it as a season finale.  And like Margaret of Anjou, Richard’s character has been developing towards this climax – in my read-through, I’ve likened his journey to that of Anakin Skywalker from ‘freckled whelp’ to Sith Lord …

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