Studying a History play? Look for the playwright’s sources …
My Marxist critical inclinations – that a text can’t be read in isolation from the contextual crucible that created it – get pretty much free reign when it comes to teaching Edward II. For the OCR A Level course, my students need to compare Marlowe’s drama to Tennyson‘s monodrama, ‘Maud‘ and, get this, 50% of the mark is context (that’s AO3, troops).
What, exactly, is context? I’d suggest that for both texts, maybe all texts, context is usually a mix of two things:
Jonathan Bate: The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador: London, 2008)
Professor Bate will probably be a familiar face, or voice, to anyone on the ‘Shake-scene’ in the UK. You can hear him participating in Shakespeare-themed episodes of BBC Radio’s ‘In Our Time’, he heads a University of Warwick MOOC on ‘Shakespeare and his World’, and amongst his many written accomplishments, he edited the Arden third edition of Titus Andronicus.
This is such an engaging book. Because ‘you don’t read Shakespeare, he reads you‘, we learn almost as much about Professor Bate as we do about Shakespeare. If you want to know what a modern Shakespeare scholar is like, you could do worse than start here.
Continue reading “[book review] Bate: The Genius of Shakepeare”
What, exactly, is a text?
As the school year commences, for teachers if not students, welcome to the first page of my main copy of Marlowe‘s Edward II. [a]
Why am I showing you this?
Continue reading “Quotation of the Week (#55): 03 September 2018”
Buying books is what we do … sometimes we even read them!
Ouch – where did those six weeks go, then?
I vividly remember sitting in a pub on the last day of term, almost too exhausted to take in the fact that we were finally finished. That seems like about 10 days ago. The rest has passed in a blur of walking (with blisters you wouldn’t believe); sleeping under canvas at every opportunity (I reckon upwards of two weeks); sleeping in general (storing up resources for next term and dealing with the futility of trying not to dream about school); writing resources for school and this blog; reading; and buying books …
The more I admire Juliet, the more protective I get about her …
PTS read-through: Romeo and Juliet, Act II, sc. ii
‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound.’ (II.ii.1) [a]
This is one of the reasons why I avoid teaching R&J at GCSE.
Continue reading “PTS 12/076: Keep Your Snake In Its Cage, Boy …”
An excellent addition to college / uni library shelves. Less sure about your personal collection …
Brinda Charry, The Arden Guide to Renaissance Drama: An Introduction with Primary Sources (Arden Shakespeare) (Bloomsbury Publishing, London: 2017) £18.99 (paperback)
Renaissance plays are among the world’s most valuable literary artifacts. They are also historical documents, ideological statements, philosophical reflections and theatrical scripts.
Brinda Charry has produced a relatively accessible and comprehensive overview of the period and its drama, split into two distinct sections.
Continue reading “Charry: Arden Guide to Renaissance Drama (review)”
I came, I saw, I kissed …
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.
Marlowe didn’t join them; he wanted to beat them, I think …
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.
Continue reading “Quotation of the Week: 20 August 2018 (#54)”
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 …
Continue reading “PTS 12/074: Carry on, Nurse (and Mercutio) …”
Lear and Trump ARE very similar – just not the way you think they are, Mr Carr …
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?
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 