Tag: Books
Christmas 2018 Book Haul
If I asked you, dear reader, to congratulate me on my restraint at October half-term, you might commiserate this time round …
2018: Shakespeare’s Lepidopterist
“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 …
QotW (#62): 03 December 2018
Telling stories ABOUT stories seems to be my stock-in-trade when it comes to teaching Shakespeare.
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]
QotW (#61): 12 November 2018
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 …
QotW (#60): Monday 29 October 2018
Elated, Validated, or just Deflated?
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 …
Half-Term Book Haul
An almost ascetic book haul this time out …
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 …
QotW (#59): 22 October 2018
It’s no wonder we love soliloquy …
Regular visitors know that I teach Richard III and Edward II at A Level – coincidentally, plays which seem to have appeared within months of each other, in or around 1592. Marlowe doesn’t get discussed much in the circles I move in online, and Edward II often feels even more overlooked – so when someone wanted to talk about the differences between Kit and Will on /r/shakespeare (after watching a performance of Tamburlaine), I couldn’t resist diving in. Here’s an edited extract of what I said:
QotW (#58): 15 October 2018
Can we just stop putting ideas in Shakespeare’s head, please?
… just busy.
And increasingly grumpy … when I’ve found no time to blog, other than a single new Golden Dogberry.
Autumn Term is always a log-jam, and my least favourite of the three. I told my better half today that whilst there had been a LOT of time at home and weekends where I was too busy to see her, there wasn’t really any ‘me time’ in there. I haven’t read anything for weeks, and obviously, the blog has suffered. At least our school has finally been inspected now after years of being on ‘DEF-CON2’, and with any luck we won’t see THEM for a while …
Let’s get back to it, shall we?
My Delightful Society
‘I’ll show you mine; you show me yours …’
‘Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.’ William Ewart Gladstone
This post came out of a discussion on Reddit where I asserted that we weren’t seeing enough Shakespeare shelf-porn. SHAKESPORN, in fact. Yup. You heard me. So in the spirit of ‘I’ll show you mine; you show me yours‘, here’s a tour of my Shakespeare bookshelf: MY ‘delightful society‘ …
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 