QotW (#67): 11 February 2019

“this it is, when men are ruled by women” – or at least by their groins …

Claudius & Gertrude

Although I’m never going to end up on stage, I often compare teaching to acting.

Non-teachers, think for a second: up to six performances a day, with audiences who require subtly different characterisations from you.  (My timetable goes from Y12 to Y7 without interval on a Friday afternoon, for instance).  That plus the teacher persona you can only shrug off when you’re safely indoors (because even walking down the street you end up intervening when you see pupils in uniform mucking about).  To say nothing of the range of people you have to be – in five minute chunks – at Parents’ Evenings …

No wonder I’m perpetually exhausted.

But if I were asked to play a Shakespearean role, what would be my top three choices?

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QotW (#66): 04 February 2019

Tilley Morris PalmerThis week finds me in a sombre, reflective mood.  Maybe it’s the continuation of Dry January (day 35 without alcohol, thanks very much).  There will, mind, be ‘more cakes and (especially) ale‘, at some stage, but not for a few weeks yet.  Apparently, I was ‘more fun’ when I was drinking, so bear with me.

Then, today is my younger son’s birthday: 18 today.  If that doesn’t give a man pause for thought on how time passes and how he has spent his life, I don’t know what will.

Which brings me to Morris Palmer Tilley.  Until recently a footnote in my life, and possibly that or less in yours …

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QotW (ep.65): 28 January 2019

sussex-barn-owl
image:  Hugh Ribbans

This weekend just gone marked the 40th RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch.  As the ‘Upstart Crow‘ (or magpie) himself, I’m sure Shakespeare would have approved …

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QotW (#63): Monday 14 January 2019

king john donald trump
image: Mashable [a]
I mentioned the other day that I was coming into King John blind, apart from the Disney film and a vague notion of the Magna Carta.  The little I am beginning to accumulate through secondary reading and the play itself is startling.

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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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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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QotW (#59): 22 October 2018

It’s no wonder we love soliloquy …

BH marlowe-and-shakespeare

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:

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QotW (#58): 15 October 2018

Can we just stop putting ideas in Shakespeare’s head, please?

BH atent-dead
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett

… 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?

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QotW (#57) 17 September 2018

BH organise-fish-solidarity-hi
ORGANIZE!

Why do I keep reading books about the plays, about the contextual crucibles in which they were cooked up?

Because there’s always something new to learn, or an angle that I hadn’t considered before.  And that’s where this week’s QotW comes in.

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