Asides

PTS 13/078: Homophone fun with King John

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image:  History Notes.  The guy on the left is asking the king if he can go to the toilet …

King John, Act I

Having broken out of my Romeo and Juliet-induced enervation, I approached King John with a sense of excitement bolstered by my positive experiences with the Henry VI plays.  Unusually, maybe impatiently, I skipped my Arden’s introduction and got stuck in after finding these hopeful signs elsewhere:

“a neglected play about a flawed king” [a]

and

“King John has all the beauties of language and all the richness of the imagination to relieve the painfulness of the subject.” [b]

So, what did I make of Act I?

Continue reading “PTS 13/078: Homophone fun with King John”

Quote of the Week: 23 October

Christ, this is IT […] THIS is why I do it.  All of it.

BH the summing upW. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (Penguin:  London, 1992)

Today’s post is all about one simple fact: the world-wide-web existed centuries before the Internet.  Before electricity, in fact.  And I want you to plug into it.

I find it apposite, and slightly ironic that writing about Shakespeare, and without any deliberate choice on my part – I promise you – I’m listening to the Tron Legacy soundtrack as I type this.  My other literary love is Science Fiction, and again, the point I’m making relates to that intoxicating cocktail of the 16th and 26th centuries, with a dash of the present thrown in.

So, the pre-internet web …

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Richard III: KS5 essay 1

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If this is the first time you’ve read an essay here, please take a look at this post before proceeding.

This essay was set as the first assignment for my KS5 class this year – on the OCR specification.  Student submissions were therefore marked on the following criteria:

Richard’s unscrupulous ambition and misogyny is balanced, in Act 1 scenes 1 and 2, by his facility with words and mischievous, almost devilish sense of humour.

AO1:  Personal Response (30%)

AO2:  Analysis of Writer’s Methods (40%)

AO3:  Understanding of the role and influence of Context (10%)

AO5:  Exploring different interpretations of the text (20%)

“There is as much to admire as there is to loathe about Richard.”

How far and in what ways do you agree with this statement? [Act 1, scenes 1/2: 1,000 words]

Continue reading “Richard III: KS5 essay 1”

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