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It was too cute to pass up!

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Happy birthday, Shakespeare! 

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*curtsies vivaciously* In a recent reply to an ask, you spoke of your experience with Shakespeare in elementary school. At the end of your reply, you said that "High school was a different story." From what I've witnessed, near all of my peers respond with the exasperated "ugh, *more* Shakespeare?" when that time of the English course approaches. Young adults just don't seem to appreciate the Bard these days. I can't help but be curious; what was your experience with Shakespeare in high school?

*Curtsies* I think part of the problem is that high school students don’t appreciate Shakespeare because they’re taught not to. Seriously. Every single teacher I had in middle/high school started our Shakespeare unit by saying something along the lines of “Sorry, this is going to suck, but we have to do it because it’s part of the curriculum.” And every time I just… if you tell kids something is going to suck they then they are predisposed against it. This is literally the most idiotic teaching strategy and I will never for the life of me understand why we teach kids that Shakespeare is especially difficult. Part of the reason is (some) teachers are lazy or aren’t qualified to be teaching it. Pick a given public high school English class and I’d bet money the teacher is teaching the plot of Hamlet, not how to read the language. How on Earth is a student supposed to get a basic understanding of Shakespeare, iambic pentameter, or early modern English if all they’ve learned at the end of a semester is that a Danish prince dies? Of course they roll their eyes. They’ve been brainwashed to think Shakespeare is boring, and very few teachers are willing to do them the courtesy of helping them to understand the language, so they have very little hope of overturning that conviction. Moreover, we do a terrible job of selecting plays for high school students to read. The first one is almost always Romeo an Juliet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great play, but if you want a bunch of teenagers to get excited about a play, for the love of the Bard don’t give them a play about teenagers committing fucking suicide. The other one that’s popular in high schools is Hamlet. And yes, maybe it is one of the greatest plays in the English language, but it is also one of the most complex and impenetrable. People with goddamn PhDs in Shakespeare don’t even know what the fuck’s going on in Hamlet, so why the hell would we use this as an introductory play for high school students? It doesn’t make any sense. 

Basically this is a really long, ranty way of saying that my high school Shakesperience was frustrating. I sort of had to grit my teeth and bear it, because even at age fourteen I could see what an idiotic system this is.

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Charles Oman's "The Great Revolt of 1381" I bought it for the grand total of $1.32 on Kobo!

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Interestingly, Francis Bacon, the first historian of the first Tudor, in his History of the Reign of Henry VII, highlighted other aspects of the king and reign. Bacon noted, for example, how immediately after his victory at Bosworth, Henry ‘caused Te Deum Laudamus to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army.’ He similarly observed how, on entering London, ‘he went first into St Paul’s church’ to make ‘offertory of his standards’ and how on progress he made ostentatious pilgrimages and organized thanksgivings. Bacon’s Henry VII was a king who paid attention to rituals of state and church: he prepared carefully the coronation of his queen, Elizabeth of York, to display Lancaster and York united under his rule, he sponsored jousts and tournaments to entertain the nobility; he graced the sergeants of the law with his attendance at their feasts; on progress in the west he combined majesty with a common touch when he ‘gave the citizens great commendations and thanks.’ Far from the bureaucrat of much twentieth-centre historiography, Bacon’s Henry VII was a ruler who, ‘being sensible that majesty maketh the people bow’,’kept state and majesty to the height.’ ¶ For though he identified the first Tudor’s deployment of ceremony as a means of securing his precarious dynasty, Bacon, from the standpoint of having experienced Henry’s successors, did not regard him as a master of these arts of majesty. Henry VII did not, he concluded, perform the stage of power: ‘in so much as in triumphs of jousts and tourneys, and balls, and masques, which they then called disguises, he was rather a princely and gentle spectator, then seemed much delighted’. For all his building the king dwelt ‘more richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond, or any of his palaces’. And if the purpose of patent and progress was to win the people by love rather than fear or reverence, Bacon could only conclude that he failed, having ‘the last in height, the second in good measure, and so little of the first [that is love]’. As for ‘visible greatness’, whatevver his patronage of artists, Henry VII was the Tudor who failed my postcard recognition test. He has not imprinted himself on the nation’s imagination or in its memory: as a recent web discussion put it, ‘Henry VII is not a king we remember well in terms of innovation or splendour’. Two other popular websites concur: Henry VII, his Wikipedia entry closes, ‘was succeeded by his second, more famous son’; ‘he is not’, the website of world royalty judges, ‘the Tudor king best remembered today. That honour belongs to his infamous successor.’

Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England, Kevin Sharpe

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The Chinese edition of The Plantagenets by Dan Jones from Dan Jones’ Facebook page - concurring with the author, the cover is stunning. 

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this day in horrible history 

↳ 30 May 1431 AD - Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in Rouen.

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Where there’s a Will, there’s a play

A bumper sticker I saw today.

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this day in horrible history 

↳ 29 April 1429 AD - Joan of Arc arrives at the Siege of Orléans.

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this day in horrible history 

↳ 23 April - Birth (1564) and Death (1616) of William Shakespeare. 

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Happy 451st birthday to William Shakespeare! You don’t look a day over 400. (Shakespeare Uncovered)

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Tina Packer has spent a lifetime researching Shakespeare and his plays, both as an actress and as a director. And as she focused on the role that women play in his works, she noticed a progression.

Consider Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew,one of his earliest plays, which centers on a man breaking a defiant woman’s spirit. Strong-willed Kate is a harridan; her compliant sister, meanwhile, says things like,“Sir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe.”

And contrast it to the bard’s late play Coriolanus, which features Volumnia, the only person strong enough to stand up to the angry general when he decides to wage war on Rome. She’s a heroine, saving the day as she tells her son, “Thou shalt no sooner march to assault thy country than to tread — trust to’t, thou shalt not — on thy mother’s womb.”

See our full interview with Tina Packer here.

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As modern education very seldom includes Greek, I thought the only way of implementing More’s intention was to convert such proper names into English equivalents.

I’m reading the introduction to the 2003 Penguin Classics edition of Thomas More’s Utopia and this is my face right now after reading what I put in bold, above—😒 Not impressed.

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Queen Margaret {Henry VI}

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Thank you so much for all this! Yes, I already figured that Shakespeare was working with the material he had available to him but this is so interesting, and I like your parallel drawn between Henry V’s Agincourt and Elizabeth I’s Spanish Armada. It makes for some very interesting historical perspectives.

Also adding Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV and Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars to my TBR. 

“You’re a Ricardian…would you like to come and see Shakespeare’s Richard III with me?”

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Agreed, re: Shakespeare not setting out to deliberately vilify Richard III (or, indeed, Richard II). 

One thing I would like to better understand is this Tudor propaganda issue - the propaganda angle seems to be something that is commonly accepted, at least from what I have read so far in books, but from what I have read in Tumblr tags, opinions are not as clearly cut. I am open-minded and would like to understand so that I may be better informed. Any input from followers would be much appreciated. (My ask box is open.)

“You’re a Ricardian…would you like to come and see Shakespeare’s Richard III with me?”

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I am not the only one who has made these links or coincidences among the King Richards - there’s actually a book I’m wanting to read on this very topic: The Three Richards by Nigel Saul. Description: 

Three King Richards ruled England in the Middle Ages. All had memorable reigns. Richard I was a crusading hero; Richard II was an authoritarian aesthete who was deposed and murdered; Richard III was the most famous villain in English history, locking his nephews in a tower to secure his reign. This highly readable joint biography shows how much the three kings had in common.. All were younger sons, not expected to come to the throne; all failed to produce an heir, leaving instability on their deaths; all were cultured and pious; and all died violently. For centuries, these three kings have attracted accusations but also fascination, being immortalized in theater, movies, myths, and books. In Three Richards, Nigel Saul shows why.