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une-sanz-pluis · 11 months ago

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William B. Robison, “The Bard, the Bride, and the Muse Bemused: Katherine of Valois on Film in Shakespeare’s Henry V”, The Palgrave Book of Shakespeare’s Queens (eds. Kavita Mudan Finn, Valerie Schutte, Palgrave Macmillan 2018)

#robison points out in a footnote that the biographies of her out there add very little to the historiography around her #(and of the biographies he cites only one gives her a lengthy treatment - the rest are from compilation biographies of english queens)#(this was also in 2018 so he's not referring to katherine j. lewis's chapter on her which came out this year)#honestly i find this to be very true - that she's always discussed with the same kind of narrative #(i read 3/4 of the biographies he cites and a couple he doesn't and when i was writing the post on catherine as a political agent #i went back and reread them and it was amazing how they all followed the same kind of narrative beats #the wooing scene from shakespeare! did she love henry v? widowhood and attempted romance with edmund beaufort! mrs tudor time! death)#(i'm also reminded of a comment kavita mudan finn made about how tudor-era writings tended to depict catherine's marriage to owen tudor #in a way that subsumes her agency in making the marriage into a wider narrative about the destined rise of the tudors)#and while there's less emphasis on destiny as a mystical force we're still eliding catherine's agency from the story #or pushing it into the realm of the domestic - at least one novel focuses on how her tudor marriage makes catherine abandon the political #world and the trappings of court to focus on her children husband and house - something akin to a housewife #(while still being - of course - the fairest and most fashionable and smartest and hottest woman in the realm)#- and i think it even depicts her gardening. she even celebrates the lives of peasants as the ideal because they're 'free')#(which. what.)#catherine de valois #shakespeare #historiography #historical fiction #historian: william b. robison

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