#the Henriad

[bestnoncannonship]

We just dropped the first song on our new musical's album and I'm SCREAMING!!!

And it has a TITLE!!

Meet "Brave Sons of England" an Epic New Musical based on Shakespeare's Henriad!

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A post shared by Francesca and Ann (@tea_time_for_mad_girls)

@socialshakespeare and all the Henriad readings during the pandemic heard me carrying on about it back when we were starting it and NOW ITS HERE! (I promised I'd tag you guys back in 2020....so here ya are!!)

[gayest-classiclit]

Classic Literature Sexyperson Tournament; Round 1

propaganda:

Grantaire doesn't have any atm

Prince Hal:

He’s a male manipulator!

[rambleonwithrosie]

The Lancastrian casting did NOT have to go this hard in the Hollow Crown... Like excuse me who said they could make ALL the Henrys hotties?

Like y'all I was already pro-Lancaster I didn't need this kinda propaganda to seduce- I mean induce me

[britneyshakespeare]

The actor Junius Brutus Booth in costume as Edmund Mortimer in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (1823), painted by John B. Neagle

[longitudinalwaveme]

The Worst Shakespearean Parent Poll, Part 2

This poll is considerably shorter than the last one, for a few reasons:

A surprising number of Shakespearean mothers are actually good at being mothers (e.g., Hermione, Lady Macduff, Mistress Page, etc.)

An even larger proportion of Shakespearean mothers are dead (e.g., Ophelia's mother, Desdemona's mother, King Lear's wife, Hero and Beatrice's mothers, Rosalind's mother, etc., etc., etc.) These mothers may have been good or bad, but there's no way to tell, so they're obviously not going to be on the poll.

Of Shakespeare's female villains, two (Goneril and Regan) have never had children, two (Queen Tamora and Queen Margaret from the Henriad) are fairly good mothers even if they're terrible to people who aren't their children, and one (Lady Macbeth) has no children during the events of the play. Lady Macbeth does claim that she would bash her baby's brains out at one point, but as her child is obviously no longer alive and she's making this claim during a heightened argument with Macbeth, I don't think that it's fair to put her on the poll for that. So over half of Shakespeare's female villains don't even qualify.

Which of these Shakespearean mothers would you least like to have in your family?

[drmobiusvanch]

(after some thought, i decided to include middle-aged, thus the merry wives and cleopatra)

[smolvenger]

Henry IV Part One summed up in one image

[irate-iguana]

The promised sequel to my previous post:

If anyone wants to help me come up with drag names for these characters, please feel free!

[heliza24]

Shakespeare Comparisons: Young Royals and the Henriad

I saw this post comparing Young Royals to Julius Caesar the other day, and I actually don’t think Young Royals is that closely connected to Julius Caesar. Sure, August betrays Wilhelm. But there are lots of things that don’t match up at all: Brutus, not Caesar, is the protagonist of that play, Caesar is not a contemporary of Brutus but something of a father figure, and Brutus and Cassius decide to kill Caesar because Caesar is threatening to become king and end the Roman Republic. None of those things are actually very similar to August and Wilhelm’s characters or relationship.

There is, however, a glaringly obvious Shakespeare comparison available to us in the form of the Henriad, or the plays Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. The protagonist of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 is actually Prince Hal, the prince that will go on to become King Henry V in the final play. At the beginning of the first play, he spends most of his time shirking all royal duties, drinking in a tavern in Eastcheap with his perpetually drunk and broke friend Falstaff. Over the course of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Hal has to wrestle with the idea that he will soon inherit the crown, and decide how and when to step up to this responsibility. These plays are literally about the coming of age of a young and erstwhile prince just like Young Royals. 

There are few similarities and differences between the stories that I think are interesting to explore. In the Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry IV struggles to maintain control of the crown. He took the throne as a usurper, defeating Richard II, and throughout the course of these two plays he fights to defend his position from rebels who would in turn usurp him. Because of this precarity, he’s aware of the fact that Hal will have a hard job as his successor, and that currently he’s showing no signs of being up to the task. He instead sings the praises of Harry Percy, also known as Hotspur, the young rebel who is Hal’s age currently vying for the throne. Despite Percy being his enemy, Henry IV recognizes all of the qualities of leadership that Percy displays, and wishes that he were his son instead of Hal (“In envy that my Lord Northumberland/Should be the father to so blest a son/A son who is the theme of honour’s tongue”- Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 1). But Percy is also hot-tempered and impetuous and possessed by toxic masculinity, and it becomes clear to the audience that he would not be a good king. When he learns that the reinforcements he expected are not going to arrive, he rushes into battle against Henry IV’s forces anyway, allowing Prince Hal to kill him.

In Young Royals, there is a similar precarity to the monarchy, not because someone is threatening to overthrow Kristina, but because modernity threatens to make all contemporary monarchy obsolete. Because of this, Kristina puts a lot of pressure on Wilhelm to maintain the image of the crown. In addition, August becomes a pretty neat parallel to Percy. August succeeds at fulfilling the expectations of a nobel placed upon him: he is straight, feels comfortable wielding authority, and actively wants power where Wilhelm rejects it. August is in some ways the favored son of the royal court, and his promotion into the line of succession feels reminiscent of the way that Henry wishes Percy could be his heir instead of Hal. Similar to Percy, August’s hamartias also revolve around his impetuousness, anger, and complicated relationship with masculinity. 

There’s an incredible scene in Henry IV Part 2, where Prince Hal is called to his father’s deathbed. Mistakenly thinking that Henry has already died, Hal tearfully takes the crown from his father’s pillow and places it on his own head. Henry later comes to and rails at his son, accusing Hal of wishing him dead and of being too impatient to assume Henry’s power. Hal protests; he meant only to wrestle with, and lay blame upon, the crown which he assumed had already killed his father. Hal speaks of the crown as a metaphor here, as something that sucks the life from those that are forced to wear it: 

Coming to look on you, thinking you dead, And dead almost, my liege, to think you were, I spake unto this crown as having sense, And thus upbraided it: “The care on thee depending Hath fed upon the body of my father; Therefore thou best of gold art worst of gold. Other, less fine in carat, is more precious, Preserving life in med’cine potable; But thou, most fine, most honored, most renowned, Hast eat thy bearer up. (Henry IV Part 2, Act 4, Scene 3)

Hal putting on the crown in this scene is a significant step towards his ultimate acceptance of his responsibility to rule. Even though he believes the crown to be a kind of poison, he knows he must wear it. It points to the self-sacrificing, humble king he will become in Henry V.

There’s no direct allegory to this scene in Young Royals, but the discussion of the crown as a kind of poison feels very apt for the themes of the show. As Lisa is fond of saying, Wilhelm being queer would not be an issue if it weren’t for the spectral crown hanging over his family and his destiny. This scene also makes me think of how Wilhelm asks Kristina to just be his mother and not the queen for once in season 2. Even though the crown has not literally affected Kristina’s health, it has killed off the part of her that is Wilhelm’s mother first. The crown has permanently altered their relationship.

I think if we’re drawing parallels between Young Royals and the Henriad, there’s a couple of different ways we can find connections between Prince Hal’s days of frivolous drinking at a tavern in Eastcheap and Wilhelm’s time at Hillerska. Eastcheap was a market street in the City of London (by which I mean the historic city/The Square Mile, not what we think of now as the entire city of London.), far away from any palace, which would have been populated by working class folks. The tavern is a place where Hal can be with his friends, away from the pressure of royal life. So in some ways, Hillerska works as Wilhelm’s Eastcheap. Or maybe I should say Erik’s– Erik’s description of sowing his wild oats and enjoying his time at school before things got serious seems very similar to Prince Hal’s attitude. Or perhaps more accurately we could say that Wilhelm’s adventures in Bjarstad are analogous to Prince Hal’s time in Eastcheap. This is Wilhelm’s predominant exposure to working class people, and he forms a close connection with Simon much like Hal does with Falstaff. (This however, is where the similarities between Falstaff and Simon end). 

At the end of Henry IV Part 2, Hal is crowned King Henry V, and willingly renounces his old way of life. When he sees Falstaff at his coronation, he tells him that he should “presume not that I am the thing I was” (Act 5 Scene 5) and banishes him. To me this feels reminiscent of the way Wilhelm renounces Simon publicly at the end of season 1. The difference here is that by the time Prince Hal renounces Falstaff, his transformation into King Henry V is complete. But Wilhelm’s rejection of Simon only occurs at the end of his first act, while he still has all of seasons 2 and 3 to continue to grow and make different decisions. Because of this I think it’s important to keep in mind that we don’t need to draw one-to-one comparisons between Young Royals and the Henriad, or any other classic text, in order to acknowledge that the two works are playing with the same themes. Lisa and the writers of Young Royals didn’t set out to create an updated version of Prince Hal in Wilhelm, but I think it’s impossible to write about the coming of age of a young prince in the Western World without being influenced, at least indirectly, by Shakespeare’s work. 

On a personal note, I think it’s amusing that I've been obsessed with the Henriad for about a decade, but it took me writing this post to realize that this long standing interest probably primed me to love Young Royals. I really am consistent if nothing else. 

Thanks to @bluedalahorse for helping me organize my thoughts on this as always. If there are any other Shakespeare/Hal lovers in the Young Royals tag I would love to hear your thoughts on these comparisons. And if this has you interested in the Henriad and you want to check out a production, I highly recommend the recorded Globe productions starring Jamie Parker as Prince Hal/Henry V.

[househaunterz]

fellas, is it autistic to make fanart of Shakespeare's Richard ii?

[appljuiceboxx]

ok but what about hal calling hotspur "hotsperm" in front of the whole court.

[antique-ro-man]

Might expand this into a bracket if I feel so inclined. I’ve included characters I feel like have received the tumblr sexyman treatment, but I’ve definitely missed some.

[gayest-classiclit]

ok not a main poll i doubt we're having any of those anymore

there's another one too in a bit but this one is less important so have it first!

bear in mind that it took me 7 months to read wap. preferably something relatively short

for other books, classic lit please! i read practically nothing else

[rambleonwithrosie]

I wonder if the ye olde Shakespeare fandom had Poins stans who were outraged when he just didn't appear in Henry V...

[withasideofshakespeare]

The Boars Head is giving gay bar owned by a lesbian.

[househaunterz-art]

i saw Richard II at the Guthrie and I haven’t been normal since.

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