the words ‘doing something gross + cronenburgian with shakespeare’ are appearing in my notes for my presentation at the dissertation symposium of my master’s degree

Mad At You Island is where the events of William Shakespeare's The Tempest take place

you know what character from house of cards really fascinates me in retrospect? sarah harding. she is, from the moment she’s introduced, essentially francis urquhart’s attempt at replacing mattie. she’s hand-picked from the milieu at a party at chequers by urquhart’s wife for expressly that purpose. she, like mattie, is beautiful, clever, blonde, and in her mid-twenties— she’s a pollster, not a journalist, but the role that urquhart negotiates with her is very similar. a close companion and unwitting pawn. like mattie, too, she is the one to make the first move to start their affair…. although she doesn’t seek out the paternal aspect that mattie did, they get very close and she clearly falls in love with him before she starts to smell a rat and tries to go back to her husband. it’s very interesting to watch her get slightly obsessed with mattie, to go down into the archives to read her work in the chronicle and how she profiled urquhart when they first met. browning’s duke’s second wife pulling back the curtain to stare at his ‘last duchess’. fascinating, too, that she starts their relationship in the first place after a group of street thugs attack her and say ‘ask ‘im about mattie storin’ and ends up in urquhart’s office with a whiskey doing exactly that. she’s spun the lie that mattie jumped from the roof— and in response, she declares that it ‘won’t be like that with me’. and when all this comes to a head, and she finds out from tim stamper what really happened to urquhart’s last mistress— ‘this grew, i gave commands’— francis is steps ahead of her, coldly arranging for her a violent death. then, in the third series, while urquhart is dreaming of mattie at night, seeing her constantly in his head, he only ever says sarah’s name once– in a list, when all his other past victims are coming to his tongue. she is simply one face among many: ‘stamper and sarah gone’. she doesn’t even get a clause to herself. it is deeply intriguing, and one has to assume it’s purposeful. sarah was just a second girl wearing cordelia’s face, being called cordelia’s name. the explosion she dies in almost obliterates her not just physically, but narratively. while mattie, even though her tape remains secret, speaks on, and on

3am and i can’t sleep so i’m up cataloguing every single shakespeare quote in house of cards