Always Bring A Book With You

1. Titus and Ronicus. Somewhat like Titus Andronicus, but with the addition of Titus’s wisecracking brother, Ronicus Andronicus. Known for that one wild slapstick scene with the pie at the end.

2. The Complete The’s of Shakespeare. Consists of every ‘the’ that Shakespeare wrote, delivered in an appropriate manner for each instance. Has the advantage of being much easier for a million monkeys to type. Is therefore much kinder to monkeys than the alternative. Please consider the monkeys. 

3. Henry V in space. We begin the play awaiting the arrival of the French Ambassadors. They are coming from France, which is seven light-years away and several hundred metres under the newly-risen Atlantic. It may be a long wait.

4. A Twelfth Night’s Hamlet. In which Hamlet is shipwrecked on the way to England and has to dress up as a woman dressing up as a man to in order to evade detection whilst avenging his father’s murder, but comedy strikes when he vacillates a little too long in an oddly-mislocated enchanted forest. Everyone ends up both completely heterosexually married and also dead.

5. The Scottish Play, a theatre-safe version of Macbeth which avoids bad luck by never mentioning the title character’s name or indeed anyone else’s name either. Explores issues of identity and confusion. Usually there is at least one murder, but nobody is quite sure of who by who. In fact, because nobody is sure who is king, or indeed what the succession actually is, it naturally follows that the only way to ensure kingship is to kill everyone.

I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.

golden leaves and lit candles 🍂🕯🎃

— death is the mother of beauty

and what is beauty?