Behind the Henriad

*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. 

this day in horrible history 

this day in horrible history 

this day in horrible history 

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.”

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.

What Shakespeare, like most people in the 1590s, was concerned with, though, was the fact that the Tudor dynasty was drawing to an end. Elizabeth died about a decade after Richard III was probably first performed, and four years after the first performances of Henry V, Shakespeare’s last history play prior to 1613. The aging Queen was, understandably, reluctant to name a successor, but the issue was on everyone’s minds throughout the 1590s. Not coincidentally, a lot of playwrights and poets were writing about history, and more than a few of these were interested in the Wars of the Roses narrative (many of them no longer survive, but Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV is an interesting non-Shakespearean example, and for a non-dramatic example, see Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars, which Shakespeare definitely read, as it’s echoed here and there in the second tetralogy. Daniel repaid the favor when he revised the poem in 1609; his continuation and revision of it owes a lot to Shakespeare). And the Elizabethans didn’t approach history as we do: the important thing to the early modern reader of history was what kind of lesson or example you can take from it. One sixteenth-century text on the art of history-writing has this to say:

And as the examples of prosperous successes, which God hath gyuen as iuste rewardes to those, that woorke according to vertue: the great good will and loue that all men haue towardes them: their fame, glorie, & praise, sounding in all mens mouthes, and finally their immortalitie in being chronycled for their noble actes, do chiefely serue, to sturre vs, to verteous, honest, and commendable doinges: Euen so, nothing is more meete to drawe us from vice, and dishonest dealing, than the examples of euill successes, which God hath giuen to the wicked…

— The Sunne in Splendour (1982), Sharon Kay Penman

On the commonalities between the Richards, see also this diagram:

This photoset, however, reminds me that I neglected to put these two circles into a larger circle labeled “HORRIBLE DEATH.”