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It was too cute to pass up!

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Happy birthday, Shakespeare!Â
*curtsies vivaciously* In a recent reply to an ask, you spoke of your experience with Shakespeare in elementary school. At the end of your reply, you said that "High school was a different story." From what I've witnessed, near all of my peers respond with the exasperated "ugh, *more* Shakespeare?" when that time of the English course approaches. Young adults just don't seem to appreciate the Bard these days. I can't help but be curious; what was your experience with Shakespeare in high school?
*Curtsies* I think part of the problem is that high school students donât appreciate Shakespeare because theyâre taught not to. Seriously. Every single teacher I had in middle/high school started our Shakespeare unit by saying something along the lines of âSorry, this is going to suck, but we have to do it because itâs part of the curriculum.â 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 arenât qualified to be teaching it. Pick a given public high school English class and Iâd 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 theyâve learned at the end of a semester is that a Danish prince dies? Of course they roll their eyes. Theyâve 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. Donât get me wrong, itâs a great play, but if you want a bunch of teenagers to get excited about a play, for the love of the Bard donât give them a play about teenagers committing fucking suicide. The other one thatâs 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 donât even know what the fuckâs going on in Hamlet, so why the hell would we use this as an introductory play for high school students? It doesnât make any sense.Â
Basically this is a really long, ranty way of saying that my high school Shakesperience was frustrating. I sort of had to grit my teeth and bear it, because even at age fourteen I could see what an idiotic system this is.
I studied A Midsummer Nightâs Dream in grade 9 and thatâs the only Shakespeare play I studied academically because the year after, Shakespeare was taken out of the curriculum. I remember being disappointed and also that I was the only student who wasnât elated by the change.
Charles Oman's "The Great Revolt of 1381" I bought it for the grand total of $1.32 on Kobo!
Interestingly, Francis Bacon, the first historian of the first Tudor, in his History of the Reign of Henry VII, highlighted other aspects of the king and reign. Bacon noted, for example, how immediately after his victory at Bosworth, Henry âcaused Te Deum Laudamus to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army.â He similarly observed how, on entering London, âhe went first into St Paulâs churchâ to make âoffertory of his standardsâ and how on progress he made ostentatious pilgrimages and organized thanksgivings. Baconâs Henry VII was a king who paid attention to rituals of state and church: he prepared carefully the coronation of his queen, Elizabeth of York, to display Lancaster and York united under his rule, he sponsored jousts and tournaments to entertain the nobility; he graced the sergeants of the law with his attendance at their feasts; on progress in the west he combined majesty with a common touch when he âgave the citizens great commendations and thanks.â Far from the bureaucrat of much twentieth-centre historiography, Baconâs Henry VII was a ruler who, âbeing sensible that majesty maketh the people bowâ,âkept state and majesty to the height.â ¶ For though he identified the first Tudorâs deployment of ceremony as a means of securing his precarious dynasty, Bacon, from the standpoint of having experienced Henryâs successors, did not regard him as a master of these arts of majesty. Henry VII did not, he concluded, perform the stage of power: âin so much as in triumphs of jousts and tourneys, and balls, and masques, which they then called disguises, he was rather a princely and gentle spectator, then seemed much delightedâ. For all his building the king dwelt âmore richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond, or any of his palacesâ. And if the purpose of patent and progress was to win the people by love rather than fear or reverence, Bacon could only conclude that he failed, having âthe last in height, the second in good measure, and so little of the first [that is love]â. As for âvisible greatnessâ, whatevver his patronage of artists, Henry VII was the Tudor who failed my postcard recognition test. He has not imprinted himself on the nationâs imagination or in its memory: as a recent web discussion put it, âHenry VII is not a king we remember well in terms of innovation or splendourâ. Two other popular websites concur: Henry VII, his Wikipedia entry closes, âwas succeeded by his second, more famous sonâ; âhe is notâ, the website of world royalty judges, âthe Tudor king best remembered today. That honour belongs to his infamous successor.â
Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England, Kevin Sharpe

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The Chinese edition of The Plantagenets by Dan Jones from Dan Jonesâ Facebook page - concurring with the author, the cover is stunning.Â
this day in horrible historyÂ
âł 30 May 1431 AD - Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in Rouen.
Where thereâs a Will, thereâs a play
A bumper sticker I saw today.
this day in horrible historyÂ
Ⳡ29 April 1429 AD - Joan of Arc arrives at the Siege of Orléans.
this day in horrible historyÂ
âł 23 April - Birth (1564) and Death (1616) of William Shakespeare.Â

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Happy 451st birthday to William Shakespeare! You donât look a day over 400. (Shakespeare Uncovered)
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 Shakespeareâs Taming of the Shrew,one of his earliest plays, which centers on a man breaking a defiant womanâs spirit. Strong-willed Kate is a harridan; her compliant sister, meanwhile, says things like,âSir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe.â
And contrast it to the bardâs 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. Sheâs a heroine, saving the day as she tells her son, âThou shalt no sooner march to assault thy country than to tread â trust toât, thou shalt not â on thy motherâs womb.â
See our full interview with Tina Packer here.
As modern education very seldom includes Greek, I thought the only way of implementing Moreâs intention was to convert such proper names into English equivalents.
Iâm reading the introduction to the 2003 Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Moreâs Utopia and this is my face right now after reading what I put in bold, aboveâđ Not impressed.
Queen Margaret {Henry VI}
âYouâre a RicardianâŠwould you like to come and see Shakespeareâs Richard III with me?â
Like anyone ever asks Ricardians this anymore! YOU GUYS. EVERYONE KNOWS SHAKESPEAREâS VERSION IS NOT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. YOU WON and now people who work on the histories get asked about Richard III (the play) being Tudor propaganda ALL THE TIME. Even if youâre talking about entirely different history plays.
#i have also been expected to sympathize as a fan of historical richard ii #but i donât think shakespeare did badly by him at all #nor did he set out to deliberately libel richard iii #he was working with an established historical villain #the tudor propaganda issue is very complex
Agreed, re: Shakespeare not setting out to deliberately vilify Richard III (or, indeed, Richard II).Â
One thing I would like to better understand is this Tudor propaganda issue - the propaganda angle seems to be something that is commonly accepted, at least from what I have read so far in books, but from what I have read in Tumblr tags, opinions are not as clearly cut. I am open-minded and would like to understand so that I may be better informed. Any input from followers would be much appreciated. (My ask box is open.)
Well, basically what I mean is this: itâs important not to lose sight of the distinction between saying that Shakespeare is writing his histories within a framework established by the ideological needs and aims of the Tudor dynasty, and saying that Shakespeare is actively promulgating that ideology. So, for instance, itâs fair to say that he has to depict Henry VII as heroic because he was the queenâs grandfather and you canât make him look bad (in fact, there was a law against depicting members of the royal family onstage; the fact that Henry VII had been dead for over eighty years obviously mitigated this, but youâll notice that Shakespeare keeps his presence fairly minimal, and the Tudors donât become major dramatic characters until after Elizabethâs death). Or that Richard III is depicted as evil because thatâs the narrative he had available (indeed, Shakespeare probably didnât have access to any other version). But I wouldnât say heâs doing this to legitimate the Tudor dynasty: for one thing, theyâd been in power for a century and didnât need Shakespeareâs help!
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, Shakespeareâs last history play prior to 1613. The aging Queen was, understandably, reluctant to name a successor, but the issue was on everyoneâs 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 Heywoodâs Edward IV is an interesting non-Shakespearean example, and for a non-dramatic example, see Samuel Danielâs Civil Wars, which Shakespeare definitely read, as itâs 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 didnât 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 wickedâŠ
So Shakespeare isnât really interested in Richard III qua Richard III: heâs interested, first of all, in what makes for compelling drama, and secondly, with what his story as Shakespeare understood it has to do with the psychology of power and of civil war. Heâs not trying to advance a cohesive interpretation of the events of the fifteenth century, or create an unqualified celebration of the current ruling dynasty; in fact, his examination of the operations of power and the theatrical dimension of monarchy is critical more often than not. Which is why the Earl of Essexâs supporters commissioned a performance of (what was probably) Richard II before Essexâs failed rebellion of 1601 â after which the Queen (perhaps apocryphally) said âI am Richard II, know ye not that?â While itâs common to point out specific parallels between the two, in some sense all stage monarchs are the current one. I mean, Henry V was a great success, winning a decisive underdog victory against a superior military force â compare the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, which in a sense was Elizabethâs Agincourt. And Shakespeareâs Henry V (a deeply cynical play which is also a patriotism party from some angles) ends with a reminder of how everything went to hell after Henryâs death, âwhich oft our stage hath shownâ â and which is exactly what people in the 1590s were afraid of. Elizabeth could as easily have said âI am Henry V, know ye not that?â
Thank you so much for all this! Yes, I already figured that Shakespeare was working with the material he had available to him but this is so interesting, and I like your parallel drawn between Henry Vâs Agincourt and Elizabeth Iâs Spanish Armada. It makes for some very interesting historical perspectives.
Also adding Thomas Heywoodâs Edward IV and Samuel Danielâs Civil Wars to my TBR.Â

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âYouâre a RicardianâŠwould you like to come and see Shakespeareâs Richard III with me?â
Like anyone ever asks Ricardians this anymore! YOU GUYS. EVERYONE KNOWS SHAKESPEAREâS VERSION IS NOT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. YOU WON and now people who work on the histories get asked about Richard III (the play) being Tudor propaganda ALL THE TIME. Even if youâre talking about entirely different history plays.
#i have also been expected to sympathize as a fan of historical richard ii #but i don't think shakespeare did badly by him at all #nor did he set out to deliberately libel richard iii #he was working with an established historical villain #the tudor propaganda issue is very complex
Agreed, re: Shakespeare not setting out to deliberately vilify Richard III (or, indeed, Richard II).Â
One thing I would like to better understand is this Tudor propaganda issue - the propaganda angle seems to be something that is commonly accepted, at least from what I have read so far in books, but from what I have read in Tumblr tags, opinions are not as clearly cut. I am open-minded and would like to understand so that I may be better informed. Any input from followers would be much appreciated. (My ask box is open.)
âRichard stood motionless for a time, gazing at the gilded effigies of this ill-starred Richard and his Queen; they had been depicted clasping hands, at the Kingâs own request. Richard knew, of course, that his was thought to be an unlucky title; only twice before had a Richard ruled England, and both met violent ends.â
â 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 âHORRIBLE DEATH.â
(Or perhaps âVIOLENT DEATH,â but Richard II was actually starved to death. Which is horrible without technically being violent.)
I am not the only one who has made these links or coincidences among the King Richards - thereâs actually a book Iâm wanting to read on this very topic: The Three Richards by Nigel Saul. Description:Â
Three King Richards ruled England in the Middle Ages. All had memorable reigns. Richard I was a crusading hero; Richard II was an authoritarian aesthete who was deposed and murdered; Richard III was the most famous villain in English history, locking his nephews in a tower to secure his reign. This highly readable joint biography shows how much the three kings had in common.. All were younger sons, not expected to come to the throne; all failed to produce an heir, leaving instability on their deaths; all were cultured and pious; and all died violently. For centuries, these three kings have attracted accusations but also fascination, being immortalized in theater, movies, myths, and books. In Three Richards, Nigel Saul shows why.