#henriad

i think we should call hal/hotspur and bolingbroke/northumberland henry² jr. and henry² sr. respectively

maybe bolingbroke killing richard was matricide. yall ever think of that one.

Truly nothing like going to a Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry IV Part I and trying to explain the plot to your family to make you realize your vague recollections from studying the play in fall 2019 pretty much begin and end with “Well I think Hotspur is cool”

remembering the time i called henry bolingbroke a 'christfailure crusadecel.'

Me, a confused Shakespeare nerd trying to understand the football hype: um.....for Harry Kane, England, and St. George I guess??

is falstaff vriska coded

i keep thinking about the fucking "queers the exiled/englishman binary" joke i made in the fake richard ii discourse post and like i'm sure there's something there but like i don't think you can call it transgender. i mean you can call "i was banished as hereford but i come back as lancaster" a trans vibe i guess because name loopholes tend to be rather trans but like richard literally banishes bolingbroke. like. the exile itself is not trans because it's forced. the return from exile is also not trans i would assume because he's literally just returning to england and resuming englishman status/reasserting his english identity (this is not detrans either and if you suggest it is i will fry your spleen and eat it. sorry). the transest thing about bolingbroke's return besides his name loopholing is how he usurps richard (because usurpation and assuming a role that was not assigned to you at birth is also, i guess, pretty transgender, or at least as trans as you can get for an english nobleman in the tragedeigh of ricky the second), not in his return to england nor his exile? i guess you could say that exile is more like forcefem (not in the tumblr rewrite of what forcefem is as a liberatory thing, but as a humiliation related kink; though i don't think this is bolingbroke's kink, it's just humiliation)? richard is the "effeminate king," and to strip bolingbroke of his english identity and his lands/inheritance is emasculating. richard attempts to assert his own masculinity by invading ireland using bolingbroke's stolen masculinity / ballsack (figurative) / inheritance or whatever, but ultimately fails in his campaign (thus proving him a #femme failure). and also something something to make bolingbroke a foreigner (at least in a temporary sense) is to forcibly feminize him because something something how foreigners were looked upon as both brutishly masculine and effeminate? something something the idea that the ottomans were having gay sex all the time (they weren't but i remember hearing someone say something about the english thinking this was true. because you know. slanderous propaganda or whatever). bolingbroke is so good at being a man he unmans the king, which again is the most trans part of his return, because bolingbroke literally goes against the divinely-ordained legal order of things by usurping the king. a catholic bishop literally tells him not to do it because shit will collapse and everything will be awful, and the pope loves cancelling trans people so that all checks out i guess. but like. getting exiled in bolingbroke's case is not very transgender, nor is returning as an englishman. so in actuality, that bit really does serve it's purpose because it sounds like it's saying something and then you think too hard for a moment and you realize it's actually not...which is perhaps the essence of all the poorly wrought queer theory i've imbibed.