Just Readin'

A little while ago, I saw a documentary about Shakespeare's mother , which talked about all of the social and political changes that occurred in the lifetime of Shakespeare and his mother. Although I know quite a bit about the history of England, it never really occurred to me that Shakespeare lived through the dynastic shift between the Tudors and the Stuarts and was born shortly after Elizabeth I established Protestantism as the official religion of England. Although England's official religion would remain constant for the rest of Shakespeare's life, in the lifetime of his mother England's religion changed three times. These important shifts would certainly form an important backdrop in Shakespeare's life, particularly in a world in which religion determined how everyone saw the world and their place in it. In fact, there is some speculation that Shakespeare and his family remained Catholic even after the Protestant Reformation, further muddying the waters. Wha...

Not gonna lie, I'm not a big fan of Henry IV. Everyone's always trying to tell me "but blah blah blah Falstaff", "but blah blah blah power politics" and I'm like "eh, cool story bro". But one scene from this play has always fascinated me: Act II, Scene III. This scene is unique in the play, not only is it the only scene to include a woman (at least a woman who actually has lines) but because it gives us a unique glimpse into domestic life and issues of gender. That one speaking female character is Lady Percy, also known as Kate (although her real life counterpart's name was Elizabeth). Kate is a woman in a man's world. As her husband, Henry Percy, Hotspur, famously says: ...this is no world / To play with mammets [dolls] and to tilt with lips: / We must have bloody noses and crack'd crowns... -William Shakespeare But what is interesting about Kate is the way she attempts to resist this world centered on patriarchy. She is...

So, I think everyone in the world can agree that The Scottish Play is top-shelf bard. To my understanding, it is the play against which all other tragedies and histories (you could make the argument that Macbeth is a history, don't fight me on this) are measured (except for Richard III , nothing beats Richard III ). There are a lot of reasons why The Scottish Play is the classic that it is, a lot of reasons that scholars love to analyze it. But my favorite thing about Macbeth is that it's so, so, very weird (as in strange, not as in the Weird Sisters - hang on, we're getting there). Seriously; it's bizarre! I know that in a world that contains alligator hot dogs, the vampire birth scene in Breaking Dawn , and the English system, everything else seems fairly normal, but, it you consider it, Macbeth is a really strange play. There are apparitions, witches, and ghosts; at various times in the play, horses eat each other and chimneys are blown down by the force of one...

As an English major, I have to have an opinion about Shakespeare. Personally, I'm a fan of the histories. I like the comedies as much as the next person, but I think that there's some perspective to be gained from reading dramatizations of real (or mostly real) events. I quite like King John and Macbeth (which, in my opinion is both a tragedy and a history), but my favorite Shakespeare play is, without a doubt, Richard III . While half the fun of Richard III is Richards wile and villainy, I think that a lot of people make a mistake when they assume that Shakespeare's Richard is the same as the historical Richard. I recently wrote a post on my main blog about my evolving opinion of Richard III ; to make a long story short, I think that, while Richard made some bad decisions, he wasn't evil. It was hard to be a good guy in England during the War of the Roses. Even the much applauded Edward IV was capable of extreme acts of brutality and even executed his own brot...