The problem with regicide...

So. It turns out that if Claudius was to confess to the particularly evil act of killing King Hamlet, he would be stripped of his crown (naturally) and be at the mercy of the new King - young Hamlet. As Denmark was a devoutly Catholic nation at the time (the significance of Shakespeare's family's Catholicism and England's new-found Protestantism is the subject of muchos, muchos literature), Hamlet would be entirely within his rights to demand divine vengeance and the immediate death of Claudius. He could, however, be lenient and merely mutilate him horribly or be an absolute pussy and just banish him.

Dean and Cat would have to decide...I think Claudius would be deader than a dodo in no time at all.

How To Do Shakespeare @ National Theatre

Saw this and thought of you:

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/51994/platforms/adrian-noble.html

I Want You To Want Me by Anne-Marie Kornachuk

This is the title of my song and here is an image capturing the darker side of this state.

You In My Respect Are All The World

This is how Helena sees the world. Its all Demetrius, all the time.

'Those be rubies, fairy favours;'

These are just a few little thoughts for everyone in fairy land....

When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.
(James M. Barrie, Peter Pan.)

Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men;Wee folk, good folk,Trooping all together,Green jacket, red cap,And white owl's feather!
(William Allingham, The Fairies.)

When I sound the fairy call,Gather here in silent meeting,Chin to knee on the orchard wall,Cooled with dew and cherries eating.Merry, merry, Take a cherryMine are sounder, Mine are rounderMine are sweeter, For the eaterWhen the dews fall. And you'll be fairies all.
(Robert Graves, Cherry-Time.)

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,For I would ride with you upon the wind,Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
(William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire.)

Love Peaseblossom* x

Shakespeare's Life and Works and his Contemporaries

Shakespeare’s Life and Works and his Contemporaries

1564 Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe born. Shakespeare was educated to grammar school level; Marlowe to postgraduate level.

1574 Ben Jonson born. He was educated to degree.

1577 Holinshed “The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland”, the primary source for the history plays.

1582 Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway.

1583 Birth of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna.

1585 Birth of Shakespeare’s twins, Judith and Hamnet.

1586 Mary Queen of Scots is executed.

1587 Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was among the first English plays to be in blank verse signalling the beginning of a mature phase in Elizabethan theatre.

1588 Defeat for Spanish Armada.

1588 Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

1589 The Comedy of Errors.

1589 Shakespeare moves from Stratford to London to establish himself as an actor and playwright. His family remains in Stratford.

1590 Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queen (part 1-3) is published. It is an allegory written in praise of Queen Elizabeth. It found such political favour the queen granted him a pension of £50 per year.

1590 Henry VI (part I)

1591 Henry VI (part II)

1591 Henry VI (part III)

1593 Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is published. Thought to be the basis of forthcoming “Merchant of Venice”.

1593 Marlowe dies

1593 Two Gentlemen of Verona

Venus and Adonis is dedicated to Henry Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton, one of Shakespeare’s patrons and addressee of his sonnets.

Richard III

1593 Theatre’s closed due to the plague. Reopened in 1594.

1594 Shakespeare becomes a founding member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

1594 Marlowe’s Edward II is posthumously published.

1594 The Taming of the Shrew

1594 Titus Andronicus

1594 Love’s Labour’s Lost one of a few Shakespeare plays that have no known source for the main plot.

1594 The Rape of Lucrece is much more intimately dedicated to Wriothsley: “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end ... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours."

1594 The sonnets are written.

1595 Romeo and Juliet

1595 Richard II

1596 Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, dies

1596 Spencer’s Faerie Queen part (4-6)

1596 King John. This play, written in the year of Hamnets, features a character who suffers the loss of her son. (See Appendix).

1596 Midsummer Night Dream. One of a few Shakespeare plays that have no known source for the main plot.

1596 Merchant of Vince

1596 Henry VI (part I)

1597 Jonson has a fixed engagement in the Admirals Men at the Rose theatre.

1597 Shakespeare buys a cottage in Stratford.

1597 Merry Wives of Windsor

1598 Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour

1598 Henry IV (part II)

1598 Much Ado About Nothing

1599 Globe built

1599 Spenser dies

1599 Earl of Essex sent to Ireland

1599 As You Like It

1599 Julius Caesar

1599 Henry V

1599 Shakespeare becomes a shareholder

1600 The Fortune Theatre opens

1600 Hamlet

1600 Troilus and Cressida

1601 Essex rebels against Elizabeth I

1601 Twelfth Night

1602 All’s Well That Ends Well

1603 Elizabeth I dies. James I becomes king. This is the beginning of the Jacobean era with the new genre: tragicomedy. This was influenced by Marston and Jonson.

1603 Othello

1604 Marston’s The Malcontent published. It was is most successful play, first performed by the Children of the Chapel, a group of boy players as described in Hamlet. This was then performed by the Kings Men, who supposedly stole the play from the younger players.

1604 Measure for Measure

1604 Timon of Athens

1605 The Gunpowder plot

1605 King Lear

1606 Jonson’s Volpone

1606 Macbeth

1607 Pericles

1608 Shakespeare’s mother dies

1608 Anthony and Cleopatra

1608 Coriolanus

1609 Cymbeline

1610 Jonson’s The Alchemist

1610 Winter’s Tale

1610 The Tempest One of a few Shakespeare plays that have no known source for the main plot.

1611 Two Noble Kinsmen

1612 Webster’s The White Devil

1613 Henry VIII

1614 Webster’s Duchess of Malfi

1614 Jonson’s Bartholomew Fayre

1616 Shakespeare dies

1616 Jonson’s Folio published

1623 Shakespeare’s First Folio published with all plays but Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, Loves Labours Won and Cardenio.

Appendix:

Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599) English poet most famous for his incomplete epic poem.

Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637) English poet and dramatist known for his satirical plays. There are many legends about a rivalry between Jonson and Shakespeare including Jonson scoffing over the setting of Winters Tale on a non-existant seacoast of Bohemia. Jonson and Shakespeare debated in the Mermaid tavern in which Shakespeare would outwit the more learned Jonson. According to G.E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson had equal reputations. Jonson was arrested for writing the seditious and slanderous The Isle of Dogs. He was briefly incarcerated again for murder, pleading guilty to manslaughter. By 1620 his work and popularity declined.

Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593) an English dramatist, poet and translator for Elizabethan theatre. Foremost Elizabethan tragedian. He was a university educated man (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College). In the year of his death he was arrested for blasphemy (allegedly).

King John: Constance grieves son Arthur

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.—
I will not keep this form upon my head,
[Tearing off her head-dress.]
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!

—Constance

Move over Ken Branagh...

Some of you will have seen this already, but it deserves another look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCVc5TaPpe8