Showing posts tagged shakespeare

London. 1598.

shinobi93:

It’s a warm night, but Will is awoken by a sudden chill. He’s about to return to sleep when a noise attracts his attention. A cough, to be precise. An impatient cough.

He opens his eyes, expecting to see nothing but darkness, but instead a figure stands before him, glowing enough to cast a dim light around the room. No, he thinks, it cannot be. A trick of the mind, the result of much writing and sack and little else. He closes his eyes, counts slowly, then reopens them. Still there. Conjuring spirits as well as words now.

‘I am real, you clotpole,’ the spirit says with a roll of his eyes. 

Standing before Will like the diabolical creatures conjured by Faustus is a man five years dead, the only hint of this fact other than the glow being a smear of blood down the right cheek. The figure is grinning, like haunting Will Shakespeare is the best fun he’s had in years. There’s only one word Will can think of.

‘Kit?’

yes this is a good

(Reblogged from shinobi93)

question for shakespeare histories peeps

shredsandpatches:

Signups for this year’s Histories Ficathon are going to be opening in the near future. Any of you guys interested?

Obviously you don’t have to decide right now, and saying you  might be interested isn’t a commitment — and I’ll certainly make an announcement regardless when they open. I’m just curious as to how many more people we might possibly get this year — last year signups opened before The Hollow Crown aired, after all. It’s a very friendly ficathon, although it has traditionally been quite tiny. Plus every year I get at least one email from someone asking if their story idea is too cracktacular. I have yet to say yes to this question.

(Also, everyone is AU-crazy and there are lots of people who know where to look for historical resources, if you’re nervous about the whole “writing medieval people” aspect of it! IT IS SO MUCH FUN YOU GUYS. It’s the highlight of my fannish year. IT IS LIKE MY BIRTHDAY AND CHRISTMAS AND KITTENS AND PONIES AND RAINBOWS AND CUPCAKES AND SPARKLES ALL ROLLED INTO ONE. I mean, last year I got ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE RICHARD II FIC. It was so fucking brilliant.)

I’m in.

(That zombie Richard II fic is legit brilliant, btw.)

(Reblogged from shredsandpatches)

poins:

i am not sure what i just read but i think i liked it

Horatio has his own manservant now, who looks nervous but refills his cup with steady hands. He looks a little like Laertes from certain angles; at times Horatio wants to grab him and kiss him to see what he does. Laertes bit his mouth open and raked his nails down Horatio’s back as he broke open beneath him, but Horatio does not think his manservant will do the same.

I approve.

(Reblogged from borgevino)

fic rec: Strong Infection

Play: Richard II
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Richard/Aumerle, Richard/Henry UST, Richard/Anne (past)
Warnings: AU. Zombie AU. Corpse Imagery. Fire. Tombs. Nightmares. Implied Sex. Richard POV.
Rating: R for imagery.
Notes: Historical age!Isabelle while everyone else really isn’t. Sorry…
Summary: When there’s an unidentified plague in Europe, shipping over a corpse from Italy just might be the most terrible plan in the history of terrible planning. Then again, who needs a reason to start setting things on fire? In which (mostly) everyone stays alive, brains are a highly prized commodity, Henry looks good in firelight, Richard is Richard, Edward is long-suffering, and no-one wants to know about Hal and the Percies.


((Yes. It’s a zombie apocalypse Shakespeare AU. And it WORKS.))

Janet Suzman 'mad as a snake' over Rylance and Shakespeare 'myths' | Culture | The Observer

shredsandpatches:

YOU STICK IT TO ‘EM, DAME JANET.

I mean. Jacobi and Rylance are two of my favorite actors, but they are wrong wrong WRONG on this issue. Jacobi especially annoys me because Rylance is by all accounts a cloudcuckoolander, so his Unfortunate Opinions seem less egrecious.

(Reblogged from shredsandpatches)

fic rec of the day

poins:

WHAT A SHAKESPEARE FIC?

heavens above.

victorian AU, conversation between Henry V and aumerle as Harry decides to reinter Richard.

“The ironic thing,” Harry told Edward later, “is that I only figured it out at all because it was important to my father that Richard should be buried in sanctified ground. It was the sort of thing he only really cared about after the fact.” He ran a hand through his sandy hair and smiled, after a fashion, the sort of fashion that requires only half of one’s mouth, and Edward nearly started: for a second, he’d seen Richard sitting there swishing his brandy about in a manner that was as bitter as brandy-swishing could possibly be. “Didn’t stop him from having him killed, after all.”

I AM DEEPLY IMPRESSED.

(Reblogged from borgevino)
“

One does not forget time in these plays, for time is moral choice. The Prince does not; Falstaff does not. But Falstaff, who has tried to evade time throughout, as time is reckoning, speaks the final word on time in the plays, unaware of the comprehensive irony he speaks: “O, if I had had time to have made new liveries…” (2 Henry IV V. vi. 10-11).

It is in this double pattern of time for the Prince and Falstaff that certain scenes, long dismissed with a word or two as pure comedy, reveal their meaning as analogical structures similar to the first scene of Caesar. The first of these, that in which the Prince and Poins amuse themselves with Francis, the apprentice drawer, is initiated by the Prince with typical equivocation––he proposes the joke “to drive away the time till Falstaff come.” Unlike many readers, Poins eventually recognizes the ambivalence of this remark, for he asks after the joke, “But hark ye; what cunning match have you made with this jest of the drawer? Come, what’s the issue?” (1 Henry IV II. iv. 100-102).

The joke, as everyone knows, lies in Poins’s calling for the drawer from an adjoining room, and the Prince’s calling him back when he has responded, so that Francis is kept scurrying back and forth, each time crying “Anon, anon” to Poins. This is a variation of one of the oldest of farce routines, running about in some foolish way, and without doubt, it provided the usual hilarity for the general; the caviar, however, lies in what is said by the Prince and drawer between scurryings. What the Prince says, Francis does not understand, nor does Poins, who is in the next room. But much of the delight of the scene lies in the recognition by the discriminating, that in the context of the Prince’s most inward thought, “Anon, anon” has much meaning, which they are sharing with him.

The point, as the Prince says at the outset, is why Francis has given him a pennyworth of sugar. This has happened when the Prince, in joining the tapsters among their hogsheads, has been assured by them that he is no “proud Jack, like Falstaff”, and that he shall command them “when I am king of England”. The dialogue with Francis, however, deals with more than the gift of sugar; the Prince asks about his length of servitude, his feelings about abandoning it, his age, and finally the gift. If one remembers here Hamlet’s complaint about clowns, that “…there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered” (Hamlet III.ii.45-48), he will do more than laugh; he will consider and understand the necessary question. The way to understanding here, as throughout the two plays, lies in grasping the fact that the Prince is consistently introspective; that his personal inquiry is always what kind of ethical action marks a king, and what kinds of men kingship must deny and what kind take unto itself as constant and true. If here we know that the Prince’s questions are about himself, as well as about the least in the kingdom, we will have the answer to Poins’s question, “Come, what’s the issue?”

Five years is “a long lease for the clinking of pewter”. But how long is apprenticeship to the crown?

Analogical Probability in Shakespeare’s Plays, which is tragically unavailable for public consumption unless moneydollars are forked over because at some point over the course of human history for reasons I cannot fathom knowledge itself became a commercial product.