- Feb 3, 2024
- LitBits
- 0
New blog post by Vagabond Heart – discussions in this thread, please
---
I was cracking on with my stupidly self-imposed lockdown challenge to read The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I’d met a few Henry’s now, and although I knew one of them was meant to be rousing stuff, I had no clue which one it was. Could it be this one, I thought?
16. Henry IV part 2
But no. Nothing to see here, folks.
Half the play was about preparing for a fight which never happened.
The rest was Falstaff preparing to be bigged up by the new King. This also never happened.
The big F did get a shag with the wonderfully named Doll Tearsheet though. But I reckon he didn’t deserve her.
Talking of character names, there were some corkers:
Ancient Pistol
Shallow
Silence (couldn’t stop singing)
Fang
Snare
Mouldy
Shadow
Wart
Bullcalf
and Feeble.
And, harking back to the treasure trove of swear words I was compiling, if anyone can tell me where on the body God’s liggens are, I’ll be eternally grateful. As with many other words in this play, you can Google the living shit out of it and be none the wiser.
1/10 because it had a couple of really spiffing lines in it, including, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’
Never mind. Perhaps this next Henry would deliver the goods?
17. Henry V
Will had now got to the point of feeling so proficient with language he’d decided to branch out a bit. This is the play where he had a go at doing accents. With varied rates of success, to be honest.
There were plenty of French in the cast of characters, and there was also a Welshman. However, I spent most of the play wondering why it was full of Germans.
Here’s what I mean: –
Alice: ‘de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits – dat is de princess.’ Alice … is French.
Katherine: ‘I cannot tell vat is dat.’ (Also French)
Fluellen (who I only knew was Welsh when he started waving a leek about): Got is goot.
Then there was a whole section in the middle that was just in French (I don’t speak French, so that was fun). Turned out to be mostly naming body parts, so really not important.
The play revolved around the fact that Henry’s great-grandmother was the daughter of the French king. And although succession followed a strictly male line, Henry reckoned bugger that, he’s still the true ruler. France, on the other hand, already had a king that it was perfectly happy with. And no one had invented football yet, so off to war they went.
Will rather glosses over the fact that, once he got going, Henry became a complete off-with-their-heads-style, genocidal maniac, especially as regards the prisoners of war.
But to balance that out he gave Henry the lines that I’d been waiting for. And they were every bit as good as I’d been led to believe.
From the speech ending in the rousing battle cry: –
‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
to the famous: –
‘…We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother…
…And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not here;
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’
… he showed why he was earning the big bucks.
But my favourite lines went to some of the lesser characters, for instance: –
Nym: ‘Will you shog off?’ (Means exactly what you think it does.)
Duke of Bourbon: ‘Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!’
And this from Pistol, which I think should be an A level essay question: ‘Art thou a gentlemen? what is thy name? discuss.’
Scoring wise, a solid 6/10
Already hyped up I moved onto the next one, which was a sort Shakespearean Pride and Prejudice, but with more fun and fewer bonnets.
18. Much Ado About Nothing
The stars of the show here were Beatrice and Benedick; a couple of verbal sparring partners so sharp they could cut themselves. The thing is they were nuts about each other – any fool could see that.
They didn’t actually need the help of their friends ‘to fall in love’: they just needed a way to do it without losing too much face.
At one point Beatrice alluded to them having a history, where he appears to have acted like a jerk, and she wasn’t about to go down that road twice.
Consequently, they both had to pretend to a mutual loathing, despite the fact that they both thought of and talked about each other ALL THE FRIGGING TIME.
Even when the Prince proposed to Beatrice (THE ACTUAL PRINCE!), she was so obsessed with Ben-a-dick that she barely registered it.
There was lots of other stuff going on in the play, but none of the scenes were as much fun as when these two were scoring points off each other.
By the end of the play I just wanted to be Beatrice, and say, ‘there was a star danced, and under that was I born.’
And to have a humbled and awestruck Benedick tell me, ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is that not strange?’
9/10 because lovely.
There was now one play left between me and one of the most well-known plays of all. Would I be able to review it objectively? Or would it totally derail my entire process? Find out next time.
---
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…
For more posts by Vagabond Heart click here WTF, Will! parts 16 – 18 – Litopia
---
I was cracking on with my stupidly self-imposed lockdown challenge to read The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I’d met a few Henry’s now, and although I knew one of them was meant to be rousing stuff, I had no clue which one it was. Could it be this one, I thought?
16. Henry IV part 2
But no. Nothing to see here, folks.
Half the play was about preparing for a fight which never happened.
The rest was Falstaff preparing to be bigged up by the new King. This also never happened.
The big F did get a shag with the wonderfully named Doll Tearsheet though. But I reckon he didn’t deserve her.
Talking of character names, there were some corkers:
Ancient Pistol
Shallow
Silence (couldn’t stop singing)
Fang
Snare
Mouldy
Shadow
Wart
Bullcalf
and Feeble.
And, harking back to the treasure trove of swear words I was compiling, if anyone can tell me where on the body God’s liggens are, I’ll be eternally grateful. As with many other words in this play, you can Google the living shit out of it and be none the wiser.
1/10 because it had a couple of really spiffing lines in it, including, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’
Never mind. Perhaps this next Henry would deliver the goods?
17. Henry V
Will had now got to the point of feeling so proficient with language he’d decided to branch out a bit. This is the play where he had a go at doing accents. With varied rates of success, to be honest.
There were plenty of French in the cast of characters, and there was also a Welshman. However, I spent most of the play wondering why it was full of Germans.
Here’s what I mean: –
Alice: ‘de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits – dat is de princess.’ Alice … is French.
Katherine: ‘I cannot tell vat is dat.’ (Also French)
Fluellen (who I only knew was Welsh when he started waving a leek about): Got is goot.
Then there was a whole section in the middle that was just in French (I don’t speak French, so that was fun). Turned out to be mostly naming body parts, so really not important.
The play revolved around the fact that Henry’s great-grandmother was the daughter of the French king. And although succession followed a strictly male line, Henry reckoned bugger that, he’s still the true ruler. France, on the other hand, already had a king that it was perfectly happy with. And no one had invented football yet, so off to war they went.
Will rather glosses over the fact that, once he got going, Henry became a complete off-with-their-heads-style, genocidal maniac, especially as regards the prisoners of war.
But to balance that out he gave Henry the lines that I’d been waiting for. And they were every bit as good as I’d been led to believe.
From the speech ending in the rousing battle cry: –
‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
to the famous: –
‘…We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother…
…And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurst they were not here;
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’
… he showed why he was earning the big bucks.
But my favourite lines went to some of the lesser characters, for instance: –
Nym: ‘Will you shog off?’ (Means exactly what you think it does.)
Duke of Bourbon: ‘Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!’
And this from Pistol, which I think should be an A level essay question: ‘Art thou a gentlemen? what is thy name? discuss.’
Scoring wise, a solid 6/10
Already hyped up I moved onto the next one, which was a sort Shakespearean Pride and Prejudice, but with more fun and fewer bonnets.
18. Much Ado About Nothing
The stars of the show here were Beatrice and Benedick; a couple of verbal sparring partners so sharp they could cut themselves. The thing is they were nuts about each other – any fool could see that.
They didn’t actually need the help of their friends ‘to fall in love’: they just needed a way to do it without losing too much face.
At one point Beatrice alluded to them having a history, where he appears to have acted like a jerk, and she wasn’t about to go down that road twice.
Consequently, they both had to pretend to a mutual loathing, despite the fact that they both thought of and talked about each other ALL THE FRIGGING TIME.
Even when the Prince proposed to Beatrice (THE ACTUAL PRINCE!), she was so obsessed with Ben-a-dick that she barely registered it.
There was lots of other stuff going on in the play, but none of the scenes were as much fun as when these two were scoring points off each other.
By the end of the play I just wanted to be Beatrice, and say, ‘there was a star danced, and under that was I born.’
And to have a humbled and awestruck Benedick tell me, ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is that not strange?’
9/10 because lovely.
There was now one play left between me and one of the most well-known plays of all. Would I be able to review it objectively? Or would it totally derail my entire process? Find out next time.
---
Get the discussion going – post your thoughts & comments in the thread below…
For more posts by Vagabond Heart click here WTF, Will! parts 16 – 18 – Litopia
