#hcessay

[borgevino]

just want you to know that my senior thesis was on henry bolingbroke and i watched your taylor swift video of henry/richard At Least once a day while writing it thank u for your service

THIS IS MY LEGACY...... THANK YOU FOR TELLING ME

[borgevino]

butilovefire replied to your post: [screeches the text of a play is inextricably...

yep. i mean you CAN look at texts separately from performance but you have to recognize and acknowledge the severe limits of that approach (esp if you’re trying to address authorial intent which would obviously be entangled with performance)

exactly!  all texts are living texts (in the way the reader responds to them) but plays are doubly so—because you have the text, and then the production's response to the text, and then the viewer's response to the production and the text, and different productions activate different elements of the text—even elements that weren't there in the author's intention.

(and even if you're looking at text as just text it's impossible to ignore the ways it has interacted with culture in the past, and will interact with culture in the future—surveillance-state hamlets, atemporal twelfth nights, news-network coriolanuses, soviet macbeths...)

sea-change replied to your post: [screeches the text of a play is inextricably...

but i mean like texts THEMSELVES aren’t static things so even if you were looking at a playscript seperate from the idea of performance (which. whyyyyyy. unless MAYBE you were deep into someone like muller but even then) you. can’t force it to be something it’s not for the sake of your argument??? like, ALL texts are meant to be engaged with, and playtexts are meant to be engaged with bodily. it’s not even authorial intent, it’s the shape of text itself, and its job is to shape you.

and then jacqui says exactly the thing i meant.  because yes.  i really haven't done theatre enough to really talk about this, but there's something about the potential ways the text is uniquely transformed and embodied by each actor who performs it that's just.  really fundamental.  to even its existence as a text.  

[borgevino]

goodshipophelia: iaGO AND BLACK HOLES BECAUSE HE TAKES OTHELLO OVER AND TURNS HIM AGAINST HIMSELF AND CRUSHES HIM INTO NOTHING EVEN TAKES AWAY THE POSSIBILITY OF REDEMPTION BY HAVING IAGO'S TREACHERY REVEALED, BECAUSE IAGO DIES AND TAKES THAT LAST HOPE WITH HIM

borgevino: Y E P AND THEN IAGO’S LAST ACT !!!! HIS LAST ACT!!!! IS SILENCE. LIKE HE JUST. STOPS. AND REFUSES TO MAKE MEANING OUT OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED !!!! and idk i’m in the process of Having Critical Thoughts (aided greatly by harry) of about iago vs the fourth wall and how iago’s silence at the end of the play and his constant deflection about his actual motives are actually intentionally subversive to the narrative or something idek just. just. iagoooOOOOOOOO

goodshipophelia: idk about subverting the narrative but IAGO TAKES OVER THE NARRATIVE FROM INSIDE AND CONTROLS BOTH THE EVENTS OF THE PLAY AND OUR EXPERIENCE OF THE STORY ITS FUCKING HORRIFYING HE GETS OUT AND TAKES OVER

borgevino: YES THAT’S WHAT I MEANT whoops i worded that badly but YES !!!! HE DOES AND IT’S LITERALLY THE MOST TERRIFYING THING i spend a LOT OF TIME looking at iago and going ???!??!?!??!!!!!!! HOWWWWW. there are a lot of levels of performance right there. i can’t even process them all right now but to be able to perform to the characters within the play AND ALSO the audience of the play is just !!!!!

goodshipophelia: AND THEN OF COURSE: IS HE PLAYING HIMSELF?? IS HE NATURALLY LIKE THIS OR DID HE CONSUME HIMSELF FIRST, PERFORMING INFINITELY FLEXIBLE NOTHINGNESS UNTIL HE /BECAME/ IT—taking his inability to advance, his perpetually-overlooked everyman status, and make it into a mask? or was he /born/ a black hole??

borgevino: WHICH ONE DOES HE THINK HE IS ALSO ??? is he also performing foR HIMSELF (idek if that’s even ! a question that makes sense!!!! BUT !) this play is a black hole in that every time i think about it i get drawn into an ever-deepening hole of ?????????? re iago until eventually the entire universe is just ???????????????????

goodshipophelia: im just going to curl into a ball of othello-related confusion and roll away

borgevino (rather later): okay okay i thought about it some more and iago is also like a black hole because like. you can’t observe black holes w telescopes etc directly. you have to look at what’s around them and kind of infer what’s happening. and that’s exactly what he does with his last silence—he makes it so that we can’t figure out what he’s thinking; we’re just left to watch the rest of the play go on around him ??????? i’m just gonna lie here until the word ‘honest’ stops being painful tbh

goodshipophelia (a month later): YOU CANT OBSERVE A BLACK HOLE /JESSIE/ I LOVE YOUR BRAIN. iago gets like seven speeches to make us feel like we know him and we still only observe him from his effect on others

borgevino: yesssssss exactly, it’s like whenever he says his motive he’s trying it on for size—it would actually be pretty interesting to go through the play and see if he ever says the same reason for his actions more than once

[borgevino]

William Shakespeare!

favorite thing about language or writing

,adflkjfaljjfffs if i try to answer this it will turn into my favorite things about everything, because to me literally everything is language, i’m not kidding, all my mental pictures are literally words in disguise as pictures (this was disconcerting when I realized it as a sophomore studying studio art and caused no end of consternation, how on earth am i supposed to create a meaningful original drawing when i’m imagining it in words [i solved this problem but at the time it was v concerning])

BUT OKAY SPECIFICS HMMMM i don’t think i can explain this without talking about invisible cities (because i am literally the most predictable person) because the language that makes up those cities describes cities on one level, but I’ve also written papers on how the cities can each be seen as a miniature treatise on literary theory—so the language is doing two entirely different things at the same time, and probably more; there are a lot of things going on in every single word in that book.  and literally every time I read it, there’s something new I pick up….

so just this sense of living texts, the way that some texts are always relevant (shakespeare is still performed in new ways meaning different things with the same words after CENTURIES)—and the way that every text is literally just the same linguistic elements recombined into a way that makes everything about them totally new—

and then ugh language is so powerful, because there is SO MUCH that you can build with it (look at h5 and the way he speaks throughout the plays he’s in, because he uses language and manipulates it—speaks in prose in eastcheap, in verse in court, plays with his name with hotspur ‘two stars hold not their motion in one sphere’, shoots puns at the dauphin, builds a myth to send his men into battle ‘for he today who sheds his blood with me will be my brother’, h5 is all about kingship through language)—and so much you can destroy with it, too, which is the dark side of language (‘sticks and stone will break my bones but words will never hurt me’ one of the biggest lies ever told, language hurts untold millions every day—not just hurt feelings, or bigoted speech, but the conduits of power that use language in a way that’s inherently harmful to minorities etc)

and i just

ugh

language.  language language language.

(and i didn't even really get into deconstruction !!!!!!)

[borgevino]

Are the Henry V play fandom & the historical fandom interchangable?

like.  h5 the character vs h5 the person?  or h5 the the text or h5 the historical events?

in any case, i think they overlap a lot—and learning about the history helps a lot with understanding the play, and enjoying the nuances of it—but i wouldn’t say they’re interchangeable, no.  h5 the person is a lot more terrifying than h5 the character (which is SAYING SOMETHING because h5 the character is pretty freaking scary).  and h5 the text is, well, a text, which means you can talk about language and word choices and who says what and the way they’ve said it (ex: h5 keeps telling stories to keep everyone motivated!  it’s kind of amazing!  tbh i’d like to see a production where h5 and the chorus are doubled).  whereas in history things…can be analyzed, but less…linguistically.  and tbh when i read shakespeare i am there for the language first and the plot second.

did that make sense?  did that answer your question?

[borgevino]

allow me to throw you a challenge bone. shakespeare's seven kings all together constitute a psychomachia. write that essay.

wait does that mean that each king represents a deadly sin because oh my god

r2: prideh4: envyh5: wrathh6: sloth? (he is terrible at doing things)edward: lustr3: gluttony/greed

or were you leaving edward out and throwing in john and h8 instead because that's just six and edward isn't...enormously kingy (but! lust!)

[borgevino]

Hey, my Shakespeare expert ;) I have an exam in a week. I've chosen to write on Othello and Tragedy for my first question, and then either Gender with Macbeth and Coriolanus, or the Supernatural with Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream (it depends if it comes up as a theme I could write about or not.) I'd have loved to write about kingship, but I already wrote a lot on the theme with Richard II for my previous assignment, so I can't really do that again. Do you know of any way that (tbc)

that I could write about Henry IV (we didn't study Henry V so I'm not allowed to write on that) alongside Macbeth in terms of kingship, just because I love the play and it's a shame to not get to write on it, or would I be better off sticking to what I have planned?

gender in coriolanus and macbeth though

THAT IS SEVERAL BOOKS' WORTH OF FASCINATING ESSAYS

i would say go for that one because then you get to talk about volumnia and lady macbeth !!!!!!! the mother and the childless woman and how that influences their responses to their respective subjects of persuasion, and then you can talk about lady macbeth's relationship with macbeth vs coriolanus' relationship with virgilia and that is such a GREAT GREAT GREAT TOPIC, WHAT A GOOD TOPIC

i would stick with that one.

tbh i haven't really...done enough with macbeth to know how you can talk about kingship in it?  the only thing i've really done with macbeth is the gender thing.

[borgevino]

hey since you're a shakespeare fan and I don't find that many of them on here and I'm desperate I was wondering if you could help me out?? I have this Shakespeare exam in January and I have to write 2 essays about 2 themes in regards to 2 plays each. Do you think Macbeth would be best for the theme of the supernatural, gender or kingship? Or do you think Richard II and Henry IV Part 1 would be good for kingship (possibly with usurpation) ? feel free to ignore if you don't want to help haha :)

aaah no problem!!  there are lots of us if you know where to look, shredsandpatches is really good on richard ii and the other histories and goodshipophelia is just good overall, and nissanissas also does a lot with shakespeare.  harry-le-roy and smokeandsong also have a+ shakespeare opinions, and cassius614 and renkris as well.

i've always done gender with macbeth because then you get to talk about lady macbeth's terrifying speeches and her ideas of masculinity and how they don't quite line up with how masculinity actually seems to work within the play.  and about the witches (they have beards! it confuses banquo!) and how the fact that they're female says something about, like, feminine mystery or something.  idk.  if you have access to jstor or a similar database try searching for 'macbeth witches female archetype' or something along those lines.

richard ii is good for kingship and ideas of kingship and the difference between the performative aspect of kingship and its political aspect because richard is a++ at being king performatively while also being complete shit at the political part.  and you can also talk about the whole idea of the divine right of kingship and how richard relies on it while simultaneously undermining it with his actions.  yes richard ii is good for kingship.  i don't know that 1 henry iv would be that great? henry v would be stellar for kingship and 2 henry iv has some excellent speeches—'uneasy lies the head that wears the crown' comes to mind along with the crownswapping scene—but i don't remember there being a lot about kingship in the others.

ah i've written about some of these things before, check the hcessay tag

hope that helped???