are you guys tired of Woodstock yet? I'm starting to get there.

[angevin2]

After Saturday (which is when the readthrough is) I may shut up about it for a bit, although I've had a really really clever idea for the diss chapter on it. I am so smart. S-M-R-T! I mean S-M-A-R-T!

Anyway, for your amusement, I present to you what is, perhaps, the most obnoxious dialogue in Elizabethan drama.

Comments

[kaskait]

That was funny.

Your part tonight will just be reciting a list. Thats it. Ha.

[angevin2]

I'm thinking of setting it to music and making Richard channel Yakko Warner.

[gillo]

Hysterical. It would seem I belong to Greene, though I was Staffordshire born.

I'll swear the Pythons did a parody that was more coherent than this. Possibly it was Beyond the Fringe.

Indeed it was:

Shakespeare also suffered at the hands of the Beyond the Fringe team, as this sketch 'So That's The Way You Like It' demonstrates.

Miller: Get thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do thee to Wessex, Exeter

[angevin2]

Hee! I think I've seen that before, actually, iirc thanks to someone who found my great love for Shakespeare's histories amusing. ;)

I would also like it known that Woodstock is a much better play than this passage makes it look. It is completely and utterly on crack, but it's a lot of fun.

[gillo]

I confess I've never read "Thomas of Woodstock" (though I had heard of it, honest!).

I knew the Beyond the Fringe parody way before I knew enough about the History Plays to recognise the target. It's like "1066 and All That" - the more you know, the funnier it is.

[angevin2]

Most people haven't unless they're really serious about Elizabethan history plays (Richard II in particular). ;)

It's a lot of fun, though, and a great text for my dissertation because it's so, so self-conscious about its own historiography -- weirdly, nobody else has written anything that I can find on that topic, although as far as I'm concerned that's a Good Thing. There's a text of it here; I think you might enjoy it. :)