to put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, and plant this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke

[angevin2]

I wrote 687 words of dissertation today! This after a rather lengthy hiatus. Granted, 280 words of that were involved in block quotes, but still, that means I wrote 407 words of dissertation, and the way things have been going, that is Nothing To Sneeze At

Comments

[shakespearechic]

I was just re-reading Jane Austen's "The History of England by a partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian" and found this amusing passage regarding Henry IV (the pamphlet begins with him and ends with Charles I):

"Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor Richard the 2d, to resign it to him, & to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered. It is to be supposed that Henry was married, since he certainly had four sons, but it is not in my power to inform the Reader who was his Wife. Be this as it may, he did not live forever, but falling ill, his son the Prince of Wales took away the Crown; whereupon the King made a long speech, for which I must refer the Reader to Shakespear's Plays, & the Prince made a still longer. Things thus being settled between them the King died, & was succeeded by his son Henry who had previously beat Sir William Gascoigne."

[angevin2]

I love Austen's History of England, and especially that bit. Hee.

[jon3831]

Holy crap, it is the OUS!

[so_lily_briscoe]

I don't know why I have been posting so many Plantagenet family trees lately

Well I for one certainly hope you won't ever stop doing so. I love them. And the consistent presence of vines / stylized-crotch-goings-on is astonishing - once, twice, sure, vines, trees, loins, family, it's a metaphor, I get it. But so consistently. Is it just a sort of naturalization of what might otherwise appear to be a somewhat bizarre practice of passing down sovereignty through a genealogical line, or something more complicated than that? Have you come across anything interesting / not-obvious in the secondary lit?

[angevin2]

You know, I don't know if there is much secondary lit on this topic! I am thinking of doing an article about it myself, though, in which case I would have to see what's out there. One thing that interests me about these genealogies is the presence or absence of women, since what you tend to get is a visual representation of direct father-to-son generation with people springing from the loins of their fathers -- unless it's someone who has a problematic claim to the throne, because nearly everybody in this whole mess, except for Richard II and Henries IV-VI, is claiming through the female line. So if you look at Stowe's frontispiece, the only people who have mothers are people whose legitimacy is less than fully established. And that's really striking.

I do know that the arboreal representation gestures back to biblical iconography and the whole tree of Jesse thing to depict the genealogy of Jesus (since in e.g. Isaiah there is the whole radix Jesse imagery and these passages are read by Christians as messianic). The Plantagenet trees

[kitmarlowe]

I like that Hal's expression totally says "Oh, not more didactic poetry."

Haha, so do I. My old tutor was obsessed with Hoccleve and by fair means or foul would find some pretext to use that picture on every single lecture handout.

[angevin2]

Hee. I suppose that, since at some point I shall give a spiel about the Wilton Diptych to my Shakespeare students, ostensibly for historical context but mostly because it's made of awesome, I cannot blame him too severely. ;)

My diss director is into Hoccleve, too, actually...

[ricardienne]

I wonder what the whole Wars of the Roses tree would look like with everyone sawing off each others' branches?

And for a moment I thought that Hal was wearing the (in)famous Gown With Needles, but I think it's just fancy gilding.

[angevin2]

If I had any artistic skills at all, I would totally draw that. :D