that every day under his household roof did keep ten thousand men, and then ATE THEIR BRAINS
So this evening fubarite posted about seeing the RSC Henry IV about which I have been on pretty much nonstop for the last week or so, and one of the things she mentioned (um, you are a she, right, fubarite? One tends to assume, on lj) was that 2H4 had zombie Richard II in it -- at the start of the play Rumor drags his coffin in and lets him out and then he wanders around for the rest of the play being all haunty and metaphorically brain-eaty. Or something. fubarite was not that impressed, but I probably would have grinned stupidly every time he appeared, because I am Like That.
Anyway, contemplation of the lack of zombie Richard II in my life led me to recall a particularly frightening engraving of Richard that appears in the intro to the New Cambridge edition, and that I had been meaning to scan in for you for a while, for your general amusement and disturbance, as he really, really does look like he's going to eat my brain (which would, I fear, be redundant, at this point).
After I had scanned in the engraving in question I realized it would be interesting to look up the work from which it came, because it appeared in a 1597 book called A Booke Containing the Trve Portraitvre of the Covntenances and Attires of the Kings of England, by either Thomas Talbot or Thomas Tymme, I'm not sure which (Cambridge thinks it's the latter and EEBO thinks it's the former), and, as you might expect, it is a book of portraits of the kings and queens of England, from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth I. And they are completely terrifying. Edward Longshanks in particular fills me with the desire to hide behind my chair (a legacy which probably would not have displeased him).
I will do a post with examples from this delightful and upsetting text in a bit, but in the meantime, here's zombie Richard II.
Anyway, contemplation of the lack of zombie Richard II in my life led me to recall a particularly frightening engraving of Richard that appears in the intro to the New Cambridge edition, and that I had been meaning to scan in for you for a while, for your general amusement and disturbance, as he really, really does look like he's going to eat my brain (which would, I fear, be redundant, at this point).
After I had scanned in the engraving in question I realized it would be interesting to look up the work from which it came, because it appeared in a 1597 book called A Booke Containing the Trve Portraitvre of the Covntenances and Attires of the Kings of England, by either Thomas Talbot or Thomas Tymme, I'm not sure which (Cambridge thinks it's the latter and EEBO thinks it's the former), and, as you might expect, it is a book of portraits of the kings and queens of England, from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth I. And they are completely terrifying. Edward Longshanks in particular fills me with the desire to hide behind my chair (a legacy which probably would not have displeased him).
I will do a post with examples from this delightful and upsetting text in a bit, but in the meantime, here's zombie Richard II.