a_t_rain

So, I wrote Henry VI fic about Cade's rebellion, because I think I'm going to take my first shot at teaching (3/4 of) the first tetralogy this fall, and apparently fanfic is one of the ways I think through things before teaching them? At any rate, it's stunning how timely that bit feels. I think I went in thinking "oh, this is going to feel really different after 1/6, and thank God I never published my dissertation, because twentysomething-me was way too much of a Cade apologist." Which I was, but it's also layered in ways that I hadn't anticipated -- Lord Say pretty much says the most tone-deaf things possible without having the least idea they're tone-deaf, in ways that feel uncomfortably familiar if you're a red-state academic who spends a lot of time cringing at blue-state academics.

These are really good plays. I remember being surprised by that when I first read them in my MA program, and I was surpised again upon re-reading. I haven't come back to them that often, in part because they feel so unrelentingly bleak, and one of the things I usually like the most about (older) Shakespeare is how redemptive his vision of people tends to be, how even the characters who do deeply horrible things aren't usually reduced to those things. And you see glimmers of that in 2 and 3 H6, maybe in Eleanor and Queen Margaret in particular, but it's mostly not quite there yet.

Another random thing that surprised me was just how different the rebellion scenes were in the Quarto. I didn't look up the current scholarly consensus on how they relate to each other, but they both "feel" plausibly Shxian to me, like we might be looking at revision-over-time, maybe different versions for different casts? There are a lot of names, and the editors of the Norton Shakespeare seem to think they might be actor-names rather than character-names in some cases, and I actually suspect they may be both / and? At any rate, it turns out that the character who is "Smith the Weaver" in the Folio text is simply "Will" in the Quarto, where he's also described as having courted a woman named Nan -- which is, naturally, where my imagination started running away with me, as in, "oh wow, did Shakespeare actually write himself IN as the play's most vocally anti-intellectual character?" Which would be awesome, if true.

I'm alive! I see that I haven't posted here in two years, which is kind of wild, but I simply haven't been doing a lot of fandom stuff, and that tends to be what this journal is for. Anyway, that has abruptly changed, because a few weeks ago I woke up at 3 a.m. with, I swear, the voice of Richard Burbage's ghost in my head and an urge to write early modern literature RPF. I don't actually know if there is an audience for early modern literature RPF, particularly if it has a) no sex; b) almost no Christopher Marlowe; c) definitely nobody having sex WITH Christopher Marlowe. But I figured if there was an audience, it would most likely be people who know me here, rather than people randomly stumbling upon it on AO3.

So: a story. This isn't the Burbage fic, because that one started off as a short, snarky buddy comedy set in the Elizabethan theater, with a slightly more serious undercurrent about ambition, and somehow morphed into a novella-length monster with death and ghosts and envy and proto-feminism and lots of random musings about specific plays, and about the nature of artistic partnership, and about exactly how one manages stage business like biting out one's tongue. I thought for about half a minute that it might be publishable for real, and then I realized that it was not only exceptionally self-indulgent even by fanfic standards, but it had no plot other than "a couple of guys really like each other and their jobs." So AO3 it will be, whenever I finish it and think of a better title than Dick.

Meantime, here's a very short side story featuring Ben Jonson and a young Lady Mary Wroth:

Equals.

... because if there's one thing I can't resist, it's making up new ways to save Hamlet. Special thanks to whoever it was on my f-list who wondered, years ago, why Bernardo and Marcellus seem to think Horatio's status as a scholar gives him special expertise in how to speak to ghosts.

Graduate Seminar in Practical Necromancy; or, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

Now that Histories Ficathon author reveals are over, I can claim credit for The Lord Who Doesn't Lie, possibly the only fic about medieval demandes d'amour games anywhere on AO3. Hotspur / Kate, mostly fluff.

So I guess I wrote, um, RPF? It was meant to be a light-hearted story about William Shakespeare and his teenaged daughters reading bad 16th-century angstfic together, but somehow it went all religious, so I figured this would be a good day to post it.

Italicized passages are quotes from either the Geneva Bible, or Nicholas Breton's The Miseries of Mavillia (it should be obvious which is which); I've also borrowed heavily from the Geneva phrasing of the parable of the talents. Breton, by the way, would have fit right in with Anne of Green Gables and her Story Club.

This is maybe a little early for Will to be living with the Mountjoy family, but I figure he played around with historical timelines all the time, so why can't I?

( Lent )

Finally got back to this (not coincidentally, I'm teaching R&J at the moment and feeling the need to give them a happy ending). Prior installments of the Half-Blood Prince of Denmark saga are here.

Dialogue is from Act 5, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet, except where it isn't. Also, Romeo totally needs a sassy lesbian friend.

( Act Four: Graves, Yawn and Yield Your Dead )

In which Severus and Helena begin to investigate Juliet's death, and discover some interesting things about Friar Laurence. See here for the first installment of "Four Funerals and a Wedding," and here for the entire saga.

( Act Two: The Nurse and the Friar )

Because lareinenoire and angevin2 reminded me last month that I'd never actually finished this thing. I don't have any good excuse, except to note that faux-Elizabethan court entertainments, even very bad ones, are incredibly hard to write, and I now have renewed respect for anyone who managed to write a good one.

Prior installments are here, just in case you're not in the habit of remembering the plot of other people's WIPs for two and a half years.

( Act V: The Right Promethean Fire )

So, two chapters for edited collections: DONE, at least until I get the reviewers' reports. Which is excellent, as I leave for Europe in three days, and have been frantically trying to finish up all the writing-related odds and ends. Sadly, I think the Hamlet AU doesn't get finished until I get back, but this bit of silliness has been hanging out on my hard drive for ages (ever since I found out there was a seventeenth-century puppet show about "the siege of Babylon, with the humors of Sir Andrew Aguecheek") and I think it's high time I posted it.

The story of Evilmerodoch comes from William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse. I haven't made any of it up at all, except for the name-changing part and, of course, involving Sir Andrew.

( Beau Jest; or, the Countess of Babylotion )

... Yeah. Sorry I've been so bad at updating the Hamlet-fic. I have been crazy busy, and I've been feeling pretty tapped out. However, one of my former students stopped me in the hall a few weeks ago to ask me if I had seen Anonymous and told me it was sooo good, and I thought, "DID I TEACH YOU NOTHING?" so that gave me a bit of a push.

Parts 1-3 are here. If you're wondering what the heck the English players are talking about, see here for a brief account of Essex's rebellion.

( Chapter Four: The Actors Are Come Hither )