a_t_rain

I wrote really long Shakespeare-hanging-out-with-Ben-Jonson fic to celebrate. (Also, from earlier this month: Chaucer and Shakespeare hanging out with their daughters, and writing the Wife of Bath's Tale and All's Well, respectively.) This is all instead of doing revisions on the Chaucer article that I should have been working on this whole time, because that's the way I roll.

I made cupcakes for my students, too! I haven't done that in ages, not since before the pandemic. It was nice, although only three of my ten World Lit students actually showed up (we are still in this weird cultural shift where students seem to have become accustomed to attendance being optional, although this is an Honors class, so I was surprised). At least my other two classes were mostly present and engaged, and seemed to appreciate the cupcakes.

So, I wrote some new Shakespeare fan-stuff, because apparently this is what I do these days instead of a) getting ready for Week 2 of classes; b) writing that article I'm supposed to be writing; c) getting started on the extremely complicated side editing gig I've been offered (but don't yet have a formal contract for, so I guess not getting too deeply into the weeds for the moment is justified); or d) doing revisions to the other extremely complicated thing I'm hoping to publish, eventually. It'll happen, I guess. (At least, if this is my new fandom of choice, I can sort of pretend all the stuff I'm learning has some bearing on my academic life? I mean, I found out about this super-interesting lady printer who is pretty much certain to have been part of Shakespeare's social and intellectual circle, and why has no one ever mentioned this before?)

Queen's Leap (The Tempest, Ferdinand / Miranda, chess, canon attempted rape)

Handy (young!Shakespeare dealing with class / education snobbery, plus various people expecting him to fight a duel)

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.

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 )