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landofnowhere) wrote2023-12-06 09:40 pm
landofnowhere) wrote2023-12-06 09:40 pm
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wednesday books might not have anything in common
Henry VI, Part I, William Shakespeare (and possible coauthors). This does in some ways feel more like Marlowe than other Shakespeare plays do -- I see why he's hypothesized to be one of the coauthors. But even though it may not be 100% Shakespeare, it is still a fun play -- Talbot is great. And though he's not the main focus of the play, OMG Henry VI is a boy king in way over his head, as will only become more apparent in the sequels. And Joan of Arc gets to be an interesting character even though the play is clearly pro-English propaganda and I am not on board with the Act V character assassination. Looking forward to the next two parts of this one!
Network Effect, Martha Wells. Reread. Only made a bit of progress on this in the past week, distracted by other stuff. Still yay Murderbot, will report more on this later on.
Hold on To Love/The Dragonfly Years, Mollie Hunter. Reread. So anytime anyone mentions Mollie Hunter on DW, I jump in to rave about her autobiographical novel A Sound of Chariots. That book -- about grief, and being a poet, and growing up poor in rural Scotland surrounded by WWI vets, is really good and I recommend it! (It is very out of print, but available on OpenLibrary.) This is the sequel to that book, and covers our protagonist from ages 15-18 while she is working in a flower shop in Edinburgh and writing in her spare time, all during the build-up to and start of WWII. And the evocation of Edinburgh and that time period is great! On the whole, though, the story is definitely of the type thatmrissa calls "too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby" -- I originally read this book as a teenager with the title Hold on to Love, and only just learned that other editions use the title The Dragonfly Years, which is a better title, but really Hold on to Love is actually a better title in terms of reflecting the story, which is focused on the romance arc -- which has some sweet moments, but is generally pretty cliched.
(Content notes: depiction of racism (mostly toward Indigenous Highland Travellers) and anti-Semitism. The blatantly racist characters are portrayed as unsympathetic and our protagonist is shown as trying to be better than them, but it's still a story where it feels like the characters from marginalized groups mostly are there to support the protagonist's arc. Also there's a character who the protagonist thinks of as "Fat Liz", but I didn't notice any specific fatphobia in how she was portrayed, and she is shown to have her strengths. But really you should be reading A Sound of Chariots, not this.)
Network Effect, Martha Wells. Reread. Only made a bit of progress on this in the past week, distracted by other stuff. Still yay Murderbot, will report more on this later on.
Hold on To Love/The Dragonfly Years, Mollie Hunter. Reread. So anytime anyone mentions Mollie Hunter on DW, I jump in to rave about her autobiographical novel A Sound of Chariots. That book -- about grief, and being a poet, and growing up poor in rural Scotland surrounded by WWI vets, is really good and I recommend it! (It is very out of print, but available on OpenLibrary.) This is the sequel to that book, and covers our protagonist from ages 15-18 while she is working in a flower shop in Edinburgh and writing in her spare time, all during the build-up to and start of WWII. And the evocation of Edinburgh and that time period is great! On the whole, though, the story is definitely of the type that
mrissa calls "too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby" -- I originally read this book as a teenager with the title Hold on to Love, and only just learned that other editions use the title The Dragonfly Years, which is a better title, but really Hold on to Love is actually a better title in terms of reflecting the story, which is focused on the romance arc -- which has some sweet moments, but is generally pretty cliched.(Content notes: depiction of racism (mostly toward Indigenous Highland Travellers) and anti-Semitism. The blatantly racist characters are portrayed as unsympathetic and our protagonist is shown as trying to be better than them, but it's still a story where it feels like the characters from marginalized groups mostly are there to support the protagonist's arc. Also there's a character who the protagonist thinks of as "Fat Liz", but I didn't notice any specific fatphobia in how she was portrayed, and she is shown to have her strengths. But really you should be reading A Sound of Chariots, not this.)
no subject
But how could valiant English forces lose if the woman wasn't a witch! :) I actually read Shaw's play Saint Joan before the Henry VI trilogy, and thus I was introduced to young Will's opus by GBS describing it thusly: There is the first part of the Shakespearean, or pseudo-Shakespearean trilogy of Henry VI, in which Joan is one of the leading characters. This portrait of Joan is not more authentic than the descriptions in the London papers of George Washington in 1780, of Napoleon in 1803, of the German Crown Prince in 1915, or of Lenin in 1917. It ends in mere scurrility. The impression left by it is that the playwright, having begun by an attempt to make Joan a beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play could not be produced. As likely as not, this is what actually happened: indeed there is only one other apparent way of accounting for the sympathetic representation of Joan as a heroine culminating in her eloquent appeal to the Duke of Burgundy, followed by the blackguardly scurrility of the concluding scenes. That other way is to assume that the original play was wholly scurrilous, and that Shakespear touched up the earlier scenes. As the work belongs to a period at which he was only beginning his practice as a tinker of old works, before his own style was fully formed and hardened, it is impossible to verify this guess. His finger is not unmistakably evident in the play, which is poor and base in its moral tone; but he may have tried to redeem it from downright infamy by shedding a momentary glamor on the figure of The Maid.
And the start of his big discussion scene between Warwick, Stogumber and Cauchon definitely relates to that:
THE CHAPLAIN. I must say, my lord, you take our situation very coolly. Very coolly indeed.
THE NOBLEMAN [supercilious] What is the matter?
THE CHAPLAIN. The matter, my lord, is that we English have been defeated.
THE NOBLEMAN. That happens, you know. It is only in history books and ballads that the enemy is always defeated.
THE CHAPLAIN. But we are being defeated over and over again. First, Orleans--
THE NOBLEMAN [poohpoohing] Oh, Orleans!
THE CHAPLAIN. I know what you are going to say, my lord: that was a clear case of witchcraft and sorcery. But we are still being defeated. Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency, just like Orleans. And now we have been butchered at Patay, and Sir John Talbot taken prisoner. [He throws down his pen, almost in tears] I feel it, my lord: I feel it very deeply. I cannot bear to see my countrymen defeated by a parcel of foreigners.
THE NOBLEMAN. Oh! you are an Englishman, are you?
Back to the Henries - when The Hollow Crown tackled those plays, they edited out the Act V character assassination and instead put in her being burned on stage/scene, so to speak, which I'm not sure worked within the Shakespearean story but hey, A for effort.
no subject
My take on Henry VI's Joan is that she was intended to be portrayed as a villain all along, just a charismatic villain who makes some good points and has some nice speeches -- and probably the staging of the play at the time would have made that clear from the beginning, but it's jarring to modern readers who come in with different expectations.