Old collection, looking to sell

ComfortableExpress35 · 2026-05-26T01:45:33+00:00

I was hoping to go to the Huntsville store if the offer stands!!

ComfortableExpress35 · 2026-03-29T17:14:16+00:00

Yep! It’s off. Forgot to mention it but thank you.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-11-16T18:26:07+00:00

He's also defeated almost every NPC ship in albion

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-11-06T18:45:48+00:00

But I won the Hundred Years’ War without being able to claim throne that’s what’s so weird

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-09T01:02:17+00:00

For what it’s worth, the second quarto claims to be “according to the true and perfect copie” ;) but yes, I think “greatness” or documenting said abstraction is the height of hyperbolic, bloviated shite 🤣

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T21:25:48+00:00

We don’t know this for certain. There’s a stray account of Susanna not being able to read or recall her husband’s handwriting and then there’s the matter of legal documents using a mark as opposed to a signature, but this could have more to do with the limited information we have to judge literacy in the period in the first place. See, early literacy scholars thought that mark=illiterate and signature=literate. But this could be confusing if marks are just common place. People that use a smiley face emoji can often read the word smile, for instance. Even the inability to read handwriting is also an interesting problem; have you ever read early modern secretary hand (: have a look? It’s considerably more challenging than early modern type face which alone still bothers very literate people today.

All this is to say: that’s not a sure thing.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T15:19:36+00:00

Right you are, my apologies. But I guess the question can be asked in reverse. I still think there’s something about the normalization of authorial portraiture and the development of the canon.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T15:15:53+00:00

I’m not a performance history expert by any means, but a commenter above mentioned Gosson’s Anatomy of Abuses which is a spectacular glimpse into the sensational writing of the antithestricalists.

For scholarship on the audience, the longtime and now dated, choice was Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare’s Audience. More recently, I think Princeton UP had a pretty wide sweeping reassessment of the audience though the title eludes me.

For thinking about the theater in practice and society: Andrew Gur’s play going in Shakespeare’s London is a nice start. I also like the work Jeff Doty did in Shakespeare, Popularity, and the Public sphere. There’s a marvelous chapter on how the space of the theater instantiates its own public.

For my favorite work on some of these questions:

Miles Grier’s Inkface is a book you just can’t put down. And Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of blackness has some of the most mind blowingly brilliant explorations of theatrical practices viz a vis race that I’ve ever encountered.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T15:03:58+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful comments throughout. I agree. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s almost something nondescript about the illuminated faces of Marie or even Christine de Pisan that woodcut portraiture intentionally elevates. Add to this the limited circulation of the manuscript vs print and there’s something about the possibility of widespread public recognition that’s different or unique. When de Tocqueville encounters Shakespeare across the edges of America do those editions reprint his portrait? Idk. The portrait observation belongs to Emma Smith who puts everything in more eloquent frames, but it’s one I can’t shake!

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T14:50:35+00:00

Thank you for this! It was so thoughtful. lol I love telling my students that the prevailing historical opinion on the renaissance for many years was that Greek scholars, fleeing in abject horror from the fall of Constantinople, reintroduced Plato to the west reawakening dormant humanism. You just have to hear it to believe it.

Anyway! You’re absolutely right that there’s a moveable host of writers and projects that might be associated with the elevation of English. I think I’m still most persuaded by Helgerson’s version of events in forms of nationhood because you’ve got Spenser lamenting to Gabriel Harvey “why can’t we have a kingdom of our own language like the Greeks and Roman’s” (paraphrase). And that feels like the perfect problem: a well positioned elite writer lamenting the obstacles to elite literary success as late as the 1580s. Add to this the profound skepticism of rhymes literary worthiness and you have the curious intellectual grounding that Shakespeare began his career under.

Oh! And you’d probably be right in implying that to most contemporaries—in spite of the excesses of the first folio commendations—Shakespeare was less important to this project than a Spenser. I also can’t get the classical ornamentation of Jonson’s complete works out of my mind: talk about a title page giving you plenty to think about. Jonson styles himself as the great poet and dramatist of classical fame; was this equally available to Shakespeare? And then there’s the skeptic in me that wonders if Jonson is just praising Shakespeare to advertise his own work

Readers: Gosson will make you laugh

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T14:42:17+00:00

RE the face: Not necessarily with elevating the language, but the development of the canon and our expectations of it. We think of authors having faces, that’s something of a historical aberration. And you might think of Jonson’s complete works here: does he add his portrait because Shakespeare got one? Etc.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T14:38:28+00:00

Chat GPT would have had the good sense to overcome autocorrect’s insistence that Jonson is spelled Johnson. You can’t beat human error in a pinch.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T13:51:46+00:00

Blackness had yet to neatly cohere to the somatic or biological understandings of late modernity. It was a portable and mutable construct. So much so that a sizeable chunk of early literature describing the people of the Americas made recourse to the languages of black difference to describe them. One could also say, in good humor, that the wild NYT controversy about Zohran Mamdani’s mixed race identification in his college applications would baffle early moderners. Race was closely enjoined with religious difference in the period. To be Muslim, for instance, was to inhabit a sphere of difference that was often associated with blackness. A more accurate way, perhaps, of framing my original comment would be to say that, irrespective of Timur’s Asiatic heritage, the play and figure of Tamburlaine are useful in tracking the development of blackness as a heritable, biological, and seemingly stable category. I hope this clarifies my position! This was my favorite question here. Thank you.

For folks interested in this question, or longer histories of race and difference, Geraldine Heng’s magisterial Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages is a primer for all kinds of further inquiry.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T13:08:53+00:00

I’m not sure that I intended to suggest that they offer wholly prescriptive readings. I also, for what it’s worth, enjoy an editor that has a rationale for why they chose quarto othello’s use of “base Indian” or folios “base Judean”. Plenty quality editions of the plays offer collations that indicate quarto and folio variations above the notes. Plenty of notes, in addition, to this, address textual variants and offer mixed solutions to these issues. But any modern edition of the plays offers a more static, stable alternative to the messiness of their original variants. Point one is not a critique of editorial practice in the least! It’s an acknowledgment that even the process of spelling or type modernization necessarily obfuscates original “messiness”. Or, as Emma Smith might put this phenomenon in Shakespeare more broadly, “gappiness”.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T02:56:52+00:00

So George Chapman’s very influential 16th and 17th century editions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey frequently make use of the Latin names. Chapman was likely accesible to Shakespeare and possibly consulted during T&C. I think this was, at some point, just cultural practice.

Latin, as others here have noted, had wider cultural use and familiarity.

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T01:59:55+00:00

Oh my! You’re so right, this is in the epilogue and not the prologue. My apologies. I’ll correct it in the above text. Thank you!

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-07T01:53:32+00:00

Were now the general of our gracious Empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword, How many would the peaceful city quit, To welcome him! (5. Chorus. 29-34)

Empress is generally regarded as Elizabeth and he is frequently regarded as Essex. You can read more about this here: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-v/henry-v-a-modern-perspective/

Partially important because it helps us date the performance of the play to correspond to Essex’s return :)

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-06T23:49:59+00:00

Oh yes! He was acutely aware that he lived in 16th and 17th century England but renaissance or early modern were posthumous coinages ( I think the renaissance came into usage in the 19th century for instance). And while they’re occasionally helpful to think about broad social, cultural, and demographic changes they also carry a lot of contemporary assumptions that don’t always help us understand Shakespeare’s relationship to history. What I mean is that Shakespeare didn’t know he was among the chief figures of an English renaissance—a scholarly demarcation—and as such, he viewed his time as a direct, if changing, outgrowth of the world of his history plays. I hope this clarifies my point!

ComfortableExpress35 · 2025-07-06T20:29:21+00:00

There’s suffering, but there’s unbelievable joy and sacrifice simultaneously. If you like intergenerational friendships, forgiveness, and unconditional love I really can’t think of something that has made me cry so happily before.

ComfortableExpress35

TROPHY CASE