By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’: so begins perhaps the most celebrated and moving speech in all of King John, which is not exactly a Shakespeare play that’s replete with celebrated speeches. The play lurks somewhere in the attic of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, out of sight, gathering cobwebs, as if best forgotten.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
King John is the most unheroic of Shakespeare’s protagonists. He is not the cruellest, but he is perhaps the most craven, the one lacking in personal depth and, for want of a better word, character. He is more put-upon than anything, which somehow succeeds in making his acts of violence – commanding his follower Hubert to kill John’s nephew, Arthur, being the most famous, or infamous, example – even more detestable, because he cannot even be asked to possess some dramatic grandeur as he does it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
For Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In 1899, the great Victorian theatre director Herbert Beerbohm Tree made a short silent film to promote his forthcoming stage production of William Shakespeare’s history play, The Life and Death of King John. This short piece of silent cinema included footage of King John’s dying moments, along with three other clips from the production.
He didn’t choose the most famous play from the Shakespeare canon – indeed, you’d be hard-pushed to find a less well-known title – but in having King John committed to film, he was making cinema history. His King John film was the first ever time a Shakespeare play had been filmed.
A short and interesting history of Magna Carta and its surprising legacy
So few of the facts about Magna Carta in popular circulation are true. Its enduring place in popular consciousness is, however, indisputable. Its influence even extends to music: Kurt Weill composed a cantata, The Ballad of Magna Carta, about it. The rapper Jay Z even named his twelfth album after Magna Carta (albeit more because of a pun on his real name, Carter, than because he is a fan of the document, we assume). In this post, we’ll seek to debunk some common myths about Magna Carta and discuss some of the most interesting facts about it.