Wednesday, August 24, 2011

As You Like It Richard III by Kevin Dayhoff in The Tentacle

This Friday, August 26, “The Shakespeare Factory Players” will be performing As You Like It, in historic downtown Mount Airy at Watkins' Park ... For more information contact info@theshakespearefactory.com or 410-218-1479...

http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=4581

August 24, 2011

As You Like It Richard III

http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=4581

Kevin E. Dayhoff

Now is the winter of our discontent… On the morning of August 22, in 1485, a defining moment in English history took place with the death of King Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Of course, this has little to do with central-Maryland or local, state or national politics – or does it? The crushing tedium of the current state of affairs of our nation’s political discourse, the seemingly endless foreign wars and the intractable national and global economic malaise is enough to cause my bud of calm to blossom into hysteria. I almost wrote a column on the history of nylons.

As our nation currently attempts to extricate itself from an economic, social and political tar pit and wallows around like a bellowing mastodon, the Shakespearian melodrama and theatricality of Obama I is reminiscent of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Or The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the Landing of Earle Richmond, and the Battle of Bosworth Field, by William Shakespeare.

The death of Richard III – “the last English king to die at the head of an army… established the Tudor dynasty and the modern state,” according to anarticle in the Guardian by Martin Wainwright.

The skirmishes over the historic significance of the battle in Leicestershire County, in the center of England, which effectively ended the 30-year, English civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster, the Wars of the Roses, and the end of the Middle Ages, has raged ever since.

However, not in doubt is the fact that the battle ended the House of Plantagenet line of 15 kings that ruled England from 1154, when it took over from the House of Normandy, until 1485.

After the death of Richard III, King Henry VII seized the throne and became the first English monarch of the House of Tudor, which lasted until 1603....

http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=4581

As You Like It Richard III by Kevin Dayhoff in The Tentacle

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