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"TITUS: Hail Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds!

Lo, as the bark that hath discharged his fraught

Returns with precious lading to the bay

From whence at first she weighed her anchorage,

Cometh Andronicus, bound with laurel boughs,

To resalute his country with his tears,

Tears of true joy for his return to Rome.

Thou great defender of this Capitol,

Stand gracious to the rites we intend.

Romans, of five-and-twenty valiant songs,

Half of the number that King Priam had,

Behold the poor remains alive and dead.

These that survive let Rome reward with love;

These that I bring unto their latest home,

With burial amongst their ancestors.

Here Goths have given me leave to sheathe my sword.

Titus, unkind and careless of thine own,

Why suffer'st thou thy sons unburied yet

To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?

Make way to lay them by their brethren.

There greet in silence, as the dead are wont,

And sleep in peace, slain in your country's wars.

O sacred receptacle of my joys,

Sweet cell of virtue and nobility,

How many sons hast thou of mine in store

That thou wilt never render to me more?"

Ever since our discussions this week on this speech near the beginning of Titus Andronicus, I've grown more and more fascinated by it. I still feel as though this speech is reminiscent of epic poetry, especially the first two sentences of it; we start with a booming declaration, then a long cascade of clauses full of honor and virtue. The use of the word "lo" at the start of the second sentence also serves to signify this sort of grandeur. Later in the speech, Titus also does something interesting in that he refers to himself in the third person. I have two explanations for this: the first is that Titus is playing into this epic tradition and trying to integrate himself into what Rome wants him to be, a model Roman who serves his country, even at the cost of his sons; the second explanation is that this is a way of coping for Titus. Death is traumatic to witness; not absolute, but it is something that can damage a mind, and of twenty-five sons, Titus only has four now, meaning he has had to bury twenty-one children, and, potentially, one or more wives. Titus's mind is likely already scarred by all this death at the start of the play, but by referring to himself in the third person, he signifies to readers that he is coping with it by derealization—Titus is making this mythical version of himself who doesn't fear the deaths of his children, and in doing so, he can withhold the burden all these deaths place upon the framework of his mind. Another thing that helps keep Titus stable is his philosophy on death; Titus has erected within his mind the idea that death is not even something to grieve over, but something to honor and uplift because Rome glorifies it. I believe this also serves as an allegory for English society as prior to the reformations enacted, society at large had established ideas of what would happen after death: the deceased would be granted paradise if they followed certain rules, and so the family of the deceased could cope with their loss knowing they would be in heaven just as Titus can cope with the death of his sons. But just like this sense of assurance in the death of a family member is lost for the English following the reformations, Titus Andronicus sees its titular hero facing the loss of his own assurance in death being honorable, as Martius and Quintus are wrongfully executed, Lavinia is raped and mutilated, and Titus himself is tricked into cutting off his own hand.

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Title: The Hunger Games

Author: Suzanne Collins

Year Published: 2008

This week, my contemporary artifact is The Hunger Games, a novel by Suzanne Collins. I grew up with this novel and have read it more times than I can count. Recently I watched the movie, and I was really surprised by how reminiscent this novel is with Titus Andronicus. First, there's a tribute from a past game mentioned named Titus who was violent and cannibalistic, which feels like an allusion to Titus Andronicus. Second and more important, though, is the fact that like Titus Andronicus, The Hunger Games is a story full of death. The main premise of the games themselves are that out of twenty-four tributes, twenty-three will die. The Capitol paints these deaths as honorable and glorious, just as Titus paints the deaths of his children, but are they really? Or are they just being forced to conform to a narrative they can't agree to? Also like The Hunger Games, the deaths of Titus Andronicus are spectacles. In Act Five, Titus invites his enemies to a feast and feeds Tamora a pie made of her sons, and The Hunger Games has some brutal deaths as well.

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"TITUS: An if your Highness knew my heart, you were.—

My lord the Emperor, resolve me this:

Was it well done of rash Virginius

To slay his daughter with his own right hand

Because she was enforced, stained, and deflowered?

SATURNINUS: It was, Andronicus.

TITUS: Your reason, mighty lord?

SATURNINUS: Because the girl should not survive her shame,

And by her presence still renew his sorrows.

TITUS: A reason mighty, strong, and effectual;

A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant

For me, most wretched, to perform the like.

Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,

And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die.

SATURNINUS: What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind?

TITUS: Killed her for whom my tears have made me blind.

I am as woeful as Virginius was,

And have a thousand times more cause than he

To do this outrage, and it now is done."

For me, this is perhaps the most distressing moment in a play full of distressing moments. Lavinia has already suffered immensely at the hands of Demetrius and Chiron, and her death—by the hands of her own father—is particularly upsetting. Through the latter half of this play, Titus almost weaponizes Lavinia's personal tragedy as a justification for the enactment of his own revenge; she becomes a receptacle for his anger, an object of vengeance, a martyr for Titus's cause. This last image is particularly fitting considering that Lavinia haunts the stage after her assault occurs, appearing in scenes without speaking a word, more ghostly than Hamlet's father even. Those seeing Titus Andronicus on the stage may be able to get a glimpse into Lavinia's mental state by paying close attention to her body language and expressions, but otherwise, there is little to know about what specific emotions Lavinia feels. In Act 2, Scene 3, before she is raped by Demetrius and Chiron, she begs Tamora to kill her rather than be raped and live. There is a real possibility that outside of what is shown on stage, in the "world" of Titus Andronicus, Lavinia tries to communicate with Titus, asking him to end her life, but we don't get to see it. Regardless of whether or not this was what Lavinia would have wanted, the way Titus uses her story as a way of furthering his own is deeply saddening, as it makes it seem as though her story cannot simply stand on her own, but must lean upon Titus's own griefs, a conjecture that is clearly untrue.

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Title: Maker of Suicide Pod Plans to Launch in Switzerland

Author: Jane Wakefield

Year Published: 2021

This week, my contemporary artifact is less of a concrete form, but rather a topic of conversation we've been having in recent years in America: assisted suicide. As I wrote my primary entry this week, I continuously found myself returning to the same question: if Lavinia did desire to die and asked Titus to kill her, would she be justified in this decision or not? She's undoubtedly suffered immensely, being raped, losing her tongue and arms, and having to watch her husband be killed in front of her. If she survived, would she be able to lead a happy life?

This all culminates in the idea of the "right to die", whether or not as individual human beings, we have the right to make decisions over our bodies, including if we live or die.

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"NURSE: O, she says nothing, sir, but weeps and weeps,

And now falls on her bed, and then starts up,

And 'Tybalt' calls, and then on Romeo cries,

And then down falls again.

ROMEO: As if that name,

Shot from the deadly level of a gun,

Did murder her, as that name's cursed hand

Murdered her kinsman.--O, tell me, friar, tell me,

In what vile part of this anatomy

Doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack

The hateful mansion."

Something that struck me as deeply interesting regarding this quotation is that it carries on a theme from a speech Juliet has earlier in the play in 2.2 on the idea of names. Here, Romeo has grown so disillusioned with that part of his identity that he seeks to take himself away from it, even if in the process he will harm himself. In a way, it reminds me of the Ship of Theseus paradox: if Romeo wasn't a Montague, what is the likelihood that he still manages to meet Juliet, since the likelihood of him going to the party is slim? If they do manage to meet, would they still fall in love? or is this hypothetical version of Romeo so markedly different that his personality isn't harmonious with Juliet. If they do fall in love, do they happily marry, or do extenuating circumstances, such as the Capulets not allowing Juliet to marry a commoner, keep them apart? In short, is it better to have a brief, intense flash of love that is snuffed out fast, or never love at all? I believe if Romeo was given this choice, he would choose to love, for like Tennyson says: "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all."

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Title: Born to Die

Author: Lana del Rey

Year Published: 2011

This week, my contemporary artifact is the song "Born to Die", by Lana del Rey, which I've chosen for two reasons. The first is relatively simple in that this phrase is explicitly said in 3.4.4, where Capulet says "Look you, she loved her kinsman Tybat dearly,

And so did I. Well, we were born to die."

The second, more central reason is that this del Rey song perfectly captures the ethos of Romeo and Juliet in how its titular characters are so willing to sacrifice everything in the name of love. The pre-chorus of this song perfectly exemplifies this feeling:

"Don't make me sad, don't make me cry
Sometimes, love is not enough
And the road gets tough, I don't know why
Keep makin' me laugh, let's go get high
The road is long, we carry on
Try to have fun in the meantime"

As the play progresses, we see Romeo and Juliet beginning to embody this idea of growing so uncaring of the consequences of their romance. In the beginning of 3.5, Juliet tries convincing Romeo to stay with her, saying the lark singing is really a nightingale and that they still have more time, though she knows if Romeo is to escape Verona, he must leave soon, and Romeo agrees to stay after a little convincing. The roads their lives have been walking along have gotten tough, and all they can do is try to embrace the love they have for one another, even if the consequences that come with it are destructive.

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PARIS: Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew

(O woe, thy canopy is dust and stones!)

Which with sweet water nightly I will dew,

Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans.

The obsequies that I for thee will keep

Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep.

The boy gives warning something doth approach.

What cursed foot wanders this way tonight,

To cross my obsequies and true love's rite?

What, with a torch? Muffle me, night, awhile.

Paris is an often-forgotten figure in the grand scheme of Romeo and Juliet, attributed as a driver of the major story through his courting of Juliet, but never given many moments to himself. Here, in the final act of the play, do we get a glimpse of who Paris is as he lays flowers on Juliet's bed and promises to return every night. This moment of humanity is jarring, particularly in relation to what directly follows: his encounter with Romeo, their fight, and his death.

Paris, Tybalt, and Mercutio all may seem to minor characters, but how can we weigh their lives as "less significant" than those of Romeo and Juliet? Literature is inherently empathetic; by reading, we are able to understand perspectives that are not our own, grow more aware, and look into things more deeply. Claiming that these deaths are less important because Romeo and Juliet is narratively focused on its titular characters results in a failure to truly grasp the sprawling nature of tragedy, not just as an experience located within individuals, but as a force that moves through systems of individuals. Paris's death perfectly illustrates how both of these forces collide: we witness both Paris's individual tragedy as he mourns the death of a love he never had, but we also see how actions outside of his control have inflicted a systematic tragedy upon him, resulting in his doom.

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Title: The God of Small Things

Author: Arundhati Roy

Year Published: 1997

This week, my contemporary artifact is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, one of my personal favorite novels, and one that shares much in common with Romeo and Juliet in terms of how tragedy functions at both the individual and systematic levels. The novel follows a family living in Kerala in the 1960's. A series of small events and chance encounters lead to a sweeping tragedy that subsumes the entire family. Velutha, an Untouchable servant to the family has an affair with a woman named Ammu, which is discovered by a relative in the family. Velutha's father exposes their relationship and Velutha is cast away, while Ammu is kept in her room. In her emotions, Ammu lashes out at her two children, Estha and Rahel, prompting them to leave and try to take a boat. Their cousin Sophie Mol comes with. The boat sinks, and Sophie Mol drowns. One of Ammu's relatives frames Velutha for her death, and Velutha is beaten and succumbs to his wounds shortly after. This same relative continues to manipulate circumstances until Ammu, Estha, and Rahel are kicked out of the home and separated from one another.

Just like Romeo and Juliet, The God of Small Things contains countless personal tragedies: Estha is sexually molested by a man at a movie theater, Ammu's former husband is an alcoholic, Sophie Mol's mother is a recent widow after her husband died in a car accident, on and on. Yet sweeping over all these personal tragedies are systemic ones caused by the relationship between Ammu and Velutha due to its perversions of India's caste system. Velutha is an Untouchable, and Ammu is a widow. Their relationship's implosion ripples outwards through the novel, intensified by Sophie Mol's death as well as Velutha's, and as the story unfolds, we see how this systemic tragedy becomes personal, how what happens in the exterior is linked with what happens in the interior. Velutha and Paris also mirror one another in how their personal and systematic tragedies interact with one another. Both face individual tragedies for love that cannot be realized, and later die due to complications regarding that love, demonstrating how the systematic tragedy becomes personal.

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HELENA: Lo, she is one of this confederacy!
Now I perceive they have conjoined all three
To fashion this false sport in spite of me.
Injurious Hermia, most ungrateful maid,
Have you conspired, have you with these contrived
To bait me with this foul derision?
Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sisters’ vows, the hours that we have spent
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us—O, is all forgot?
All schooldays’ friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries molded on one stem;
So with two seeming bodies but one heart,
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crownèd with one crest.
And will you rent our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
It is not friendly; ’tis not maidenly.
Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it,
Though I alone do feel the injury.

Perhaps one of the most important speeches in the whole of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena takes up the pain of sacrificing one type of love for another, and in doing so, highlights the ambiguous nature of love itself, not only linguistically but socially as well. Here, Helena bemoans the loss of an intense female friendship, describing the exchange of platonic, same-sex love for the romantic, heterosexual love commonly exhibited in humans growing into adulthood. Hermia has found success in this transition, and has not had to reevaluate her stance yet on whether she favors the platonic or the romantic, while Helena, who has been rejected from both Hermia platonically and Demetrius romantically, has had to reevaluate how she views these different types of love. To Helena, there is both longing to return to a state of same-sex friendship, to be in such resonant harmony with another that they almost seem to become one in body in soul. Yet there is also the desire to pursue romantic love, even if it isolates her from society at large, because society conditions us to view marriage and romantic love as the end of affection: till death do us part. In this moment, Helena's romantic longing shatters, as she convinces herself that Hermia, through her own ability to wield romantic connections, has manipulated Demetrius and Lysander to join her in mocking Helena. Helena believes that Hermia has grown so warped by this ability to obtain romantic love with ease that Helena moves towards the platonic, conjuring up the female sex as a whole to stand in line with her against Hermia, who she sees as a traitor to their kind.

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Title: Mean Girls

Director: Mark Waters

Screenplay: Tina Fey

Year Created: 2004

This week, my contemporary artifact is Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey. In particular, I saw strong parallels in how friendship between two teenage girls can be destroyed between it and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Just like the play, Janis and Regina were close friends in childhood until Regina, like Hermia, began to shift from platonic endeavors towards romantic ones, and got a boyfriend. But when Janis began to grow upset at Regina for not spending enough time with her, Regina retaliated, and their relationship began to fall apart.

Similarly, A Midsummer Night's Dream presents two women who once shared an incredibly close bond, but due to the influences of romantic love on their platonic relationship, the closeness they once felt began to fray, before snapping entirely, as seen in the play in Act 3.2.

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SHALLOW: Sir, he's a good dog and a fair dog. Can there be more said? He is good and fair. Is Sir John Falstaff here?

PAGE: Sir, he is within, and I would I could do a good office between you.

SIR HUGH: It is spoke as a Christians ought to speak.

SHALLOW: He hath wronged me, Master Page.

PAGE: Sir, he doth in some sort confess it.

SHALLOW: If it be confessed, it is not redressed. Is not that so, Master Page? He hath wronged me, indeed he hath; at a word, he hath. Believe me. Robert Shallow, Esquire, saith he is wronged.

PAGE: Here comes Sir John.

FALSTAFF: Now, Master Shallow, you'll complain of me to the King?

SHALLOW: Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.

FALSTAFF: But not kissed your keeper's daughter.

The image of a deer recurs at various points throughout The Merry Wives of Windsor, from Act One, Scene One to Act Five, Scene Five. Beyond just The Merry Wives of Windsor itself, deer can be found in multiple other instances throughout the English literary tradition, including Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind." In line with other jokes against popular literature of his day, I believe in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare is subverting this traditional trope. As Falstaff's plans begin to develop, he continues to utilize deer imagery, be it in antlers or deer themselves, painting himself as the buck and Mistress Ford and Mistress Page as the hinds. Only in the final scene do we see this trope subverted, as Falstaff, dressed in antlers and wandering through the woods, is subjugated to humiliation through Mistress Ford and Mistress Page.

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Title: Feather

Creator: Sabrina Carpenter

Year Released: 2023

This week, my contemporary artifact is a scene from the music video for Feather, a song by Sabrina Carpenter. In this specific scene, after a man takes an inappropriate picture of Sabrina in an elevator, Sabrina charms the man, pulling on his tie until she's outside of the elevator. Here, the elevator closes on the man's tie, dooming his fate as it slowly begins to rise upwards.

There's a quite clear comparison in the plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor and in this scene of the music video: both begin with an unwanted, perverse advance from a man to someone who they may consider to be "easy", and the woman responds by punishing the man for his behavior. In "Feather", this is through murder, while in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the wives only go so far as pranking Falstaff.

Something interesting that both of these examples touch upon are the ways in which our culture's assumptions of gender have (or haven't) changed. Both Falstaff and the man in the "Feather" music video assume patriarchal perspectives, believing that they can control women or are allowed to make unwanted advances; when Mistress Ford, Mistress Page, and Sabrina react, they reestablish and renegotiate these assumptions on their own terms, and not on perceptions of their cultural environments.

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Sabrina Carpenter - Feather (Official Video)

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DUCHESS: Ah, Gaunt, his blood was thine! That bed, that
womb,
That metal, that self mold that fashioned thee
Made him a man; and though thou livest and
breathest,
Yet art thou slain in him. Thou dost consent
In some large measure to thy father’s death
In that thou seest thy wretched brother die,
Who was the model of thy father’s life.
Call it not patience, Gaunt. It is despair.
In suff’ring thus thy brother to be slaughtered,
Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life,
Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee.
That which in mean men we entitle patience
Is pale, cold cowardice in noble breasts.
What shall I say? To safeguard thine own life,
The best way is to venge my Gloucester’s death.

There are two aspects of this speech I find interesting. Firstly, I almost see this speech as a precursor to some of Lady Macbeth's speeches. It is a woman trying to convince a man to commit an act of murder for the sake of some virtue; for Macbeth, power, for Gaunt, justice. Just as Lady Macbeth's rhetoric shames Macbeth, so too does the Duchess. Second, I believe this speech highlights themes of masculinity and what it means to be a man. One of the most typical associations made to masculinity is the idea of power or control. Richard II, with all its focus on power, who can usurp it, and who should usurp it, is thus almost allegorically a play about idealized forms of masculinity. Through this lens, the Duchess of Gloucester effectively emasculates Gaunt. Gaunt may be patient, but in the Duchess's eyes, for a man of his class, this is not an acceptable excuse. Unlike Gaunt, commoners aren't born into an excess of power through wealth or status, and instead have to weaponize other facets of their lives to be inducted into societal masculinity. Among these facets are embracing suffering and not showing excesses of emotion. Gaunt, however, has the ability to create change because he has power, but refuses to utilize it. In this way, his passivity cedes his power, and thus his claim to masculinity, to Richard, who signifies an almost idealistic, hypermasculine identity.

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Title: men used to go to war

Creator: @httpdenali on Twitter

Year Created: 2022

This week, my contemporary artifact is less so a concrete work of art, such as a movie or a book, but rather a loosely defined social media trend, centered around a specific slogan: "men used to go to war." Oftentimes, this trend is seen being used to comment on a man doing something that may not be "traditionally masculine," such as drinking a sugary coffee, as shown above. Other examples might include reading Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Plath or listening to Clairo and beabadoobee with wired earbuds. I see this statement as a sort of thesis of the Duchess's speech to Gaunt, as she laments his lack of honor in his refusal to avenge the death of her husband and his brother. But this raises the question of what is true masculinity? To some, drinking a sweet coffee might not denote a gendered connotation. Likewise, can it be said that the actions of John of Gaunt aren't masculine? If so, what framework supports that claim?

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RICHARD:

No matter where. Of comfort no man speak.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let's choose executors and talk of wills.

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,

And nothing can we call our own but death

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

Aesthetically, this might be one of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare's works. It has such a beautiful motion, moving from Richard's listing of fatalistic images--graves, worms, and epitaphs, the last of which is such a great choice of word--to musing on the state of his body and soul now that he is destined to be deposed. Picking out one specific detail in this passage, I love the line "Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's, / And nothing can we call our own but death". It reminds me of one of Plato's dialogues, Phaedo, where Socrates talks about the immortality of the soul, the relationship between it and the body, and the nature of death itself. Like Socrates, who was moments away from death, Richard is facing his own personal doom, and in a way, this speech is his Phaedo, a construction of how he perceives his own body and soul as well as death. Specifically, Richard claims that the only thing he can give to the earth is his body. If there is an assumed binary of body/soul, then it makes sense to assume when he says in the next line "our lives", he is referring to his soul. This calls back to the King's Two Bodies: by taking Richard's title as King, Henry has effectively stripped Richard of his soul; as a person of such high rank, it can be assumed much of Richard's life, public or private, revolved around his identity as King. By taking away his title, the effective foundation of his identity, Richard's whole construction of self falls apart and is reduced back to the body itself.

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Title: The Tortured Poets Department

Creator: Taylor Swift

Year Released: 2024

This week, my contemporary artifact is the song "The Tortured Poets Department" by Phoebe Bridgers. Like Richard's speech in 3.2, Swift's song is both intensely fatalistic and struggling to cope with a crisis in the identity of self after a significant loss. In Richard's case, his loss is of the crown. In Swift's case, a romantic partner. The chorus of the song poses one of the album's major questions: "Who's gonna know you like me?" Swift has effectively grown so attached to her partner that her own construction of self is made through her partner, believing that there can't be any other person who understands her lover as well as her. Call it fate or chance, there is only one person who can occupy this position in her lover's heart, and it is her.

The bridge of the song takes this fatalistic outlook to a maximum:

Sometimes, I wonder if you're gonna screw this up with me
But you told Lucy you'd kill yourself if I ever leave
And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen
Everyone we know understands why it's meant to be
'Cause we're crazy
So tell me, who else is gonna know me?
At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger
And put it on the one people put wedding rings on
And that's the closest I've come to my heart exploding

Just like how Richard's own grasp on power has grown to consume all facets of his life, the relationship between Swift and her lover is so all-consuming that they are unstable, and in her lover's case, on the verge of suicide. Just like how Henry stripped Richard of his soul through usurping the crown, effectively killing Richard, if Swift were to ever leave her lover, the pain would strip her lover's soul, an action equal to death.

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PRINCE HENRY: I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humour of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at,

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

If all the year were playing holidays,

To sport would be as tediuos as to work;

But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,

And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

This soliloquy by Hal not only serves to illuminate Hal's character, as discussed in class on Monday, but also forms a strong connective thread between Henry IV Part 1 and Richard II, namely the idea of majesty as a performance. To understand this connection, looking at Hal's speech on its own allows us to bring it into the context of Richard's character. In this speech, Hal says that he will "imitate the sun," a symbol of royalty, of control, of power. But Hal does not say he will 'become' the son; instead, he acknowledges the performative aspect of his majesty, that there is a divide between the body politic and the body natural. For Hal, his philosophy towards the relationship between the two is that the body politic and the body natural do not exist in a single state of unity, but rather the body natural becomes the body politic through imitation.

This philosophy of identity is contrasted significantly by Richard's own construction of identity, where the body natural and the body politic are one in the same: Richard's conditioning into majesty means that it has become imbued into his perception of identity itself, and thus his individual self, the body natural, is intrinsically related to his majesty, the body politic.

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Title: I Can Do It With A Broken Heart

Creator: Taylor Swift

Year Released: 2024

This week, my contemporary entry is the song "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart," by Taylor Swift, one of my personal favorite tracks from her eleventh studio album. Commonly considered by fans to be set around Swift's personal experiences on the Eras Tour, one of the monumental moments of her career, as well as of contemporary popular culture at large, "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart" delves into the idea of performance both on literal and metaliteral levels: on the literal level, Swift is talking about how she was forced to walk out every week with a smile on her face, performing for hours for thousands of people even while she was going through painful heartbreaks; on a metaliteral level, the song itself is a performance, as is the album as a whole, highlighting certain aspects of Swift's personal world to project a persona to expectant fans. The Taylor Swift presented in "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart," who finds hints of heartbreak at every turn, then proceeds to tell listeners to "try and come for [her] job," is not the real Taylor Swift. Similarly, the Hal we hear in his soliloquy is not the real Hal; even in acknowledging his performance to others, he is still performing to us, the viewers, allowing us a moment where the opaqueness of his identity lessens.

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LADY PERCY: O, my good lord, why are you thus alone?

For what offence have I this fortnight been

A banished woman from my Harry's bed?

Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee

Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?

Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,

And start so often when thou sit'st alone?

Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks,

And given my treasures and my rights of thee

To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?

Our discussions of Henry IV, Part 1 in class have been illuminating and revealed aspects of the play that in my original reading a year ago I never even noticed. I truly believe that reading each and every play, and coming to class to discuss their contents with others has helped to improve my abilities as a thinker. Still, in class discussions, because of time constraints, conversations have had to focus on the heart of the play: Hal, Falstaff, Hotspur, and Henry. I believe that Lady Percy serves to highlight two important aspects of Henry IV, Part 1: the gendered experiences of honor, as well as how Hotspur views honor between the private and the public.

Lady Percy's speech immediately situates her as under Hotspur's power; she claims she is "A banished woman from my Harry's bed." As Richard II haunts this play, we see an echo of his choice to banish Henry Bolingbroke in Lady Percy's choice of words, but unlike Bolingbroke, Lady Percy cannot incite change through force or war. Instead, she must use persuasion, acknowledging her powerlessness. In this way, we see the gendered nature of honor as an example of Luce Irigaray's notion of the "masculine signifying economy," where masculine traits such as honor and power are given higher value in comparison to feminine ones. Lady Percy must work within this economy, participating in the valuing of Hotspur's masculinity by threatening to "break thy little finger, Harry." The image here is euphemistically phallic, and can be read as a threat to take away Hotspur's masculinity. In response, Hotspur says that "We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns, / And pass them current too." In this private, domestic moment, Hotspur too can acknowledge the economic nature of masculinity, as something that is built through exchange. But Hotspur's formulation here is that it is a "must," that the masculine is an axiomatic element of his and other men's identities; because it is innate, then its effects, the "bloody noses and cracked crowns," must be exchanged between its carriers.

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Title: Mastermind

Creator: Taylor Swift

Year Released: 2022

This week, my contemporary entry is the song "Mastermind" by Taylor Swift. More specifically, the opening lines of the second verse:

"You see, all the wisest women
Had to do it this way
'Cause we were born to be the pawn
In every lover's game."

Swift's view of herself aligns neatly with Lady Percy's: both see themselves working from within an economy of masculinity, because only through accepting the terms of its exchanges are they able to create their own sense of power or influence: Lady Percy's phallic threat increases the value of the phallus itself, and Swift's machiavellian tactics acknowledge that because she is a woman, she cannot assume a forthright, masculine manner of moving through the masculine signifying economy she is positioned within.