The Northern Vicar Blog

New Year’s Eve, so let’s lie on the sofa and go back to 1403, after the Battle of Shrewsbury. In this play we have the death of Henry IV, which didn’t actually happen until 1413, but who cares if we condense a decade into one play. Or perhaps I am just going back to when the play was written, probably sometime between 1596 and 1599. Even if we just go back to 2012 when “Hollow Crown” was produced as part of the BBC’s Olympic celebrations, I can’t help thinking that the world was a happier place eight years ago...

If memory serves, I did Henry IV part I for O level and part II for A level, but that was many years ago. Despite the passage of time I can still remember Miss Williamson and Mr Roberts, two of my English teachers. I think it was her first job out of College, while he had been teaching for many years. I remember writing essays on “Honour”, “Hal’s relationship with Falstaff”, and various other topics – indeed I was pleasantly surprised how much of the play I remembered. Julie doesn’t think we’ve ever seen it on stage. Henry IV...

We have several versions of “Richard II”, so we decided to watch the BBC Hollow Crown version of 2012, directed by Rupert Goold. I recognised St David’s Cathedral (where we had a lovely holiday when the kids were small), checked and found it was Pembroke Castle (last visited when I was a lad), and knew I’d seen the amazing topiary somewhere (Packwood House, visited last year). We are a long way from the stage of the Globe. Apparently the earliest recorded performance of Richard II was a private one, in Canon Row, the house of Edward Hoby, on 9 December 1595....

Since we are going to have a Christmas by ourselves, we are going to use the time to watch some of our large collection of Shakespeare DVDs. We have seen quite a lot of his plays since we first went to see “Macbeth” together forty years ago – and we had both seen a few before then. This might be the opportunity to watch the rest of them. We settled down on the afternoon of 16 December 2020. Today would have been Gareth’s 31st birthday, and he loved his Shakespeare. Our version of “Twelfth Night” was recorded for the...