max theodore’s Reviews > This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright > Status Update

on MSND: "The adolescent boy who is a love object for both men and women is something Shakespeare will explore in his depiction of cross-dressing heroines later in his career: here, the desirable boy is kept in the margins. But his role seems to crystalize versions of impossible desire in the play, and their challenge, as here, to marriage."

r&j chapter saying there's no indication of an age gap between romeo and juliet. i never lose

on richard ii:

"The difference between the [...] legitimate & the usurping sovereign, is not the difference between the true and the copy [...but] between a good, 'well-graced’ actor & the 'tedious’ one who follows him. Both kings are likened to actors, both are pretending [...] Bolingbroke is just a better, more pleasing and convincing, actor."

re: r3: "Richard's primary tactic in the play is seduction rather than elimination. And among Richard's many conquests... from Lady Anne to Buckingham, from the Lord Mayor to his deluded brother King Edward, we--the audience--are the first."

on taming: really into interpreting the induction as exposing "the lower classes and women as joint victims of a self-serving male establishment." also like the fact that smith clearly is coming at this from the angle of Gaps Left By The Text rather than trying to dilute every single fact about this play into 10 pages