The West Wing, Season 2, Episode 15, Ellie 

pinterest bitches are so cunty for absolutely ZERO reason😭

WAS THAT LAST BIT ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

AND SO ON

Did a little Richard II to practice character design. 

Twitter crosspost

Laertes is really the most iconic character in all of Hamlet. Everyone else in the play is affected by the toxic environment of Elsinore and compelled to put on masks and keep secrets and hide what they feel and Laertes is really just out there acting on whatever the first impulse that comes into his brain is. "Churlish priest my sister will be a ministering angel when you lay howling" "I would slit his throat in the church" honey you're in front of people

Richard II + text posts

i think the moment that solidified me becoming truly and utterly crazy about dt's richard ii is The look in his eyes as the bishop of carlisle puts the crown back on his head after the let us talk of kings speech like . Oh My God he literally poured out his soul and cried about how lonely he was because the position of king demanded he had to be removed from everyone else and never be a real human person and How can he be king when he feels things like everyone else even if he wishes he didn't . and the response he gets to this from one of his most loyal followers is "ok my lord but wise men don't cry about their problems they instead find ways to prevent this from happening. giving into your weakness is just letting bolingbroke win"

Richard ii works best if you're a butch woman or a femme man. It's about the androgyny, it's about the obvious physical differences that clearly mark the vulnerability of a queer monarch, the religious trauma and the active deconstruction of a false identity handed to you at birth. It's also about being incredibly attractive.

productions of richard ii should include the fact that in the historical deposition richard had to put a ring on henrys hand like in a marriage. i think that would add a certain je ne sais quoi to this disastrous fucked up mess

also the fact that in like four of the five r2 productions i know of, richard is put in like some kinda all-white dress thing for the deposition. what im saying is stage it like a fucked up sham marriage or dont stage it at all

thbis production Gets it

i dont like saying “character from [play] is [thing]” unless theyre explicitly defined as [thing] because characters can be performed so many multifaceted ways that bring infinite nuance to their characters, but i think theres a really compelling argument to be made for richard ii (as portrayed by shakespeare) being autistic

anyway.

this became my undergraduate thesis lol

So for the project I posted about this morning I’m building a digital archive focusing on Shakespeare’s history plays as performance events, particularly when they’re staged together as a cycle. (Since we need a lot of items in our archive, I wanted to pick something I liked a lot that also had a lot of types of media available.) But I’m worried that I’m going to get distracted by watching RSC promotional/behind-the-scenes videos from the King & Country cycle because they’re so great.

Take this one, for instance. I love Oliver Ford Davies.

i'm chewing nonstop on ricky2 autism btw. nooooooot good rep but it compels me. my go-to histories autism hc is always hotspur (and hal for that matter. note to self to talk about hotspur/hal autism foils) but now that i've pondered this with richard... i know his devastating self-centeredness is a result of being king since age 10 because being king is a cursed amulet that sucks out your soul and it doesn't have to be more complex than that HOWEVER. gotta say you could play this REMARKABLY autistic

like sorry what the fuck are you mad at me for john. you literally gave me advice and you're mad that i took it? because i was somehow supposed to just magically know that you wanted to be consulted like a "father" not like a "judge"? did everyone else know that. how was i supposed to know that. i literally did what you said out loud tf is your problem boomer

forgot to reblog this to talk about hal and hotspur. hotspur everybody has already covered but because i love Foil Characters i am also a great fan of Foils Autism so i raise you: if hotspur has the Loud Passionate Can’t Lie Or Fake Polite To Save His Life type of autism then hal is the quintessential masker. he always knows exactly how to reflect the people around him and contort into the best shape to fit the situation. by the time henry v rolls around he’s done this so well and so completely that there isn’t much of a person under the mask. he’s not hal anymore; he’s just The King.

dt richard ii canonically assigned low empathy autistic by word of god

stop eating gruel with the fools and come eat a leek with a freak