Thomas of Woodstock

[helenic]

I never got round to posting the Edward II illustration when I did it last year because the covers were sort of unofficially being kept secret until they were all published at bardcamp, but it's the bardcamp reunion this Saturday and I've just whipped up a super-quick cover art for the reunion play, Thomas of Woodstock.

Thomas of Woodstock is a non-canonical play by either a young, enthusiastic, inexperienced Shakespeare, or a contemporary writing Shakespeare fanfiction which they were too shy to put on stage for some reason. I was originally thinking of painting a nicer version of this illustration of Woodstock's murder, but because in the end I only had a couple of hours I decided to just do a quick photo-manip. I themed it on two lines from the play: one from Woodstock himself - “When kingdoms change, the very heavens are troubled” - and one from his servingman, when Richard's queen dies: “The lights of heaven are shut in pitchy clouds/And flakes of fire run tilting through the sky/Like dim ostents to some great tragedy.”

It's a bit melodramatic and gloomy for a play that is, in places, remarkably good fun, but it was the best I could do on short notice. If I could have submitted two covers, one tragic-historical one on the front and one comic-historical on the reverse, this would have been the other one:

Comments

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

Thomas of Woodstock is a non-canonical play by either a young, enthusiastic, inexperienced Shakespeare

Oh man, you don't want to get me started. (Or maybe you do, but I won't presume.) Suffice it to say: I disagree.

or a contemporary writing Shakespeare fanfiction which they were too shy to put on stage for some reason.

Heh. Well, Woodstock was pretty definitely staged, I'd think, because the MS is full of performance notes (cues, calls for props, and whatnot) as well as notes from the censor. The latter may indicate the reasons it was never printed, though!

I do suspect, though, that it's entirely possible that the Woodstock playwright was influenced by Shakespeare, rather than the other way round as is commonly assumed. There's a bit of a trend among people who write about this play (all three of them) towards a speculative Jacobean date for it (the MS is certainly Jacobean, but the play could be older), and while I can see the case for it, my dissertation chapter on it kind of needs it to be late Elizabethan.

Anyway, I mostly came in to squee over your cover art for it. I am a bit attached to this play. ;)

[bamboozlynne.livejournal.com]

That's gorgeous - the top one ;-)

[emperor]

I sniggered at the second :)

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

The first is really gorgeous. The second humorous. :)

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Wow! to the first, and giggles to the second.

Yay, looking forward to seeing you tomorrow! :-)

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Yay!!