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: