Recent adventures: Richard III @ The Rubicon Theatre, I Got My First "medieval" Tattoo
The tattoo though, is a "facsimile" of the Wife of Bath in the Ellesmere Manuscript!
Hi everyone! As soon as I was ready to start a Substack I got busy — lol!
I just wanted to fill my growing audience (!!!) on some recent weekend adventures of mine.
I’m currently writing a syllabus for a Shakespeare course I’m teaching this summer. I’m including one of my favorite Shax plays — Richard III — which just recently I got a chance to see at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, CA!
From the go, the promotional material set me up for a mid y2k aesthetic — a graffiti stencil of a monstrous Boar (symbol of Richard III). Somebody pass the Evanescence CD, oddly colored Mountain Dew, and an illegal Kinder egg from the Canadian border!
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credits to: The Ventura Breeze
The set dressing was minimal, but that’s not a synonym for bad. Not at all — the situating of a corner of a castle made for a versatile backdrop. The cast was young adults with some kids — including two younger boys who played Richard III’s nephews. If you know what happens to them, dramatically or historically, it’s quite chilling! The Richard III, always notoriously fun to play, had some non-descript physical disability, as historically how it has gone in the player’s world. I would like to point out that discussions of disability studies and Richard III are quite rich anymore. This includes numerous articles and monographs, such as “Fuck Off and Die” Alice Dailey by and a recent performance in 2022 by Arthur Hughes for the Royal Shakespeare Company — significant to note he is a self-identified disabled actor.
The soundtrack and sound effects were perfectly kitsch — the Ghost Adventures signature distress sound — would make Zak Bagans proud. The script’s edits and selections were done so as to make the narrative a bit more brief, although I feel that in some ways it’s for the best. Richard III is a hard play to digest, no less to read and/or listen to. For more info on Fearless Shakespeare and their future, please keep up with them, visit their page on the Rubicon’s website!
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After passing my qualifying exams, I decided to treat myself by getting a tattoo of an illumination from the Ellesmere MS — which if you didn’t know is the most famous Canterbury Tales manuscript, surviving from the very early years of the 15th century just after Chaucer’s death.
A character I’ve been thinking about for awhile — the Wife of Bath — is someone I relate to onomastically (we’re both named Alice). So to match my Alice in Wonderland forearm tattoo, I decided to get Alys on the other arm. My artist, Alex Jones, at White Lotus in Ventura, has been a godsend! I love all the artists there, and give my highest recommendations!
AND, the next day, at a graduate student workshop for New Chaucer Society’s ongoing congress in Pasadena, CA, I got to literally flex my tattoo in front of the Ellesmere MS itself at the Huntington Library!
courtesy of the Huntington Library and their amazing staff
That’s all for now! I’m going to get back to the congress and panels for the rest of the evening.
