Amy Acker + suits.

The Murder Club™

Sameen “Panicking” Shaw | 5.06 Person Of Interest

root appreciation: 43/?

“it’s easy to feel violated, even paranoid. let me ask you this, do you have feelings that you’re being watched?”

Won’t finish this meme: Sam on season 9

nervous Barry Allen psyching himself up to talk to Iris West.

• a play coauthored by william shakespeare and john fletcher, who collaborated with shakespeare on other works such as henry viii and cardenio (a lost play)
• it was written around 1613-14, making it one of the latest examples of shakespeare’s writing (if not the latest) 
• the source material is the knight’s tale from chaucer’s canterbury tales, but the playwrights made alterations and also added a subplot with a character known as the jailer’s daughter (who shares many qualities with ophelia from hamlet) 

• there are two cousins, palamon and arcite, who are theban knights. they’re best friends; even while imprisoned in athens, they promise that nothing will ever come between them – and then they see emilia, hippolyta’s sister and so the sister-in-law of duke theseus. both of them, of course, immediately fall in love with her. arcite is able to obtain a pardon, and palamon escapes with the help of the jailer’s daughter, who has fallen hopelessly in love with him. the two of them are left to clash over emilia in the outside world.

• the back of my ncs edition says something fancy about the recent focus of scholarly attention on sexuality in early modern texts but basically emilia is gay and there are some noteworthy relationships (namely theseus and pirithous) 
• stylistically gorgeous when it comes to shakespeare’s writing; it has that density and complexity that you see in the language of plays like the tempest – just read this speech from 1.1 
• and when it comes to fletcher, it’s not as if it’s unreadable – one of the most moving scenes in the play, where palamon and arcite arm one another before their duel, is fletcher’s. (if anything, fletcher is more readable than late shakespeare’s syntactical wilderness anyways.) 
• there’s this collision of ancient greece, high middle ages, and late renaissance that complicates sources in a really cool way – there are passages that are reminiscent of chaucer, of a midsummer night’s dream, of hamlet; there’s something of everything. it does the same with genre: it could be called a romance, and the atmosphere is dreamlike, similar to pericles  
• or like a tragicomic midsummer. the midsummer connection deserves its own bullet point because of some seemingly deliberate parallels, namely a group of rustics putting on a play for duke theseus. the mood of the play is elegiac, autumnal, reflective, which is heightened by the sense that the playwright is thinking back to early in his career 
• and speaking of pericles, that play is having something of a rebirth right now and I’m utterly convinced that the same will happen with the two noble kinsmen very soon. (an rsc production is opening in august, in fact, which I think will contribute; see rehearsal photos here.) 
• also, what better way to celebrate 2016 by reading one of shakespeare’s plays that has gone neglected for so long? 

you’ve always had someone to come home to.