My quarter at the University of California: Riverside is well underway, and the reading/writing assignments are taking up a lot of my time. To ensure I don’t abandon the blog during this period, I am going to experiment with adapting what I write for homework assignments into blog posts. Such posts will be indicated with the title Crosswriting. If I write on something and you would like to see me expand upon it, by all means let me know.

When William Shakespeare began his career as a playwright, he didn’t start with the plays that are most famous today, such as Hamlet or Macbeth. Instead, he started with history plays: stage dramas that depicted the political turmoil of England a century or so earlier, particularly the famous War of the Roses. Some of the very first plays Shakespeare wrote were the three parts of Henry VI, though it appears he may have written Parts Two and Three before Part One- or, at least, that’s how their publishing dates are listed, not necessarily their performance dates. For my Shakespeare class this quarter, we started with King Henry VI, Part One.