That old charlatan! I'd forgotten about him. The fake Dauphin in Huck Finn is one of literature's textbook crybullies: a man forever trying to garner sympathy for the world's cruel failure to recognize his lofty status and his obvious qualities, while at the same time trying to use that purported august rank to push people around--soliciting pity and fear-tinged respect for traditional values as a one-two punch.

And it works, to some extent, and that was Twain showing that even hardy frontier Americans have an instinct for class and rank-based bootlicking that can be induced and manipulated by a savvy con man.

Twain's musings on traditional values mesh with one of Shakespeare's major themes in Henry VI, and that's the replacement of customary ways of doing things with practical, amoral solutions that rely on modern methods and technology. Shakespeare's hero (who I haven't talked about yet) in Henry VI: Part I is Talbot, general of the English armies.

Talbot is an old school medieval...knight, really. He believes in forming orderly ranks and engaging with the enemy in traditional combat, and taking prisoners when they yield, and signaling a parlay with the enemy whenever one or both sides might need to renegotiate the terms of the combat going forward, and all that old-timey stuff.

Joan of Arc is more of an asymmetric guerrilla fighter, and she uses artillery and skirmishers and disguised scouting forays and basically whatever it takes to win. I get the impression that Shakespeare sides with the English traditionalists here, but it's hard to tell, as he could hardly side with the French in the Hundred Years War if he was going to put on a historical play in London and expect to not be booed off the stage.

Twain, of course, wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which is about a practical, hardnosed technophile New Englander from the late-19th century taking the place of Merlin in 6th Century England through the use of modern hardware standing in for magic. Twain was a huge tech fan; when he was in his 50's he lost his entire fortune investing in various modern inventions, none of which ever panned out.



Ah well, I'm rambling again. One more thing about Twain and Shakespeare....

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.

— Mark Twain

Joan of Arc was the last novel Twain wrote, though he wrote plenty of essays and short stories afterwards. I never read it. Nowadays it's not considered to be one of his major works. Still, I'd like to get around to it some day.

At some point in the last few months the Golden Nugget took down their plexi and reduced the seating at their tables to 5 max. I didn't like either of those developments, so I made my way down to the Venetian.

I had not been to the Strip since last March. The entire North Strip, from Encore to the Strat, has been turned into a massive construction zone, with Las Vegas Boulevard torn down to two lanes and the adjacent properties accessible only through mazes of construction detritus. Seems like a smart idea to get a ton of infrastructure repaired and refurbished while they wait for Covid to pass.

I wanted to grab some pictures of the Strip but it was raining. I don't remember the last time it rained steadily. Was it summer? Red Rock Canyon and the surrounding hills got a bit of snow today, but nothing in town.




The Venetian is 8 max with plexi, just like Red Rock Station. Rake is fairly high at 10% up to $5, with an additional $2 promo drop; however, they give away $1200 per hour from 10:15 AM to 11:15 PM.

$600 goes to the high hand of the hour, and the minimum qualifier is any full house, which will almost always hit as long as they have a few tables running. Venetian gives another $600 every hour to one random player. At 11 AM they had 7 tables running. Given an average of 7.5 players per table, that works out to around $23 given out per player per hour. At 1:30 PM they had 10 tables going, so that was still $16 per player per hour. I imagine that the place fills up later in the afternoon, and the increased numbers further dilute the promo money, but getting there at 10:30 and playing a 3 to 4 hour session seems like a +EV proposition

Of course the variance is high: with ten tables running you only have around a 2.65% chance of hitting one promo or the other during any given hour, but the prospect of an extra $600 is nothing to sneeze at if you're playing $1/$3.

I played one hand of note where I faced what could have been an attempted angle from Villain. I'll write that up later.

Venetian: 3.5 hours:
(-$49)

V is an Asian-American woman in her late 20's or early 30's, sitting on my right. She had sat down on the previous hand and limped along from the button with AQ. However, she was talking on the phone during that hand and making some sort of appointment, so her preflop passiveness with a big hand in late position may have just been not wanting to calculate a raise while doing something complicated on the phone.

Next hand, V is in the SB and I'm in the BB with 99. Three players limp in and V--now off the phone--quickly makes it $20 to go. I had planned on doing the same with my nines, but now that V has gotten there first, this is a good spot for me to put in a 3-bet, but if V is limping along with AQs on the button, then what range is she insta-bombing limpers with in the SB? I flat instead, and a player in the MP also calls. V has the effective stack with around $180.

Flop: 743 (Pot $64) - Three Players

V appears to make a checking motion, but then she bets $50.

It wasn't a super obvious check, but she did tap her index finger three times on the top of her stack.

Having just sat down and not knowing whether or not V is a novice player, I decide not to make a stink about it. I try not to be a rules nit with new or bad players if the offense isn't egregious, and--more importantly--if I haven't lost anything by it. I call and MP folds.

Turn: 7 (Pot $164) - Heads Up

V taps her stack again, then she tosses in a $5 chip while at the same time quietly telling the dealer that she's all in. I have excellent hearing, and I'm sitting directly to her left, and I did not hear her, so if I had quickly tossed in a $5 chip as a call, I would have been committed to calling her $110 all-in bet.

Fortunately, the dealer loudly asks her, "ALL IN?"

In return she gives him a slight nod. The dealer announces that V is all in. I've only seen V play two hands so far, but this still seems enough of a read for me to make a turbo muck with an overpair on a less than 2/3rd pot all in bet on the turn.

I figure if she's new then she's acting really nervous and randomly and that's often a sign of a big hand, rather than a stone bluff. If she's an experienced player, then it looks like an angle to get me to toss in a red chip and call her stealth all-in. Venetian doesn't have the all-in cards, and they really should.

Again, I didn't make a stink, as I wanted to see what kind of player V was, and it turned out that she was experienced and something of a reg at the Venetian. Thing is, if it was an angle, then now I have a tell on her going forward.

After his hand, V was very nice and chatty, almost flirty (going for the long con, maybe?), and she even tipped me off to a promo super-nit at the table, and that saved me about $90 when I put the super-nit on a very narrow range and didn't barrel a turn and river runout that I would have bombed on anyone else. Sure enough, super-nit had top top and was content to call my flop bet and just check it down to the river showdown.

I have a feeling that your -$49 is probably pretty reflective of what any decent player would expect from a session at the V. That morning promo nit fest with a large rake seems tough to beat. I think with the promo you mentioned it’s still probably +EV but looking like a $0.60 hourly with a ton of variance. Unless you just plan on playing this in the morning and still playing the Red Rock evening games than maybe why not. That being said not sure you have the bankroll to cover the variance on the promos at the V.

Just my thoughts I think you have this figured out better than me.

Results can be wildly varying when making rules inquiries at the Venetian. I don't know what the current situation is there now, but in the past some of the rulings I've witnessed there have been astonishing.

In fashion news, I'm a little upset about the disappearance of Akane's hat. I don't feel it's my place to comment on women's millinery, so I've decided to live with it.

The game at the Venetian was not bad, though my sample size is too small so far to have a real read, and the rake is either comparable to Red Rock or just a dollar more--I should know the Red Rock rake but I've forgotten.

Nits and super nits can be exploited. Nits will bet/fold a capped range too much, among other things, and super nits never fold top pair or an overpair, as they've folded for the last 90 minutes to get to it. That's exploitable: make a dirty two pair, gutshot or set on the turn or river and put them all in, never mind that it's 3x pot to do so. That can be high variance, but it's high EV.

Agreed on the hat. It's like Buckethead without the bucket head. Fortunately she still shreds the drum kit like a young John Bonham.

King Henry VI: Part I (Part III)


Years ago I read an excellent book called How Not to Write a Screenplay by Denny Martin Flinn, which goes over the many common mistakes novice screenwriters make that get their screenplays thrown out by flunkies before they ever reach a producer's desk. One of these is writing out overly long or detailed combat scenes. Flinn argues that in most cases it's best to just write "They fight," and to let the director hammer out the details of said fight during production.


Shakespeare used a lot of that sort of shorthand, with stage directions giving terse descriptions like they fight, alarums and excursions, so it's difficult to tell from the written plays how elaborate he was with directing his battle scenes, but given that one of his main competitors in the theater district charged Elizabethans admission to watch packs of dogs tear bears apart in the arena, I'd guess that Shakespeare's combat scenes would have to be intricately choreographed and very gory, in order to compete.

The sight of an armored young woman lopping off heads and slicing out innards must have made for quite a spectacle, though all of Shakespeare's women were actually portrayed by male actors, thanks to longstanding English laws conflating female actors with prostitutes, and banning them from the stage--that's right: Romeo and Juliet were boys kissing.

It's easy to see the consternation that Joan's battlefield presence causes Lord Talbot, England's straight-laced war hero, and he instantly drops her into both of the two buckets that men have so often reserved for classifying strong and difficult women: witch or whore, or in this case some sort of hybrid whorewitch, since Talbot chooses to run with both. And so we have a quick summary of the English view of the legacy of Joan of Arc.

But as I mentioned in Part I, Shakespeare has Elizabeth I, England's Virgin Queen, totem of their military prowess, looking over his shoulder in the form of her Master of Revels, a man who will be reading this script and whose permission Shakespeare will need to produce this play.

So I feel that Shakespeare needs to thread the needle here: he can't draw too many obvious parallels between Good Queen Bess and Joan, because Elizabeth I is England's current hero; pure and untouchable, and he can never make Joan out to be the hero, as the English--more than a century later--are still touchy about losing the Hundred Years war, and they consider Joan to be one of its villains.

At the same time he can't drag Elizabeth I down with Joan through their association of both being strong, difficult women in an age that isn't ready to deal with this type on a realistic basis, so he's going have to tarnish Joan with the whorewitch slur without getting even a speck of it on Elizabeth I.

What interests me is that Shakespeare knows what he has to do, but it seems like he still can't get over his admiration for Joan, at least in the early acts. After Talbot spews out a string of insults at her, Joan just says something to the effect of, "Hey, don't make such a fuss over me, I'm just a girl who's about to kick your ass." This is a hero line, at least it is in our era.

Later on, she adds the equivalent of "I have more important **** to do than to fight one on one with you all day like two old timey knights. I'm off now to lift the siege of Orleans and feed my people. You can go bury your other general whom we shot with a cannon after he was stupid enough to stand on top of a battlement in plain sight of our artillery."

Thus the French retake Orleans, posting their first victory in a long time. Much rejoicing commences and the French credit Joan for their success.

Soon after this, the English infiltrate the French lines in the dead of night and deal them a minor setback, and we hear from the man who has repeatedly sworn his undying fealty to France's maiden savior.


Here Shakespeare puts the first puncture in Joan's armor. She's human, she sleeps like everyone else, and she doesn't have the power to guarantee a French win every time, but she cottons to all of the above, and after doing this she uses her powers of persuasion to calm everyone down and to get them focused on the battle ahead, until this mini-sketch happens...


I completely missed this gag the first time I read it: an English soldier running through the French camp yelling that Talbot is coming, then stealing everyone's stuff after they all panic and run away. But I have to wonder why Joan would ever flee a mere report of Talbot after she proved herself a match for the man one-on-one, and for his armies in the field?


Shakespeare hasn't put in a good cheap joke in a while, and this is a good spot for it. But this gag also serves to continue on with his downgrading of Joan of Arc.

More of this in Part IV.

King Henry VI: Part I (Part IV, Conclusion)

Henry VI is in the process of losing all of England's holdings in France, which is not winning over England's nobles. Richard, Duke of York is scheming to take the throne away from him. This will be the start of the War of the Roses, a decades-long struggle for the throne between Richard's faction and Henry's faction that results in almost every male heir on both sides for the next two generations being murdered as children, or executed as adults, or killed in battle.

It's a mess. I'm not going to cover it. I'll just note that it's basically the equivalent of ten or more seasons of Big Brother, but rather than kick the losers out of the house, the other housemates strangle and stab and poison and behead them.

My interest lies in covering how Shakespeare treats the French heroine, Joan of Arc, who takes advantage of the disjointed and flailing English war effort through asymmetrical stealth and guerrilla tactics.

After lifting the siege of Orleans, Joan and a few soldiers dress up as peasants and get themselves let into the English-held city of Rouen, wherein they quickly locate the points of weakness along the walls and signal the locations for a successful French attack and seizure of the city.

When Talbot returns to Rouen with his English army, he finds the French ensconced there, and he becomes incensed at Joan's unchivalrous tactics as the French stand on the walls and mock Talbot and his army.


Talbot's aged and injured lieutenant, the Duke of Bedford, cries out.


The scene is a good illustration of the old school versus new school theme running through the play. Joan is the cool young punk mocking the old squares. Hers is the pragmatic Al Davis approach to France's liberation...just win, baby. She never gets angry; it's always the men around her who engage in the emotional histrionics.

The French don't have long to celebrate their win, however, as the English take back Rouen with the help of their major ally in France, the Duke of Burgundy. Joan follows with a pep talk.


Charles the Dauphin doesn't freak out on Joan, this time, as he had done after other reversals. Joan has a new idea: set up a meeting with the powerful Duke of Burgundy, and convince him to fight for France instead of England.

Everyone has a feel for Joan's persuasion skills by now, so they're like, "Great idea!" The Dauphin sends a messenger to the Duke of Burgundy asking for a parley with him, and Burgundy shows up in the French camp, and Joan proceeds to talk him into switching sides and fighting for them. Easy peasy.

After this diplomatic coup, the French are able to trap Talbot's forces outside the walls of Bourdeaux at a time when the dukes who head the other two English armies are too busy bickering with each other to send aid to Talbot in his time of peril.

Lord Talbot and his teenage son, John Talbot, fighting his first battle, are both killed in the rout. After it's over, Joan talks about running into young Talbot.


Giglot! Nice. I had to look that one up. From what I can gather, it's a disused insult denoting a sort of gum-snapping bimbo, which is a pretty bad read from young Talbot, given that it would require Joan to first undergo a transformation similar to the puzzling change that overtook Sandy at the end of Grease.


I mean, I get it. You're the teenage son of a renowned general, trying to prove your worth in your first battle, and some girl shows up on the field and calls you out as a "maiden youth" and offers to kick your ass in front of everyone. I'm guessing that he thought of some better comebacks...after he called her a bimbo and ran away.

We'll never know, as he's dead the next time Joan runs into him. He and his dad are lying together in a heap of English corpses.

Sir William Lucy, from the English army, comes to collect their bodies. When asking the French for Talbot, Sir William lists out all of Talbot's extensive titles and accolades for like five straight minutes. Joan pounces on him for that.


After this we come up to the big betrayal. This won't be a betrayal of Joan of Arc by the French, or by anyone; I'm talking about the betrayal of Joan's character by William Shakespeare.

Everything we've seen from Joan of Arc so far has put the lie to Talbot's remonstrations that she was a witch and a whore. Joan has done nothing so far to cast any doubt on her assertion that her powers are a temporary gift of grace from God, granted to her to free her people. Throughout the play she's been chaste, sensible, calm, focused, savvy, strong, pragmatic and smart, in victory and in defeat.




Uh oh.

Those don't appear to be emissaries from the Virgin Mary

The fiends won't help Joan, and she grows more desperate.



The historical Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, who were not actually talked into switching sides by Joan and were still fighting on the English side at the time. Shakespeare gives the credit for Joan's capture to the English.

The English bring Joan's father, a Shepherd, to see her. She curses the poor man out and denies her parentage, claiming to be of royal descent and not from peasant stock, even though she'd introduced herself as a shepherd's daughter back in Act I.


The English prepare to burn her at the stake. As a charitable gesture to her maiden purity, the Earl of Warwick suggests that they procure extra wood and fuel so that Joan will burn faster and suffer less.



Joan is led off to be burned at the stake offstage and the play ends with a small victory for the English or something and King Henry says something inconsequential and I don't give a **** because the story got instantly and permanently ****ed up the ass the minute Joan's character took a shiv in the back from old Bill.

Why did he do it? Why did Shakespeare betray Joan?

Obviously, we'll never know. There's no writer's commentary track to go with the play. We know that it's one of his first plays, and it's likely that Shakespeare didn't have his reputation to lean on when he presented it to the Queen's Master of Revels for approval, so that any story-ruining notes from the latter might well be heeded.

Another thing I was leading up to in previous parts is that it might be unwise for an Elizabethan playwright to make too many on the nose comparisons between France's Joan and England's Queen Elizabeth I, so that making Joan cartoonishly cowardly and evil in the end would be a way of steering clear of that.

It's also possible that Shakespeare's Joan was never good, and that I as a reader missed several cues, subtle or otherwise, which could have tipped me off to that.

We know that the historical Joan's conviction for heresy was reversed by the Church 20 years after her death, that she is considered to be a hero of France, and that she was eventually canonized as a saint, so Shakespeare was taking some major liberties by making her the abject villain, though she was undeniably an enemy to her English occupiers, and ostensibly to the Elizabethan theatergoers a century later.

And in the end, that might be it. You don't send everyone home from Red Dawn feeling guilty that the scrappy American kids bested their forthright and honorable Russian adversaries through base falsehood and deceit.

Shakespeare likely had no choice but to make Joan into the bad guy, it's just out of his usual harmony that he waited until the last minute to do it.

SJ do you post on literary or writing related sites? I bought, Oh No Not Again that had one of your stories from one of these sites. Did you post this elsewhere? I’m not a big Shakespeare guy but I’m sure those who are would appreciate this.

Well, there has been a debate for decades questioning if Shakespear was really the author of these plays. Some of the doubting seems to stem from the fact the Shakespeare was a commoner and couldn't have possibly had the education to come up with such great works. This theory, and the attempt to prove that some aristocrat was the true author, even seems to be an obsession of some. Which I, and my liberal sentiments, find offensive. But can it possibly be that Shakespeare didn't finish the play? Thus explaining the discrepancy with the Joan character? Or was it a collaboration, like Lennon & McCartney?
We'll never know.

I knew that male actors played the female parts back then, but it never crossed my mind that Juliet was a boy, lol. Game changer.

I don't post on the literary sites. The Oh No anthology is from fark.com, a news aggregator with a decent comments section, which is a very rare thing on the Internet. Some of the Farkers are excellent amateur writers, so they do an anthology every year. I didn't write for the 2020 version, but I'd like to come up with an original fiction short story for the 2021 version...if I do, I'll probably post it here first.

To be clear, the actors who played Juliet and all of the other women were male, but all of Shakespeare's female characters were written to be women.

It's funny because he often gets the women in his comedies into a spot where they have to travel somewhere in secret, and they usually dress up as men in order to avoid being raped on the road by bandits, so you have a male actor playing a female character pretending to be a male character, kind of like what one critic said about Billie Joe from Green Day: that he's an American who sings like a British guy who's trying to sing like an American.

In As You Like It they bump it up one more level. You have Rosalind, who runs off to be with her love interest Orlando, meeting him in the forest but--in order to spy on him a little and test his love--keeping her disguise as the boy Ganymede. Orlando tells "Ganymede" that he's a good looking lad and asks him to pretend to be Rosalind so that he can practice wooing her. So there you have a male actor playing a female who's pretending to be a male who pretends to be a female. I wouldn't be surprised if they went for some sort of campy drag queen energy in some of the comedies.

As far as the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays, I think it was a guy named Shakespeare. it's the simplest explanation, which is often the correct one. I might go into it in more detail in a later post, but then again I might not. The last time I looked into it was many years ago, and I've forgotten most of what I learned, except that I was fairly convinced at the time that Shakespeare was real and wrote most or all of his plays, and maybe collaborated on a few of the early ones. It would be a lot of work to dig up and weigh all those arguments again..

I've been reading my way through more Shakespeare plays, but none of them have held that je ne sais quoi that's made me want to give one of them the full treatment here, so I'll afford them a quick rundown instead.

After Henry VI: Part I we have Henry VI: Parts II and III, followed by Richard III. These particular early Shakespearean histories are categorized as Succession Plays; the genre, occasioned by Shakespeare and others, echoed the angst that Elizabeth I caused in England by refusing to name a successor towards the end of her life.

The Elizabethan succession crisis was a ****ed up situation, with as many as a dozen viable heirs to the throne kicking around at times, but the playwrights couldn't comment on that directly for fear of being censored, or worse, so they used allegory instead, and they reached into either mythical or actual past events, highlighting the chaos, suffering, betrayal and wholesale murder resulting from a lack of various royal succession plans.

There are more dukes in the Henry and Richard plays than there are named dwarves in The Hobbit movies. Like Peter Jackson, Shakespeare does a pretty good job of keeping them distinct, but I lack the ability to do the same for you in a long review without going to extreme lengths that neither of us would appreciate.

So I'll just say that Henry VI was a weak king who lost his crown and his life to his overly ambitious nobles, one of whom was Richard III, who murdered his way through his two older brothers and all of his young nephews to become King of England for a short while, until all his betrayals caught up with him and he was abandoned by most of his allies and killed in battle with Henry VII.

Next will be short takes on Titus Andronicus, the nastiest and goriest Shakespeare play, followed by a few comedies, as that was the order in which they were printed in Shakespeare's original anthology, known as the First Folio.

Amazing that you don't get as much interaction on your Shakespeare posts as you do on your poker posts. Who would have thought?? ;-)

As a former Shakespeare geek in high school, I definitely appreciate the posts - they are well researched, written and presented. It also brings back a lot of memories - I went to the Oregon Shakespearean Festival in Ashland with summer school classes in '75 & '76 (pre-freshman and sophomore years of high school). They were great productions with some future stars - Jean Smart played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Queen Margaret in Henry VI Part II. She also starred in A Long Day's Journey Into Night (they did non-Shakespeare plays also) with William Hurt.

In addition to the great entertainment, Ashland was a really cool town. Lithia Park was a great place to score some weed and both trips were were rife with new sexual experiences for me, but those are stories for another time. Your posts brought back some great memories.

Here were the line-ups the two years I went:

1975:

Charley's Aunt
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Oedipus the King
The Petrified Forest
The Winter's Tale
All's Well That Ends Well
Romeo and Juliet
Henry VI, Part I

1976:

Brand
The Devil's Disciple
The Little Foxes
The Tavern
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
King Lear
Henry VI, Part II

Thanks for the kind words, dedmau5! The line-ups look like a nice sort of eclectic mix of genres. Maybe the cast voted on it instead of just having one director decide?

I don't expect this Shakespeare stuff to be a hit. I equate it to my favorite Fallout YouTuber whenever he goes off script and does a long series on a strategy game like Crusader Kings: he has a good time with it, but it bores me.

Whenever he does that, I'll just check in on him occasionally and I'll watch little snippets of the strategy stuff, finding some of it to be enjoyable in small doses, and that's all that I can hope for in this case: people who find Shakespeare boring--which I totally get--skimming the posts and finding a joke or a reference here or there to laugh at or spark some interest.

Meanwhile, I'll keep working my way through his plays. The good news for some is that I won't be doing any of his sonnets. I never warmed to those, though I can't explain why I haven't.

Nah, it is definitely a niche area of interest. But I mean, I do the same in my blog and go on tangents on meditation, cinema, life stuff, philosophy and whatnot...

On the Shakespeare theme : I studied in literature (my courses were in French and taken in Montreal, but were still not so much exclusively focussed on the French Canadian and France canon, but on a worldwide scrutiny) and even if we did touch certain aspects of Anglo-Saxon literature, we never even once whispered the name of Shakespeare!!! Granted, I must admit that I took more interest in courses pertaining to Latino literature and French Canadian lit and funky conceptual courses in general (like lit and cinema, lit and anthropology, lit and philosophy, "deserts" in lit, lost in a labyrinth etc.), but still...

Seems like there's a certain level of chauvinism between and English and French-based literature. For example, I ran into very little Voltaire, Camus or Rabelais in my literature courses, even up to the advanced college surveys, and these are cherished names in French lit. It likely comes down to a sort of unspoken rivalry.

Ugh. What are we doing on this turn?

Yatahay Network - 400/800 NL - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BB: 75.07 BB
UTG: 41.83 BB
Hero (UTG+1): 108.22 BB
MP: 87.79 BB
MP+1: 32.2 BB
MP+2: 33.49 BB
CO: 26.87 BB
BTN: 32.91 BB
SB: 57.35 BB

9 players post ante of 0.13 BB, SB posts SB 0.5 BB, BB posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 2.62 BB) Hero has Q A

fold, Hero raises to 2.5 BB, fold, fold, fold, CO calls 2.5 BB, fold, fold, BB calls 1.5 BB

Flop: (9.12 BB, 3 players) J 5 Q
BB checks, Hero bets 6.34 BB, CO calls 6.34 BB, BB calls 6.34 BB

Turn: (28.16 BB, 3 players) K
BB checks, Hero checks, CO bets 17.9 BB and is all-in, fold, hero?

Toss it

Yep. If your time bank is running low and you're still finding likely combos that beat you, and you're not getting a crazy good price, it's time to let it go.

Call. You can still fold on the river.

Only works if it's an anguished, clock-inducing slow-fold.

All-in River Surrender Techniques are for Patreon subscribers only.

Just got Henry V by Kenneth Branagh that I ordered on Amazon.
One of the few classic movies that I always wanted to see and never did.
Hope it's worth the 12 bucks.
Next movie on bucket list is Kurosawa's Ran. I know I know, it's not Shakespeare.

You're an inspiration to all of us SJ.

Thanks Nepeeme2008! Henry V is the one with the classic pep talk, "Once more into the breach, dear friends..."

IIRC it's the one where Prince Hal has put aside his young degen ways to become Serious King and conquer France. I don't think I've seen any of the Branagh versions, but his reputation is impeccable.

Titus Andronicus

Three schools of thought surround the authorship of Titus Andronicus, a play that is considered by many to be Shakespeare's worst, although its reputation has improved somewhat in recent decades.

One school claims that someone else wrote the play, but it doesn't explain how it ended up in the First Folio, which otherwise only contains Shakespeare plays. A second school says that Shakespeare wrote it, bad as it is, and we should just accept that the Bard could pen a bomb. A third school balances the argument by providing textual analysis which points to a collaboration between Shakespeare and another playwright.

I side with the third school. Writer collaborations were common in Elizabethan theater, and Shakespeare was young and still establishing himself when the play came out. The textual analysis itself is too technical for me to lay out without boring all of us, but I had noticed on my own an unevenness in the style within the play, and that's what made me look into its provenance and discover the three schools of thought.

Let's look at a passage from Act IV that the collaborative school attributes to Shakespeare:


...and compare it to a passage from Act I, attributed by the collaborative school to a playwright named George Peele:


I mean, the latter's not bad, per se; it just doesn't sound like Shakespeare to me.

In any case, the play is pretty lousy, but I like it. It is unabashedly hideous and violent, and it clearly revels in the hysterical misery it causes the title character, Titus Andronicus.

Titus is a venerated (and fictional I believe) Roman general who at the beginning of the play has lost 21 out of his 25 sons in Rome's battles with the Goths. In the play he kills #22 himself in a dispute over who Titus's only daughter should marry, and then sons #23 and #24 are framed by the villain Aaron for the murder of the Emperor's brother, and Aaron tricks Titus into cutting off his own right forearm, saying that the Emperor will not execute his sons in exchange for it, only to have Titus's son's severed heads and his own forearm delivered back to Titus.

Soon after this, the Emperor's stepchildren, Demetrius and Chiron, rape Titus's daughter Lavinia, then they tear out her tongue and cut off her arms so she can't finger them, so to speak. As these clanking tragedies pile up, Titus Andronicus loudly loses his mind.

After this we're treated to an old school 'your mom' joke. Aaron, the villain, is a Moor, of Black North African descent. He has an affair with the Empress, and she gives birth to a Black child, and her older white sons--the ones who raped Lavinia, confront Aaron with this.


Nice.

Meanwhile, by placing a stick between Lavinia's arm stumps, Titus is able to induce Lavinia into writing the names of her rapists, Demetrius and Chiron, in the dirt. Titus springs a trap and murders them. Then he invites the Emperor and Empress to a banquet where he's cooked the Empress's sons into a sort of soufflé, which he then serves to them.

This kicks off a classic Shakespeare Act V All-out Bloodbath, wherein almost all the remaining main characters get stabbed to death, leaving just one character--Titus's son #25--to pick up the pieces and give a Jerry Springeresque closing speech.

As written, Titus Andronicus is far too over the top to cause in the reader the level of pathos and regret that his later, much better tragedies go on to inspire. The overall feel of this play is akin to watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the third time and laughing defensively at the noisy and gruesome set pieces.

This might explain why the play's reputation has improved in the last four decades or so, versus how it was universally reviled for the first 380-odd years of its run: we're more acclimated to extreme violence and gore than were audiences in the past.

Next: Some meh early comedies that I'll likely blow through quickly in a single post so we can get to Romeo and Juliet faster.