Rebound

We have got hooked on 'Upstart Crow' - a TV sitcom closely modelled on the better-known Blackadder (by the same writer). The twist is that the anti-hero is not the fictional Edmund B, but a caricature of William Shakespeare. 'Upstart crow' was an insult, and an implicit accusation of plagiarism, levelled at Shakespeare early in his career by an elderly contemporary critic - ironically borrowing a line from Horace, who once described another poet as a 'crow decorated with other people’s feathers'. This is in turn a reference to Aesops fable of The Bird in Borrowed Feathers

Upstart Crow is full of knowing jokes for students of Shakespeare's life and works, English literature in general, professional and amateur theatre and Elizabethan history. It also intertwines contemporary political references with an overload of irony and sarcasm. It is the very definition of 'woke'; I can imagine a lot of people find it insufferably smug

One imagined character is the daughter of Shakespeare's London landlady. She is consistently depicted as the smartest person in the room - usually a room full of men - and thwarted in her ambitions by the restrictions on women in 17th century England. We still have a few episodes to watch, but I'm hoping there might be a reference to the fact that the theatre eventually dedicated to Shakespeare's work, in his home town, was the first major public building in Britain to be designed by an architect who was a woman, in 1927

This is the classic tourist board shot: art deco brickwork, check, pleasure-boats on the ripply water, check, swans, check, blue sky with puffy white clouds on perfect English summers day, check. What pulled me up and provoked the picture was the patch of light on the water, that I puzzled over for a while. The camera is pointing south-west; the morning sun is off to the left. I think the light is reflecting from the windows at the top of the fire-station tower (wash your mouth out!) on to the water and back up at me. Almost certainly, there is a Shakespeare quote that uses a scenario like this as some sort of metaphor - it's probably in Hamlet; they all are. Something like 'When you point your finger / 'Cause your plan fell through / You got three more fingers / Pointing back at you' (Mark Knopfler / Traditional)