the cumulative listing here emphasises Hotspur's obsession with war

A broil is a fight. The "afar remote" fight he refers to to commence this play is a crusade in the holy land, as indicated at the end of Richard II.

Cultural rules and values are especially bound up in storytelling, but also the rejection of them. In general the older and more specific the target audience, the more likely a story is to challenge cultural values and assumptions. But maybe that's wrong - what about propaganda?

What is the role of storytelling? Why does it come so naturally to us? Should we be 'homo narrans' instead of 'homo sapien'? Some philosophers think so.

I like the word 'subvert' also, because good writers try to subvert bad ideas or assumptions that clash with their own experience - they work with them to turn them on their head.

This is skirting around the idea of 'perspective' or 'point-of-view' but you can be sure these big neutral words will be considered in the questions you're given. How does being exposed to someone else's mindset help us understand the world and each other better?

reading: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190523-does-reading-fiction-make-us-better-people

The assumption here is that texts help us to understand outliers and unlike experiences, 'insight' being the key preface.

Be especially aware of visual texts and visual language: but by this stage in your English careers you should be able to write about fiction and non-fiction, poetry, design, fine art and photography.

Grief? Joy? Relief? Fear?

Individual - personal, unique, interesting? Collective - social, cultural - even universal?

I love this word choice. When Shakespeare immediately references the 'will' of Brutus after his metaphorical description of making the right choice, he's connecting it to Epicurean philosophy - particularly the idea that fate is not determined, but crucial moments swerve use down different paths.

Ben Whishaw's hot-tempered performance of this line reveal's Brutus's increasing frustration and despair at what he - and the audience - understands as a situation that no logic can navigate him out of. Though the pretense is of a rational argument, Hytner's production shows it to be anything but. This also adds to the dramatic irony of his later metaphor, through which the audience understands Brutus is already on the wrong side of history.

This is capitalised on very cleverly by the Hynter production, which extends the "because I love you" line out into some sexual tension between a man in power and his colleague. The costumes of Calpurnia and Decius contrast in his version, and the performances suggest a scorned, homely wife and a confident young colleague - with the implied hint of an affair.

It's classic of Shakespeare to start his play with the common people rather than the most noble and important characters: a ground-level clash between the two popular ideologies. This is part of why we consider him to be a great humanist: he valued all perspectives equally, from the porter and the shoemaker to the mightiest Roman emperor.

Shit gets real when the rhyming couplets hit you in Shakespeare. Here there are two at once; first Hal's high-modality statement that it's either them or the rebels who must die. It's undercut, though, by Falstaff's wistful hesitation: he wishes he could stay in the tavern.

As we see throughout this scene - and continuing throughout the play - no scene is too important to be littered with jokes about Falstaff's fatness.

And the Prince emerges from night into day.

How do you guys read this?

...the news is finally delivered. What happens in between, and what does it represent?

The news begins...

Asimov: "For the first time the contrast between the two men is put into a less conventional light. Hotspur's chivalry and "honor" becomes a kind of grotesque preoccupation with killing for no reason but to kill. His concern is first for his horse, who is necessary to him for his killing, only later for his wife, who is not. Coming as it does, immediately after the Prince's foolery with the tapsters, we see the contrast particularly clearly. Prince Hal forgets matters of importance in his preoccupation with laughing, but Hotspur forgets matters of importance in his preoccupation with killing. Brought down to this, in the absence of the trappings of battle and with the enlightenment of Prince Hal's sarcasm, we may catch a glimpse of the fact that laughter is perhaps a better reason for which to neglect business than murder is, and that he who delights his "inferiors" is perhaps more to be admired than he who kills them."

"mammets:" A doll or puppet; a lifeless figure, an effigy, a scarecrow.

This is really very clever. Think of the word 'chronicles' and the implication here. What is Hotspur appealing to, and how does it make the audience feel?

This feeds into Falstaff's overarching anxiety.

Hal considers himself as one of the (anthropomorphised) 'Moon's men' when he uses inclusive pronouns to talk about them - "us."

Sun God

These dashes usually indicate a change of focus for the speaker. He's shifting to speak to Westmoreland, rather than the court - and Audience - in general.

This is really clever dramatic irony. One of Shakespeare's favourite face-offs is human will vs. divine intervention: here, Henry assumes his son purely exists as God's punishment for his rebellion. He is of the old breed, where everything has a holy purpose. The irony is that Hal's disreputable character is a feigned role, as seen in his Act I soliloquy. It's his nefarious, Machevellian purpose, not God's holy one, that renders him such a rogue. It's these subtle hints that prove Shakespeare was a prototypical humanist.

"Sack" is booze, specifically sherry.

"Intestine" IS a double meaning here. In Shakespeare's time the specific name of the inner organ was only developing; intestine meant more genrally "inward" or "inner." So the word plays two roles here: to show how the "shock" of war is both physical and mental or emotional, and to create strong visual imagery of literal disembowelment, by showing us 'intestines.'

This hyperbolic imagery is more traditional of grandiose theatre speeches, but it shows that the classical language of the stage and of persuasion often overlap.

Very early on, Shakespeare breaks the blank verse of traditional nobles to establish a more important feature of their speech: traditional Aristotlean rhetoric. Apt for a play about politicians.

Note that the worker's dialogue is in prose - Shakespeare's naturalistic, "commoner's" language - while most of the "patrician" class characters tend to speak in the blank verse of traditional theatre and the nobles.

Like the "soles / souls" pun previously, Shakespeare's jokes often depend on double meanings that are more apparent when the lines are spoken than when they are read. An "awl" is a tool used to pierce holes in leather, but here the sentence structure makes us hear "all," inflating a humble cobbler into a witty philosopher...

The cobbler is engaging in some jesting wordplay, which may not indicate anything other than his good spirits.

Soles? Or SOULS?

This is the first scene of the play!

I'm excited!