REVIEW: Falling Into Sinkhole (Jake Beka, 2026) | 🔗 https://brennan.day/review-falling-into-sinkhole-jake-beka-2026/

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Did I tell you about the time I tried to read "Fourth Wing"? I esp. loved the part where the MC is so scared that they calm themselves by recounting the entire world's backstory. I've seen less clunky world-building on Minecraft, cha-cha.

Rebecca Yarros is the Dan Brown of E.L. James-es. DNF. (postscript: actually, at least I could finish a Dan Brown book. ugh)

Is there any #Romantasy out there by accomplished storytellers? Colleen Hoover-level writing, maybe?

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The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Henry VI, Part 2 by Shakespeare

Henry VI, Part 2 is one of the most politically revealing history plays, not because it offers a tidy account of England’s past, but because it stages government as a struggle among vanity, appetite, performance, and weakness. The play is less a celebration of monarchy than a diagnosis of it. Again and again, Shakespeare shows that power is not simply seized by the ambitious; it is also surrendered by the indecisive. In that sense, the tragedy of the play lies not only in factional violence, but in the hollowness at the centre of authority.

At the heart of the drama stands Henry himself, a king almost constitutionally unfit for the world he inherits. He is pious, conscientious, and sincere, yet disastrously passive. His goodness is real, but it is politically useless. Shakespeare sharpens this contradiction by surrounding Henry with men who understand action as theatre: Suffolk flatters, York plots, Warwick manipulates, Cade performs rebellion like a grotesque carnival. Henry, by contrast, retreats into prayer and moral lament. His famous wish that he could live “a private man” reveals a character whose inner life is richer than his public authority. Yet the play does not permit the luxury of private virtue. Kingship in Henry VI, Part 2 demands force, strategy, and self-display; Henry offers conscience instead, and conscience cannot govern a realm in crisis.

This tension gives the play its tragic atmosphere. Shakespeare does not portray Henry as simply weak in a comic sense. Rather, he is a man tragically mismatched to history. He repeatedly wants peace, but peace in this play is not a natural condition; it is an impossible dream in a world driven by rival claims and bloodline politics. The result is that Henry’s goodness becomes a form of political vulnerability. His moral sincerity is admirable, yet it leaves him exposed to those who know how to exploit idealism. Shakespeare’s insight is merciless: in a corrupt system, innocence is not protective.

The play’s other great energy comes from ambition personified through Gloucester, York, Suffolk, and Queen Margaret. Gloucester and his wife Eleanor are especially important because Shakespeare uses them to expose the fragility of reputation. Gloucester begins as protector of the realm, but he is undone by court intrigue and personal vanity around him. Eleanor’s dabbling in prophecy, witchcraft, and public desire for advancement turns politics into superstition and scandal. Her fall is among the play’s sharpest ironies: a court that depends on performance destroys itself through performances of legitimacy. The playwright repeatedly suggests that the language of law, prophecy, ceremony, and patriotism can all become masks for selfishness.

Queen Margaret, meanwhile, is one of the play’s most forceful presences. She is often read as an outsider to English politics, but Shakespeare gives her remarkable rhetorical power. She understands that authority can be manufactured through speech, pressure, and spectacle. Her scenes show what Henry lacks: decisiveness, appetite, and tactical intelligence. Yet the play does not simply admire her. Her energy is also destructive, and her resentment helps drive the collapse of political trust. She embodies a courtly world where affection has become rivalry and marriage has become policy.

Perhaps the most unsettling section of the play is Jack Cade’s rebellion. Cade’s uprising is not merely a comic subplot or a populist interlude; it is The Bard’s grotesque experiment in anti-government. Cade offers an absurd version of justice in which literacy is suspect, hierarchy is inverted, and violence becomes the language of reform. His promises are ridiculous, but they are also revealing. He taps into genuine grievance, then turns that grievance into chaos. Shakespeare’s treatment of the rebellion is both satirical and anxious: social unrest is mocked, but it is also shown as the inevitable consequence of broken institutions. The famous boast that the rebels will “kill all the lawyers” is funny, but it also signals a world where order has become so compromised that even absurd rebellion can seem momentarily plausible.

Structurally, the play is restless and crowded, full of scenes that feel like fragments of a larger catastrophe. That looseness is not a flaw; it is part of the design. England itself is fragmenting. The nation appears as a body losing coherence, with each faction claiming to heal it while deepening the wound. Its history therefore becomes anatomical: power is not stable inheritance but a diseased organism. The play’s violence is political symptom rather than isolated event.

What makes Henry VI, Part 2 enduring is its refusal to romanticize authority. This tale shows that legitimacy without strength is fragile, strength without legitimacy is corrupt, and rhetoric without principle is catastrophic. Henry’s tragedy is that he knows what should be done but cannot do it. Around him, everyone else knows how to act but not how to deserve rule. That painful imbalance is the play’s central truth. It is not merely a chronicle of rebellion and court intrigue; it is a study of what happens when the forms of power remain intact after the moral substance has gone missing.

In the end, Henry VI, Part 2 reads like an anatomy of political collapse. Shakespeare gives us a king too gentle for his crown, nobles too hungry for the common good, and a nation too divided to recognize its own unraveling. The result is a work that feels less like an early history play than a dark prelude to the Wars of the Roses proper: a kingdom already breaking apart, while its rulers continue to speak the language of order.

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Henry VI, Part 1 by Shakespeare

Henry VI, Part 1 is one of Shakespeare’s most revealing early history plays because it dramatizes not the triumph of statecraft but the fragility of nations in the making. Rather than presenting England as a coherent political body, the play stages a country already splintering under the pressures of succession, military exhaustion, and competing claims to legitimacy. Its most striking achievement is that it turns history into theatre in the fullest sense: power is performed, authority is narrated, and identity is fought over in public before it is ever secured in law.

At the centre of the play stands not Henry himself, who is still a boy and mostly a symbol of dynastic inheritance, but the men and women who struggle to interpret or exploit the vacancy around him. This is why the play feels less like a stable historical chronicle than a contest of voices. Bedford, Exeter, Talbot, Gloucester, York, Suffolk, and Joan all speak as if England belongs to the one who can best command the story. Shakespeare gives each faction its rhetoric, and in doing so he shows that political power depends as much on language as on armies.

Talbot is the play’s clearest embodiment of martial honour. He is introduced as a national hero, and the playwright gives him the kind of elevated language that makes his death feel like the end of an older, nobler England. His most memorable meditation on reputation—“Glory is like a circle in the water”—captures the play’s tragic irony: glory expands outward, but it cannot last. It is beautiful, resonant, and vanishing. Talbot’s tragedy is not merely that he dies in battle, but that he belongs to a world in which heroic values are no longer enough to sustain political reality. His son’s death with him turns military honour into familial devastation, and Shakespeare uses that scene to show how public history consumes private life.

Yet the play is not simply a lament for English decline. It is also fascinated by instability as a source of dramatic energy. Joan of Arc is the most vivid example. Shakespeare writes her as a figure of extraordinary power and unease: she is charismatic, tactically intelligent, and spiritually ambiguous. To the English she is an uncanny threat; to the French she is a saviour. The play repeatedly tests her between holiness and witchcraft, patriotism and deception. This tension is deeply revealing. Joan is not just a character but a crisis in interpretation. The play cannot decide whether she is divinely inspired or demonic, and that uncertainty becomes one of its central dramatic engines. In this sense, Joan exposes how fragile the categories of national myth really are.

Her presence also complicates the play’s treatment of gender. Henry VI, Part 1 is full of men performing authority through martial and political language, yet Joan repeatedly outmaneuvers them. She challenges the masculine codes of war not by rejecting them, but by mastering them. That is precisely why the play must try so hard to contain her. She becomes a site onto which English anxieties about foreignness, female agency, and religious uncertainty are projected. The result is a character who is both theatrically compelling and ideologically unstable.

The play’s political world is equally unstable. The disputes between York and Somerset over the red and white roses are often read as the seed of the later Wars of the Roses, but The Bard is interested less in the genealogy of civil war than in the absurdity of factional pride. The famous rose imagery transforms a dynastic quarrel into a visual emblem of division, but the deeper point is that such symbols acquire authority only because people agree to fight over them. Shakespeare shows the beginnings of civil conflict not as a sudden catastrophe but as a series of misreadings, resentments, and opportunisms.

Henry himself is the play’s most poignant absence. He is decent, pious, and politically ineffective. That is not a flaw in Shakespeare’s design; it is the point. Henry represents innocence confronted by the hard machinery of power, and his weakness creates the vacuum in which all the others operate. He is a king, but not yet a ruler in any substantive sense. Around him, the state becomes something like a broken stage set: splendid, ceremonial, but already cracking.

What makes Henry VI, Part 1 especially interesting is that it is often treated as a lesser Shakespeare play, yet it contains many of the preoccupations that will define his later work: the instability of political legitimacy, the theatricality of identity, the tension between public role and private self, and the way history is shaped by storytelling. The language may not yet have the full complexity of the mature tragedies, but it already has remarkable force. It moves between ceremonial grandeur and battlefield urgency, between patriotic elevation and cynical realism.

As a literary work, then, Henry VI, Part 1 is less about resolution than about exposure. It exposes the vulnerability of heroic ideals, the slipperiness of historical memory, and the violence hidden beneath national myth. Its world is one in which glory enlarges like ripples in water, but the water never holds. That image may be the play’s truest emblem: beauty expanding outward for a moment, then disappearing into instability.

The Loneliness of A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf put forward an enduring vision of women with the space and financial stability to write. But it’s also a sad vision—of isolated writers, cut off from peers or mentors.

by Joanna Scutts

https://newrepublic.com/article/206731/loneliness-room-one-virginia-woolf-hold-up

Virginia Wooldf at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/89

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