Displaying my usual level of celebration of our independence from England, I wrote the following with my Fourth of July sparkler:
If you cannot quite read it, it’s a piece of the famous first line of Henry V: “O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest of invention.” As we are all responsible for knowing all of the choruses in Henry V, the third play in our repertory, they have oft been foremost in our minds (cf. “O, I’d like a little touch of Harry in the night!”). The fact that the utensil here is, in fact, fire, helped.
It is brought to you by these additional sources: Mr. Paul Reisman and his camera, which has a ‘firework’ setting with a really long shutter speed, enabling me to write this out in a couple of seconds, and Mr. Evan Hoffmann and his Piercing Eloquence blog, from which I shamelessly stole it.
This will probably not be the first time that I steal things from Evan’s blog, as all of us, including myself, can count on it to be much better stocked with news than this paltry thing. But that means that you can count on it for actual information, should you want it.
I am well pleased that my celebration of this holiday afforded an opportunity for my Shakespeare Nerdiness, as I was forced to abandon my usual Fourth of July tradition. Normally, I wear black, but a lack of planning and the limitations on the amount of clothes we could bring meant I didn’t have full mourning attire.
