Friday 4 February 2011

Woe!

Gentemen of the Shade is already a book title; the book in question is written by Harry Turtledove, and pertains to vampires during Jack the Ripper's reign of terror.

It should be a law that no line from Shakespeare can be used as a title of a book that does not deal adequately with the themes in the work from which the line was drawn. Books about vampires should be especially forbidden.

(For those who don't know, "gentlemen of the shade" is a phrase from Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, spoken in a speech by Falstaff to Hal, the crown prince and his drinking buddy: "Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty. Let us be called Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal." Ah, Falstaff. I'd have loved to have drawn from this speech in a short story or novel. There's so much fun to be had, so many ideas to un/ravel.)

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