>>6116447>>6117071>>6117075Jeremy Irons is a very good actor, when he is not starring in Eragon or Dungeons And Dragons films. Here he is pronouncing his verdict on modern fantasy post 2008, through an impassioned soliloquy delivered in Henry IV Part I (adapted in The Hollow Crown tv series).
Recently I learnt of an interesting academic theory that all of Shakespeare was either conscientiously or unwittingly part of a Tudor propaganda narrative of historical revisionism, in fact in the transition from feudalism to pre modern capitalism, living standards in England experienced a severe decline (as measured by net national income per capita) during the Tudor Elizabethan years, even if you do not entirely believe the reconstructed economic wage aggregates, or question the estimates of population approximately doubling in that era, etc there are numerous events (eg enactment of Poor Laws against vagrants, dissolution of monasteries whose charities had helped the impoverished at that time etc) the historiography itself lends itself to the economic data series showing a severe decline in living standards amongst the population of Shakespeare's time, increase in beggars, vagabond and vagrancy etc. So the theory suggests that Shakespeare's plays (which drew upon a history that demonised and distorted their predecessors, Richard III etc) were part of a royal promulgated narrative that attempted to portray those past eras as being more tumultuous and worse than their contemporaneous era, where the average denizen was being economically immiserated. We are ok though we now have technofeudalism yay
