Julius Caesar: A Final Banging On About (+ the works)

 That's John Wilkes Booth above left playing Mark Antony, ironically perhaps given he was the Booth who'd actually go on to assassinate someone, and that's his initially more famous brother Edwin as Brutus to his right with their brother Junius Jr. as Cassius. Maybe of all the big roles in Julius Caesar, Antony was just considered the most actor-proof. Has any other single play proved so historically significant? Assassination's played such a disproportionate part in the history of America, a country so influenced by an idea of Rome, that idea so influenced by Julius Caesar. Here's the full story:

 And, again according to wikipedia, as early as 1937 Orson Welles was reframing the play as a parable of Fascism, a political phenomenon Shakespeare documents with astonishing acuity given he was writing over three hundred years before it happened, but maybe it all seemed so familiar because in providing us with the warning Shakespeare was also writing the handbook. And what could we do with that warning, anyway? Cassius' contempt in Act One for the people he's proposing to "liberate" seems just as prescient, although not necessarily unjustified given Shakespeare's depiction of the mob. It's almost a trademark of Shakespearean tragedy that it's always the wrong people who are right.

 Here's the whole thing:

 And here's "Titus" again, showing just how bad things would get. The opening victory of  the chaotic but ruthless tyrant Saturninus over the principled but patronising democrat Bassianus is almost Julius Caesar in microcosm:

 And here's "Shrew", doing for the institution of marriage what "Two Gents" did for courtly love:

 And here's "Two Gents". We get to call them these now that we're experts:

 And finally here's Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year:

 So that's over fifteen hours now of me talking out of the side of my mouth, something I had no idea I did until I made these. No, I like it. Shows a lack of training. Adds character. Thanks again to all who've supported me, and this, and here's a rattling cup for anyone who wants to be in that number.