Henry V

If you’re reading all of these blurbs, first of all, thank you, and second of all, you may have just read the blurb for Much Ado About Nothing in which I admit to perpetrating a visual pun, because I couldn’t think of anything better. Well, I’m about to do it again, only this time I am perpetrating the visual pun because it is a direct expression of one of Shakespeare’s most famous fourth-wall-breakers. At the beginning of Henry V, Chorus opens the show by asking the audience to suspend their disbelief: ‘… may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?’ The ‘wooden O’ is a reference to the Globe Theatre, where many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed. It was a circular, stadium-like building, probably with a partly open roof – a wooden O. What you see on the front of this card is a wooden typesetter’s O. Traditionally, small type for printing books was made from metal, but large, poster-sized type (which this certainly is) was made from hard, polished boxwood. I hope then, that this card may spur your imagination to a state not found on any map, to an undiscovered country ‘crammed within this wooden O.’