Henry IV, Part 2

I saw the Henrys performed in the late 1980s by the English Shakespeare Company. The entire trilogy was staged with shifting time periods. While the battle scenes shifted from chainmail and swords to guns and gas, other moments took the form of radio broadcasts from the 1930s, and at one point I distinctly remember Prince Hal eating milk and cereal. It was a remarkably effective and surprisingly cohesive technique. In many ways that production has shaped my approach to this project; some of the representational items you see here obviously represent very old things, but the items themselves come from all the decades of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st. That goes for the knight figure you see on the front of this card. Like the knight featured on the front of Henry VI, Part 1, this is one of the earliest toys I can remember, that I still have. His vintage is early 1970s. Long ago, he had a little sticker on his shield – I don’t remember what the heraldry was. Another point of note – I lost his little sword almost immediately, so my resourceful parents (Rose and Keith) snapped one of the tines off a plastic hair comb, painted it with some sort of crusty silver pigment, and jammed it into his little hand. Lo and behold, the best roughcast miniature sword ever! Thanks, Mum and Dad.