A General Comment

Well, now, I'm sure y'all sit around your campfires or your cozy hearths and talk all night about the owl in HENRY VI, Part 3. But did you know that there is also an owl in HENRY VI, Part 1? No? Then sit back and get ready to be amazed. This here French general calls our man Talbot "Thou ominous and fearful owl of death." Ouch! As I look at these two plays, all smushed up so close together in dramatic chronology, I think to myself, Jack, I think, is there an argument to be made that Shakespeare's plays were not intended as "books," exactly, and that they do not, in that case, have a legitimate place on your big long list of books you have read since 2011 with owls in them? And then I remember that I don't even care that a chimpanzee is not technically a monkey.