A very happy 2026 to you all, and good riddance to 2025. 

My birthday is in a few days. I try to cultivate a good attitude toward aging, and for the most part I have, but I do struggle with the impending mortality of it all, especially on years when I'm feeling like I'm not quite where I would like to be. I'll save you the therapy session but I do feel that way this year, just a smidge, so turning 49 has me a little melancholy. 

Enter poetry! It came into my head not long ago to memorize one of my favourite passages of Shakespeare's, the hollow crown speech from Richard II. I adore it. I get bits of it stuck in my head like earworms. I don't know about you, but when I get an earworm of a song in my head, sometimes the only way to exorcize it and move on is to listen to the song. It's the same with poetry, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just recite the speech to myself when I needed it?

I've long been interested in deliberate memorization as a practice. I used to memorize prayers when I was a child. I memorized the "to be or not to be" speech when I was in Grade 4 as part of an individualized curriculum endorsed by an excellent teacher. I studied piano through the Suzuki method, which means performing without sheet music. When I was still a journalist at the Ottawa Citizen, 10 years ago, I wrote a feature about memorization, which included talking to a 13-year-old who had just finished memorizing the entire Qur’an.

There was a time when I could recite you bits from my favourite books without even trying. (Like many nerds, I got into the habit of saying the "fear is the mind-killer" speech from Dune to myself.)

But as I get older, things stick in my memory less perfectly. I haven't memorized anything on purpose in years, and I am finding my project of the Richard II speech more challenging than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago. I'm getting there, though, and the fact that it's challenging is all the more reason to do it! Lately I feel that using our minds in any way that stretches them is an act of rebellion.

Here's the speech:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered. For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

My favourite part – maybe my favourite two lines in all of Shakespeare – is 

"For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—"

I love that it's "death", not "deaths." With Shakespeare it's always dangerous to ascribe such tiny choices to the writer's intention, because there are variations between editions and we don't have his handwritten version to compare to the quartos of Richard II or the First Folio. Nevertheless, all we can go on is what we have, and the slight connotation of "the death of kings" as a concept rather than "the deaths of kings" as a list is lovely. The speech goes on to argue that all the deaths are the same kind of death: a murder perpetrated by the true king, Death himself.

(And speaking of variation, of course, every actor brings their own interpretation to this bit. Mark Rylance played it for a laugh, unusually; compare for example to David Tennant’s more freaked out version. My favourite portrayal of Richard II is Ben Whishaw’s in The Hollow Crown, which I can’t find a clip of but is worth watching if you haven’t.)

It's the "for God's sake" that tears my heart every time. In Shakespeare's time, the phrase had been around long enough that it was already being used as an interjection the way we use it today (although the more literal meaning of "to honour God" was also still around.) Here, Richard is crying out with urgency, appealing to his friends – not to go off and fight, not to find some way out of their predicament, but to stop, to find some peace. To sit upon the ground and tell sad stories, which is such a universal, human reaction to the certainty of death. While I'm alive I'll sit on the ground and tell sad stories, and that activity feels vital, urgent, communal, and connected to the earth. We come from dust and return to dust – but we can make dust our paper. What is eternal is not what is written, but the act of writing.

Another reason this speech has been rattling around in my head is that I've been reading a lot lately about the concept of the monarch's "two bodies", which was very current in Shakespeare's time, the idea that a king or queen had their physical, mortal body like the rest of us but also (if they were not deposed!) a kind of idealized "body politic" that did not die. (This concept is still around in law and political philosophy, the idea that the monarch is both a "natural person" and a fictional person – that the crown is the king is the state. You can see this in this piece by Philippe Lagassé about Canada's oath of citizenship, which references the Richard II speech in the title.) 

The reason I've been thinking about that is because it's part of the thematic underpinning for the novel I'm trying very hard to finish and send to my editor, which is set in the 1580s. As usual, the things that grab my interest connect up in ways that aren't even clear to me at first. Am I writing a novel sort of inspired by the idea of the "king's two bodies" and Platonic ideals because I'm nearing 50? Huh, I guess I am.

That novel won't be out this year, but 2026 will have two novels from me in it: Mercutio in the spring and The Swordmaster in the fall (northern hemisphere). So it'll be a busy year for this newsletter, and I'll let you know about events and publication dates etc as they develop.

Thanks for sitting upon the ground with me.