Happy St. Crispin's Day!

I really need to update this thing with something substantive.  I'm trying to come up with lecture topics for Torrey Academy.  So far, I've committed to giving a lecture next semester I've tentatively and boringly titled "Shakespeare and his Sources" which will expand and develop a paper I wrote on Shakespeare's use of Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum in Hamlet.  The lecture will also deal Shakespeare's sources of his Histories.  There are a few other lecture topics and titles with which I have been toying...

Why Torrey Academy is Better than Hogwarts:  A Brief History of Western Education

I've been doing research work for a project on the history of education for the past year and have a lot of info (I'm actually procrastinating last bits of the work right now...).  The stuff I've written is going to end up on a wall in some school in Parry, Iowa.  Might as well give a lecture on it before I forget everything!  And yes, I do think that TA's curriculum is better than Hogwart's apparent curriculum.  Not that the books aren't fun and don't deal with important issues, but the school seems mostly concerned with one's ability to swing a wand around and mix obscure ingredients together.

Piety and Superstition: Hawthorne's New England

This would deal with Hawthorne's perception of the piety and sometimes eccentric supernatural beliefs of his Puritan ancestors.  Basically, I just want to say the name Cotton Mather in front of 15 high schoolers multiple times over the course of an hour.

Something or other on Tolkien's use of Old English in LOTR or something on Alfred or Aelfric or whatnot.

Title says it all.