Once Upon a Tudorista: The Story of Lizy's Paper

Portrait of Henry VIII and his family. 

 

It all began what feels like a very long time ago. Even I don't remember exactly how it started. I do know that I was beginning to see connections between the tragic events in the lives of the Tudor monarchs and similar events in Shakespeare's plays. I'd spent my life growing up reading about the Tudors, so why not write about them? 

With this topic in mind I began putting my ideas together. I started officially by searching for relevant scholarly articles. The best result I had was the paper "Shakespeare's King Richard III and the Problematics of Tudor Bastardy", which was an in-depth look at the connections between Richard's accusations of his relatives' bastardy and the tainted legitimacy of the Tudors. When I started drafting the paper I decided to narrow down the topic to just legitimacy. I still struggled, however, with my verbose writing and also my lack of sufficient scholarly sources. I was not very successful with social networks, but I tried posting my developing thesis statements on Facebook.

My grandfather passed away on the weekend of March 23rd, and the funeral was to be on the 30th. Deciding to head down to Arizona for the funeral, I finished my first draft by Wednesday the 27th and drove down on the 28th. It was here I was able to talk to my cousin Gloria, who commented on my ideas and gave me some more perspective (and by the way, she recently announced that she is expecting a baby). I returned just after midnight on April 1 and within twenty-four hours had found several more scholarly papers to add muscle to my argument, and I also checked out a couple of books from the library. I re-wrote the paper using substantial chunks from the first draft plus quotes from my new sources. For lack of writing time and paper space, my paper ended up being about why legitimacy was such an important issue in the sixteenth century rather than about how Shakespeare and the Tudors were connected, but I felt like the thematic issue was important to address (for personal reasons I will refrain from discussing).  I finished editing on Friday and called it good. 

Most of what I learned from the experience was that if I am writing an academic paper about something I am passionate about, I am more likely to put effort into it. Writing this paper gave me a chance to become more familiar with the Tudors and the history of their reign. From others' positive feedback and from my own personal feelings about the paper, this is one of the best term papers I have ever written.