A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
The number of Shakespearean characters who have a father but are, for some usually unspoken reason, missing a mother is often commented on. This isn't to say that there aren't any mothers in Shakespeare.... there are just a lot of missing ones. Let's see what happens when we put some of them back.
Queen Lear would have SHUT THAT THING DOWN.
Happy New Year, everyone! 2016 is (fortunately) fading in the rear view mirror of life, and I'm so excited to see where Good Tickle Brain takes me this year. Thanks for being along for the ride!
Let's make some Shakespearean New Year's Resolutions, shall we?
And just in case you missed the past couple installments of resolutions, here they are:
Happy holidays to all of you! I will be taking next week off to spend time with my family, but I look forward to seeing you here again in the new year!
2016 has definitely had its full share of heartbreak, but it was also a year of adventure and excitement (and stress and euphoria and terror and learning) as I started working full-time on Good Tickle Brain. Thanks again to all of you for reading and supporting and laughing and generally being a fantastic audience. I look forward to another year of sharing Shakespearean silliness with you.
As a large quantity of snow has been dumped in my general vicinity recently, I thought it only appropriate to revisit my Shakespearean snowmen...
Star Wars: Rogue One opens tomorrow! In case you're not up to date, here's what has happened in every since Star Wars movie so far. SPOILERS, obviously...
This was a lot harder to put together than I had anticipated. The prequels were surprisingly difficult to summarize.
Are you familiar with the song "I am the very model of a modern major general" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirate of Penzance?
Are you familiar with mathematician and satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer's parody of that song listing all the elements in the periodic table?
Well... this is kind of like that, only with Shakespeare plays.
If you send me video of yourself or some friends singing this song, I will totally share it with the world.
Wow, it's been a long time since we've seen any Shakespearean Selfies...
We continue our 3-panel play journey through Shakespeare's "apocrypha" with a closer look at Shakespeare's infamous lost play, Cardenio!
GET IT? BECAUSE IT'S LOST? HAHAHAHAHA I AM SO FUNNY
...ahem. But seriously, folks...
Cardenio, based off an episode from Miguel Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, is a lost play attributed to Shakespeare and his frequent collaborator John Fletcher. It is "lost" because, while we have a record of its existence and performance, it does not exist in manuscript or published form.
In the 18th century, editor Lewis Theobald claimed to have come into possession of several manuscripts of a hitherto unknown Shakespeare play, which he edited into Double Falsehood. The manuscripts he used have mysteriously disappeared. It's impossible to say if Double Falsehood is, indeed, Cardenio, but it seems to be as close as we're going to get to the lost play.
If you really want to know what happened to Cardenio, you should read Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde. I can't recommend Fforde's Thursday Next series of books enough, by the way. Lots of Shakespeare and literary in-jokes wrapped up in a totally surreal universe.
