SHAKESPEARE MONTH continues! When we last left Will, he was stuck in the Lost Years, but now he's made it to London and is ready to start writing plays!
Tune in next week to learn a bit more about WHERE all those plays were performed!
Shakespeare: The Lost Years
It's SHAKESPEARE MONTH here at Good Tickle Brain! Today we take a look at one of the most exciting period in Shakespeare's life: that seven-year gap when we have no documentation as to his activites and can thus imagine him doing ANYTHING.
I kind of love it that we don't know exactly what Shakespeare was doing during this time. It's nice to have a few unanswered questions.
Tune in Thursday to see Shakespeare's triumphant emergence in London!
Shakespeare: The Youth
It's SHAKESPEARE MONTH! Let's continue our journey through the timeline of Shakespeare's life with today's installment taking a closer look at Shakespeare's salad days in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Tune in next week to find out all about those missing seven years!
Shakespeare: The Timeline
It's April, which means it's SHAKESPEARE MONTH! All month I'll be running a series of biographical Shakespeare comics. Now, I'd like to state up front that I'm not a Shakespeare historian: I'm a Shakespeare cartoonist, and the two are very different things. So if there's something glaringly incorrect, I apologize in advance.
(And no, saying Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him is not glaringly incorrect. Go find an Oxfordian stick figure comic to follow or something.)
Tune in for the next installment on Thursday!
The Game of Shakespeare's Life!
Continuing our epic journey towards Shakespeare's 400th death anniversary on Saturday, here is a handy-dandy board game that allows you to relive all the exciting ups and downs of this master playwright's eventful life!
For all my fellow board game geeks out there: I know this is a totally rudimentary roll-and-move luck-fest with no strategy. I'm sorry. I actually started out designing a slightly more interesting game, but it was clear that I couldn't both draw a comic and design a functional board game within the space of two days, so this is what you get.
Also, so many of you were gratifying excited about my Shakespeare Play Flowchart from Tuesday that I WILL be making a poster of it available. I have to re-design it a bit to make it more poster friendly, so it might be a little while. If you want to stay updated on the poster, as well as all other Good Tickle Brain news, sign up for my weekly newsletter. In addition to news, you get a weekly digest of my comics plus exclusive behind-the-scenes peeks and book/DVD reviews.
Good Tickle Brain at the Folger Library!
In just 8 DAYS I will be speaking at the Folger Shakespeare Library! In case you've missed my previous announcements on this, here are the basic facts:
WHO: Me!
WHAT: Talking about my comic and live-drawing on stage
WHERE: The Folger Theater, Washington D.C.
WHEN: Friday, April 29, at 6:00pm
WHY: Because it's going to be REALLY SUPER FUN
HOW MUCH: Nothing! It's absolutely FREE! You can reserve a FREE ticket at the Folger website.
Shakespeare's Skull
So, as you've probably heard, Shakespeare's grave was scanned and his skull doesn't appear to be in it. Naturally, there is only one appropriate way to respond to this sort of news:
YORICK YORICK YORICK YORICK YORICK YORICK YORICK YORICK YORICK
An Egregiously Brief Overview of Original Pronunciation.
First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday...
Anyways... today's comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!
O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my "thing". At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme "move" and "love", it's not actually him pretending to be mad.
The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I've repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare's O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don't believe me, just take a listen:
Seriously. That's gorgeous. Here's a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:
It's easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare's original accent than American accents are from it.
Shakespeare can be performed in any accent. English, Welsh, Scottish, American, Canadian, Singaporean, I don't care. His words still have immense power. However, when you hear it spoken in O.P., you really get a sense of what it must have been like for those first groundlings at the first Globe Theatre.
Interview with Richard III (Deceased)
On Thursday the remains of King Richard III, discovered underneath a Leicester city car park in 2012, will be re-interred in Leicester Cathedral. Good Tickle Brain sent our best reporter to the scene and secured an exclusive interview with the remains in question.
Why does everyone have to bring up the princes in the tower? We were having such a nice conversation too!