A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
Another dip into the Patreon archives today! I’ve been writing a lot of Shakespearean-themed song parodies that I can play on my (relatively) newly-acquired ukulele, and this classic song had only only four chords and a really obvious parody opportunity.
“We’re gonna get in trouble now but stab by me…”
Please enjoy my continuing existential crisis in comic form, courtesy of my affirming Patreon supporters.
Guess I’ll keep drawing…
Some more bonus content courtesy of my Patreon supporters! The genesis from this comic came from conversations I had with my pocket dramaturg, Kate Pitt, while working on my Hamlet adaptation. I ended up depicting the closet scene in a fairly conventional way, but I adored Kate’s suggestion for this very meta staging choice:
Seriously, I’m not sure why Kate has a better instinct for medium-busting visual jokes than I do. I’m supposed to be the artist in this partnership. It’s not fair.
Another depressingly autobiographical filler comic today, courtesy of my wonderful Patreon supporters.
If you need me I’ll just be over here, lying on the floor, waiting for July.
I was hoping May was going to be the month where I finally caught up one some long-neglected commissions and got my working life under control again. Unfortunately, I ended up burning out and not getting very much of anything done. My brain basically feels like it was just mauled by a bear.
Oh, and speaking of “mauled by a bear”…
This video comes courtesy of my exquisitely generous supporters on Patreon.
Hey! I was hoping to be back up and running this month, but May was kind of a disaster for me and I am at the end of my proverbial tether, so here are some filler strips courtesy of my wonderfully generous Patreon supporters.
THE POST-IT NOTES AREN’T WORKING
Time for our final (for now) installment of Pocket Blogs by Kate Pitt! Thanks so much to Kate for sharing her inestimable Shakespearean geekery with me this month.
Last week we explored the early modern world of women (living and dead) caring for each other during childbirth. This week, we’ll find out how deeply medieval men could embed pointy metal objects into each other’s faces and survive. (The answer may surprise you!)
At the end of Henry V, once Agincourt has been won and the French and their fancy horses have been defeated, the scene shifts to the French court where Henry V woos the French Princess to be his bride. This wooing is little more than a formality, given that the marriage is a requirement of the peace treaty and Henry won’t stop killing her relatives without it. However this scene is usually (but not always) played as a meet-cute and Henry pours on the charm.
Mya, face to (mangled) face with Henry V.
By mine honor, in true English, I love thee, Kate. By which honor I dare not swear thou lovest me, yet my blood begins to flatter me that thou dost, notwithstanding the poor and untempering effect of my visage. Now beshrew my father’s ambition! He was thinking of civil wars when he got me; therefore was I created with a stubborn outside, with an aspect of iron, that when I come to woo ladies, I fright them.
Henry apologizes for the way his face looks (not often necessary onstage) and blames his appearance on his father’s war-like distraction when he was conceived. However there is a much more straightforward explanation for his 34-year-old face looking past-its-best: twelve years earlier, he was hit in the face with an arrow.
The history of English royals surviving arrow-wounds up to this point was not great, so when sixteen-year-old Prince Henry was hit at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 there must have been panic. This is the battle where Henry IV’s army defeated the rebel Hotspur and his forces. Shakespeare depicts Henry and Hotspur gloriously fighting to the death, when in reality Hotspur was killed by an arrow to the face and Henry nearly died from the same.
Henry’s wound was not the “shallow scratch” he dismissively describes in Henry IV Part I when his father asks him to leave the battlefield because his bleeding is becoming conspicuous. Henry’s wound was “in posteriori parte ossis capiti secun-dum mensuram 6 uncharum.” (Ed. note – if blood isn’t your jam, last chance to bail before I start translating things.) In other words, the arrow was embedded six inches deep into his skull.
Someone yanked out the shaft of the arrow so Henry wasn’t walking around with over two feet of wood sticking out of his face, but the metal tip of the arrow (known as a bodkin point) was still firmly stuck in his head. Fifty years earlier, Scottish King David II allegedly survived an arrow wound where the point remained embedded, but it was generally accepted that leaving sharp bits of metal in the body was Not Good and the arrowhead would need to come out.
Henry IV turned to a surgeon named John Bradmore for help with his son’s wound. Bradmore was perfect for the job was because he was a metalworker in addition to being a surgeon and could create custom tools for tricky operations. After enlarging the wound over several days with honey-dipped probes, Bradmore forged a brand-new medical instrument – hollow tongs with an screw in the middle – that he used to grab onto the arrow head and (after a bit of wiggling) pull it from the bone.
The prince survived, Bradmore wrote a book, and they both – I hope – drank a significant amount of wine (that wasn’t being used to disinfect Henry’s wound) after enduring the unanesthetized removal of a sharp piece of metal from deep inside a sixteen-year-old’s skull.
Artistic depictions of Henry show both sides of his face as unharmed, however the surgery must have left a significant scar. Onstage, Henry V usually (but not always) has silky-smooth skin and Shakespeare doesn’t specifically mention a facial wound. The Netflix film The King, starring Timothée Chalamet as Henry V, gave him a tiny wishbone-shaped scar as a nod to the skull-smashing injury but, as oft this blog has shown, The King has bigger problems.
Shakespeare’s depiction of Henry V onstage has deeply shaped how we see the historical King. Even Henry’s tomb at Westminster Abbey reflects modern media. While most the King’s effigy is original and dates from around 1431, its hands are 1971 replacements modeled on Lawrence Oliver’s. Audiences are accustomed to the noble, unblemished Henry V they see onstage rather than the scarred historical figure. Shakespeare’s Henry V stands in stark contrast both to the evil, “unfinished” Richard III in the Shakespeare canon, and to his ill-faced friend Bardolph in his own plays.
If Henry truly, as he tells Kate, “never looks in his glass for love of anything he sees there,” executing Bardolph whose face “is all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs” may feel uncomfortably close to strangling the self he saw in the mirror at sixteen. The boy with the broken cheek has become King, leaving behind his old friends and his old face, cutting out all infection to become the mirror of all Christian kings. I wonder what he saw.
Writing these pocket blogs has been a joy, many thanks to Mya for her support!
by Kate Pitt
Time for another installment of Pocket Blogs by Kate Pitt! Fun fact: when Kate and I were discussing this series of pocket blogs, I failed to realize that “severed heads” would be a recurring theme. (Neither did Kate! Severed heads are just so fun!)
Last week we completed a deep dive into a historical character from Shakespeare who had terrible things done to his head. This week, we have the wife of a historical character from Shakespeare whose head was treated very nicely and was present at the birth of one of Shakespeare’s patrons, King James I.
Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is so deeply Scottish that it is known as “the Scottish play” to superstitious folk who believe that saying the play’s proper name will bring untold calamities on their heads. It was written during the reign of James I who united the crowns of England and Scotland and contains numerous references to things that would make him happy including witches (he wrote a whole book about them), his escape from the Gunpowder plot, and a flattering depiction of his ancestor Banquo.
Despite the witches’ prophecy that Banquo’s children shall be kings, the king at the end of the play is Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan. One of Shakespeare’s sources for Macbeth was Holinshed’s Chronicles which tells the story of the historical Malcolm, Malcolm III of Scotland. Malcolm’s second wife Margaret was later canonized as Saint Margaret, and it is her head that we will be discussing.
While much of Macbeth takes place during civil war, there is hope at the end of the play that everyone will take their shiny new earldoms home and stop fighting. Not so much historically. Malcolm III and Saint Margaret had multiple sons, including two named Edgar and Edmund (!), who fought each other, Duncan’s son Donald Bane, and the English for control. Malcolm III was killed fighting an English force at the Battle of Alnwick in 1093 and his wife Margaret died a few days later. They were both buried in Dunfermline Abbey in Fife, a Benedictine priory that Margaret founded. She was canonized in 1250.
Some of the miracles and interventions attributed to Saint Margaret are book-based. The Bodleian Library holds a copy of the gospels owned by Saint Margaret that is said to have miraculously remained intact despite being dropped in the river. However, she was best known for protecting women during childbirth. Queens of Scotland in particular looked to Saint Margaret for protection, given that she was a queen herself and safely gave birth to eight children including three future Kings of Scotland.
Giving birth in the sixteenth century was dangerous and women needed all the help they could get. Prayers, birthing girdles, and saint’s relics were all used as protective measures. Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and wife to James IV of Scotland, paid eight shillings to "feche Sanct Margaretis Sark” for protection when she was in labor with the future James V of Scotland. “Sark” is an archaic Scottish word for a shirt or a chemise and referred to a relic of St. Margaret’s that was kept with her remains at Dunfermline Abbey.
Multiple Scottish Queens used Saint Margaret’s shirt as a talisman during childbirth but only one used the Saint herself. When Mary Queen of Scots was in labor in June of 1566 she asked for the Saint’s entire head to be brought to the birthing chamber in Edinburgh Castle.
Laboring under the desiccated eye of her 450-year-old predecessor was apparently a comfort rather than a terror, and Mary was safely delivered of the future James I. I’m quite sure that modern medical professionals would look askance at a severed head in the delivery room, but in Mary’s case it worked. In her later life, Mary Queen of Scots was significantly more concerned with keeping her own head rather than sending for those of other Scottish queens. St. Margaret’s head was kept in a silver reliquary with a crown of pearls and precious stones, while Mary’s was not treated so kindly.
James I has a family connection to Macbeth not only through his ancestor Banquo, but also because the mummified head of Malcolm’s wife may have been one of the first things he saw when he was born. James had a long and glorious future ahead of him while Saint Margaret was not so fortunate. While some of her relics survive, Margaret’s head disappeared during the chaos of the French Revolution. While a number of heads disappeared during that time, most of them were not 700 years old.
Next week will involve exactly no severed heads. It will involve Shakespeare and head wounds but of the fun, survivable kind!
by Kate Pitt
Interested in early modern childbirth strategies that don’t include dead saints? Check out friend-of-Good-Tickle-Brain Anjna Chouhan’s podcast Shakespeare’s Pants. The most recent episode on Pregnancy and Childbirth shows how women – living women – relied on each other.
