Shakespearean Christmas Carols, part 3

You've sang through part 1 and part 2, so here's the most recent set of Shakespearean Christmas carols! 

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. 

The Star Wars Saga So Far... (in 18 Panels)

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. 

A Modern Major Shakespeare Fan

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.

Cardenio (in 3 Panels)

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.

Sir Thomas More (in 3 Panels)

Continuing my 3-panel play journey through Shakespeare's so-called "apocrypha"...

Sir Thomas More exists as a heavily revised manuscript showing evidence of collaboration by around six different people, with playwrights Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle credited with the bulk of the original material.

It is generally agreed now that Shakespeare contributed three pages of material covering Sir Thomas More's confrontation of the rioters threatening to evict and murder Flemish immigrants. Sir Ian McKellen has been particularly active lately in highlighting More's most impassioned speech to the rabble. I've shared this video before, but it's still worth a look:

Those three pages of material - housed, with the rest of the Sir Thomas More manuscript, in the British Library - are probably the closest we're going to get to any Shakespeare manuscript. PRETTY COOL, EH?