Good Tickle Brain

Happy Pride!

If you want to learn more about Shakespeare’s queerness I recommend Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, by Will Tosh. I’ve just started it but so far it’s doing a great job examining what queerness looked like in Shakespeare’s time.

Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival

I will be at the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival this weekend, June 13-14, at the Downtown Ann Arbor District Library. I will also be running a “how to draw stick-figures” workshop on Saturday, June 13 at 11:30am. I realize that (a) this is very late notice, and (b) most of you aren’t in the Ann Arbor area, but if you are… stop by and say hello! I will have printed mini-comic versions of the above comic available!

Shakespeare Anyone? Podcast

It’s (allegedly, possibly, vaguely) Shakespeare’s birthday!

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! 6-7 the meme, too famous to live long.

It’s no secret that I love Shakespeare’s history plays. When I was a kid I loved them for their numerous sword fights and battle scenes. Now I love them for everything else. And also the sword fights.

This scene is from Henry IV, part 2, which is admittedly my least favorite part of Henry IV. This deathbed scene between Henry IV and his son, Prince Hal, however, is pure gold. Henry IV’s reign has been overshadowed by the fact that he usurped the throne from his predecessor, Richard II, and was directly or indirectly responsible for his death. As a result, Henry IV’s reign has been plagued by political discontent and outright rebellion. Fortunately he has a really solid plan to fix everything.

Anyways, Prince Hal becomes Henry V and invades France and distracts everybody from his domestic troubles and everything is fine forever.

Exorcising all my earworms for this year by turning them into Shakespeare songs…

In case you don’t have any kids in your life, here is the original song:

And in case you want MORE Shakespeare-themed song parodies, check out my holiday songbook, full of Shakespearean twists on seasonal classics, complete with ukulele chords and murder.

With all the talk of Wicked: For Good going around I thought it would be a good time to revisit the classic Shakespearean tale of witches. And so today I’m presenting a song from Wicked: For Bad.

(Original song here, if by some miracle you’re not aggressively familiar with it already.)

I know this is primarily a Shakespeare webcomic, but I thought I would take a moment today to share something that’s been at the forefront of my mind lately… colonoscopies!

If you really need a Shakespearean hook to pull you in, think that I am simply showing you how, as Hamlet says, “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”

Please feel free to share this comic with everyone you know and spread the good word about colonoscopies. You can also download a PDF of it, print it, and fold it into a little booklet, like so:

As the holidays approach, we here at Good Tickle Brain would like to issue a Public Service Announcement: please make sure you are allowing the correct white-bearded individual into your house this Christmas.

One of them is the anthropomorphic representation of the Christmas holiday season amalgamated from numerous Christian and pagan folk traditions, and the other is a felon.

Sign up for Shakespeare News!

If you want more Shakespeare nerdery and joy in your life right now, I highly recommend signing up for Shakespeare News, a weekly e-mail newsletter round-up of all the Shakespeare stuff that is happening right now. It is brilliantly compiled and written by my consulting pocket dramaturg Kate Pitt, who infuses her trademark blend of dry humor and impeccable research (complete with footnotes) into every issue. It is very possibly the only thing I am ever pleased to see arrive in my Inbox. If you enjoy Good Tickle Brain I am confident you will find a lot to enjoy here too. Sign up now!

Thanks for still reading Good Tickle Brain

Today is the 10th anniversary of Good Tickle Brain! I can't believe it's been 10 whole years since I decided to start sharing nerdy Shakespeare comics online in the hope that other people might find them mildly amusing.

Ironically, my 10th year running Good Tickle Brain has also been far and away my roughest. I've posted barely anything this year, due to a particularly challenging combination of injury, chronic pain, increased family care responsibilities, and mental road blocks. But I'm still here, and I'm still committed to making Shakespeare fun and making fun of Shakespeare through the power of stick figures. (Also the chronic pain has mostly cleared up, so that's helped a lot.)

Assuming I can get my brain to cooperate and life doesn't throw me any more curve balls this year, I'm hoping to have my long-awaited comic book compilation of Hamlet out in time for the holiday season. I'm so proud of the work that has gone into it and I can't wait to get it into your hands.

As Good Tickle Brain moves into its 11th year (it goes to 11!) I hope to figure out a sustainable schedule that allows me to post new comics regularly again without short-circuiting my very tenuous work-life balance. Thank you all so much for continuing to read and share my work. I hope to continue to create more of it for you to enjoy over the next 10 years!

Look at where we are...

Look at where we started...

The festive season is upon us, and that can mean only one thing: the return of Shakespearean Christmas Carols and the inevitable onslaught of crass commercialism!

OK, that was two things… Let’s start with the carols. All together now!

And now for the crass commercialism! The Good Tickle Shoppe has seen a lot of updating today. Let’s do it in bullet points:

Shakespearean Holiday Songbook available for pre-order! I am printing my first collection of Shakespearean holiday songs, complete with extra verses and, for the instrumentally inclined among us, ukulele chords! I should have these in stock by December 6, if everything goes according to schedule. Order yours today and I’ll ship it as soon as I have the books in hand.

“Which Shakespeare Play Should You See?” flowchart poster back in stock! It’s been a hot minute, but I finally got my act together and reprinted my flowchart poster! This is the perfect gift for any Shakespeare fan. I know for a fact it hangs in the halls of various theatres around the world, in the homes of renowned Shakespeareans of all kinds, and, perhaps most importantly, in my friend’s bathroom. She always likes to make sure people have something sensational to look at when otherwise occupied.

T-Shirt Clearance Sale! I’m trying desperately to get rid of the remaining t-shirts currently cluttering up my closet, so they are all over 50% off. I can’t deal with the inventory management involved in t-shirt sales anymore and will not be printing any more, so once they’re gone, they’re gone. However, I do hope to set up a print-on-demand shop in the near/mid-range/far future, which will remove the inventory headache from me and also allow me to offer a lot more designs. Stay tuned!

Don’t forget the comic books! My classic books, The Complete Works of Shakespeare in Three Panels Each, A Stick-Figure Macbeth, A Stick-Figure Romeo and Juliet, and A Stick-Figure Midsummer Night’s Dream are all in stock and ready to stuff any stockings you might have hanging around!

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:

Another depressingly autobiographical filler comic today, courtesy of my wonderful Patreon supporters.

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”…

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.

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. 

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!

In last week’s inaugural installment of Pocket Blogs by Kate Pitt, we introduced you to Lord Saye, a.k.a. That One Random Head on a Pole in Henry VI Part II. This week Kate will show us how that one random head on a pole is connected to EVERYTHING.

Last week I hinted that one of the reasons I’m fond of Lord Saye in Henry VI Part II is that he is related to Shakespeare. While that isn’t strictly true, he is related to the Shakespeare I grew up with as a millennial with a VCR and a pulse: Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love. 

The full name of the historical Lord Saye in Henry VI Part II is James Fiennes, first Baron Saye and Sele. Joseph Fiennes and his brother Ralph are members of the Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes family and descended from the sixteenth Baron Saye and Sele, the Venerable Frederick Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, who traces his lineage all the way back to the first Lord Saye who met a sticky end at the hands of Jack Cade back in 1450. 

Both brothers’ acting pursuits have repeatedly brought them close to their Shakespearean past. Ralph Fiennes has played many, many, Shakespeare roles to great acclaim, and one of his earliest was Henry VI at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. That production was an adaptation of four plays (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III) into three plays (called Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III) and collectively known as The Plantagenets. There were at least some severed heads on pikes in that production, which means there is a decent chance that Ralph Fiennes crossed paths backstage with a prop head representing one of his ancestors.  

The current Lord Saye, Nathaniel Thomas Allen Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 21st Baron Saye and Sele, is 100 years old, served honorably in WWII, and still lives in the family home. That home is Broughton Castle, originally built in the 14th century and passed down in the Fiennes family since 1457 when the son of Shakespeare’s Lord Saye, William Fiennes, the 2nd Lord Saye and Sele, succeeded in right of his wife to it. 

In addition to being the Fiennes family home, Broughton Castle is often used as a filming location and was the home of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love. Yes, Joseph Fiennes played Shakespeare at the home of his third cousin once removed. The dance where Will meets Viola was filmed in the Great Hall, Colin Firth is grumpy in the Oak Room, and the balcony scene was filmed in the garden. 

To sum up, not only does a Fiennes (James) appear in a Shakespeare play as a character, but a Fiennes (Ralph) has appeared in a Shakespeare play depicting that Fiennes (James), and his brother Fiennes (Joseph) has played Shakespeare at the home of the son (William) of the first Fiennes (James). 

I first discovered this Fiennes frenzy rolling when I lived in Saybrook College as an undergraduate. Saybrook College is named after the town of Old Saybrook where Yale was originally founded. The town is named after Saybrook Colony which was named after the first Viscount Saye and Sele who helped fund it along with a Baron Brooke. The Saybrook college arms are a quartering of the Saye and Sele/Fiennes arms (three gold lions on a blue background) and the Brooke arms, which is how I spent a significant amount of time in college writing papers while wearing sweatpants with the heraldry of a minor Shakespeare character on them. 

Saybrook College today is known for its two beautiful courtyards and “the Saybrook Strip” whereby residents enthusiastically remove plus or minus most of their clothes during the third quarter of a football game. We also honor the memory of Lord Saye with an annual “Saye and Sele Day” celebration, which recently included a mechanical shark.

Not every Shakespeare character with only two scenes has quite as much backstory as Lord Saye. His death is memorable and moving on its own, but next time you see Henry VI and he makes the cut, you can connect him to all the ways his life brushes against yours. Shakespeare is brilliant at sketching out characters and then shading in their hearts with a single line – “She was too good for me”, “I was adored once, too” – that tells us about their past. Lord Saye is interesting for all the ways his life reverberates in his future and our present. 

by Kate Pitt