Who's Your Shakespeare?

Hamlet as a D&D paladin.

Tropical Rainforests

Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.

Savannas/Tropical Grasslands

Temperate Rainforests. I almost didn’t include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and that’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here

Taiga Forests

Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy

Polar Ice Sheets

Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australia’s good at adding its own twists)

Barren Desert

If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran

Salt Flats

Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes

Madagascar’s Karst Limestone Formations

Madagascar’s Spiny Forests

Madagascar’s Baobab Forests

Madagascar’s Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)

Danxia Landforms

Badlands/Mountainous Deserts

Steppes and Highland Prairies

Flood Basalts

Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity

Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.

But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, it’s unbelievable:

Seaside Cliffs

Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.

Tidal Flats

Bayous/Cypress Swamps

Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests

Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches

Kelp Forests

The Open Ocean

Coastal Seabeds

Rocky Beaches with Tidepools

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.

In most circumstances, it means precisely what you think it means. Pretty much every time Shakespeare uses ‘fat’, he means obese (most often in reference to Falstaff, unsurprisingly), though there does seem to be senses like ‘stuffy’, ‘tired’, or ‘sweaty’ associated with the word in early modern English. One of the few instances where ‘fat’ doesn’t mean ‘overweight’ is in Henry IV Part 1 when Hal says to Poins, ‘come out of that fat room’ (2.1.1), where it’s inconceivable that the room is overweight, and therefore must mean stuffed, or stuffy. The connection between ‘fat’ and ‘sweaty’ is a peculiarly early modern one. They believed that sweat was a kind of grease, so fatness, associated with greasiness, becomes analogous to fatness (c.f. Hamlet describing telling his mother she sleeps in the ‘rank sweat of an enseamed bed’, where ‘enseamed’ means grease-soaked. ew.). The image is that of ‘sweating’ meat: when grease comes out of meat in the cooking process. As for ‘fat’ and ‘tired’, the idea is that ‘fat’ is being used as a truncation of ‘fatigate’, meaning something like ‘fatigued’, obviously. But I haven’t seen this truncation anywhere else in Shakespeare’s works (‘fatigate’ is used once, in Coriolanus).

The passage you’re referring to in Hamlet is one of those small but contentious passages that has been discussed in some detail, mostly because many critics don’t want to believe, or find it hard to believe, that Hamlet would be fat. It’s often brought into evidence that there’s little reason to think that Burbage, who played Hamlet, was fat, though he was apparently stout (which doesn’t necessarily mean overweight) and short. It’s also worth noting that where Falstaff’s corpulence is brought up constantly, Hamlet’s shape isn’t ever mentioned in the same way. This might have a lot to do with the fact that he’s a prince, of course, but rank doesn’t stop people from mocking Sir John.

As the queen offers to ‘rub [Hamlet’s] brows’ with her ‘napkin’ (5.1.270) in the very next line, it’s possible that she’s referring to the fact that he’s sweaty, and so again is the idea that he’s fatigued, and therefore out of breath. Philip Edwards, in the New Cambridge edition, says that ‘probably the queen means that he is soft, out of condition, in poor trim’, suggesting that she means all the associations of being overweight without the fatness itself. J. L. Hibbard, the editor of the Oxford Shakespeare edition, gives the interesting suggestion that it is ‘maternal solicitude. Gertrude is eager to find an excuse for her son should he lose the match; and her solicitude becomes all the more evident if Hamlet is neither fat nor scant of breath’. I like this interpretation, but there’s no verifying it either way.

So while it’s quite likely that Gertrude means that Hamlet is indeed overweight, other possibilities remain.

More typical, I suppose, is the person quoted in the article who says “a fat Hamlet is as unthinkable as a lean Falstaff.” Of course, a lean Falstaff is unthinkable because the text very clearly establishes that Falstaff is fat; a fat Hamlet is unthinkable because…Hamlet is intellectual and thoughtful? Which of course no fat person could ever be. 🙄 There’s no reason in the text that Hamlet can’t be fat; it’s just that the meanings ascribed to fatness by our culture don’t apply to Hamlet as a character. So I say MORE FAT HAMLETS.

“Villian, I hast done thy mother” will never get old

Don’t even get me started on how GAY Mercutio and Benvolio are

Or how GAY Hamlet and Horatio (Horatio deserves better tho)

Beatrice saying that men are dirt 

“Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man” - said Mercutio, on his deathbed

How GAY the Twelfth Night is

The hybrid comedy-tragedy that is Romeo and Juliet so we can laugh our asses off while these fools die

“What, you egg!” *stabs*

[Exits, pursued by a bear]

Hamlet the Angsty Emo Teen ™

Seriously Hamlet is the biggest Drama Queen in all of literature and that includes Sirius “Only one will die tonight” Black

Pretty much all of A Midsummer Nights Dream was legendary

THE DAD JOKES

2) DID U KNOW that the switch between PROSE and VERSE MEANS STUFF? LET’S FIND OUT HOW? This is PLAYFUL.  3) Shakespeare was a glovemaker’s son! Shakespeare was playful with language but borrowed a lot of his language innovation from teenaged girls! Shakespeare was a genius, yes, but he was lowbrow! He was ordinary! He was the Lin Manuel Miranda of his day! No, no one “really” spoke like that, but nobody really speaks like they speak in Hamilton, either!  4) *class singalong to the lumineers* 

5) *class close-read of the lumineers*  6) SEX JOKES. KIDS, LOOK AT ALL THESE SEX JOKES. THOUGH YOU FRET ME YOU CANNOT PLAY UPON ME.  7) me: *struggling really badly not to swear*  8) LET PAAPA ESSIEDU TAKE IT AWAY

9) Me: DID U KNOW SHAKESPEARE WAS BI 

10) WITH THAT IN MIND SHALL WE CLOSE READ HORATIO’S EVERYTHING 11) DID U KNOW THAT ‘MAID’ MEANT BOTH ‘GIRL’ AND ‘VIRGIN’, that’s what all this maid/maid talk is, an ALSO did you know that ‘maid’ meant VIRGIN REGARDLESS OF GENDER, ISN’T THAT FASCINATING 12) LOOK AT THIS COOL PART WHERE SHAKESPEARE TALKS SHIT ABOUT ACTUAL ADOLESCENT BOY ACTORS. THEY WERE HIS RIVALS, KIDS. THEATER WAS A VICIOUS COMPETITION BETWEEN ADOLESCENT BOY ACTING TROUPES AND ADULT MEN DOING ACTING, AND SHAKESPEARE TAKES SOME TIME OUT OF HAMLET TO LET US KNOW HOW HE FEELS ABOUT IT 13) DOUBT THOU THE STARS ARE FIRE

DOUBT THAT THE SUN DOTH MOVE