A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
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!
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!
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!
For the last (for the moment, anyways) installment of this month's Shakespearean Stick Figure Iconography series, we're going to take a look at that very iconic sorcerer, Prospero!
Of course, one of the most memorable Prosperos I've ever seen was Patrick Stewart as a bald, clean-shaven, fur-clad arctic Prospero, and female Prosperos are becoming more and more widespread, so obviously these signifiers are not universal...
....except the stick. He's always got his stick.
Tune in next week as we start on an April Shakespeare special!
For this "Shakespearean Stick Figure Iconography" series, I deliberately picked characters who were very visually distinctive, and few characters are more visually distinctive than the Queen of the Nile.
I'm a big fan of Cleopatra's little snake crown. It's iconic and shows up quite often in productions. I can almost imagine the costume designers sketching the crown out and thinking... "yeah, we're adding the little snake, just try and stop us."
You know who's big on iconography? The British royal family. Here's some of the distinguishing characteristics and symbols of Henry V!
I love Henry V's gorget. Sometimes it's a chainmail coif. Either way, it's cheaper and more comfortable to wear than a full suit of armour.
Sadly, the pudding basin haircut rarely makes an appearance on stage nowadays.
Shakespeare's tragic characters are usually easy to depict, as they have instruments of death and destruction to wave around. Comedic characters are usually a little trickier, like today's subject: Rosalind!
Am I wrong about Rosalind's hair? Almost all of the Rosalinds I have ever seen have been red-headed. (I should mention that I've so far never seen a non-white Rosalind... which is not to say that non-white Rosalinds can't also have red hair if they want to.....)
I know we just got finished with the entirety of Julius Caesar, but it's the Ides of March, and what are the Ides of March without Julius Caesar? So here's the latest in my ongoing examination of the distinguishing characteristics and props of Shakespeare's most famous characters:
Julius Caesar is one of those characters who is most famous for being dead. He is lying onstage, dead, for many more lines than he actually speaks. However, despite being dead most of the time, he still manages to dominate the entire play. That's good PR.
