A stick-figure Shakespeare comic by Mya Lixian Gosling
Grab your mink robe of state, kick back in your Mojo Dojo Castle House with a brewski small beer, and sing along to this:
In case you are somehow not familiar with Ryan “No Known Relation But I’m Not Ruling It Out” Gosling’s epic performance of this song from last year’s Barbie movie, please check it out immediately.
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 fact that we're online is a miracle.
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!
Yo ho ho! Merry Christmas!
I’ve literally been waiting ALL MONTH to get to today’s 30 Days of Shakespeare highlight.
I've been attracted to this speech ever since seeing Felix Aylmer's adorably bumbling performance of it in Olivier's film adaptation Henry V. It's a totally comedic scene with him dropping papers and losing his place, while Robert Helpmann's Bishop of Ely gets increasingly frustrated and eventually just gives up.
For some reason, not all productions of Henry V play it this way, which has been a source of continual disappointment to me. But that doesn't change my love of the stupid speech itself. I went so far as to memorize it, so I could trot it out in case anyone asked me what my favorite lines from Shakespeare were. Nobody has, but that hasn't stopped me from reciting it anyways.
I love many things about Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Henry V, so much so that I could have devoted an entire week to picking out moments from it that bring me joy. Instead, I decided to highlight one of the goofier things about it that delights me to no end.
Brian Blessed is the man they invented the phrase “an imposing physical presence” for. His embassy to the French court is a thing of wonder, with his armor-clad bulk busting into the soft and silken French court like a wrecking ball, and his measured voice threatening without ever raising in volume. He continues to be a solid, mostly silent presence, right up until the battle begins, when he becomes a one-man wrecking ball. I love this specific shot of him. It looks like he’s having the time of his life.
If you’re in the Ann Arbor area, stop by Booksweet bookshop at 1pm on April 23 to hear me do a Q&A on Shakespeare adaptations and other fun Shakespeare-related things! Because it’s Shakespeare’s birthday! Details here.
Hey everyone! It’s Shakespeare’s birth/death month, and I wanted to do something special to celebrate it this year. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been having a really hard time creating new comics lately. I think the <gestures vaguely to indicate pandemic/impeding world war/social injustice/toxic politics/apocalyptic climate> has been getting to me and creating comics has just felt frustratingly impossible and pointless.
But the fact of the matter is that I really like creating comics and I feel empty when I don’t create comics. So, in an attempt to reconnect with what inspired me to start creating comics in the first place, every day this month (hopefully) I will be drawing something from the Shakespearean world that brings me joy. I’m starting things off with one of my earliest Shakespearean memories.
If you want to watch the charge, it starts around 1:37 on this video. Make sure you have the sound on.
If you’ve got moments from the Shakespeare world that bring you joy — a performance, a character, a line, a fun fact, anything goes — leave a comment below! Let’s all share the Shakespeare joy this month.
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
Today’s play page update features not one, not two, but THREE Henries! I have to confess, these are six of my favorite plays (ok, not Henry IV, part 2, as much as I love the deathbed reconciliation scene.) Olivier’s film of Henry V was my gateway into Shakespeare nerd-dom, seeing an RSC tour of all three Henry VIs and Richard III cemented my allegiance to the history plays, and the title of my webcomic COMES DIRECTLY FROM HENRY IV, PART 1.
Give me that sweet, sweet Plantagenet in-fighting, thank you.
