I’m back! Sort of. Maybe? Kind of. Possibly. Anyways. Look! A comic!
Unlike Cap, I cannot do this all day, but I’m going to try and get back into a sustainable comic-producing rhythm this month. Thanks for your patience! It’s good to be back.
30 Days of Shakespeare, Day 7: Michael Boyd's Histories
Today’s 30 Days of Shakespeare highlight is one of the most epic and memorable experiences in my entire theatre-going history.
12 hours of solid history plays. I was in heaven. I think some part of me is still chasing the high of this incredible experience.
Shakespearean Valentines (part 3)
Them: Shakespeare is soooo romantic!
Me: 🤨
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt
Huge shout-out to my consulting pocket dramaturg Kate Pitt for coming up with the ideas for all of these.
Be sure to check out Shakespearean Valentines (part 1) and Shakespearean Valentines (part 2), as well as all my other Valentine’s Day themed comics.
POCKET BLOGS: Saye What?
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
Interested in more deep dives into Shakespeare characters? Check out friend-of-Good-Tickle-Brain Hailey Bachrach’s dramatis personae, explorating the canon one character at a time.
POCKET BLOGS: Saye Anything
Hey everyone! Mya here. I’m really excited today to introduce a new feature here on Good Tickle Brain: POCKET BLOGS! As regular readers will know, since 2019 I have been working on my comics with the world’s first, foremost, and possibly only pocket dramaturg, Kate Pitt. (For more on Kate, including the etymology of the term “pocket dramaturg”, check out this Q&A with her.)
Kate is, if anything, an even bigger Shakespeare geek than me, and certainly has a bigger Shakespeare brain. I will often text her a random Shakespeare fact and say “Isn’t this cool?”, only to receive back “YES, and…” followed by a dozen more related facts, complete with footnotes. As I am taking the month off, I thought it only fair to share some of her delightful geekery and expertise with all of you.
So sit back and get ready to peer into some of the most geeky, random, and entertaining corners of the Shakespeare-verse with Good Tickle Brain’s new series of POCKET BLOGS!
Spare a thought for poor Lord Saye. The ill-fated lord’s entrance in Henry VI Part II is often overlooked because he arrives at the same time as Queen Margaret. Margaret makes consistently dramatic entrances across the four Shakespeare plays she appears in and there is an excellent chance that someone is about to be stabbed, slapped, or screamed at if she is nearby.
In this scene, Margaret enters carrying the severed head of her very dead ex-lover the Duke of Suffolk, and talks affectionately to it while her husband King Henry desperately tries to work out how to put down a major rebellion.
Saye is in the middle of all this and spends most of his first scene (and he’s only got two) standing around awkwardly while the King and Queen talk to everyone who isn’t him. It can’t feel great to be ignored in favor of someone who is missing his trunk and all of his limbs, and when King Henry finally turns towards Saye it is to point out that the advancing rebels would very much like to turn his head into a tote bag just like Suffolk’s.
Cue the awkward laughter and a messenger running in with the news that the rebels have arrived and everyone present who still has their heels should immediately betake themselves to them and get out of town. King Henry reminds Lord Saye that everyone hates him (because he raised taxes and can speak French) and he should probably join the bravely-running-away royals.
Lord Saye however, declares that he will stay and face the rebels. He is innocent after all. Why should he flee when he has done nothing wrong? At this point, practiced Shakespearean audiences will be reaching for the popcorn. Declaring innocence never ever (ever) works when attempting to avoid unpleasant consequences in Shakespeare and indeed, Lord Saye is captured less than forty lines later and dragged before the rebels to be interrogated.
Jack Cade, the leader of the rebellion, accuses Saye of such abominable crimes as printing, teaching grammar to children, and dressing his horse in excessively fancy horse-clothes. Saye is definitely not guilty of the first indictment, as this scene takes place in 1450 and the first books in England weren’t printed until at least twenty-five years later.
Regardless, the rebels continue to hurl increasingly ridiculous accusations at Lord Saye – “thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb” – while he confidently bats them aside by speaking Latin and quoting Caesar’s Commentaries. Not necessarily the best strategy when negotiating with angry men with pikes, but Saye also demonstrates that he can speak eloquently in plain English:
Tell me, wherein have I offended most?
Have I affected wealth or honor? Speak.
Are my chests filled up with extorted gold?
Is my apparel sumptuous to behold?
Whom have I injured, that you seek my death?
These hands are free from guiltless blood-shedding,
This breast from harboring foul deceitful thoughts.
O, let me live!
Lord Saye’s contention that his hands are “free from guiltless blood-shedding” is equivocal, given that he menacingly indicates elsewhere that he has definitely shed some blood: “Great men have reaching hands. Oft have I struck those that I never saw, and struck them dead.” There were rumors that Saye was involved in the murder of Henry VI’s uncle Duke Humphrey, though Shakespeare depicts that death as definitely Suffolk’s fault.
In addition to being a cunning politician and a huge classics nerd, Lord Saye is also a war hero. Jack Cade contemptuously challenges him, “when struck’st thou one blow in the field?” but Saye fought with Henry V in France. He is now in his mid-fifties and past his fighting days (the rebels mock his palsy) but Lord Saye feels that his prior service to his country should save his life.
Cade disagrees. Even though he admits, “I feel remorse in myself with his words”, he orders Saye to be dragged offstage and beheaded. The rebels also break into Saye’s son-in-law’s house and behead him too. They then put both their heads on pikes and parade around London smushing the heads together to make them look like they are kissing because the rebels are apparently twelve.
“For with these borne before us, instead of maces, will we ride through the streets, and at every corner have them kiss.” (BBC Shakespeare, The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, 1983)
Lord Saye is one in a long line of Shakespeare characters who appear briefly and die quickly. Cinna the Poet in Caesar, Young Seward and The Family Macduff in Macbeth, Cornwall’s servant in Lear: all of their deaths, like Saye’s, serve to make the bad guys look worse. However, Jack Cade and his crew have already murdered innocent people before Saye comes on the scene, so what does his death teach the audience that they don’t already know? Dramatically, there may be an argument for cutting this scene. Next week however, I’ll explain the extravagantly silly reasons why I am delighted by Lord Saye and think he should be in every production. (Hint: he’s related to Shakespeare!)
by Kate Pitt
GTB Play Page Updates: Henries IV, V, and VI
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.
Shakespearean Halloween Party I-IV (Remastered)
As Halloween is fast approaching (when did the run-up to Halloween become as involved as the run-up to Christmas?) I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of my earlier Halloween comics and re-draw the earliest ones digitally. Enjoy!
Original Shakespearean Halloween Party I here. Honestly, after all these years, Desdemona’s handkerchief and the bees are still my favorite Shakespearean Halloween costume ideas.
Original Shakespearean Halloween Party II here. Seriously, butter knife + string + stick is all the effort I want to put into a costume.
He’s dressed as a lion tamer and is holding a shrew. I’ve had to explain this to everybody, the sure sign that a joke didn’t work. Oh well.
Pls note bear is mauling his shoulder. Textual accuracy is important.
Quaran-quotes
Another day of global pandemic filler, with some useful quotes for you to practice while self-isolating! (Note: I didn’t notice they were ALL from history plays until I finished drawing the comic. I guess you can tell what my favorite genre is…)
Don’t be an idiot like Falstaff. Stay away from Eastcheap and the Boar’s Head. Stay home. And while you’re staying home….
BARD TALK: MARCH 28, 10:00AM PST
This Saturday I'm giving a virtual Bard Talk on Zoom courtesy of the Shakespeare Center of LA! (Unlike many events, this one was always supposed to be a virtual webinar, so nothing has changed!) You should all register and come see me talk awkwardly at my webcam and do some live drawing. Don't pretend you have something more important to do... Register for the talk here.