goodticklebrain

[goodticklebrain]

Good Tickle Brain's 10th Anniversary!

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.

#henry v #shakespeare #website updates

[goodticklebrain]

Shakespearean Christmas Carols + The Great Shoppe Restock!

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!

#christmas #shoppe #henry v

[goodticklebrain]

Hamlet Outtakes: The Panel Oft Proclaims the Man

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:

Seriously, I’m not sure why Kate has a better instinct for medium-busting visual jokes than I do. I’m supposed to be the artist in this partnership. It’s not fair.

#patreon #hamlet

[goodticklebrain]

Abandonment

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

If you need me I’ll just be over here, lying on the floor, waiting for July.

#autobiographical #patreon

[goodticklebrain]

How to Draw Antigonus (a.k.a. The Bear Guy)

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”…

This video comes courtesy of my exquisitely generous supporters on Patreon.

#patreon #video #how to draw #winter's tale

[goodticklebrain]

Organized

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.

THE POST-IT NOTES AREN’T WORKING

#autobiographical #patreon

[goodticklebrain]

POCKET BLOGS: Perilous Arrow’s Motion

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!

by Kate Pitt

#pocket blogs #henry v

[goodticklebrain]

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 #henry vi

[goodticklebrain]

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. 

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

#pocket blogs #henry vi

[goodticklebrain]

Shakespearean History Bingo

One final remastered and expanded Shakespearean bingo card today. I’ve saved my favorite genre for last: history!

I haven’t worked it all out, but I suspect this is the easiest card to get “bingo” on, given the preponderance of Henries, Edwards, Richards, Yorks, Lancasters, and Gloucesters.

Here’s the original:

Many MANY thanks to my pocket dramaturg, Kate Pitt, for collaborating with me on these. Two heads are often better than one, especially when one of them is Kate’s.

I’m taking May off! Because I really need to. There may or may not be some fun filler content, depending on <gestures vaguely> circumstances. Either way, I’ll see you back here in June for some more Shakespeare fun!

#william shakespeare #early modern #bingo

[goodticklebrain]

Come Together (Write Now)

We interrupt your Shakespearean bingo cards to bring you a song to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday tomorrow! (If you’re not familiar with the tune, get caught up here first.) ALL TOGETHER NOW!

For more fun Shakespeare birthday content, check out my brand new Man From Stratford archive page!

#william shakespeare #man from stratford #shakespeare's birthday #song parody

[goodticklebrain]

GTB Archive Updates: The Man From Stratford

It’s SHAKESPEARE’S BIRTHDAY WEEK! To celebrate, I’ve collected all the comics I’ve drawn about Shakespeare the man (as opposed to Shakespeare the golden retriever, or the plays of Shakespeare) in one place! Check it out for an overview of Shakespeare’s life, several Shakespeare-themed song parodies, and many past celebratory birthday comics.

#man from stratford #website updates #william shakespeare

[goodticklebrain]

Shakespearean Tragedy Bingo (Remastered)

Let’s continue with more remastered and expanded Shakespearean bingo cards! Up today is tragedy.

The free square used to be “very poor life decision” but that proved harder and less satisfying to draw than a big ol’ pile of bodies.

Here’s the original:

Upcoming Event

It’s Shakespeare’s birth month, and you know what that means… lots of random online events celebrating Shakespeare! I’m excited to be a part of Hark Journal’s birthday celebration this year.

Who: Me! And also Devon Glover, Ian Doescher, Conor Hanratty, David Serero, and Wendy Lennon! What an awesome line-up.

What: Six awesome Shakespeare people chatting about their work and Shakespeare! Wheee!

When: Monday, April 19, 7:30pm

Where: On Zoom! Where else? Register here!

#william shakespeare #early modern #bingo

[goodticklebrain]

GTB Archive Updates: Musical Parodies

If you’ve been following my work here for a while, you know I love writing musical parodies. Seriously, I can’t get enough of it. And now you can browse all my musical parodies in one place!

In related news, I got a ukulele last year and am planning to put together “The Song Book of Shakespearean Parodies That Are Particularly Easy to Play on the Ukulele” sometime in the uncertain future. Don’t hold your breath, but it’s going to happen.

#website updates #song parody

[goodticklebrain]

Shakespearean Comedy Bingo (Remastered)

Just over six years ago I drew a series of bingo cards for each of Shakespeare’s major genres. They weren’t perfect; for starters, they were a 4x4 grid instead of the standards 5x5 grid. So, to celebrate Shakespeare’s birth month, I decided not only to give them the old “remastering” treatment, but also to team up with my pocket dramaturg, Kate Pitt, to add nine extra squares per card. Print them out and bring them to the next Shakespeare play you see!

Here’s the original:

I keep picking things to “remaster” with the idea that they will be quicker and easier to do than original comics, to give me some time to work on other projects. I keep being proven wrong.

Upcoming Event

It’s Shakespeare’s birth month, and you know what that means… lots of random online events celebrating Shakespeare! I’m excited to be a part of Hark Journal’s birthday celebration this year.

Who: Me! And also Devon Glover, Ian Doescher, Conor Hanratty, David Serero, and Wendy Lennon! What an awesome line-up.

What: Six awesome Shakespeare people chatting about their work and Shakespeare! Wheee!

When: Monday, April 19, 7:30pm

Where: On Zoom! Where else? Register here!

#william shakespeare #early modern #bingo

[goodticklebrain]

Shakespearean Selfies, part 5 (Remastered)

The final installment of my remastered Shakespearean Selfies! It’s been super fun to revisit and update these. I’ll have to do some more soon…

And here’s the original:

If you’ve enjoyed this, make sure you check out Shakespearean Selfies, part 6, which didn’t really need to be remastered.

#william shakespeare #early modern #social media #selfies #coriolanus #midsummer night's dream #taming of the shrew #remastered

[goodticklebrain]

Shakespearean Selfies, part 4 (Remastered)

MOAR REMASTERED SELFIESSSSSSS

And let’s take the Wayback Machine back to the original:

Wasn’t going to be able to improve on the bear, so basically just copied it.

#william shakespeare #social media #selfies #early modern #twelfth night #macbeth #winter's tale #remastered