Last Chance To See These Shakespeare T-Shirts!

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Well folks, I’ve been having fun designing Shakespeare t-shirts, but not everything can be a “Mercutio Drew First” top seller :).  Amazon’s got a “30 days or it’s de-listed” policy, so the following designs, which sometimes went up so fast people didn’t even get a chance to see them, are now in danger of disappearing.  So if you’re looking to add to your wardrobe, or for something to give as a gift (buy now, keep it until Christmas!) it would help me out greatly if this was the week you decided to hit the buy button.  If they go, they go, and I’ll keep bringing up new designs.  But I wanted to make sure that I put the word out that they *are* possibly going, in case anybody had seen them once and thought that they might come back later and get it.  Later might be too late!

This one simply says “Shakespeare Geek” on both the front and back.  Available in a variety of colors!

 

 

Maybe I’m the only one that finds this joke funny. It’s originally from our #ShakespeareanFirstDrafts Twitter hashtag game and reads, “Holy $%^& Yorick Died?!”

 

 

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  I have two versions of this, one with a red devil and this one with the green.  I actually made them for my son (the little devil :)).  But he’s got the red one.

 

I like to think of these two as a set.  I couldn’t decide which one so I made both.  Maybe it’s the color combinations people didn’t love?  You just gotta tell me, people. I can always change it!

If I was ruled entirely by research, I would have nothing but “Shakespeare insult” t-shirts.  I decided to put one up and see if anybody was interested, but truthfully my heart wasn’t in it. I like the original material better.

 

If you like the general idea of what I’m trying to do here but haven’t yet seen the one that screams “Yes, I must have it!” don’t be afraid to write in with your suggestions.  Several designs (which are not here, because they are selling :)) come straight from Facebook and Twitter followers offering up ideas.  This is especially true if you don’t like a particular color combination (I’ve met as many people who only do black t-shirts as those who ever do black t-shirts :)).  That’s easy because I already have all the image files!

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the business! Every time I check my stats and see the numbers go up I think, “There’s a little more Shakespeare released out into the world.” The dream is to one day bump into a stranger wearing a shirt that I know I made! Shakespeare makes life better!

Here’s a link to all the current merchandise if you want to see everything!

Thanks again!!

Serif or Sans, That Is The Question

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Calling all font historians!

So, my brother’s decided to take up calligraphy / penmanship as a new hobby. Every morning he posts to Facebook in new fonts, inks, etc.. practicing his skills.  Today he posted a “typewriter font,” which I thought interesting because I just imagined him manually adding in the little serifs on each letter. I went looking into the history of the word “serif” (and by extension its partner “sans serif”, literally “without serifs”) and discovered that it’s apparently as recent as 1813?

I quickly fired up my First Folio (because who doesn’t have that on hot key?) to look at the font used 190 years earlier (attached).  Look at that!  Serifs everywhere.

Of course this is simply a case that “they didn’t call them serifs back then,” I get that.  What I’m wondering is, circa Shakespeare’s time, did the printing presses even have a concept of “choice of font”?  When would serif versus sans serif have even entered the picture?

…I just had a horrible thought.  Can you imagine if they’d printed the original First Folio in … <shudder>  Arial?

 

Review: Will, Episode 4

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

SCENE : The “Will” writer’s room.  BILL sit lazily about, staring at the ceiling, drumming fingers, periodically crumbling paper and tossing into a wastebasket.  DAVE sits in a corner, reading.

DAVE: (looking up)  Hey, do you  know what swive means?

BILL:  Swive? Nope. Why?

DAVE: (showing book) Because it says in this Shakespeare glossary that it’s another word for the F-bomb.

BILL:  So?

DAVE: (devious smile appearing) Don’t you get it?  If we didn’t know about it, neither will the censors!  So we can fill this week’s script with stuff like “Shut up and swive me now” and “They can go swive themselves for all I care.”

BILL: That’s genius.

Last week was all about how many naked buttocks they could show, this week is apparently archaic swear words. I can’t make this stuff up.  (For the record, my searches indicate that Shakespeare himself never used the word.)

“But what about the torture?” I hear you asking.  “I’m not here for the language and the nudity, I want to see blood spattering for no reason!”

Well then fear not, I have good news!  There’s actually what I thought a funny scene where our resident psychopath (Topcliffe, is it?) is fishing.  “Ha!” I thought.  “Fishing.  Shakespeare. That’s funny.”  (“Shakespeare” is actually a very popular manufacturing line of fishing poles.)

Hahaha, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets a fish hook embedded in his chest. Topcliffe then picks up the fishing rod (still attached, mind you) and starts walking away.  I think, nay hope, that he’s going to now lead the poor soul away like a leash.  Nope.  Just goes ahead and rips it right out of him.

Grossed out yet? Later we’ll see him actually hung from the ceiling by giant hooks in his back.

Sometimes I wonder why I watch this stuff.  Seriously.

There’s almost no actual Shakespeare in this one.  He’s riding on the popularity of Two Gents, but everybody keeps calling it a “tragicomedy” and saying how much they like the dog, and Will wants to be taken seriously.

He’s got some good lines about why he wants to write – to explore why we love and why we fight and what it means to be human. That’s the good stuff, that’s what I want to hear about.  But it’s pretty brief.

Of course we drop a few random lines, Marlowe talks about how it’s not his fault that his life’s not going so great, the fault lies in his astrology. This of course is wide open for “The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves,” or maybe ” Additionally we meet Sir Walter Raleigh, who has been to America, and describes it as “Brave new world with such stuff in it.”  You get the idea.

 

Shakespearean Collective Nouns

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Once again, Bardfilm offers a guest post for our edification—or, at least, for our amusement.

The English language offers a host of interesting collective nouns. You can describe a lot of geese as a gaggle of geese. More than a few whales make up a pod of whales. When you see tons of crows around, it’s natural (and fun) to say, “A murder of crows was on the neighbor’s back tree this morning.”
But what if you have a lot of Hamlets running around? How do you refer to the twenty-three Lady Macbeths you saw auditioning last night?
Here’s a list for exactly those instances. Think how useful (and fun) it will be to say, “I’m not looking forward to auditions. There’s a whole scrub of Lady Macbeths out there!” Without much more ado, here they are:

Shakespearean Collective Nouns

  • An innocence of Desdemonas.
  • A sack of Falstaffs.
  • An assignation of Bottoms.
  • An ide of Caesars.
  • A jealousy of Iagos.
  • A wherefore of Romeos.
  • A vengeance of Hamlets.
  • A fahrenfoul of witches.
  • An obscurity of Pericleses.
  • A gurgle of Ophelias.
  • A torrent of Lears.
  • An equivocation of Porters.
  • An infinite variety of Cleopatras.
  • A platitude of Poloniuses.
  • A poke of Gloucesters.
  • A scrub of Lady Macbeths.
  • A discontent of Richard IIIs.

Feel free to add your own options in the comments below. I know you’ve seen one too many Juliets—how would you describe them as a group?

Our thanks to kj, the author of Bardfilm. Bardfilm is a blog that comments on films, plays, and other matters related to Shakespeare in a relatively-informal manner.

 

This “Best Of” article originally appeared December 2010.

 

How Does Shakespeare Make Your Life Better?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I call it our mission statement:  “Dedicated to proving that Shakespeare makes life better.”

I know what I mean by that.  But I can’t always articulate it (mostly because I have so many different ways to answer that).  Want to play a game? Complete the following sentence:

Shakespeare makes my life better because …

… it makes me feel connected to more people than I would ever know otherwise. Guy takes a picture of my “Mercutio Drew First” t-shirt last week. Made my day.  Why? Because I know that he knows enough Shakespeare to get the reference, and knows that his daughter will get the reference, and found it important enough to share with her.  Awesome. Something I did just touched two strangers.

…you learn and you teach at the same time. My friends, family and coworkers think of me as the Shakespeare guy, deferring all Shakespeare related topics and questions to me, and assuming I have all the answers.  And I enjoy that, because to the extent that I have the answers, I love to talk about it – if people around me learn more about Shakespeare through me?  Super. The world’s a better place.  But my online friends for the most part know more about Shakespeare than I do, so the roles are reversed. I spend more of my time listening and learning from them.  I’m totally ok with it being both. I’m always open to learning what I don’t know, and sharing what I do.

…knowing Shakespeare is like adding salt to food when you cook. It doesn’t make things taste salty, it makes thing taste more like they were supposed to taste in the first place. It intensifies the flavor that was already there. Shakespeare intensifies the way I feel about things, because I know that somebody else has already managed to put those feelings into words, and I can use those words to communicate what I’m feeling with other humans who are also feeling the same thing.

Who’s next?