Category: Best Of

Here you’ll find those Shakespeare Geek posts that have proven themselves over the years to be especially popular.  We’ve been at this for almost twenty years and logged thousands of posts, so this is one way of making it easy to find the best stuff.

It’s also a very old category that’s not well-maintained and will probably go away.

Best Of Not By Shakespeare

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AI Shakespeare

A significant portion of my traffic – I’m talking strong double digits here – is related to my collection of Not By Shakespeare posts. Once upon a time, I started collecting those social media posts that you see all the time with quotes like “When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.” And they’re attributed to Shakespeare, and you know perfectly well they’re not by Shakespeare. You can never find a reference to what play (or sonnet or poem) the original came from because there isn’t one.

Then again, traffic’s traffic, so I might as well lean into it!

Top Ten Not By Shakespeare Posts

  1. I love thee, I love but thee With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold And the stars grow old. I personally love this quote and have used it on occasion. Just because it’s not by Shakespeare doesn’t mean it’s not a nice sentiment. I’m surprised to see it ranked so low.
  2. When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry. I honestly don’t even understand this one.
  3. If you love and get hurt, love more. If you love more and hurt more, love even more. This is what we in the computer programming business call an infinite loop.
  4. Everyone I meet is in some way my superior. In that I learn from him. This one’s got some actual credentials – it’s from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
  5. New friends may be poems but old friends are alphabets. Do not forget alphabets, because you will need them to read the poems. What does this even mean?
  6. Expectation Is The Root Of All Heartache I would have thought this to be the most popular, since it’s the simplest to search for. But I suppose it comes in too many generic variations for them all to find their way here.
  7. Love me or hate me, both are in my favor … This one brings serious “If you cant handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best” vibes.
  8. Do not go gentle into that good night. I feel like this could have worked its way into Shakespeare’s work at some point. But this one is credited to a much more recent author, Dylan Thomas.
  9. I Would Challenge You To A Battle Of Wits But I See You Are Unarmed This is a stubborn one. It pops up everywhere. I’m doing a project right now where I asked ChatGPT to generate a database of Shakespeare quotes for me and sure enough i had to pluck this one out — five times. It may remind you of Beatrice and Benedick but she had something different to say on Benedick’s lack of wit.
  10. You say that you love rain, but you open your umbrella when it rains. Far and away the winner, there are weeks where my entire first page of search results is just variations of this quote. I’m happy that years after first posting it we finally tracked down the original author. That probably helps!

I’ve got about thirty posts in the Not By Shakespeare category, but ninety percent of the traffic lands on one of the above. By listing them here I hope that this page will get some of traffic of its own. People can bookmark it for future queries.

Venn Shakespeare

~ duane ~ 5 Comments

 

Venn vs Euler Diagram
Venn <-> Euler

The most popular post I’ve ever made is the one depicting Shakespeare’s works as a Venn Diagram (although technically that shape is an Euler Diagram).  That post on Facebook has garnered over 2 million views at this point, and hundreds of comments. People have asked me if it is available as a poster (as far as I know it is not – I did not create the original image).

The problem is, I don’t like it.  Most of the comments are of the form “Why do you have play X in this category but not that one?” and “You forgot to put Y in the Z category” and so on.  The categories (Suicide, War, Romance, Supernatural) are, I think, too broad.  Does Romeo and Juliet count as war between the two families?  I would say no, but some people disagree.  How about Much Ado About Nothing? It starts with the men coming home from war.

So here’s what I propose.  Can we make a better one, or a set of better ones?  Something that more people can agree on? If we can make something that’s generally agreeable to a large audience I’ll be happy to make it available as a poster / stickers / t-shirt / etc…

I’ve been working with Bardfilm on some new categories.  The goal would be to find a set such that:

  • All plays are represented by at least one category.
  • Minimize the number of categories that have no entries.
  • No single category has too many entries.

What categories would you like to see?  “Supernatural” made our list as well.  I was thinking “Insanity” might be a good one. Bardfilm proposed “Fake Deaths” and “Cross-Dressing”.  If we can’t agree across all the categories we can look at doing one for Comedy, one for Tragedy, one for History, but I think those would end up looking a little sparse, and I’d feel bad about leaving out Romance.

What other ideas have you got for us? Tell us the category you think should be on our diagram, and which plays would be in it.

Most Popular Shakespeare Geek Merch for 2017

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

When started making Shakespeare geek merchandise as part of Amazon’s merchandise program back in April of this year I had no idea how it would go. I’m no graphic designer.  At best I had the strength and popularity of one particular quote I thought might do well.  So I started throwing anything I could think of up onto a shirt and seeing what happens.  I’m actually quite happy with the results, and I hope that the hundreds of people out there who purchased are happy with what they received in return.  I still harbor hope of bumping into strangers wearing a shirt I created.

Since it’s a slow week to close out the year I thought I’d take a look at my sales numbers and see what the most popular Shakespeare geek merchandise turned out to be. In all examples below, click the image to visit Amazon if you’d like one for yourself!

Right now Amazon’s got something weird happening with their inventory where they’ve drastically cut back on how merch vendors (like me) are indexed.  What that means is that while I have nearly 100 designs with them, only about two dozen are visible at the moment. And even with that, some of them are out of stock.  I hope they get it together soon because they also have a “delist shirts that haven’t sold in XX days” policy that hasn’t changed, which makes no sense to me — if people can’t see my designs then, of course, they can’t buy them!  

Got Dagger?  This idea actually came out of a Twitter conversation, from one of my followers.  I asked permission to use it on a shirt, and people seemed to like it.  Amazon looks like they’re having trouble sourcing the long sleeve shirts right now (most of them say currently unavailable) but hopefully that will be remedied after the holidays.

Mercutio Drew First! The Sequel  This is the one that brought me to the dance, so to speak, but it’s not the original.  People had told me that they didn’t like the Star Wars font of the original, which I wouldn’t have expected because isn’t it a Star Wars joke?  But I aim to please, so I made a few versions with different fonts and they seem to have been popular enough to make the list.

Bard Core  Who knew? I was walking through a department store one day and saw some kind of skater / surfer shirt that said “Hard Core” on it and thought, “Can I do something Shakespearey with that?”  So I threw “Bard Core” onto a shirt. Sure enough, people liked it!

Elsinore Was An Inside Job I have to say, I think this is my favorite shirt even though nobody seems to get it. I wanted to do a play on the 9-11 conspiracy meme (jet fuel can’t melt unbated and envenomed steel?), and this is what I came up with. That’s actually the silhouette of the real Kronborg castle, but I don’t know how many people are going to recognize that.  The smoke plume and the gun sight seem a little mixed message, I know. But I wanted to break it up with some color.

Warning! Quotes Shakespeare When Drunk This one was another Twitter group effort (from the same evening that gave us “Got Dagger?”) People seem to like the long sleeve version more than the short sleeve, so I hope Amazon gets its act together and restocks soon!

Swords Don’t Kill People (Unbated and Envenom’d Swords Kill People)  I’m so happy this one found an audience. I just like everything about it – the image, the font, the way the top part catches your attention and the bottom delivers the punchline. I hope somewhere there’s a fencing team wearing it to competition.

Quince & Snug & Flute & Snout & Bottom & Starveling I made a whole bunch of these after seeing this particular style (just a list of names with & at the end of each line) pop up everywhere. I don’t understand where it came from, I thought it was part of some viral tv show. Turns out it’s been around forever. There’s another design I made that has Hermia & Helena & Demetrius & Lysander, which I thought surely would have been more popular, but this is the winner (for this particular style, at least).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream I guess Dream is just a popular choice for Shakespeare t-shirts.  This one, as you can see, is really more about the cool center graphic. It’s hard to tell from the thumbnail, but the decoration around the edge is the names of the characters, all properly in balance with Bottom on top and Puck on bottom.  Lots of discussion over whether Bottom should be on the bottom, but I personally like it better this way. Shows the importance of Bottom to the play, while leaving in the silly nature of Puck who I think would enjoy hanging out upside down.  Do it in the reverse and you make Puck the central figure, and no matter how much you like Puck, I don’t think that was Shakespeare’s point.

Shakespeare Makes Life Better I love that this one is popular.  It’s a very simple idea – doesn’t even have a picture of Shakespeare, just a quill pen.  But it’s also the heart of this site, so if any of these designs is going to deliver the message I’m trying to get across, let it be this one.

And the winner, to no great surprise, is…

Mercutio Drew First (The Original)   Maybe it’s because I promote this one the most, or because it’s been around the longest with the most links. Or maybe it really is the most popular all on its own. I think I started using this one back as early as 2008, but didn’t have shirts until 2010. It’s been ripped off plenty of times since then, so if you do like it, remember to look for the original!

So that’s it!  The most popular Shakespeare geek merchandise of 2017. If you see anything above that you’d like, or that someone you know might like, please click the images to visit Amazon!  Once there you can browse around the “recommended” and “people also bought” links to see many of the other designs not listed here, in case something else strikes your fancy.

Thanks as always for your support (of both the site and the mission) and I’ll see everybody in 2018!

 

Shakespearean Collective Nouns

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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.

 

Shakespeare Wedding Season

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Remember when I wrote a book? Spring is peak season for weddings, and frequently I get traffic for people looking for Shakespeare wedding ideas. So I thought it was a good opportunity to revisit the story…

Has it been seven years? Man I forget how long it’s been that I’ve been doing this.  Then I realize that there’s probably a whole slew of readers who never saw the original project.

Back in 2010 I told myself, “Listen, take one of those ideas running around your brain and actually finish it.”  Ideas are the easy part.  Execution and completion are the hard part.  That’s the story of my life right there.  This was my pure will power effort to get something from the idea stage all the way to completion.

The result is Hear My Soul Speak: Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare. I’d been to one too many weddings where they trotted out Sonnet 116 again and I said to my wife, again, “Why can’t they ever recite something different? There’s so many Shakespeare wedding quotes to choose from.”  I read Sonnet 17, personally.  Actually I recited it to my wife during our first dance.Then it dawned on me that maybe it’s because they don’t know anything else to choose from. Everybody knows 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…” by the way) probably because they heard it at somebody else’s wedding and thought, “I’ll have that at mine, too.”

Then it dawned on me that maybe it’s because they don’t know anything else to choose from. Everybody knows 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…” by the way) probably because they heard it at somebody else’s wedding and thought, “I’ll have that at mine, too.”

Shakespeare Wedding QuotesSo I went through all the sonnets and quote databases I could, pruning out the not by Shakespeares (*), organizing them into how they might be used (the proposal, the vows, the guest book, the toast…) and explaining their context.

Hear My Soul Speak

The end result is a tidy little Shakespeare wedding quote reference book to use whether you’re getting married, in the wedding party, or just on the guest list.  If you’re in any of the above categories, check it out!  Shakespeare makes life better.

(*) Look, I love “I love none but thee til the stars grow old and the sun grows cold,” or however it goes, but it’s not Shakespeare. It’s Bayard Taylor.