Yesterday, I skipped the Year in Review feature I usually do on December 31. The reason for this is simple. I did not blog at all in 2022. My last post is literally the Year in Review feature from December 31, 2021. I didn’t even do a “Fifteen Years” post on January 1, like I usually do and like I’m doing now.

So this year’s January 1 post has a question mark. Am I really celebrating sixteen years of blogging when I only actually blogged for fifteen of those years? Or am I instead marking a birthday. The blog is indeed sixteen years old today.

2022 was a pretty lousy year for me. I spend most of it unemployed, begging and borrowing, temping and tutoring, gigging and gagging, trying to stay afloat for another week. It was a lousy year, but it had a happy ending, and I’m hoping 2023 will be a better year because of it.

In November, I got a job as a high school English teacher. I am teaching classes of 9th and 11th grade students. And will I get the chance to teach a certain Renaissance writer who may come up from time to time? Yes, I will. I’ll be teaching Romeo and Juliet to the 9th grade classes and Macbeth to the 11th grade classes in May and June.

So there should be more to write about this year, now that I’m a Shakespeare Teacher.

And the creative project I mentioned last year, Project Bootstrap? I can tell you now that it’s a novel, and I’ve done a lot of work on it in the past year. I still have a long way to go before I’m ready to approach publishers, but I have a lot of passion for the project and look forward to enjoying the process of writing it. Maybe I’ll check in here from time to time to discuss my progress.

Happy New Year!

Well, this is the time that, every year, I list my top ten posts of the year. In light blogging years, I’ve limited myself to the top five.

But this year, I only posted three times. This post will be the fourth, so even a top five list will be difficult.

So let me review the three posts I did manage this year, followed by the usual excuses, pledges to do better in the future, etc.

I started with my annual January 1 Blog Birthday post. I’ll probably do one again tomorrow. This one is full of promises to be a better blogger, promises that ring especially hollow looking back on it a year later.

Later in January, I posted a video I created for an online Shakespeare event. This was meant to replace a real-life Shakespeare event I used to attend back when attending events was a thing. In the video, I splice together two speeches from the same character at different points in his life, taken from two different plays.

Jump ahead to November 1. I posted a challenge I hoped would go viral, inviting visitors to cast a Shakespeare play using only the cast of one movie. I did a couple myself. It was fun. Feel free to give it a try.

So those were my three posts for the year, and this one will make four. So, what happened? Well, honestly, I personally had a truly lousy year, and if I were looking for an excuse for not writing, I wouldn’t have to look much past that. However, the real reason I haven’t been blogging is a lot simpler and a lot more positive.

This year, I embarked on a new creative project. I’m not really ready to talk about it yet, but for the moment, we’ll refer to it as Project Bootstrap. I’ve spent a lot of time working on it this year, and have a lot to show for it, though there is much work left to be done before I attempt to unleash it on the world. Any surplus creative energy I may have had this year was spent on that, which is why I didn’t feel the need to come here as often.

In the new year, I hope to be able to do both. Thanks to those who are still here to read this. Happy New Year!

And a warm Rest in Peace to Betty White who left us yesterday. It was a sad note to play out a lousy year.

I don’t have much to say today, but I did want to pop in and wish the website a Happy Birthday.

I started this blog on January 1, 2007. I liked the idea of the beginning of the site starting on the New Year. But, really, there’s no reason to think everything is going to change after the ball drops.

Here it is, 2021. And even though we all (including me) celebrated the passing of the awful year 2020, what’s really different now? We’re still in the middle of a cultural civil war, with seemingly half the country unable or unwilling to acknowledge the dangers of a devastating pandemic, the realities of systemic racism, and the results of a democratically decided election. Happy New Year.

Fear not, because I’m back now. Can a well-timed Shakespeare Anagram provide the necessary perspective to bring our country together on a particular issue? Can a weekly riddle provide distraction and entertainment during a stressful time? Can a… wait, what else do we do here besides riddles and anagrams? I remember there used to be more.

Well, maybe now is the time to bring it all back. Or maybe it’s time to start something new. Got a feeling ’21 is gonna be a good year. And if it’s not, we can just pretend that ’22 will come along and fix it all.

I look forward to our continuing this journey together.

The day before each year is an invitation to reflect back on the previous year, and today I can say that I was a fairly crappy blogger this year. Most of the posts from this year are riddles, and even among those, not since August 6.

What can I say? I was pretty well fed up with the state of the world and depressed about any number of things. Ideally, the blog is an opportunity to channel my frustrations into creating something, but it hasn’t been that very much in 2020.

Still, there are a few posts I think are worth highlighting, but only five this year instead of ten. And if you’re reading this, thanks for coming back. I hope to do better for you in 2021.

5. Shakespeare Anagram: Julius Caesar (February 1)

When the Republican-controlled Senate decided to deny the American people an impeachment trial for our criminal president, I wrote this anagram to remind us that we had the power to remove him ourselves in November. And we did!

4. Science is Real (July 4)

One of the prevailing feelings I’ve had about the world for the past few years is helplessness. Everything’s wrong, but what can I do about it? I can vote, sure. I’ve also started writing a poem each Fourth of July, in the hopes of sharing my patriotic spirit with my fellow Americans. This year’s wasn’t my favorite of the three, but it made a point I thought was important.

3. It Is Upon Us (April 10)

It was the fourth anniversary of the death of one of my closest childhood friends, and I took the opportunity to tell a funny story involving him. He would have hated this year just like the rest of us did, but he’d have found a way to make the best of it. This I know.

2. Read Shakespeare Online! (July 17)

One of my favorite things to do is gather with groups of friends to read Shakespeare plays. That was taken from me this year, but my friends continued to meet online to continue our reading groups on Zoom. This post encouraged others to do the same, and shared the resources we use to do it (including the resource page I have on this site).

1. Macbeth 2020 (April 21)

Living in isolation, I was driven to create something, even if I had to do it “all by myself,” as the song goes. Fortunately, the monthly Shakespeare event I used to attend also moved online this year. When the Night Shift Theatre Company transformed the Drunken Shakespeare event (held in a bar) into the Sequestered Shakespeare event (held on Instagram), it gave me the opportunity to reimagine the cauldron scene from Macbeth as a Zoom call in 2020. I posted the video here as well.

Have a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2021!

In the before-times, when social contact was allowed, one of my favorite things to do was to gather with friends and do readings of Shakespeare’s plays. We would choose a play in advance, meet together at an agreed-upon time, divide up the roles, and read the play out loud from beginning to end.

When the world shut down, I was part of four such groups, each of which met on a monthly basis. This seems like it would mean a weekly reading for me, but in practice, the dates tended to cluster, and I often attended several in one week.

Since the COVID shelter-in-place, all four groups have shifted online, and I now participate in regular readings via Zoom. To be clear, this doesn’t come close to replacing getting together with friends and reading live, but it does replace not having a reading at all quite nicely.

And it occurs to me that there may be some folks within the sound of my voice who might be looking for something fun to do with friends from a distance. If a Shakespeare reading sounds like fun for you, I want to show you how easy it can be to put together.

First, find some friends who like Shakespeare and want to do this. One person should have a Zoom account so they can create a room, but if that’s not available, there are alternatives like Google Meet that can also work.

Last year, I put together a resource page for groups who want to meet live to do Shakespeare readings. That’s not an option right now, but the page is just as useful for online readings.

You can choose the play in advance, or wait until everyone has met and choose a play based on the recommendations for the number of readers you have.

There are 24 plays that have sections on the page, and each play section links to the Folger Digital Text for that play, so everyone will be using the same text. Each section also contains divisions to assign roles from the play to 2 to 12 readers.

All that remains is to randomize who is assigned each reader number, which can be quickly done at this website.

So, if you’re looking for a fun way to connect with your long-lost Shakespeare-loving friends, online Shakespeare readings just might be the thing to try!

Shakespeare Teacher is now thirteen years old. If it were a kid, it would be ready for its bar mitzvah.

I usually get reflective about the blog on its birthday, but I pretty well covered ten of the thirteen years in yesterday’s Decade in Review. So instead, I’ll reflect on the year now being 2020.

Whenever the odometer flips an extra digit, it throws me for a loop. I’m old enough to remember when 2020 felt like a year in the distant future. Even after the 2016 election when all eyes turned to 2020, it seemed so far away. I turn 50 this year, so my own odometer is about to flip an extra digit as well. There’s no more difference between 50 and 49 than there is between 2020 and 2019, but it feels qualitatively different.

Anyway, this website now has 1,299 posts in 124 categories and 3,575 approved comments. Come join me tomorrow at 10am, as we flip three digits of the odometer with a brand new Thursday Morning Riddle.

Thanks to everyone who has visited, participated, or otherwise supported my now-teenager over the years. And welcome to new visitors as well. We’ve got some miles on us now, but the journey continues apace!

As I like to reflect on the best posts of the blog each year, it makes sense now to look back at the past decade of Shakespeare Teacher to see what’s been accomplished. Rather than individual posts, I’ll be reflecting on threads and themes, but I’ll still present it as a top ten countdown. Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2020!

10. Shakespeare Lists (2011 — 2014)

Sometimes my obsessive Shakespeare fandom runs over the brim, and I have to post a list. In 2011, it was a list of my favorite Shakespeare audio productions. Then, in 2012, I posted a list of Shakespeare’s Top 50 Most Underrated Characters. Later in the year, I added a list of retrochronisms, a word I coined to describe references that were correct in Shakespeare’s time, but potentially misleading when viewed through a modern lens. In 2013, I created a seven-point scale describing how historically “real” the characters in Shakespeare are. And, though it’s only tangentially related to Shakespeare, I’m going to include my 2014 list of literary devices in Disney’s Frozen. After that, I was content to let it go.

9. Shakespeare Follow-Up (2013 — 2017)

I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of Shakespeare’s works as a primary source document for Early Modern England. So when a character from one of the plays refers to “the glorious planet Sol” or proclaims that the “poor world is almost six thousand years old,” we are reminded that we are hearing a voice from over four centuries in the past. Digging into these instances has not only helped illuminate Shakespeare’s worldview for me, but has also given me the opportunity to explore a range of diverse topics from the nature vs. nurture debate to the history of lie detection.

8. Creative Celebrations (2011 — 2019)

It all started in 2011, when I was asked by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to participate in a project where bloggers across the Internet post how Shakespeare has influenced their lives, in celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday (April 23). I posted a tongue-in-cheek essay describing how Shakespeare destroyed my life. A week later, I followed up with a satirical post comparing the birther movement to the authorship deniers. This pair of posts got some nice attention and made me think that the occasional humor piece might be a nice addition to the blog. This led to the Shakespeare Autocorrect post on Christmas 2012. I thought it might be festive to do something special for the holiday season. But that one post brought in more traffic, reposts, and backlinks than anything I had ever written before. The following Christmas, 2013, I posted Shakespeare Clickbait, which also proved to be popular. In 2017 and 2018, I celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday with two posts comparing the current White House to characters from Shakespeare, first with Sean Spicer Does Shakespeare and then with Macbeth’s Twitter Feed. In 2019, I continued the birthday celebration with a collection of Shakespeare Memes. These posts remain some of the most popular on the blog.

7. Patriotic Poetry (2018 — 2019)

Sometimes I process my thoughts by writing poems. I don’t usually post them to the blog, other than the Thursday Morning Riddle, of course. But in advance of Independence Day 2018, I noticed a lot of my liberal friends on Facebook were wondering if they could still be patriotic during these troubling times. I wrote Anthem 2018 in response to this and posted it on July 4, because this is every bit as much our country as it is his and that’s ground I’m not willing to concede. On July 4 of this year, I posted another poem, Grateful, which focused on the supporters. I’ll probably do another one this coming July 4, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary after that.

6. Career Highlights (2010 — 2016)

Shakespeare Teacher is essentially a one-man show, so when I get a cool gig in the Shakespeare Teacher world, it’s my pleasure to come here and share it with you. The decade kicked off nicely when I published a book chapter in 2010 on teaching Shakespeare in the elementary school. Then, in 2012, I had the opportunity to serve as a member of an Educational Advisory Board for the PBS documentary Shakespeare Uncovered. In 2016, I was hired as a “Shakespeare Expert” on a Shakespeare-themed Celebrity Cruise, giving four talks onboard the ship and escorting shore excursions to Shakespeare-related destinations.

5. Shakespeare Song Parodies (2012 — 2013)

This was a temporary weekly series, but one of my favorite features on the blog. Basically, each week I would take the lyrics to a well-known song and I’d rewrite them to make the song about Shakespeare. I ended up writing 40 parodies in total: one for each of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, one for the sonnets, and a final tribute to all of the plays together. It seemed to be a popular feature at the time, and remains one of the highlights of the site. It was also cited in a peer-reviewed journal article that discussed Shakespeare contrafacta (apparently the real term for what I was doing).

4. Shakespeare Anagram (Saturdays)

If you would have told me a decade ago that this feature would still be going, I’d have had my doubts. In recent years, I’ve been adding in a political essay along with the anagram, hoping the novelty of the art form might draw some attention to topics such as the scapegoating of immigrants or the administration’s family separation policy. But my favorite anagram of the decade was when I anagrammed a Shakespeare sonnet into a new sonnet to make a statement about marriage equity, almost a year before Obergfell v. Hodges would be decided.

3. Family Trees for Shakespeare’s Histories (2014 — 2018)

In the summer of 2014, I put together a series of family trees for members of the Plantagenet family who appear as characters in Shakespeare’s history tetralogies. The idea was that they would serve as a resource for 21st century Americans reading these plays that were written for the audiences of 16th century London. When the site was expanded in 2018, I elevated the trees to have their own page. Whether these charts help clarify or add additional confusion I leave as a judgement for the reader. But I sure learned a lot from compiling them.

2. Thursday Morning Riddle (Thursdays)

What can I say about the Thursday Morning Riddle? It’s my best friend. It’s my worst enemy. When I don’t have to wake up early, it wakes me up early, and when I do have to wake up early, it wakes me up earlier. It keeps me going when I can’t go any further, and it has sustained the blog though long periods when I didn’t have any other writing in me. It has entertained children, been a hit at dinner parties, and brought in new readers to the blog over the years. And I have to give a special shout-out to my friend Asher. This site might not be here today if, during those lean months, its readership had dropped to zero instead of a reliable one.

1. Shakespeare Reading Group Resource Page (2018)

I can’t tell you what I was put on this earth to do. But if the answers are in the back of the book, and I learn someday that it was to do this, I might not be entirely surprised. I take immense, almost religious, pleasure and fulfillment from participating in Shakespeare readings with like-minded friends, and if I can help bring that experience to others, then I must. What more could a Shakespeare Teacher ask for than an outlet to help bring the text to a wider audience? Go check it out, and see if you can gather a group together to give it a try.

Another year has gone by, and the time has come once again to look back over the past twelve months to remember the best posts of the year.

10. Thursday Morning Riddle (Thursdays)

This is more of a category entry than a single post. But this was a particularly good year for the blog’s longest-running feature. Nine distinct solvers cracked the year’s 41 riddles. Independence Day and Halloween always fall on the same day of the year; this year it was Thursday, so we got two extra holiday-themed riddles in addition to the yearly Thanksgiving riddle. I was able to experiment with some intertextual riddles (here and here) as well as some unusual rhymes (here and here). This year also saw the 500th riddle on the website. Have I really written 500 riddles? Who am I?

9. Theatre: Titan Theatre Company’s Hamlet (April 7)

Calling this show “the best production of Hamlet I have ever seen” was no small compliment. And, indeed, my enthusiasm for Titan’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s flagship play led me to outline in some detail my experience in attending it. I shared the review with my friends who were in the play and I came to understand that it circulated among the cast. The next thing I know, Titan has linked to the review from their website and they’re using a pull quote from the review in their print promotional materials! I’ve been back to see a few more of their shows since then; I highly recommend checking them out.

8. Shakespeare Anagram: Hamlet (October 19)

This one makes the list for the anagram, not the essay. This is my favorite of the year. The short anagrams are the most difficult, and I really liked the way the letters came together to make a coherent sentence. The quote was well-known, and both the quote and anagram applied well to the essay subject. It was everything I look for in a good Shakespeare anagram, and I’m pleased to include it here on the year-end list.

7. Lessons from Shakespeare: The Duke of Buckingham (July 28)

It was meant to be a regular feature, and may yet be, but so far there is only one of them. The idea was to take a closer look at one aspect of a Shakespeare play and apply the lessons we learn from it to today. In the lone installment, we look at the Duke of Buckingham from Richard III, and ask ourselves if silence in the face of evil is the best path, even if it is only a survival strategy.

6. More Shakespeare! (January 13)

This was just a short announcement, but for something exciting to me. Last year, I launched a resource page for people doing Shakespeare reading groups. Originally, I had posted divisions for 16 plays. But over the winter break last year, I added 8 more, for a total of 24. If you’re here reading this, why not consider putting together your own reading group?

5. Another Open Letter to Donald Trump (September 28)

Wouldn’t it just be easier if he were to step down? I make the case. Spoiler alert: he didn’t.

4. NSFW: Shakespeare Pick-Up Lines (August 21)

I wrote these for a performance I was giving in a Shakespeare event at a local bar. The piece was a big hit with the Bard-savvy crowd, so I decided to publish it here. Enjoy!

3. Shakespeare Anagram: Henry VI, Part Three (July 6)

This one makes the list for the essay, not the anagram, though the anagram is pretty good, too. The essay is about the Trump administration’s family separation policy at the border. Of the many, many instances where this president has shown himself unfit, this may be the absolute worst. And it’s still going on.

2. Grateful (July 4)

Last July 4, I wrote a poem about America, which in 2018 was mostly about retaining the ability to love our country while the president is so awful. This year, I focused my verse on his supporters. I may have lost a few people with this poem, but I guess I lost them a long time ago.

1. Shakespeare Memes (April 23)

For Shakespeare’s birthday this year, I repurposed 15 popular memes and made them about Shakespeare. From “Distracted Boyfriend” to “American Chopper Argument,” there’s something for everyone in here. After all, one does not simply celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday!

Shakespeare Teacher (and Quincy) got a nice mention in the most recent issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter!

Click the image to read the entire article by Stephanie Cowell, who crafted a lovely write-up of our reading group, now running over ten years.

Or, you can click here to go directly to the resource page referenced in the article.

To the Romans, I’m D (yes, we’ve been here before);
I’m the miles the Proclaimers would walk (and then more);
I’m an Indy car race; I am Fortune’s top drawer;
And this riddle, by number, for those keeping score.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Trish White. See comments for answer.