Another April 23 is now upon us. Each year, on this day, we celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, acknowledging occasionally that he also died on this date. But as this year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, focus has shifted to the more morbid milestone. And since it was Shakespeare who taught us, in many ways, what it means to us as humans to face our mortality, it seems only fitting to celebrate his legacy on the anniversary of his death.

Celebrity Cruises is marking the occasion with a ten-day Shakespeare-themed cruise, and they have invited me to serve as the resident expert on all things Shakespearean. I’ll be giving a series of four talks onboard the ship, moderating a round-table discussion, and escorting a shore excursion to Kronberg Castle, the real-life inspiration for Hamlet’s Elsinore.

Naturally, I’m extremely excited about the opportunity. I’m not generally one to seek out opportunities to travel, but the chance to geek out on Shakespeare for ten days with some like-minded fellow passengers will be a unique experience. And so, I am resurrecting the blog, so I have a place to chronicle my journey.

I’m writing this from London, and the cruise will embark this evening from Southampton. We will be visiting Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, ending up in Amsterdam on May 2. I’ll post updates here when I can. For example, here is a picture of me at the British Museum last night.

I’ll post more updates when time allows. Till then, unto Southampton do we shift our scene.

Today is the blog’s eighth birthday. There are currently 1,067 posts in 97 categories and 3,011 approved comments. There have been 152,588 unique hits to the blog. Because of the long hiatus earlier this year, I am no longer listed on Technorati. But, also because of the hiatus, maybe that’s a good thing.

Happy New Year to all within the sound of my voice! I’m looking forward to a happy and productive 2015!

So… it’s been a light blogging year.

There seems to be a cycle where the more I write, the more people visit, and the more I want to write. But the same phenomenon works in the other direction. I also think that blogs are generally in decline these days. Many thanks to the readers who have stuck with the blog while it has been mostly riddles and anagrams. I hope to have more for you in the new year.

Still, we did manage to reach 150,000 views last month, just two short years after hitting 100,000, so that’s not nothing. Let’s have some cake.

The 150,000th hit came in at 11:02pm on Wednesday, November 26, 2014 from Denver, Colorado. The mile-high milestone found the site via a Google search and viewed the Teach Along with the Frozen Soundtrack post.

So I’m not giving up yet, and I’ve paid to renew the domain name and hosting services for another three years. So the blog will be here for us if we wish to be here for it, at least until December 2017.

And there were a few posts this year that I was proud to write and happy to see find an audience. There weren’t ten of them, but I’d put the top five up against the best of the rest, so let’s get right to it!

5. Thursday Morning Riddle: Ambiguous Edition (December 18)

This was a riddle that had two possible answers, each of which fit all of the clues. I’ve never done that before, and don’t expect to be doing it again any time soon.

4. A Good Pairing (February 9)

In a rare digression into teaching Shakespeare, I compare the literary devices between popular song lyrics and a Shakespeare sonnet. This pairing has been teacher-tested and student-approved!

3. Plantagenetics (December 2)

Do recent revelations about infidelity in the royal family cast doubts on the legitimacy of the Queen? No. No, they don’t.

2. Teach Along with the Frozen Soundtrack (June 2)

This is an exploration of some of the literary, poetic, and rhetorical devices in the soundtrack for Disney’s Frozen that you can point out for students, or have them find for you.

1. Family Trees for Shakespeare’s Histories (September 19)

I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and I finally did it! Each play’s tree shows who’s living, who’s dead, who’s related to whom, who is actually in the play, and what names might be used to reference them. Enjoy!

Have a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2015! (Probably…)

From Hamlet:

I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do ’t.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Today, this oddest dilatory hiatus now ends.

Know I again shall devise witty things to vent on each month.

Today, this blog is celebrating its seventh birthday. Right now, it has a Technorati authority of 99, which ranks me 24,523 out of 1,343,382 ranked blogs. There are currently 1,018 posts in 95 categories and 2,875 approved comments. There have been 130,657 unique hits to the blog.

This was the year I wrote my thousandth post. We said goodbye to the Shakespeare Song Parody, and said hello to the Shakespeare Follow-Up. I posted 10 reviews, 22 anagrams, and 43 riddles.

I’m looking forward to the exciting possibilities the new year brings. I hope you will join me on this journey.

Once again, I present my top ten favorite posts of the year as a countdown. Only three of this year’s entries deal directly with the Common Core.

10. The Wager (April 28)

My friend Brian bet me he could pass my Shakespeare final without taking the course, and I accepted his wager. We both ended up learning more than we had expected.

9. Shakespeare and the Common Core (January 6)

Does the Common Core really eliminate all literature in favor of dry government manuals? Not even close. In fact, Shakespeare is actually mandated by the Common Core.

8. Shakespeare Follow-Up: Circumnavigation (November 29)

This year saw a new feature added to the blog: The Shakespeare Follow-Up. I chose this one, following up from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a representative sample.

7. Cleopatra’s Facebook (April 17)

This project actually happened two years ago, but I worked with a class of 6th grade students who created a Facebook page for the Egyptian queen, reflecting the events of Antony and Cleopatra.

6. Don’t Be Rotten to the Core (October 2)

While I do have some specific concerns about the Common Core, fixating on distortions and distractions prevents us from having the real conversations we need to have about education.

5. Shakespeare Clickbait (December 25)

What if we used the same tactics to get people to read Shakespeare that websites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy use to get readers to click on their stories? I present: Shakespeare Clickbait.

4. Danny and the Death Ray (January 9)

This is a nice little story about a small town, and one boy who dared to speak out in order to save it. Some people read into it as an allegory for something else, but I just don’t see it.

3. In the Zone (March 6)

Wouldn’t it be a shame if the Common Core really were a better way to structure education, but nobody ever knew it because the implementation had been botched so badly?

2. Shakespeare Song Parody: We Love the Plays of Shakespeare (June 28)

The ongoing Shakespeare Song Parody feature came to an end this year, but not before the appearance of this swan song, paying tribute to all of the plays one last time.

1. How Real is Richard? (February 13)

When the bones of King Richard III were unearthed earlier this year, I was inspired to create a seven-point scale to rate how “real” each of Shakespeare’s characters actually are.

Have a Happy New Year, and I hope to see you in 2014!

How far should we go to get people to read Shakespeare? I say we do whatever it takes.

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My teenage daughter and her friends think that posts like this can’t go viral. Please help me teach them an important lesson by sharing this on Facebook and Twitter.

This is Post #1000 on Shakespeare Teacher.

And there was much rejoicing throughout the land!

I shudder to think of myself doing anything one thousand times, but the evidence is right before us. Looking at my category links, about one third of the thousand posts are Thursday Morning Riddles. Roughly another third are about Shakespeare, and about a third of those are Shakespeare Anagrams. I have over 100 posts about education, and 48 of them are explicitly about Teaching Shakespeare. So if you were wondering how much of Shakespeare Teacher is actually about teaching Shakespeare, the answer is almost five percent of it.

The milestone comes at a good time because I had an unusually high amount of traffic over the past few days. It seems as though the Shakespeare Autocorrect post went viral on Facebook again. I couldn’t really track the progress, because I was at Macbeth, but the site got 320 hits on Friday, and that’s a new one-day record. Also, someone on a Reddit message board put up a link to this old post, and that brought in a lot of new visitors over the weekend.

Interestingly enough, a Hebrew-language site linked to my univocalic Hamlet lipogram. I don’t read Hebrew, but I know enough to recognize the linked text says “Hamlet” and that the article seems to be about constrained writing pieces. And impressively, most of the article itself seems to have been written without any vowels at all!

That’s a Hebrew joke, thrown in for free in honor of the thousandth post. Are we still having fun? Put me down for another thousand.

I am pleased to announce a new regular feature to the blog: the Shakespeare Follow-Up!

Shakespeare lived and wrote during a time we call the Early Modern Period. And yet, there is much about his time that doesn’t seem very modern at all. It’s common for students to mistakenly refer to Shakespeare’s language as “Old English” because it seems so far removed from the way we speak today. But once you get past the vocabulary and sentence structure, you realize that the language is just the tip of an iceberg representing a 400-year-old gap of knowledge, culture, and worldview.

Shakespeare was born in the same year as Galileo, but pre-deceased him by over 25 years, well before the Italian’s famous grapple with Pope Urban over the question of heliocentrism. Dying as he did in 1616, Shakespeare just barely missed the beginnings of what we consider to be modern science. Bacon’s Novum Organum, published in 1620, contained the early stirrings of the scientific method. And as the Scientific Revolution started picking up some serious steam later in the 17th century, the ideas of the world Shakespeare inhabited were already starting to seem antiquated.

A lot can happen in 400 years. Empires rise and fall, as historians rethink their judgements. Breakthroughs are made. Values shift. We still love Shakespeare because he tapped into the universal truth of human existence, sure, but that doesn’t mean we understand him fully, nor he us. Shylock’s conversion, Dromio’s beating, Katherine’s taming… they can seem harsh to us, living in a different culture and a different time. New discoveries, like the recent unearthing of the remains of Richard III, give us insight on historic people and events that Shakespeare never would have had. Just because Shakespeare’s always on our main stage, doesn’t mean we’re always on the same page.

And thus is born the Shakespeare Follow-Up. Each week (or whenever the mood strikes me), I’ll identify a passage from Shakespeare that highlights a particular gap between Shakespeare’s time and our own. Perhaps it’s a scientific statement of fact, believed to be true in Shakespeare’s time, but ridiculously outdated in ours. Maybe it’s an idea that wasn’t accepted in Shakespeare’s time, but it turned out to be remarkably prophetic. Or maybe it’s an instance where Shakespeare shows us that something we think of as wholly modern has been around longer than we think. I’ll quote the passage, and then provide a “Follow-Up” of where we are today.

This feature will probably end up to be more about cultural, historical, and scientific shifts than it is about Shakespeare. But this blog has always been approached with the philosophy that a love of Shakespeare is only the beginning of a life of examination and discovery. This feature will be another step in that journey. And I think understanding the gaps between us and Shakespeare helps us understand his works better as well. Hamlet tells Horatio that there “are more things in heaven and earth” than are dreamt of in his philosophy. And so, let it be with Shakespeare.

Sound like fun? The Shakespeare Follow-Up will appear on Fridays.

Thank you all for your patience as I took an unplanned hiatus from the blog. The summer’s over now, and it’s time to return to a regular schedule of writing.

I just added 22 new categories and went back through the archives to update them. So now, if you want to browse through posts that contain Classroom Ideas or my thoughts on Education Policy, those are now options available to you. You can see the Popular posts that, for whatever reason, generate the most traffic, or sift through the Snark. I even added a new category on Teaching Shakespeare, because that’s how I roll.

So what can you expect from the next few months of Shakespeare Teacher? Well, I’m kind of curious about that myself. I expect I’ll continue to do the riddle, and have no plans to abandon the anagram. I even have a new feature planned, still in search of a title. The rest is a mystery waiting to be unravelled. I’m looking forward to our making that journey together.