I’ve done this feature before, but this is the first of what I hope will be a series of weekly opportunities to check in on what searches people do to find themselves at Shakespeare Teacher, and to respond in the name of fun and public service. All of the following searches brought people to this site in the past week.

when queen elizabeth died what
happened to king iago in scottlandOnly one reigning Queen Elizabeth of England has ever died, so I’ll assume you are asking about Elizabeth I. When she died in 1603, the crown was inherited by King James VI of Scotland, who then became King James I of England as well. This united the two kingdoms, and today we even refer to the nation as the United Kingdom.

Iago is a fictional character in Shakespeare’s Othello. There was also a 7th century Welsh King by that name.

obama shakespeareI’m not sure what you’re looking for, but I’m not surprised it brought you here. May I interest you in an anagram?

university teachers genghis khanAnd you thought the midterm was tough.

is teaching shakespeare good?Yes.

genghis khan gameHow come you always get to be Genghis?

wife of henry 8th that was ugliest women aliveAh, you must be thinking of Anne of Cleves, though that may be a bit harsh. Henry had arranged to marry her sight unseen so that he could form a political alliance with her family. But before he agreed to marry her, he sent Hans Holbein the Younger, the greatest portrait artist of his day, to go and paint her. When he returned, as the story goes, Henry liked what he saw and agreed to the marriage. Unfortunately, Henry didn’t realize he was looking at a picture painted by the greatest portrait artist of his day. When he saw the real deal, he was less pleased. The marriage was short, and (fortunately for Anne) ended in divorce.

I leave the task of responding to the remaining search terms to my readers:

book: bush tragedy and Falstaffwhy was shakespeare so successful riddle

how did shakespeare change history

letters to genghis khan from family

social justice of gilligan’s island

a good headline for a shakespeare play

Well, I’m off to Pennsylvania for the holiday weekend. I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have, but I’ve already set the blog on autopilot for the next four days. The posts are written – all regular features: a Riddle, a Googleplex, an Anagram, and a Lipogram – and are scheduled to appear on their proper days, one per day from Thursday to Sunday. Sunday is also the last day of the month, which means that if everything goes as planned, I will have fulfilled my obligations to NaBloPoMo.

I’m glad I participated in the experiment, even though it was difficult at times. I think I’d like to continue trying to post on a regular basis. Thanks to all of you who have been reading along, and especially to those who have left comments behind. You can see the ten most recent comments in the right-hand sidebar if you want to join in the active conversations.

There will be a new riddle tomorrow. As always, the first person to answer correctly gets a name check in the main post. However, since I don’t know when I’ll actually get a chance to go online, it may be a few days before I’m able to respond. Thank you in advance for your patience.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

It seems that I am the winner of the Shakespeare Geek’s comment contest. I won by posting a comment thanking him for blogging about my lipogram experiment.

First prize is the Manga Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sweet!

Thanks, Duane!

I am excited to announce a new (though temporary) weekly feature to the blog, inspired by the book Eunoia by Christian Bök. The book has five chapters, each using only one of the five vowels (A, E, I, O, U), and excluding the other four. I thought it might make a fun constrained writing activity for the blog.

The Challenge: I will write plot summaries for five of Shakespeare’s plays, each using a different target vowel, and excluding the other four. I will choose one play from each of the five genres. I will post one summary each Sunday for five weeks.

Five weeks. Five vowels. Five genres. Five plays.

I haven’t read Eunoia, so I don’t know how Bök deals with the letters W and Y, but I have laid down my own ground rules. Y is okay if it’s used as a consonant (as in “Yet”) or in conjunction with the target vowel (as in “boy”), but not when used by itself (as in “my”) or when it forms its own syllable (as in “every”). There will be no restrictions on the use of the letter W.

Obviously, I will need to change most of the character names to make this work. But rather than arbitrarily choosing new names, I think it would be more faithful to the constraint to choose descriptive nicknames.

For my first attempt, I have chosen to summarize a History play, King Henry IV, Part One, using “A” as the only vowel.

Enjoy!

Hal and Falstaff at War, Part A

 

Brash Lad’s clansman March has a fall at war. Stalwart Braggart attacks and nabs March, and wants cash. Brash Lad wants March back. Grand Man (Hal’s dad) can’t pay Stalwart Braggart that cash. Brash Lad rants mad. Grand Man can’t pay a call at Abraham’s Land, as was always a plan. Grand Man stays wan. An adamant Brash Lad walks, and clasps Stalwart Braggart’s hands.

Hal, Jack Falstaff, and a madcap charlatan band hang at a bar. Falstaff has a scam plan. Hal’s plan sandbags Falstaff. Falstaff, back at that bar, brags and brags. Hal calls Falstaff’s brag and can flash all Falstaff’s cash. Falstaff warns Hal that smart scams can’t trap Stalwart Braggart and Mad Marksman, and that Hal’s dad, Grand Man, wants a harsh chat. Falstaff playacts Grand Man and lambasts Hal. Hal playacts Grand Man and Falstaff playacts Hal. Falstaff (as Hal) says that Hal can’t cast fat Jack Falstaff away. Hal (as Grand Man) says that Hal can, and that’s a fact, Jack!

Brash Lad, Stalwart Braggart, and March all play ball, and plan an attack at Grand Man. March’s lass sang. Grand Man lambasts Hal, as Falstaff had. Hal asks vaward, and Grand Man grants that. Falstaff drafts scalawags that Hal can’t stand and flagrant dastards that pay Falstaff hard cash and walk. Mad Marksman clasps Brash Lad’s hands. Hal packs arms. Falstaff packs sack.

War starts! Mad Marksman attacks Grand Man. Hal casts Mad Marksman away. Hal and Brash Lad clash, and Hal slays Brash Lad. Mad Marksman attacks Jack Falstaff. Falstaff falls flat and playacts a carcass. Hal calls Brash Lad a gallant, and calls Falstaff fat. As Hal walks away, Falstaff plays at sarcasm and says that a gallant’s as apt as a warrant and a hangman. Falstaff nabs Brash Lad’s carcass and says that Brash Lad had drawn a last fall at Falstaff’s hand.

Hal’s man nabs Mad Marksman. Hal plays lax gallant and casts Mad Marksman away. Hal and Grand Man plan an attack at Stalwart Braggart and March. Call that play “Part B”…

Next Lipogram: As You Like It

Inspired by Ro’s participation in NaBloPoMo, I have decided to return to daily posting. I’ve really been neglecting this blog, so this seems like as good of a time as any to rise to the challenge.

I plan to post an entry to this blog each day for the next 30 days. Regular features like the Shakespeare Anagram and the Thursday Morning Riddle count, as they do require quite a bit of effort from me. However, simply posting a video without comment just doesn’t do justice to the dignity and honor of NaBloPoMo.

So, in addition to my regular features, I’ll now be writing about the election, activities that I’m up to, responses to items I see in the news and other blogs, and maybe, just maybe, I might slip in something about teaching Shakespeare. As always, comments are welcome.

Happy Halloween!

Now that the one-two punch of reCAPTCHA and Akismet have practically eliminated spam from my comments list, I feel safe adding a “Recent Comments” feature to the right-hand sidebar. This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, since I really like how it has changed the experience of reading Duane’s blog for me. But without the spam-busters, it would have been impossible.

What this means for you, the reader, is that if you decide you’d like to comment on an older post, the rest of the Shakespeare Teacher community will be able to see it, and possibly continue the discussion. So feel free to weigh in on today’s Shakespeare or rank my list of sources by reliability or whatever old discussions you’d like to reinvigorate. Go ahead and give it a try!

Unfortunately, this will make it slightly harder to avoid spoilers for Thursday Morning Riddles and Conundrums, but I think the trade-off is worth it.

I have also created an e-mail address where you can contact me directly. It is “webmaster” at this domain name.

Shakespeare Teacher: Serving our customers since 2007.

I’m always curious to see what search terms bring people to this site. Here is a list of all of the search terms that brought people here yesterday:

how shakespeare demonstrated “religion” in his plays

 

presidents with the letter y in their name

 

king henry viii shakespeare for children

 

who are the present day descendants of ann boleyn

 

king henry the eighth for kids

 

modern day descendants of henry the eighth

 

free shakespeare for kids

 

shakespeare did math

 

math – coins – line drawings of

 

saddam hussein vs. iago

 

textual analysis of elizabath i letter to king james vi

 

what play of shakespeare hads the word shyster in it?

 

characterize ophelia in act 3 scene 1

 

open-ended question of the week

 

who am i riddles

 

music tech teacher.com’

 

shakespeare class distinction “as you like it”

 

sir francis bacon blog

The word “shyster” does not appear in Shakespeare. There is a character named Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and a popular anti-lawyer quote in Henry VI, Part Two.

Several United States presidents have had the letter Y in their names. First name: Ulysses S. Grant, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter; Last name: John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy; First and Last Name: Zachary Taylor; Commonly Used Middle Name: John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison.

As for the Ophelia thing, do your own homework.

The spam was getting way out of control, so I installed reCAPTCHA. Now, when you want to leave a comment on this blog, you will just need to type in a couple of words to prove you’re a real human. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Feel free to play around with it by leaving a comment in this post. This will also let me know that the thing is working, so thanks in advance.

To the Romans, I’m C; When I’m C, waters boil;
On the field of the pigskin, the yards of the soil;
I’m the years that the English claimed they were French royal;
And this riddle among every Thursday dawn’s toil.

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Neel Mehta. See comments for answer.

I’ve been trying to think how I could top last week’s Shakespeare Anagram, where I took Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech and anagrammed it into adapted versions of five other Hamlet speeches. I decided to attempt to anagram one entire scene from Shakespeare into an adapted version of another scene from Shakespeare.

I thought it best to use two scenes with the same characters, so that the letters in the speech prefixes would even out, and of course I needed to find two scenes of roughly equal length. I went for two scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the one just before the murder of Duncan and the one right after. (I’ll call the two scenes Beforekill and Afterkill, which I think has a clarity that calling them I.vii. and II.ii. lacks.)

Well, I did not get very far. In fact, I didn’t get past the very first step, which is to do a letter inventory. It turns out that Beforekill has over 30 more instances of the letter W than Afterkill has. This is a lot, considering that the scenes themselves are only about 90 lines long a piece. So, unless I want to add a bunch of web addresses, it’s probably not going to work. There are only so many times you can work “How now!” into conversation before it gets tedious.

It’s not a length issue, as Afterkill is rich in Rs and Ss, letters that you would expect to appear frequently in a given passage. Also, Afterkill has quite a few extra Ys than Beforekill and, oddly, about 20 more Gs! So why such a big W disparity in the other direction?

Part of it is a deliberate use on Shakespeare’s part of W alliteration in Beforekill, as in “which would be worn now” or “will I with wine and wassail,” but I think it’s more than that.

W is the letter of question words. When? Which? Why? How? Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are debating and planning the murder and are challenging each other with questions. W also the first letter of We. They are in this together. “If we should fail?” “We fail.”

After the murder, it’s all about Get this and Go there and Give me the daGGers. The soft W is used for coaxing and hedging. The hard G is used for scrambling and panicking. Awesome.

So there won’t be any full-scene anagrams, at least not right now. But I enjoyed discovering the reason why not, and thought you might enjoy it too.