From King Lear:

Back do I toss these treasons to thy head

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Knotty shoe side-shots acerbated a host.

It’s time once again to check in on what searches people have done 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.

Now we’re getting a little closer to the present. King George III was king during the American Revolution; he was the King George we were revolting against. His reign was long – over 59 years! In fact, only his granddaughter Victoria reigned longer, though Elizabeth II is likely to pass him as well on May 12, 2011. But I digress.

George III is a direct ancestor of all subsequent monarchs of England. He was succeeded by two sons, a granddaughter, a great grandson, etc. So I’d imagine he’d be a direct ancestor of pretty much everyone who we consider to be of English royal birth today, though someone with a better grasp of how all of that works may correct me. I’d also imagine that he has many descendants who are not considered English royalty, their connection to the crown being too distant. Again, I am not beyond correction on this point.

The Tudors is for adults.

Cheater!

Many important historical events occurred during the 52 years of Shakespeare’s life, both in the world and in England in particular. Shakespeare was born in 1564, just two months after Galileo, and died on his birthday in 1616 on the same day as Cervantes (actually ten days later).

That’s a lot of history to cover here, but I’ll give you a sampling of five of the more significant English, but non-Shakespearean, events that took place during Shakespeare’s lifetime and how they may have affected Shakespeare. I invite readers to quibble with my choices:

1588 – The English navy defeats the Spanish Armada. This sparked a new era of English patriotism which coincided with the beginning of Shakespeare’s writing career. It’s why a lot of his early plays are Histories, as that was a popular trend at the time.

1603 – Elizabeth I dies without an heir, and is eventually replaced by King James I. James became a patron of Shakespeare’s company, now “The King’s Men,” and Shakespeare will write Macbeth in honor of the new king.

1605 – Catholic conspirators attempt to murder James in the Gunpowder Plot. It is believed that there are references to the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth.

1607 – Establishment of Jamestown colony in Virginia. The Tempest may have been inspired by the wreck of a ship that was headed for the colony.

1611 – Publication of the King James Bible. Rumors that Shakespeare worked on the project are mere speculation. Stories about Psalm 46 containing hidden messages should be taken with a grain of salt.

The expression “slings and arrows” is from Hamlet, but I assume you’re talking about the Canadian television series. There were three seasons, each revolving around a different Shakespearean tragedy. Julius Caesar was not one of them. The plays were, in order, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.

He would look like a 517-year-old man holding a giant drumstick.

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

It’s time once again to check in on what searches people have done 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.

This feature happens to share its name with the headquarters of Google Inc., located in Mountain View, California. I have no idea what goes on there on Fridays.

I don’t grant your premise, unless you are referring to the historical figure and not the Shakespeare play. In fact, you might say that the play was actually written specifically to appeal to the new king. Witches were a fascination for James, so he’d have been intrigued from the start. Also, James was a direct descendent of both the historical Malcolm and the historical Banquo. Notice that the witches make a prophecy that doesn’t actually come true in the play, which is an odd dramatic convention. They prophecy that Banquo will not be king, but will instead be the father to a line of kings. Later, Macbeth is shown a vision of eight kings along with the ghost of Banquo who points at them for his. The eighth king is meant to be King James, as he is the eighth king in the house of Stewart. The prophecy doesn’t come true in the play; it comes true in the audience.

So far, it’s just Nixon, but the night is young.

You do realize you’re skipping over a whole year, right? No interest in The Tempest with Helen Mirren as Prospero? Not anxiously awaiting the new Hamlet with Screech and the Chocolate Rain guy? Okay. From what I can tell, the Shakespeare film event of 2010 will be King Lear with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Naomi Watts, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Keira Knightley as his three extremely beautiful daughters. Also, Eddie Murphy – I kid you not – is planning to do a version of Romeo & Juliet. I imagine he will be playing both roles, but that’s pure speculation.

I was amused to see this one because I used the phrase “lambasts Hal” in my first Shakespeare Lipogram, and I chose the verb because it only has the vowel “A” in it. But I wonder if you’re really looking for that scene from Henry IV, Part One, or if you’re actually looking for this scene from Henry IV, Part Two. It’s one of the great scenes from one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works and was even listed as #38 on my Top 50 scenes in all of Shakespeare.

Hal finds his deathly-ill father asleep, assumes he’s dead, and takes the crown off with him. When he returns, the King’s awake, and lambasts Hal. They reconcile, and Henry gives his son advice for how to be king. The language is… there’s no adjective I could use that you wouldn’t say “Well, yeah, it’s Shakespeare” but the language is particularly rich and evocative in this scene. I did an anagram of a quote from it a while back, but I’m surprised I still haven’t done the most timely quote of them all: “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,/ May waste the memory of the former days.” It’s even got a “Q” in it. I’ll have to save that one for a rainy day.

Most definitely. I suggest gathering a group of friends together, dividing up the roles, and reading it out loud. Trust me on this one. That’s how to read Macbeth.

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

I attended my 20-year high school reunion on Saturday. It was a lot of fun to see what everyone’s up to now. It was also a bit strange, because we were only 18 when we graduated, so it really was half a lifetime ago that we all knew each other. We’re all different people now, almost strangers, yet we have a knowledge of each other that in some ways is far more intimate than the friends we make today.

I also saw my 9th-grade English teacher, the first teacher ever to assign me to read Shakespeare. Of course, I very much enjoyed letting him know what I’m up to now, and he seemed very pleased as well. It made me think of my first Shakespeare experience, reading The Tempest in his class. I didn’t really understand it, but I was determined that I was going to, and eventually I did.

The Tempest seems like kind of an odd choice to use to introduce students to Shakespeare for the first time, though I can’t really see anything wrong with it. He also had taught us the Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, which might also have been a good first play. Usually when I’m working with 5th-graders, I’m introducing them to Shakespeare for the first time, and I generally go with Macbeth or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I recently did Cymbeline with an 8th-grade class, but they had already read Romeo and Juliet, another good choice.

Then there are other plays, like King Lear or Troilus and Cressida, that I don’t think are good choices for young children. I was once asked to teach Antony and Cleopatra to 6th-grade students, and it went well, but I think Julius Caesar might have been a more appropriate choice. I also worked with a teacher who, against my advice, wanted to teach Othello to his 8th-grade class. I was so wrong; that went really well. I thought the play was too mature for them, but those kids taught me a thing or two.

So the Question of the Week, if it’s not obvious by now, is this:

What play would you choose to introduce Shakespeare to a group of students for the first time?

Does your answer change with the grade level? What if an adult friend of yours who had never read Shakespeare asked for a recommendation? Do you go with one of the masterpieces, or a fun easy read? Is one genre better than another for a first-timer? Or do you go with something you’re passionate about, so your enthusiasm can be infectious?

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

shakespeare and technology
tudor riddles
riddle for a waste paper basket
plays genres
josh lymon secret service codename
descendants of king george vi
shakespeare reading group
what did the tudors find and bring back to England
descriptive word that starts with the letter y
knowledge in othello
is smarter a word
who is the more complex villain in king lear
new book on shakespeare, author on the daily show
mary queen of scots descendants in Virginia
macbeth simplified language
codependent relationship between macbeth and lady macbeth
who influenced sir francis bacon
venn diagram puzzles
descendents of the tudors to present day
fox 40 morning news riddle
what did tudors do in there free space
teaching shakespeare to four year olds
henry viii riddles
riddles in shakespeare
lateral thinking games
queen elizabeth “i am henry …”
multiple choice test for king henry the 8th
in merchant of venice two fathers in post strike rules on their daughters
giant shakespeare crossword puzzle
boleyn living relatives
literacy in shakespeare’s time
a list of twenty things that shakespeare wrote
top 10 reasons to vote
where can i find information on the descendants of bloody mary
what is the coincidence that happened between shakespeare and cervantes

This is a partial list. I deleted several of the search terms, mostly looking for modern-day descendants of the Tudors.

I can tackle a few of these, and I’ll leave the rest to my readers. To the best of my knowledge, Josh Lyman’s Secret Service codename was never revealed on The West Wing. Yes, “smarter” is a word. And Bloody Mary did not have any children, and thus, no descendants.

I have taught Shakespeare to a wide variety of age groups, but never to four-year-olds. I defer to the Shakespeare Geek who is building an early appreciation for the playwright with his own daughters.

As for the Elizabeth quote “I am Henry”, I’m at a loss, though you may be thinking of the Queen’s reaction to a production of Richard II, which is about the deposing of a monarch. She was aware that the Earl of Essex commissioned the production in order to foment rebellion. Elizabeth I is said to have remarked “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”

Does anyone know which Shakespeare author was on The Daily Show? And would anyone like to address the questions about Merchant and King Lear?

The First Folio (1623) delineates Shakespeare’s plays into three genres: Comedy, Tragedy, and History. More recent scholars added the category of Romance to describe some of his later plays, and there is also a fifth, more nebulous, category that goes by several different names, which describes plays like Troilus and Cressida that seem to defy genre.

How meaningful are these genres? Certainly, a play like King Lear has a very different tenor than, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s not just a question of mood, but even the rules are different. These are plays in different genres. But does this distinction hold up across the canon? Or does each play speak for itself? This is the Question of the Week.

How much stock should we put in Shakespearean genres?

And if you say that these genres are correct, I have a few follow-up questions. Perhaps you’d like to tackle one of these as well:

• Why is Macbeth a Tragedy while Richard III is a History?
• Why is As You Like It a Comedy, while The Winter’s Tale is a Romance?
• Why is Much Ado About Nothing a Comedy, while Romeo and Juliet is a Tragedy? (Is it just the ending? Is that enough to consider it a different genre?)

This blog just reached 20,000 hits, and you know what that means. Yes, it’s time to break out the cake and SiteMeter counter.

For the record, the 20,000th hit came in at 9:48pm today from Waterville, Maine. The visitor came to read the post from March 25, 2007, discussing the last episode of Slings & Arrows.

It’s worth noting that the first 10,000 hits came between January 3, 2007 and December 16, 2007, while the second 10,000 hits came between December 16, 2007 and July 8, 2008. At this point in time, the blog’s Technorati ranking is 648,508.

Once again, many thanks to all who have visited. This is your day.

This blog just reached 10,000 hits. Huzzah! Huzzah! That’s 20,000 eyeballs! I guess it’s time to break out the cake and SiteMeter counter.

For the record, the 10,000th hit came in at 1:22pm today via a link from an English teacher’s webpage at Xavier High School, right here in New York City. The teacher is a former graduate student of mine. So here’s a big shout out to Mr. Cambras and his 9th and 10th grade students who I see are studying Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. (…and some other good stuff, too.) Welcome to all.

If this blog teaches you nothing else, it’s that studying great works of literature will allow you to take the letters from passages in those great works of literature, mix them around, and form new pieces of writing that kind of relate back to the original passage. And if you do that, then eventually 10,000 people will come to see them.

Yesterday’s Cake War prompted me to think about what Shakespeare had to say about pastries and revenge. I came up with the scene where Titus tells his enemies that he’s going to bake them into pies and serve them to their mother. Enjoy!

From Titus Andronicus:

Hark! villains, I will grind your bones to dust,
And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste;
And of the paste a coffin I will rear,
And make two pasties of your shameful heads;
And bid that strumpet, your unhallow’d dam,
Like to the earth swallow her own increase.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

Initially, a Nonny Nu did hail my King Lear cake as unpalatable, until I had W flip her off on her site. A mad armada from both sides, we would post the worst insults.

So, our feud oath lasted a day. Tomorrow, I will know better. The cake had proved wiser than us all.

I can’t believe I’ve gone almost eleven months without a blogger feud. Let’s do this.

Nonny Nu (nonnynu dot blogspot dot com), a blogger who writes mainly about her cats, decides to throw some stones.

First, she uses a picture of my King Lear cake on a Happy Birthday posting on her blog, which is totally fine with me. But then she ends with this:

P.S. That isn’t the birthday cake. That’s just some photo I found on the web. But, can you believe some people are so serious and hoity toity as to quote Shakespeare on a birthday cake? No doubt, they will be having wine with it. *eyes*

Serious and hoity toity? I rather thought I was being whimsical and hoity toity. And what’s wrong with a little wine on your birthday?

That’s it, Crazy Cat Lady, I’m calling you out. Don’t you know it’s not nice to taunt a fellow blogger? Especially not one whom you have given temporary control over the image at the top of your blog? I just replaced it with this picture and you should just be glad I didn’t get all goatse.cx on you. (To my readers: If you don’t know what that is, just let it go.)

Let this be a warning to others. Rule number one: you do NOT mock the Shakespeare Teacher.

UPDATE: She’s got it fixed now, but for about eight hours today, her site looked like this.

UPDATE II: I just read through her comments, and she posted this image of a cake that has such a delicious self-referential paradox that even W.V.O. Quine would ask for seconds. (Who’s hoity toity now?) I think I’ll head over and offer a truce.

UPDATE III: The truce has been accepted, and what must be the shortest feud in Internet history has come to an end.

UPDATE IV: The one-day feud has now been immortalized in an anagram.