Blog Index • Shake-Speare’s blog

2024

● 07 Mar – Leechcraft Liposuction
A Frenchman makes un grand faux pas with Elizabeth
● 03 Jan – METAMETAMORPHOSES: The Boys Are Back
Ovid and Ned with a new version of their old poem in a new book
╚═ ● Related Page: 📕MMM Home

2023

● 15 Nov – Hawks and Handsaws
A good look at a woodcut in a book on falconry
● 08 Nov – First Folio, Almost
As the First Folio turns 400, what didn’t happen at 397
● 01 Oct – Arrivals and Departures
Things flying in different directions
● 12 Jun – Quince’s Hidden Heptameter
Fourteeners in MND, echoing my earliest poems
● 15 May – What’s Hecuba to Harold?
Hecuba and Hamlet on an island
● 23 Apr – First Folioage
Fallen leaves about the First Folio
● 15 Mar – Caesar Shall Forth
The Ides of March are come
● 02 Feb – Byrdsong
I (re)tell a story at ByrdCentral.com
╚═ ● Related Page: A Goodly Manor For A Song

2022

● 29 Dec – Limerick 21: Rhetorical Question, 1170
A deathday poem for Thomas Becket
● 02 Dec – Italy in Shake-Speare’s Footsteps
An exclusive excerpt from ‘A Rose By Any Other Name’
● 02 Sep – Mark, Frank, and Tom
Three men search for Shakespeare in the early 1900s
● 12 Aug – Jellyfish Hamlet
Hamlet and friends in a bizarre 1934 Hollywood short feature
● 14 Jul – Oxfordian Rose at the Fringe
A show you shouldn’t miss at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
● 08 Jun – Play On 2: Music from the Magic Pub
Tongue in cheeky with a little help from my friends
● 20 May – Sonnet 157: Not Household Words
Chasing wild Oxwords for Sonnets Day
● 23 Apr – Much Noise No Nuts, Part 2
Shake-Speare’s connection to Cervantes via Sicily, or not
╚═ ● 23 Apr – Related Page: Most Wonderful: Webbe’s Travels
● 23 Apr – Much Noise No Nuts, Part 1
Shake-Speare’s connection to Cervantes via Cardenio, or not
╚═ ● 23 Apr – Tangent: Impossible Dream, With Subtitles
● 30 Mar – Limerick 20: All the Sonnets of Shake-Speare
A hybrid limerick-sonnet metasonnet
● 14 Jan – Macbeth: Black and White and Red All Over
Joel Coen’s Expressionist ‘Macbeth’
● 05 Jan – The Jesuit Under the Floorboards
I investigate unexpected comments about myself in a book about my executed cousin

2021

● 10 Dec – Moonlighting with Mose
My 2021 ends with something dramaturgical, non-Shake-Spearean (mostly), and posted elsewhere
╚═ ● 13 Dec – Related Page: Guiding Mose Eakins
● 07 Oct – Lost and Found
What I lost in 1591 was not my ring
● 08 Sep – Play On 1: Musing About Musicals
#1 in a series about music in Shake-Speare’s life and work
● 24 Jun – Limerick 19: Fortune’s Dearest Spite Returns
On my 417th deathday I explain my recent absence and its connection to Sonnet 37
● 21 Feb – Hostage to Catalonia
A shakedown, a translation experiment, and a new discovery about the real Don Quixote

2020

● 14 Oct – First Folio 2: You Are Not For All Markets
Epilogue: The result of today’s auction
● 13 Oct – First Folio 1: Sell When You Can
Prologue: A 1623 First Folio finally goes to auction
● 16 Sep – Limerick 18: Ode for the De Vere Society
Lauding the new DVS website, with a peek at my picture
● 08 Sep – Forsooth, Five Years
The blog’s first half-decade, and what lies ahead for Oxfordians
● 13 Jul – Verse In Time To Come
A personal take on the goals of poetry, and how to achieve them
╚═ ● 13 Jul – Related Post: Poem: Mommy, by Prince Hamlet
● 07 Jun – Such News As This
A news-less First Folio auction update, and new manicules in a new book on my shelf
● 18 Mar – Diseases Desperate Growne
A First Folio was to be auctioned in New York next month, but the plans have changed
● 25 Feb – Essex: A Stranger to Moderation
Another beheading: the Earl of Essex, 419 years ago
● 12 Feb – Poem: Twelfth Day of February
Short semi-elegy in mostly trochaic tetrameter
● 25 Jan – Limerick 17: Not Nonsense
Shake-Speare’s connections to the limerick, in verse and prose

2019

● 23 Dec – Marvellous Searching Engines
Ongoing site work, and visual evidence that Willy can’t SEO
● 24 Nov – Certain Convocations
Hello Redditors, and a worthwhile new post/video
● 01 Oct – Proving My Pudding
Eponymity on a plate
● 26 Sep – Shake-Speare’s Schoolbooks
More about Sir Thomas Smith’s books in the Old Library at Queens’ College, Cambridge
● 30 Aug – Look Upon His Like(ness) Again
A portrait of me that isn’t, and who it is
╚═ ● 30 Aug – Related Post: Thomas Hawkes, The Martyr I Almost Knew
● 12 Aug – Limerick 16: A Sirius Question
Heliacally rising in a northern sky near you
● 31 Jul – The Stroke and Line of his Great Justice
A legacy from the late US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
● 30/31 May – Limerick 15: The Revenge of Queen Tomyris
My Herodotus is auctioned – before and after, 30/31 May
● 28 May – It Was No Carnival in Flanders
My four-week trip to the Eighty Years’ War
● 20 May – Sonnets Day
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed
● 26 Apr – The Graver’s Strife
Was Martin Droeshout a lousy engraver?
● 03 Apr – To Z Or Not To Z
Reader Poll: Should I return to Oxford endings?
● 25 Mar – Plastering the Inveterate Canker
Bearishly belittling Bill’s bandages

2018

● 01 Oct – Blog Birthday Reader Survey
I ask readers to answer a few authorship-related questions
● 13 Sep – Shrew 3: Brush Up Your Oxford
‘Kiss Me, Kate’ and Cole Porter’s problematic lyrics, which I revise and repurpose
● 05 Sep – Shrew 2: Whips and Changes
Adaptations and alterations in ‘The Taming of the Shrew’
● 06 Aug – Shrew 1: My Household Stuff
Unpacking ‘The Taming of the Shrew’
╚═ ● 06 Aug – Tangent: The Naming of the Shrew
╚═ ● 06 Aug – Tangent: The Ideal Wife of 1525
● 15 Jul – St Swithin’s Dud
Some verse about what could have been, had we conquered Croatia: a little touch of Harry in the afternoon
● 24 Jun – A Flourish With Drums and Trumpets
My eponymous march, including a playlist with variations
● 24 Jun – Limerick 14: Jeff’s Journey
A limerical biography of a good friend
● 24 Jun – Limerick 13: Randolph Scott
Tribute to an icon of the celluloid American West
● 06 Jun – Willy and the Strats
New lyrics for an Elton John tune
● 30 May – In Obitum Christopher Marlowe
On the anniversary of Marlowe’s death, his snarky Latin trolling of a dead judge
╚═ ● 30 May – Tangent: Possibly Maybe Marlowe
● 14 Mar – Seven Times Fourteener
A hodge-pudding of heptameter
● 10 Mar – Howards Beginning
A selective chronology of the early Howard Dukes of Norfolk
● 01 Mar – The Apian Demiſe of the Accurſed ſ
Tempest-uous typographical trivia
● 11 Feb – Online Shakespeare Authorship Course, And It’s Free
A step forward in Authorship education
● 08 Feb – Trying to Remember Trying Mary is Trying
Redrawing the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, with a poetic Prologue
● 07 Jan – Worked Too Well
A short conversation about an old joke

2017

● 28 Sep – Book Review: Strong Stuff
Reviewing ‘The Life and Death of King Edward’ by Joshua Gray
● 13 Sep – A Late Summer Afternoon’s Daydream
Recalling Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of MND
● 06 Sep – Patronage Alla Fiorentina
Florence, the Medici, and artistic patronage
● 24 Aug – Doodling and Noodling
A newly-found example of my handwriting, and what it signifies
● 18 May – Limerick 3: Back In Black & White
My new poem is published as part of an important centenary
● 26 Apr – Mad North North West
My failed investment in Canadian mining, referenced in ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’
● 20 Apr – Sonnet 60B: Thoughts at 467
I rewrote Sonnet 60 for my 467th birthday on the 12th
● 21 Mar – Something, Something, and Statistics
Stratfordian stylometry and ‘The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion’
● 18 Mar – Smell the Gloves, Part 2
Uncovering the origin of the Oxford Glove meme, with some pentameter at the end
● 12 Mar – Smell the Gloves, Part 1
The real story of the perfumed gloves I gave to Elizabeth
● 04 Mar – Guest Poet Ben Jonson: To the Reader. Try Again.
Jonson’s second attempt at his First Folio introduction
● 26 Feb – 393 Years of Printing: Plays to Pancakes on a Pilgrimage
My visit with a copy of the First Folio

2016

● 05 Jul – Oh Put Me In Thy Bookes
My visit with a couple of noteworthy old books written about me
● 10 Jun – A Lot of Hot Air
Degassing an old falsehood
╚═ ● 10 Jun – Tangent: Nicholas Hill
╚═ ● 10 Jun – Tangent: Robert Basset, Nicholas Hill, and the Lame Plot
╚═ ● 10 Jun – Tangent: Legends of the Fart
● 03 Jun – Stab Him, He’s a Murderer
A particular example of Stratfordian uncivility
● 02 Jun – Exeter Exegesis
The Exeter pedigree, from the 8th Marquess back to William Cecil
● 12 May – Henry IV and the Holy Grail
Monty Python mashes up 2H4 with their movie about King Arthur
● 08 May – Limerick 12: Limerical Ode to LCFC
A new poem about a football team, of all things
● 06 May – Let Him Die For’t
The Sonnets meet 3D printing
● 05 May – Limerick 11: Tweet Tweet
A short poem, but not short enough
● 02 May – Announcing #Oxford467
Advance notice for my 467th birthday
● 27 Apr – Tweeting the Sonnets: #Bard154
Joshua Gray’s project to convert my Sonnets to tweets
● 25 Apr – Two Gentlemen of Southeastern England
Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance discuss The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt
● 23 Apr – Four Centuries of Skonk
Connecting a modern work of postmodern fiction to the 400th anniversary of the death of Willy of Stratford
● 23 Apr – Limerick 8: Editorial: 400 Years of Undeath
An anti-commemorative poem for an over-commemorated day
● 02 Mar – Limerick 10: Hamlet’s Solimeriquy
Rewriting Hamlet’s soliloquy as a limerick
● 25 Feb – Limerick 9: All Good Writing Comes From Life
A new poem expressing my agreement with Red Smith
● 23 Feb – Two Palms Are Not Enough
The Stratford-on-Avon District Council commissions a fitting portrait
● 21 Feb – Sonnet 155: New Subject, Less Cryptic
My first new sonnet in a very long time
● 14 Feb – Limerick 6: A Love-ly Wish for Valentine’s Day
New poem for Valentine’s Day
● 13 Feb – Ophelia’s Little Valentine
Alex Epstein gets the point about Ophelia
● 11 Feb – Sonnet 73 and Limerick 5: Once in a While I Get Serious, Sort Of
Sonnet 73 as written, and rewritten as a limerick
● 10 Feb – Limerick 4: I’m a Ricardian At Heart
A short limerick about Richard III
● 08 Feb – Heads-Up on a Heads-Off
Mary Stuart’s execution and its place in the history of cinema
● 08 Feb – Limerick 2: Sui Generis My Foot
A new poem making an important point about talent
● 06 Feb – Limerick 1: 154 Sonnets Are Enough Already
A new poem about Henry VIII, my first real foray into limericks
● 25 Jan – What You Will, or What You Won’t
The satire in ‘Twelfth Night’ that almost nobody gets
● 20 Jan – Protesting Too Much
Why can’t Stratfordians take a joke?

2015

● 05 Nov – Why Macbeth Isn’t About the Gunpowder Plot of 1605
Correcting a temporal error
● 29 Oct – Hamlet and Executions
A little-known clue to the correct dating of ‘Hamlet’
● 01 Oct – I Didn’t Gild the Lily
Clarifying one of my most commonly misquoted phrases

TANGENTS AND PAGES AND POSTS, OH MY

Tangents and Pages expand on something in a Post that needed more space, when I didn’t want to digress inside the post itself. Posts are dated by WordPress, Tangents are usually dated by me to match the post they go with, and Pages rarely have dates at all. Now that everything is listed here and in the sidebar menu, the difference doesn’t matter much.

Undated pages found on the main menu bar aren’t listed here. The pages that accompany METAMETAMORPHOSES have their own index, so they aren’t here either.

Banner:
• Catalog room (detail) [cpl.org]
· Cleveland Ohio Public Library, 1955

VERO NIHIL VERIUS