As another year comes to a close I thought it would be fun to go back and pick the biggest posts of 2013.  I’m happy to discover that the top 5 are, in fact, original content produced by Bardfilm and myself.

I’m presenting these in chronological order, because the older a post is the more chance it’s had to get traffic (so it’s not really fair to compare a January piece to a November one).

January 24, 2013  
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare — in Haiku
This piece is amazing because when he said Complete, he meant it.  KJ does a haiku rendition of 39 Shakespeare plays.  We should print and bind this.

February 14, 2013
Shakespearean Pickup Lines for Valentine’s Day
We all know that Shakespeare wrote the best wedding quotes, but you can’t just jump to the end of the story!  What about the pickup line that gets you started?  Shakespeare’s still your wing man.


February 22, 2013
Shakespearean Hip-Hop Lyrics
The trickiest part of this mashup is deciding on a genre of hip-hop!  It has been around for a little while, and changed quite a bit over the decades.


May 8, 2013
Most Popular Shakespeare Tattoos
I’d always wanted to do a gallery post, and this was my chance. 

July 30, 2013
Game of Thrones? That’s cute.
When I saw that someone had do a meme where all the Star Wars characters say patronizing things to Game of Thrones characters (well, and vice versa) I knew I had to mash it up with Shakespeare. I think my job was far more difficult, though – it’s not like Viola from Twelfth Night is instantly recognizable like, oh, Darth Vader.

Which portrait is your favorite?  It seems like Droeshout and Chandos always get the love, but there are quite a few more contenders : Cobbe, Flowers, Sanders?

Well, the Sanders portrait is changing ownership.

The portrait – an oil on two joined oak panels named after its likely creator, John Sanders (1559-1643), Mr. Sullivan’s great grandfather 13 generations removed and a Shakespeare associate in London – was first brought to international attention by The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen in a front-page story in May, 2001. 

Mr. Sullivan, who inherited the portrait in the early 1970s from his dying mother in Montreal, began to try to confirm its authenticity in the early 1990s and to date has spent more than $1-million in the effort.

Anybody on the “Sanders is the only portrait painted from life” side?  Other than the guy with the direct family connection, who is not shy about talking up how important it is for Canada to have a Shakespeare portrait, what’s the “mounting evidence” they mention in the article?

You’ve probably heard the news that a Shakespeare in Love sequel that’s coming now that Miramax and the Weinstein Company are doing business together again. “The new venture will get off the ground quickly with sequels to the Best Picture Oscar winner Shakespeare In Love
and Rounders…” the article reads.  What “quickly” means in moviemaking time, I don’t know.

What I’m curious about is whether we could write the plot for this one. What stage of Shakespeare’s life do you think they’ll cover?

I ask, because we covered this exact topic in 2010.  Miramax always planned to do a sequel.  I guess business got in the way.  So this week’s news isn’t so much about a new project, as it is getting an old project back on track.

Some ideas that came up in the original thread…

* Do the Dark Lady / Sonnets storyline.

* Late career, while he’s writing The Tempest

* Do something around Falstaff

* Make the whole story about his daughter Susannah

Seriously, go back and read the original thread, there’s genius ideas in there.  How crazy would it be if one of our ideas takes off?

For those of you using the Google Chrome browser, David Fisco just sent me his game “Rote Shakespeare“. It’s a plug-in (why he wrote it as a plug-in I have no idea?) memorization game where you get a passage from the play of your choice, where one of the lines is left out and the words scrambled for you.  Click to put them back in order. There’s no timer, which I prefer, though it does count how many times you tried to get it right and always resets you as soon as you get a word wrong (which makes it easier, because you know exactly which words you got right and can just do process of elimination).

Fun game, and I like how you can zero in on the characters that you want (so you’re not accidentally handed some random spear-carrier’s line to remember).  I don’t think it has anything to do with rote memorization, though.  Unscrambling the words is actually a distraction from remembering what the line is in the context it’s given.

I’m just not sure where the plug-in thing fits.  I think it’s more of a “Chrome App”, which is fine, but I’m confused about how to install and run it if I ever want to find it again.