I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
Some explanation may be due. Back in the day, I did readthroughs with a group of people who, over the course of a number of years, worked their way through the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays. Doing this sort of thing is a) awesome, b) inculcates a certain amount of Shakespeare geekery, and c) gives one a strong sense that sometimes the great bard liked to reuse a plot point or two. So I thought I’d have a go at trying to condense down some of those reusable plot points into a sort of flowchart, vaguely based around the idea of asking Shakespeare for advice on your play-like dilemmas. I don’t claim to have shoehorned in every plot point he ever wrote, but there is at least one plot point from all the plays here. Including some of the ‘maybe Shakespeare contributed 5 lines of verse in act 4’ plays.
The click for bigness aspect here is complicated. Tumblr resizes stuff to 1280px wide, which is big enough to read, well, most of it. So click on the image for a a mostly readable version. If you want a fully readable version, I’ve put one up here (edit: on imgur as fluffhouse server no longer exists)
Reblogging the giant Shakespeare plots flowchart for Shakespeare’s birthday.
