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William Shakespeare had red hair and spelt his surname eleven different ways.
Several people have left bits of their own bodies as bequests. Juan Potomachi gave 200,000 pesos to the Teatro Dramatico in Buenos Aires in 1955 on the sole condition that his skull be preserved and used as Yorick in Hamlet. Oddly enough, this desire for a posthumous stage career had already occurred once before, when John Reed, a nineteenth-century gaslighter at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, similarly willed that his head be severed from his corpse and prepared for the same role.
The Winter’s Tale, by W. Shakespeare; Act 3, Scene 3: Bohemia, a desert country near the sea. Enter Antigonus with a Child and a Mariner.
Antigonus: "Thou art perfect, then, our ship hath touch’d upon the deserts of Bohemia?"
Well no, actually. The Bard hath made a geographic slip. Bohemia lieth totally inland. The nearest coast is eight-score miles away.
The only heavyweight boxing champion ever to have lectured on Shakespeare at Yale University was Gene Tunney.
Miguel de Cervantes – considered by some as Spain’s equivalent of the Bard – died on the same day as Shakespeare: 23 April 1616.
“Let the sky rain potatoes”, exclaims Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (Act V, Scene 5). But at the time the play was set, the potato had not yet been imported into Europe from Peru.
“God’s body,” exclaims First Carrier in Henry IV, Part One, act II, scene ii, “the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved”.
That was another of the Bard’s little anachronisms, for the action takes place almost a century before the discovery of America, whence came the first turkeys to Europe.
In 1890, Eugene Scheillfin began a project to introduce into America all birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare. The starling occurs only once (Henry IV, Part One, act I, scene iii; Hotspur: “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak …”). Starlings were consequently set loose in New York’s Central Park and now there are millions all over America.
Until 1660 all women’s parts in the English theatre were played by men. The first major performance by a woman on the London stage was that of Margaret Hughes, on 8 December 1660, in the role of Desdemona in Othello, played in Clare Market. In 1899 Sarah Bernhardt pushed forward new frontiers by playing the role of Hamlet.
It was impossible to hurry before the time of Shakespeare. The best one could do when pushed for time was to make haste, since Shakespeare’s writings are the first recorded instance of the verb ‘to hurry’.
Source: The Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopaedia, Bill Hartston and Jill Dawson, George Unwin & Allen, 1984
The first all-amateur company to have staged all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays was The Southsea Shakespeare Actors, Hampshire, Great Britain (founded 1947) in October 1966 when, under K. Edmonds Gateley, they presented Cymbeline.
The longest Shakespeare play is Hamlet with 4,042 lines and 29,551 words. Of Shakespeare’s 1,277 speaking parts, the longest is Hamlet with 11,610 words.
Source: Guinness World Records
Few of us use more than a fraction of the vast number of words which English possesses. Even Shakespeare had a written vocabulary of at most 30,000 worlds – though in the 16th and 17th centuries the language was much smaller than it is today. Chaucer, some 200 years earlier, employed only 8,000 different words in his writing. A competent modern novelist has a written vocabulary of between 10,000 and 15,000 words. James Joyce in Ulysses used 30,000. Among the rest of us a vocabulary of 20,000 words is considered good, and the average in nearer to 10,000.
Source: Oddities in Words, Pictures and Figures, The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, 1975
All Uranus' satellites are named after Shakespearean characters.
Shakespeare's tombstone in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church bears this inscription, said to have been written by him: “Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blest be the man that spares these stones, and curst be he that moves my bones”.
The animal world is well represented in Shakespeare's works. Over 3,000 references to some 180 difference species of animals, both real and imaginary, have been identified in the plays. Everything from simple country wildlife (birds, bats, hedgehogs, insects, wild boar and deer) to more exotic species: rhinoceros, tiger, elephant and bear, as well as the mythical unicorn, phoenix, and dragon.
The words "assassination” and "bump" were invented by Shakespeare. If you say "laugh it off" you are also quoting Shakespeare. Other inventions included 'puke' and 'bedroom'.
Source: comedy-zone.net
There are only two authentic portraits of William today; the widely used engraving of William Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout first published on the title page of the 1623 First Folio and the monument of the great playwright in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.
William lived through the Black Death. This epidemic that killed over 33,000 in London alone in 1603 when Will was 39, later returned in 1608.
The Bard lost a play. The play Cardenio, which has been credited to Shakespeare and which was performed in his life, has been completely lost to time. Today we have no written record of its story whatsoever.
As an actor performing his own plays, William performed before Queen Elizabeth I and later before James I who was an enthusiastic patron of his work.
Even Shakespeare had his critics. One called Robert Greene described the young playwright as an "upstart young crow" or arrogant upstart, accusing him of borrowing ideas from his seniors in the theatre world for his own plays.
Suicide occurs an unlucky thirteen times in Shakespeare’s plays. It occurs in Romeo and Juliet where both Romeo and Juliet commit suicide, in Julius Caesar where both Cassius and Brutus die by consensual stabbing, as well as Brutus’ wife Portia, in Othello where Othello stabs himself, in Hamlet where Ophelia is said to have "drowned" in suspicious circumstances, in Macbeth when Lady Macbeth dies, and finally in Antony and Cleopatra where suicide occurs an astounding five times (Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Charmian, Iras and Eros).
Source: absoluteshakespeare.com
Some of the most famous words in English literature come from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
"To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
One of the finest anagrams (a word or phrase made by using the letters of another word or phrase in a different order) in the English language can be made from this sentence:
"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."
Source: WordSmith.org
The following are all anagrams of "William Shakespeare":
I am a weakish speller.
I'll make a wise phrase.
Hear me as I will speak.
I shape warlike males.
We all make his praise
Other Shakespeare-related anagrams:
"William Shakespeare, The Bard of Avon" = "Abrasive alpha male of the worse kind!"
"William Shakespeare, The Bard of Avon" = "He of silken phrase, at a live drama. Bow."
"'Romeo and Juliet' by W. Shakespeare" = "Said, 'Weep my jealous broken heart!'"
"The Royal Shakespeare Company" = "Ahoy, actors, speak! Men play here!"
'"'Britain's a world by itself': Shakespeare" = "How literary Bard speaks befits an isle"
Source: Anagram Genius
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