1. William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but his exact birthdate is unknown. He was baptized on April 26 of that year, so his birth would have been shortly before.
2. Shakespeare did not go to college.
3. Shakespeare was eighteen when he married Anne Hathaway in 1582. She was 26 and expecting his baby. SCANDAL! The couple had a baby girl, then had twins, a boy and a girl, in 1584.
4. Sometime in the mid 1580’s, Shakespeare moved to London from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon.
5. Almost no information exists about Shakespeare’s activities from the time he moved to London to 1592, when he was described as an up-and-coming playwright in the London theater scene. Because of this, the years 1585 to 1592 are called “the lost years”.
6. According to reports, Shakespeare wrote quickly and with ease; Fellow playwright Ben Jonson said “Whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.”
7. Because of the plague outbreak in Europe, all London playhouses were closed between 1592 and 1594 because it was thought that crowded places helped facilitate the spread of the disease.
8. During this period, because there was no demand for Shakespeare’s plays, he began to write poetry.
9. In 1594, Shakespeare became one of the founders of Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting/theater group that soon became the leading player’s company in London.
10. In 1597, the theater in which The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed was forced to close since it had been built on leased land. Many partners invested in a new theater built on the south bank of the Thames river. The new theater was called The Globe.
11. Plays were performed only in the afternoon, by daylight.
12. Laws at the time prohibited people from dressing above their rank in life. Players (actors) were the only exception to this rule, and could dress as noblemen on stage without being arrested and locked in the stocks.
13. Women were not allowed to act in plays during Shakespeare’s time, so in all of his plays, women’s roles were performed by boys/young men. (This meant that in As You Like It, the boy player had to play Rosalind, a woman who pretends to be a man pretending to be…a woman! [If I described that correctly, someone bring me a doughnut.)
14. Though the printing press existed and books were being mass-produced all over Europe, Shakespeare had little interest in seeing his plays in print. He’d written them not to be read, but to be performed on stage.
15. Because they were often hastily written for performance on stage, none of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts exist.
16. Shakespeare returned to Stratford after he finished work on The Tempest, in 1611.
17. He died in 1616. The words “Curst be he that moves my bones” were inscribed on his grave.
18. Seven years after his death, some of Shakespeare’s fellow players published Shakespeare’s plays in a single volume, called First Folio. They wrote that their intention was “only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend, and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare.”
19. The following commonly used phrases are thought to be originally coined by William Shakespeare (many say these combinations of words did not appear in print before Shakespeare’s works):
All that glitters is not gold
All’s well that ends well
Bated breath
Dead as a doornail
Fancy-free
Fool’s paradise
For goodness’ sake
Good riddance
Heart of gold
In a pickle
Knock knock! Who’s there?
Laughing stock
Love is blind
Naked truth
Neither rhyme nor reason
One fell swoop
Star-crossed lovers
Pomp and circumstance
Pound of flesh
Primrose path
Too much of a good thing
Wear my heart upon my sleeve
What’s in a name?
Wild goose chase
The world’s my oyster
20. Shakespeare’s was said to have an extensive vocabular; his works contained more than 30,000 different words.
