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The Globe burned down during a Shakespeare play

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The Globe burned down during a Shakespeare play

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52 Random Facts about William Shakespeare | FactRetriever.com

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Shakespeare is credited with at least 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Learn more amazing facts about this master playwright in this William Shakespeare facts list!

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Shakespeare was born in the Julian Calendar instead of the Gregorian Calendar

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Shakespeare was born in the Julian Calendar instead of the Gregorian Calendar

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52 Random Facts about William Shakespeare | FactRetriever.com

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Shakespeare is credited with at least 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Learn more amazing facts about this master playwright in this William Shakespeare facts list!

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He caused an ecological disaster in New York

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He caused an ecological disaster in New York

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1

One of the most curious facts about William Shakespeare is that his name can be reshuffled to create the sentence 'I am a weakish speller'. We might wish for a more heroic anagram for one of our nation's greatest playwrights, but unfortunately 'I am a weakish speller' does in fact ring true when applied to Shakespeare.

It was a man named Donald L Holmes who first discovered the anagram, possibly while musing about the frivolity of early modern orthography (the art of writing words with the proper letters). Shakespeare was writing in the era before Samuel Johnson's dictionary - which started the process of standardising English spelling - so he was rather relaxed about words. Indeed, he could not even decide how to spell his own name. Consider the following variants on his signature when he was finalising legal documents such as the mortgage deeds on property in Blackfriars, and his will: Shaksper, Shakespe, Shakespere, and Shakspeare.

See also the spelling in the 1599 edition of Romeo and Juliet:
Two households, both alike in dignitie,
(In faire Verona where we lay our Scene),
From auncient grudge, break to new mutinie,
Where civill bloud makes civill hands uncleane.

2

Nobody really knows how young Shakespeare made his way from his childhood home of Stratford-upon-Avon to the bustle of Elizabethan London and playhouse glory. There are several theories about what he did when he first arrived in the capital, including the famous story that he was employed as a kind of valet - looking after playgoers' horses while they enjoyed the show. Whether or not this is true - and there is no reason why it should not be - we still don't know how Shakespeare was first introduced into theatrical society, or the circumstances in which he left Stratford.

The best theory I have heard involves two angry men and a sharp sword. It was the year 1587. The Queen's Men [a major acting company whose patron was Queen Elizabeth] were on a summer tour, bringing the latest hit plays to the provinces. Life on the road for a troupe of players cannot have been easy and tempers were beginning to fray. On the night of 13 June, the actor William Knell attacked his colleague John Towne with a sword. Towne fled but was cornered and struck back, inflicting a fatal stab wound on Knell.

The Queen's Men were now officially short-staffed. A few days later they arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon where fate may have united them with William Shakespeare. Nobody knows exactly how they first met, but Shakespeare would have seen the Queen's Men perform in Stratford.

3

Generations of Shakespeare biographers have portrayed Shakespeare's love life as being a rather colourful one. His purported lovers include figures such as Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton; a brothel keeper called Lucy Morgan, and the courtier Emilia Lanier.

Emilia is one of the candidates for Shakespeare's 'dark lady', that shadowy figure who inspired some of his most passionate sonnets. Lanier was a poet in her own right, producing some of the earliest feminist work in the English language. With titles including Eve's Apologie in Defence of Women, she exposes double standards, asking mutinously: "Why are poore women blam'd, or by more faultie men defam'd?"
Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour
As husbands have.
Some scholars believe that Shakespeare had Lanier in mind when he wrote the character Emilia in Othello. Indeed, Emilia has some of the most feminist lines in the whole of Shakespeare:

Emilia Lanier's father was also a Venetian, so it may not be a coincidence that Othello is partially set in Venice.

4

If Shakespeare knew how far his work has travelled in the 400 years since his death, he would be amazed. His original audiences included people from all walks of life, from kings and queens to prostitutes and fish mongers, but they all had one thing in common: the English language. Shakespeare was writing in the Elizabethan 'golden age' of exploration, but his world was essentially limited to the confines of our island.

Like the English language itself, Shakespeare's work has since broken free of its restraints to travel across the globe - and even beyond. In 2000, Star Trek fans produced a translation of Hamlet in Klingon, in an effort to restore Shakespeare to its 'original' language. The Prince of Denmark begins his most famous speech not with "to be or not to be", but with "taH pagh taHbe". Unsurprisingly, most people prefer the earthling version and the Klingon Hamlet is rarely, if ever, performed.

Shakespeare has also been translated into Esperanto, the artificial language based on the structure of major European tongues. Translations include Reĝo Lear, Rikardo Tria and La Komedio de Eraroj.

It should also be remembered that Shakespeare himself enjoyed languages and wrote a whole scene in French for the play Henry V.

5

At some point, William's younger brother Edmund followed him down to London. Edmund is one of those intriguing characters in history whose name appears in one or two documents and then disappears from view. We have therefore only the barest details of his short life, but with a bit of imagination it is just about possible to sketch an idea of who he was.

Born in 1580, Edmund lived in the Cripplegate area of London, just outside the city walls. It was a short stroll away from William's lodgings on Silver Street, so the two brothers would have found it easy to maintain contact with each other. Yet despite the proximity of their lodgings and Edmund's profession as an actor, there is no record that the pair ever worked together. While William was forging a dazzling career at the Globe on Bankside, it is likely that Edmund worked with Edward Alleyn at the Fortune near Shoreditch.

The year 1607 was bitter-sweet for the Shakespeare clan. Edmund fathered an illegitimate son, baptised Edward, but sadly the infant died and Edmund followed him to the grave months later aged 27. We do not know how he died but William ensured he was buried with dignity at the church of St Saviour's (now Southwark Cathedral).

6

Although he showed off his French skills in Henry V, Shakespeare was sparing when it came to the use of Latin. With such diverse audiences, he needed to ensure that everyone could understand what was going on in his plays. His friend and rival Ben Jonson scattered Latin liberally throughout his own plays and sneered that Shakespeare had "small Latin and little Greek". Jonson's slur was not entirely correct, however. Witness Shakespeare's use of the word honorificabilitudinitatibus in the play Love's Labour's Lost. The Collins English Dictionary definition of the word is "invincible glorious honorableness. It is the ablative plural of the Latin contrived honorificabilitudinitas ..."

The word is spoken by the clown Costard in a scene that contains plenty of jokes about unnecessary wordiness: "I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitundinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon."

It was a comic scene and precedes one in which several characters try out their Latin on each other and make fun of Armado for his over-blown speech patterns. It is tempting to imagine the Latin-mad Ben Jonson seeing his reflection in Armado.

7

Zoe Bramley is the author of William Shakespeare in 100 Facts (Amberley Publishing, 2016).
Shakespeare may be wildly popular all over the world but there was a time when the people of New York may have cursed his name. In 1890 a German-American named Eugene Scheiffelin took the extraordinary step of importing 60 starlings from England to New York (and a further 40 the following year). As an avid Shakespeare fan and zoologist it was Scheiffelin's dream for America to be the home of each bird species featured in the works of the bard. As well as the romance of bringing a little bit of England to New York, Scheiffelin wanted to see if non-native species could thrive there, so duly released the starlings into Central Park.

Unfortunately for the American eco-system the starlings thrived a little too well and bred rapidly, out-competing the local fauna for food and habitat. It is currently one of only three birds in the US not afforded any state protection (the other two being the house sparrow and the pigeon) and is treated as a pest. Ironically, the starling only appears in one line in the whole of Shakespeare. In the play Henry IV, Part I, Hotspur fantasises about using one of them to plague his enemy: "Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but 'Mortimer', and give it him to keep his anger still in motion."

This article was first published by History Extra in April 2016

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7 things you (probably) didn't know about William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare lived through one of the most turbulent yet thrilling eras of English history - a period of plague, riots and political and religious tensions - and went on to become one of history's most famous playwrights.

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23 Things You Didn't Know About William Shakespeare

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The Bard would have been 450 today. Here's some stuff you might not know, via NoSweatShakespeare.com

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William Shakespeare invented the word "assassination"

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William Shakespeare invented the word "assassination"

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William Shakespeare facts are few and far between. While we know alot about the playwright's works, Shakespeare facts concerning the Bard's personal life are less forthcoming.

Nobody knows Shakespeare's true birthday. The closest we can come is the date of his baptism on April the 26th, 1564. By tradition and guesswork, William is assumed to have been born three days earlier on April the 23rd, a date now commonly used to celebrate the famous Bard's birthday.

The Bard coined the phrase, "the beast with two backs" meaning intercourse in his play Othello.

Shakespeare invented the word "assassination".

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 married a woman nearly twice his age. Anne Hathaway was 26 years old when William married her at age 18. They married at Temple Grafton, a village approximately five miles (8 km) from Stratford. Anne Hathaway was said to be from Shottery.

Shakespeare and wife had eight children, including daughter Susanna, twins Hamnet, Judith, and Edmund. Susanna received most of the Bard's fortune when he died in 1616, age 52. Hamnet died at age 11, Judith at 77. Susanna dies in 1649, age 66.

There were two Shakespeare families living in Stratford when William was born; the other family did not become famous.

Shakespeare, one of literature's greatest figures, never attended university.

Of the 154 sonnets or poems, the playwright penned, his first 26 were said to be directed to an aristocratic young man who did not want to marry. Sonnets 127 - 152 talk about a dark woman, the Bard seems to have had mixed feelings for.

Most academics agree that William wrote his first play, Henry VI, Part One around 1589 to 1590 when he would have been roughly 25 years old.

The Bard is believed to have started writing the first of his 154 sonnets in 1593 at age 29. His first sonnet was Venus and Adonis published in the same year.

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 that has been credited to the Bard and which was performed in his life, has been completely lost to time. Today we have no written record of it's story whatsoever.

The Great Bard suffered breech of copyright. In 1609, many of his sonnets were published without the bard's permission.

The famous playwright died in 1616 at the age of 52. He wrote on average 1.5 plays a year since he first started in 1589. His last play The Two Noble Kinsmen is reckoned to have been written in 1613 when he was 49 years old.

William never published any of his plays. We read his plays today only because his fellow actors John Hemminges and Henry Condell, posthumously recorded his work as a dedication to their fellow actor in 1623, publishing 36 of William's plays. This collection known as The First Folio is the source from which all published Shakespeare books are derived and is an important proof that he authored his plays.

William was born to a Stratford tanner named John Shakespeare. His mother Mary was the daughter of a wealthy gentleman-farmer named Robert Arden.

Legend has it that at the tender age of eleven, William watched the pageantry associated with Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth Castle near Stratford and later recreated this scene many times in his plays.

Unlike most famous artists of his time, the Bard did not die in poverty. When he died, his will contained several large holdings of land.

Few people realize that aside from writing 37 plays and composing 154 sonnets, William was also an actor who performed many of his own plays as well as those of other playwrights (Ben Jonson).

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.

Will wrote lewd comments about woman. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's nurse crudely tells Juliet"thou (you) wilt (will) fall backward when thou (you) hast (have) more wit" (Act I, Scene III, Line 41), by which she means Juliet will learn to fall or lie on her back (have sex) when she is older.

The Bard crudely discusses genitalia size in The Taming of the Shrew where the character Curtis tells Grumio,"Away, you three-inch fool" (Act IV, Scene I, Lines 26-28). Grumio banally replies that he is at least as long as his foot.

Will dabbled in property development. At age 18, he bought the second most prestigious property in all of Stratford, The New Place and later he doubled his investment on some land he bought near Stratford.

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.

William's 126th poem contains a farewell, to "my lovely boy" a phrase taken to imply possible homosexuality by some postmodern Shakespeare academics.

The Bard's will gave most of his property to Susanna, his first child and not to his wife Anne Hathaway. Instead his loyal wife infamously received his "second-best bed".

The Bard's second best bed wasn't so bad, it was his marriage bed; his best bed was for guests.

Until The First Folio was published seven years after his death in 1616, very little personal information was ever written about the Bard..

William was known as a keen businessman to many in his home town of Stratford.

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).

Racism crops up frequently in the Bard's work. In Othello, the lead character , a Moor of African descent, is continuously insulted for his heritage and appearance (especially in Act I) by his enemies and even his supporters (Lodovico) at the play's conclusion when Othello murders his wife for mistakenly believing she cheated. Racism also occurs in Titus Andronicus (towards the Moor named Aaron), The Tempest where the misformed giant Caliban is called"this thing of darkness" (Act V, Line 275), and in Richard II.

Anti-Semitism also crops up. The Jewish moneylender Shylock in the Merchant of Venice is portrayed as greedy and calculating. At the play's conclusion he is forced to change religion to Christianity as punishment for wanting "a pound of flesh" from Antonio who agreed to this if his friend forfeited a debt to Shylock. Being a Jew is used as a curse in Henry the First, Part Two (Act II, Scene IV, Line 178), in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act II, Scene V, Line 53), The Merchant of Venice, Anthony and Cleopatra, Much Ado about Nothing , Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The Bard's characters frequently debase those of colored skin. In Love's Labour's Lost, the character King Ferdinand, King of Navarre, racially remarks that"Black is the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons and the scowl of night" (Act IV, Scene III, Lines 254-255).

William was popular with King James I. England's ruler following Elizabeth I was so taken with the Bard's skill that he gave his acting company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men a patent allowing them to perform and also made these actors Grooms of Chamber. The Bard returned the favor by renaming his company, The King's Men. This title made William a favorite for Court performances and made him a favorite with the new King of England.

William Shakespeare is one of the most identifiable icons of England. Others include members of England's Royal family, Westminister Abbey, Big Ben, and red double-decker buses.

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shakespeare fact william shakespeare facts trivia will birthday education

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William Shakespeare facts are few and far between. While we know alot about the playwright's works, Shakespeare facts concerning the Bard's personal life are less forthcoming. Nobody knows Shakespeare's true birthday. The closest we can come is the date of his baptism on April the 26th, 1564.

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Shakespeare was 18 when he got married and his wife was 26

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Shakespeare was 18 when he got married and his wife was 26

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I can't promise I won't be posting new Twenty Things... lists throughout this week. We're all about breadth of knowledge here on PW Homeschooling! No depth...just breadth. That's my motto.

Okay, so it's not really my motto. As far as you know.

I also can't promise some of these facts (and those from all Twenty Things... posts) won't show up in a possible Smartypants quiz

Let's learn more about Slick Willie, also known as The Bard!

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.

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I can't promise I won't be posting new Twenty Things... lists throughout this week. We're all about breadth of knowledge here on PW Homeschooling! No depth...just breadth. That's my motto. Okay, so it's not really my motto. As far as you know. I also can't promise some of these facts (and those from all Twenty Things...

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Shakespeare has ´´disappeared´´ for 7 years

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Shakespeare has ´´disappeared´´ for 7 years

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1. Shakespeare's father held a lot of different jobs, and at one point got paid to drink beer.

The son of a tenant farmer, John Shakespeare was nothing if not upwardly mobile. He arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1551 and began dabbling in various trades, selling leather goods, wool, malt and corn. In 1556 he was appointed the borough's official "ale taster," meaning he was responsible for inspecting bread and malt liquors. The next year he took another big step up the social ladder by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic farmer who happened to be his father's former boss. John later became a moneylender and held a series of municipal positions, serving for some time as the mayor of Stratford. In the 1570s he fell into debt and ran into legal problems for reasons that remain unclear.

2. Shakespeare married an older woman who was three months pregnant at the time.

In November 1582, 18-year-old William wed Anne Hathaway, a farmer's daughter eight years his senior. Instead of the customary three times, the couple's intention to marry was only announced at church once-evidence that the union was hastily arranged because of Anne's eyebrow-raising condition. Six months after the wedding, the Shakespeares welcomed a daughter, Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Little is known about the relationship between William and Anne, besides that they often lived apart and he only bequeathed her his "second-best bed" in his will.

3. Shakespeare's parents were probably illiterate, and his children almost certainly were.

Nobody knows for sure, but it's quite likely that John and Mary Shakespeare never learned to read or write, as was often the case for people of their standing during the Elizabethan era. Some have argued that John's civic duties would have required basic literacy, but in any event he always signed his name with a mark. William, on the other hand, is thought to have Stratford's local grammar school, where he would likely have mastered reading and Latin. His wife and their two children who lived to adulthood, Susanna and Judith, are thought to have been illiterate, though Susanna could scrawl her signature.

4. Nobody knows what Shakespeare did between 1585 and 1592.

To the dismay of his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from the historical record between 1585, when his twins' baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as an "upstart crow." The insult suggests he'd already made a name for himself on the London stage by then. What did the newly married father and future literary icon do during those seven "lost" years? Historians have speculated that he worked as a schoolteacher, studied law, traveled across continental Europe or joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a local politician's estate.

5. Shakespeare's plays feature the first written instances of hundreds of familiar terms.

William Shakespeare is believed to have influenced the English language more than any other writer in history, coining-or, at the very least, popularizing-terms and phrases that still regularly crop up in everyday conversation. Examples include the words "fashionable" ("Troilus and Cressida"), "sanctimonious" ("Measure for Measure"), "eyeball" ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") and "lackluster" ("As You Like It"); and the expressions "foregone conclusion" ("Othello"), "in a pickle" ("The Tempest"), "wild goose chase" ("Romeo and Juliet") and "one fell swoop" ("Macbeth"). He is also credited with inventing the given names Olivia, Miranda, Jessica and Cordelia, which have become common over the years (as well as others, such as Nerissa and Titania, which have not).

6. We probably don't spell Shakespeare's name correctly-but he may not have either.

Sources from William Shakespeare's lifetime spell his last name in more than 80 different ways, ranging from "Shappere" to "Shaxberd." In the handful of signatures that have survived, the Bard's name is never spelled "William Shakespeare." Instead, there are variations and abbreviations such as "Willm Shakp," "Willm Shakspere" and "William Shakspeare" instead. However it's spelled, Shakespeare is thought to derive from the Old English words "schakken" ("to brandish") and "speer" ("spear"), and probably referred to a confrontational or argumentative person.

7. Shakespeare's epitaph wards off would-be grave robbers with a curse.

William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, at the age of 52-not bad for an era when the average life expectancy ranged between 30 and 40 years. We may never know what killed him, although an acquaintance wrote that the Bard fell ill after a night of heavy drinking with fellow playwright Ben Jonson. Despite his swift demise, Shakespeare supposedly had the wherewithal to pen the epitaph over his tomb, which is located inside a Stratford church. Intended to thwart the numerous grave robbers who plundered England's cemeteries at the time, the verse reads: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare, / To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones." It must have done the trick, since Shakespeare's remains have yet to be disturbed.

8. Shakespeare wore a gold hoop earring-or so we think.

Our notion of William Shakespeare's appearance comes from several 17th-century portraits that may or may not have been painted while the Bard himself sat behind the canvas. In one of the most famous depictions, known as the Chandos portrait after its onetime owner, the subject has a full beard, a receding hairline, loosened shirt-ties and a shiny gold hoop dangling from his left ear. Even back in Shakespeare's time, earrings on men were trendy hallmarks of a bohemian lifestyle, as evidenced by images of other Elizabethan artists. The fashion may have been inspired by sailors, who sported a single gold earring to cover funeral costs in case they died at sea.

9. North America's 200 million starlings have Shakespeare to thank for their existence.

William Shakespeare's works contain more than 600 references to various types of birds, from swans and doves to sparrows and turkeys. The starling-a lustrous songbird with a gift for mimicry, native to Europe and western Asia-makes just one appearance, in "Henry IV, Part 1." In 1890 an American "bardolator" named Eugene Schiffelin decided to import every kind of bird mentioned in Shakespeare's oeuvre but absent from the United States. As part of this project, he released two flocks of 60 starlings in New York's Central Park. One hundred twenty years later, the highly adaptable species has taken over the skies, becoming invasive and driving some native birds to the brink of extinction.

10. Some people think Shakespeare was a fraud.

How did a provincial commoner who had never gone to college or ventured outside Stratford become one of the most prolific, worldly and eloquent writers in history? Even early in his career, Shakespeare was spinning tales that displayed in-depth knowledge of international affairs, European capitals and history, as well as familiarity with the royal court and high society. For this reason, some theorists have suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true identity used the person of William Shakespeare as a front. Proposed candidates include Edward De Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Mary Sidney Herbert. Most scholars and literary historians remain skeptical about this hypothesis, although many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.

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10 Things You Didn't Know About William Shakespeare | HISTORY

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Explore fascinating facts about the life and legacy of England's famous and mysterious Bard.

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Suicide happens 13 times in shakespeare´s  plays

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Suicide happens 13 times in shakespeare´s  plays

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Looking for facts about Shakespeare? Read our 56 facts about William Shakespeare to understand his life and works. Parents: John and Mary Shakespeare. Born: