• There is no certainty that Shakespeare was born on 23 April in 1564, only that he was baptized three days later in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon.
• In the Middle East, Shakespeare is referred to as Sheikh al-Subair, meaning Sheikh ‘Prickly Pear’ in Arabic.
• The Bard coined the phrase ‘the beast with two backs’ meaning intercourse in Othello.
• Shakespeare invented the word ‘assassination’.
• There are only two authentic portraits of William Shakespeare.
• Anne Hathaway was 26 years old when William married her at age 18.
• All Uranus’s satellites are named after Shakespearean characters.
• Shakespeare and his wife had eight children.
• The worst insult that Shakespeare used was ‘you bull’s pizzle’.
• At nearly 1,500 lines, Hamlet is the largest Shakespearean speaking part.
• Most Shakespeare plays employ verse and prose. But, while no play is composed entirely of prose, five plays are written exclusively in verse.
• In the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I outlawed wife-beating after 10 p.m.
• Theatres during Elizabethan times did not have toilets, nor did the plays have intervals. Although the running times of the plays were often much shorter than they are today, audience members still felt the need to relieve themselves.
• The average American’s vocabulary is around 10,000 words Shakespeare had a vocabulary of over 29,000 words.
• William Shakespeare’s will is now available to the public to read online, nearly 400 years after the great playwright put quill to paper.
• There were two Shakespeare families living in Stratford when William was born; the other family did not become famous.
• The Bard crudely discusses genitalia size in The Taming of the Shrew where the character Curtis tells Grumio, ‘Away, you three-inch fool.’
• William Shakespeare 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.
• Shakespeare, one of literature’s greatest figures, never attended university.
• 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.
• William lived through the Black Death. The epidemic that killed over 33,000 in London alone in 1603 when Will was 39 later returned in 1608.
• Elizabethan theatres would raise a flag outside to indicate what the day’s feature would be: a black flag indicated tragedy; a red, history; a white, comedy.
• The play Cardenio that has been credited to the Bard and which was performed in his life has been completely lost to time.
• Until The First Folio was published seven years after his death in 1616, very little personal information was ever written about the Bard.
• 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.
• Shakespeare’s tombstone bears this inscription: ‘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 Great Bard suffered breach of copyright. In 1609, many of his sonnets were published without his permission.
• The famous playwright died in 1616 at the age of 52. He wrote on average 1.5 plays a year from when he first started in 1589.
• 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.
• 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.
• When reading horizontally from Shakespeare’s original published copy of Hamlet, the furthest left-hand side reads ‘I am a homosexual’ in the last 14 lines of the book.
• Many expressions now taken for granted in English first appeared in Shakespeare’s works, including ‘elbow room’, ‘love letter’, ‘marriage bed’, ‘puppy dog’, ‘skim milk’, ‘wild goose chase’ and ‘what the dickens’.
• None of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays smokes.
• Suicide occurs an unlucky 13 times in Shakespeare’s plays.
• For centuries, English literary critics tried to disguise the fact that Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to a male beloved. His Sonnet 126 contains a farewell to ‘my lovely boy’, a phrase now taken to imply possible homosexuality by some postmodern Shakespeare academics.
• Some believe that Hamlet, written in 1599, registers Shakespeare’s grief following the death of Hamnet, his boy twin, in 1596, at the age of 11.
• 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 11, William watched the pageantry associated with Queen Elizabeth I’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. He left most of his property to Susanna, his first child, and not to his wife Anne Hathaway.
• 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.
• 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.
• Of the 17,677 words that Shakespeare uses in his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, his is the first written use of over 1,700 of them.
• In the 1500s, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide their body odour. Hence, the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
• Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burned bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle and guests got the top, or ‘upper crust’.
• Houses had thatched roofs, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm. When it rained, it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip off the roof. Hence the saying ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’.
• Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach on to the food, causing lead poisoning death.