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46 unusual facts about William Shakespeare


Ashorne

Some of the older thatched buildings in the village originate before the birth of William Shakespeare and one is of Medieval origin.

Ayodele Awojobi

It was during this period that he earned the nickname, "Macbeth": William Shakespeare’s famous play, Macbeth, was to be staged in the school.

Bear Lane

The poet and playwright William Davenant, a student of Lincoln College, was born here and William Shakespeare, Davenant's godfather, visited here.

Bidford-on-Avon

William Shakespeare is said to have joined a party of Stratford folk which set itself to outdrink a drinking club at Bidford-on-Avon, and as a result of his labours in that regard to have fallen asleep under the crab tree of which a descendant is still called Shakespeares tree.

Billesley, Warwickshire

Like many of the local churches, it is rumoured that William Shakespeare was a regular visitor, at least to the tiny churchyard that predates the later church.

Blackfriars Massacre

The Irish themed pub was named after Blackfriars which was mentioned in William Shakespeare's play Henry VIII.

Charles Southwell

After a lecture tour and a spell as a well-reviewed Shakespearean actor, Southwell launched the Lancashire Beacon in 1849, which also failed to last a full year.

Counts and Dukes of Alençon

His son, Jean, 2nd Duc d'Alençon (who features in Shakespeare's Henry VI), was dispossessed of his duchy in the Battle of Verneuil, August 17, 1424: the Duke was defeated and taken prisoner by English forces led by John, Duke of Bedford.

Court hand

In Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2 (written c.1591), Act 4, scene 2, Dick the Butcher says of Emmanuel, Clerk of Chatham, "He can make Obligations, and write court-hand."

Dam Dama Dam

Dam Dama Dam is a television show aired in 1998 on Zee TV, which is based on William Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

Duchess of Cornwall

Shakespeare's King Lear includes the character "Regan, Duchess of Cornwall", Lear's second daughter.

Edward J. Kuntze

Among his works are statuettes of William Shakespeare, Johann von Goethe, Washington Irving, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Abraham Lincoln; a statue of “Psyche,” one of “Columbia,” “Puck,” “Puck on Horseback,” and “Puck on the Warpath”; a bust of “Mirth”; “Merlin and Vivien,” in bas-relief; and many medallion portraits and busts.

Enslavement of Beauty

Lyrically, Enslavement of Beauty is highly influenced by the works of William Shakespeare and Marquis De Sade.

Lyrics by Ole Alexander Myrholt, except for "Sonnet #CXLIV" by William Shakespeare.

Eugène Green

Declamation of Jean de La Fontaine, Le chêne et le roseau ; Torquato Tasso, La mort de Clorinda (La Gerusalemme liberata); Théophile de Viau, La Mort de Pyrame ; William Shakespeare, The Death of Kings (Richard II), To be or not to be (Hamlet); Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Qu'est-ce que notre être (excerpt from Sermon sur la mort); Jean Racine, Je ne croiray point?

Film studies

In 1965, film critic Robin Wood, in his writings on Alfred Hitchcock, declared that Hitchcock's films contained the same complexities of Shakespeare's plays.

Grammatical conjugation

Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare as slightly archaic or more formal variants (I do, thou dost, she doth, typically used by nobility) of the modern forms.

Helsingør Municipality

Kronborg Castle, known internationally as the setting of William Shakespeare's theatre play Hamlet, is today the town's main tourist attraction.

Henrik Schück

He also wrote a series of biographies of historic figures including Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, Olaus Petri, King Gustav III as well as William Shakespeare.

How Like a Winter

The band's name is taken from the first line of William Shakespeare's sonnet XCVII:- "How like a winter hath my absence been".

I am Going to the Lordy

Sondheim has said that the use of the poem in the song was one of two times he has borrowed from another writer in his work, the other being lines from William Shakespeare's "Fear No More" in Cymbeline.

Jag Panzer

Jag Panzer sought to tackle more ambitious territory for their next album, with Thane to the Throne, a concept album about William Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Khalil Mutran

In 1912 he translated Shakespeare’s drama Othello into Arabic as Utayl, which is the most celebrated and best-known translation of the drama into Arabic.

Liane de Pougy

She preferred café-concerts and popular songs to William Shakespeare or Richard Wagner, and made minor appearances in the chorus of Folies-Bergere in Paris in St. Petersburg and cabaret clubs in Rome and the French Riviera.

Long Marston, Warwickshire

William Shakespeare is said to have joined a party of Stratford folk which set itself to outdrink a drinking club at Bidford­-on-Avon, and as a result of his labours in that regard to have fallen asleep under the crab tree of which a descendant is still called Shakespeare's tree.

Luddington, Warwickshire

The Cottage's front garden is shown on some maps to have been the original site of the church, where it is rumoured that the playwright and poet William Shakespeare may have married Anne Hathaway.

Merv Pumpkinhead

While his appearance can vary based on who is viewing him (for example, William Shakespeare saw a turnip-headed version of Merv in Sandman #75 (March 1996)), Merv is generally portrayed as having a pumpkin for a head.

Michał Elwiro Andriolli

Between 1883 and 1886, he lived in Paris, where he worked on illustrating the French language editions of works by William Shakespeare and James Fenimore Cooper.

Minack Theatre

In 1929, a local village group of players had staged Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a nearby meadow at Crean, repeating the production the next year.

Miranda, New South Wales

James Murphy, the manager of the Holt estate named the area after Miranda, a character in the William Shakespeare play The Tempest.

Mungo William MacCallum

Sir Mungo wrote a number of works of literary criticism on English and German literature, and is most notable for his work on Shakespeare.

Old Men Forget

The title is taken from a famous speech by the King in William Shakespeare's Henry V: "Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot/But he'll remember with advantages/What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,/Familiar in his mouth as household words,/Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,/Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,/Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd."

Olney Theatre Center for the Arts

2005 Olney Theatre Center opens its new amphitheater, the Root Family Stage at Will’s Place, finally giving a permanent home to its Summer Shakespeare Festival.

Orlando Reeves

An alternative explanation for the name is that one of the founders of the city was enamoured with Shakespeare, and named the city for the hero of As You Like It.

Polesworth

It is rumoured that William Shakespeare also spent some time as a fellow page boy here and they remained companions in adult life.

Richard the Second

Richard the Second is a 2001 American film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Richard II, directed by John Farrell.

Rock Island Public Library

The twelve authors carved into the sandstone are the last names of Homer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virgil, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Burns, Esaias Tegner, Alighieri Dante, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and George Bancroft.

Salford Priors

The village is eight miles from the popular tourist town of Stratford upon Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare and the River Avon runs near to it.

Sampieru Corsu

A modern legend holds this to have been partial inspiration for William Shakespeare's Othello.

Shakespeare Institute

The Shakespeare Institute is a centre for postgraduate study dedicated to the study of William Shakespeare and the literature of the English Renaissance.

Shottery

Shottery was the childhood home of Anne Hathaway, William Shakespeare's wife, and is the location of the building known as Anne Hathaway's Cottage which is a very popular tourist destination.

Soliloquy

The plays of William Shakespeare feature many soliloquies, the most famous being the "To be, or not to be" speech in Hamlet.

USS Ariel

Five ships of the United States Navy have been named Ariel, after the sprite Ariel in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

William Morrison, 1st Viscount Dunrossil

In Parliament he acquired the nickname "Shakes", from his habit of quoting from the works of William Shakespeare.

Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School

In 2008 it emerged that nine pupils had refused to sit a Key Stage 3 Shakespeare test on The Merchant of Venice because they felt the character of Shylock was antisemitic.

Zounds

The name of the band is derived from the old English minced oath coined by William Shakespeare: "zounds", which is a contraction of "God's wounds", referring to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ, formerly used as a mildly blasphemous oath.


1750 in literature

Old Orchard Street Theatre opens in Bath (England) under the management of John Palmer, with a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2.

20th Century Man

As the song progresses he criticizes modern art claiming he prefers time-honored masters such as William Shakespeare, Rembrandt van Rijn, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Gainsborough ("You keep all your smart modern painters, I'll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough").

Alykul Osmonov

His main accomplishments were transforming poetry from an oral to a literary tradition, focusing upon secular themes with an emphasis on inner emotion, daily life, and nationalism, and translating numerous European authors into the Kyrgyz language, including William Shakespeare, Sándor Petőfi, and Alexander Pushkin.

André Chénier

Although John Milton and James Thomson seem to have interested him, and a few of his verses show slight inspiration from Shakespeare and Thomas Gray, it would be an exaggeration to say Chénier studied English literature.

Anthony Jenkinson

There exists speculation that Jenkinson had an illegitimate daughter, Anne Beck or Whateley, who was at one point engaged to be married to William Shakespeare.

Arthur Golding

While primarily remembered today for his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses because of its influence on William Shakespeare's works, in his own time he was most famous for his translation of Caesar's Commentaries, and his translations of the sermons of John Calvin were important in spreading the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation.

Audition

Most performers do have a range of audition pieces and select something appropriate; an actor auditioning for Hamlet would have a dramatic Shakespearean monologue ready, and not perform a monologue from an Oscar Wilde comedy, or a contemporary playwright.

Bhrantibilas

Bhrantibilas is a 1963 Bengali film based on the 1869 play Bhranti Bilas by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, which is itself based on William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

Brothel

By the 16th century, the area was also home to many theaters, (including the Globe Theatre, associated with William Shakespeare), but brothels continued to thrive.

Cakes and Ale

Maugham drew his title from the remark of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Cakes and ale are the emblems of the good life in the tagline to the fable attributed to Aesop, "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse": "Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear".

Charles William Wallace

They also discovered Shakespeare's 1612 deposition in the Bellott v. Mountjoy lawsuit, and records of the suits Keysar v. Burbage (1610), Ostler v. Heminges (1615), and Witter v. Heminges and Condell (1619), among a range of other documents, yielding important new knowledge in the study of Jacobean drama.

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Complete Works of William Shakespeare is the standard name given to any volume containing all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare.

Drayton, Norfolk

Between 1432 and 1459 the village was in the possession of Sir John Fastolf, a prominent soldier in the Hundred Years' War who gave his name to Shakespeare's character Sir John Falstaff.

Elena-Cristina Marchisano

Elena-Cristina Marchisano has performed in plays by Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky, Molière, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, among others.

Fortune and Men's Eyes

The title comes from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 which begins with the line "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes".

Francesco Mottino

He began his career as writer for magazines and also performed on the Italian stage in plays by William Shakespeare.

Free Family Portrait Studio

Meanwhile, when Andy is reinstated as manager, Nellie begs him by reciting Shakespeare's quality of mercy quote from The Merchant of Venice.

Globe of the Great Southwest

Located in Odessa, Texas, the Globe of the Great Southwest is a replica of William Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre.

Holinshed's Chronicles

Shakespeare used the revised second edition of the Chronicles (published in 1587) as the source for most of his history plays, the plot of Macbeth, and for portions of King Lear and Cymbeline.

L. Brooks Leavitt

Among the manuscripts owned and collected by Leavitt, who turned to book collecting after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, was an original Shakespeare First Folio, as well as the original manuscript of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, written in Lawrence's own hand.

Langham letter

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has also been put forth as the author as one of the arguments for his authorship of the works of William Shakespeare, although he was on the European continent from January or February 1575 to April 1576 and was not present at the festival.

Let's kill all the lawyers

"Let's kill all the lawyers" is a quotation from the William Shakespeare play Henry VI, Part 2.

Mademoiselle Juliette

Lyrically, the song "Mademoiselle Juliette" portray Juliet Capulet from Romeo and Juliet, the drama by William Shakespeare, as a girl who would rather party than worry about the Montague-Capulet dispute.

Milwaukee Youth Arts Center

The nine smaller classrooms/studio spaces and two additional rehearsal/practice rooms are named after prominent figures in theater and music: Duke Ellington, Lorraine Hansberry, Gustav Mahler, Martha Graham, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, William Shakespeare, Dmitri Shostakovich, Stephen Sondheim, Konstantin Stanislavski, Arthur Miller, and "B-3 or B-cubed," which stands for Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven.

Range war

King of Texas is a 2002 American television movie transposing the plot of William Shakespeare's King Lear into the 19th-century American West.

Robert Nathaniel Dett

As a child, his mother encouraged him to memorize passages of Shakespeare, Longfellow and Tennyson.

Shakespeare My Butt

British author John Donoghue's 2004 book Shakespeare My Butt!, a humorous travel memoir of quirky destinations in Great Britain, also took its name from the album; Donoghue acknowledges the band's influence in the book, and the cover features a blindfolded image of William Shakespeare in homage to the blindfolded band photo on the album cover.

Stewarton

The most famous of these non-historical references concerns the legend of Máel Coluim III the son of Donnchad I of Scotland who appears as a character in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

The City of the Saved

Historical characters whose afterlives have been explored include the Pharaoh Akhenaten, Socrates, the Emperor Claudius, Jesus of Nazareth, Vlad the Impaler, Richard III, William Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler, Philip K Dick and Kurt Cobain.

The Filth and the Fury

The title of The Daily Mirror article was itself inspired by William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury which was in turn taken from a line in Shakespeare's Macbeth

The Jew

The anti-Jewish tradition on the English stage dates back at least to the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and is exemplified by the characters of Shylock in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.

The Passionate Pilgrim

The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are considered authentically Shakespearean.

The Wallet of Time

Its title is taken from the words of William Shakespeare: "Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,..." American stage actors and actresses, most of whom had been born in Europe, of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century are the subjects covered in the publication.

Theatre Royal, Brighton

In 1806 the Prince of Wales gave Royal Assent for the theatre to be built and it opened on 27 June 1807, with a performance of William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Trip Shakespeare

Matt Wilson originally proposed that the band be named Kirk Shakespeare, after two of his heroes: James T. Kirk and William Shakespeare.