Amazing and Interesting facts about William Shakespeare.

Here are some of the most interesting facts about shakesphere’s biography and life

 

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

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

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

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

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

6. We probably don’t spell Shakespeare’s name correctly—but, then again, neither did he.

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

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

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

10. Some people think Shakespeare was a fraud.

11. Sometime in the mid 1580′s, Shakespeare moved to London from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

12. According to reports, Shakespeare wrote quickly and with ease; Fellow playwright Ben Jonson said “Whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.”

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!

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. Shakespeare’s was said to have an extensive vocabular; his works contained more than 30,000 different words.

20. Almost four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death there are 157 million pages referring to him on Google. There are 132 million for God, 2.7 million for Elvis Presley, and coming up on Shakespeare’s heels, George W Bush with 14.7 million.

21. 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.

22. Some of Shakespeare’s signatures have survived on original documents. In none of them does he spell his name in what has become the standard way. He spells it Shakespe; Shakspe; Shakspere and Shakespear.

23. Shakespeare lived a double life. By the seventeenth century he had become a famous playwright in London but in his hometown of Stratford, where his wife and children were, and which he visited frequently, he was a well known and highly respected businessman and property owner.

24. The American President Abraham Lincoln was a great lover of Shakespeare’s plays and frequently recited from them to his friends. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth was a famous Shakespearean actor.

25. Although it was illegal to be a Catholic in Shakespeare’s lifetime, the Anglican Archdeacon, Richard Davies of Lichfield, who had known him wrote some time after Shakespeare’s death that he had been a Catholic.