Tuesday 18 March 2014

Book Worm - celebrate Shakespeare week

Since the first official 'Shakespeare week' is being held over the next five days and we have a range of hats named after characters of the bards' plays it seemed too good an opportunity to miss in checking out a few facts about the playwright.
This year marks his 450th birthday and celebrations will really kick off in April with the RSC hosting a spectacular fireworks display in Stratford-upon-Avon.  The market town will also host a 1,000 strong birthday procession through the streets a few days later.  
And if you're fans of Horrible Histories, then you'll be thrilled to hear that they are their movie about the bard, entitled BILL, is in production and should hopefully screen this year too.  Here's a short sketch from their award winning TV series to whet your appetite.
And here are twenty facts about the man (thanks to the Pioneer Woman's blog)
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 theatre 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/theatre 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!

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.

And if you do want to celebrate with one of our hats, click here!
From Hippolyta to Titania

And Benedick to Puck

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