WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S BIRTH AND DEATH ANNIVERSARY: English playwright William Shakespeare is believed to have been born and died on same day: April 23. Shakespeare is widely renowned for the collection of plays. His plays are timeless and still continue to be adapted for screen and theatre performances. Some of the famous plays written by Shakespeare are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello.
However, there are some strange facts about the Bard of Avon that might not know:
1. Shakespeare never published any of his own plays. It may come as a surprise but the creator of some of the most significant plays, never published his work. Friends of the playwright, John Heminges and Henry Condell did it posthumously, gifting the world with his seminal works.
2. There is a theory that speculates that Shakespeare was a pseudonym used by a woman. Considering the society at the time, women were not allowed to openly pursue their intellectual interests. This theory stems from the fact that Shakespeare’s works often introduced strong female characters who oppose the rules imposed on them and try to pave their own path.
It should also be noted that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem “Venus and Adonis,” which is a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales. The poem presents a role reversal where a woman forces herself on the man.
3. Two of Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into Klingon, the language created for the American Star Trek science fiction series. The two plays are Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing which can be read in the fictional language.
4. Shakespeare’s characters inspired names of some of the celestial bodies. The moons revolving around the planet of Uranus are mostly named after characters from his plays, including Oberon, Ariel, and Juliet.
5. It seems the plague that hit Europe in the middle ages affected Shakespeare’s creative work as well. It is reported that when the theatres were closed for nearly six months during the plague outbreak, Shakespeare turned to poetry. That is when his long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were composed.
