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Since in the past Ágota made me promise to write something like this, and than I made another promise about it, here we go... Today's post will be about Shakespeare! (I gathered all these things from around the internet, so I hope everything is true!)
1. William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but his exact birth-date is unknown. He was baptized on April 26 of that year, so his birth would have been shortly before.
2. Shakespeare’s father held a lot of different jobs, and at one point got paid to drink beer. The son of a tenant farmer, John Shakespeare was nothing if not upwardly mobile. He arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1551 and began dabbling in various trades, selling leather goods, wool, malt and corn. In 1556 he was appointed the borough’s official “ale taster,” meaning he was responsible for inspecting bread and malt liquors. The next year he took another big step up the social ladder by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic farmer who happened to be his father’s former boss. John later became a moneylender and held a series of municipal positions, serving for some time as the mayor of Stratford. In the 1570s he fell into debt and ran into legal problems for reasons that remain unclear. He was also a glove maker, a land speculator (with mixed results) and probably a secret Catholic.
3. One of the schools which Shakespeare attended is still working.
4. He did not go to college
5. 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.
6. Nobody knows what Shakespeare did between 1585 and 1592, though he may have been briefly imprisoned in 1589 while acting with Lord Strange’s Men. Several players from that theater company were jailed for performing a banned farce which referenced some religious controversies of the day.
7. Shakespeare’s plays feature the first written instances of hundreds of familiar terms.
William Shakespeare is believed to have influenced the English language more than any other writer in history, coining—or, at the very least, popularizing—terms and phrases that still regularly crop up in everyday conversation. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); and the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”). He is also credited with inventing the given names Olivia, Miranda, Jessica and Cordelia, which have become common over the years (as well as others, such as Nerissa and Titania, which have not). He was the first one to say also: 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, Knock knock! Who’s there?, Laughing stock, Love is blind, Naked truth, Neither rhyme nor reason, 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?, The world’s my oyster.
8. We probably don’t spell Shakespeare’s name correctly—but, then again, neither did he.
Sources from William Shakespeare’s lifetime spell his last name in more than 80 different ways, ranging from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.” In the handful of signatures that have survived, the Bard never spelled his own name “William Shakespeare,” using variations or abbreviations such as “Willm Shakp,” “Willm Shakspere” and “William Shakspeare” instead. However it’s spelled, Shakespeare is thought to derive from the Old English words “schakken” (“to brandish”) and “speer” (“spear”), and probably referred to a confrontational or argumentative person.
9. Shakespeare wore a gold hoop earring—or so we think.
Our notion of William Shakespeare’s appearance comes from several 17th-century portraits that may or may not have been painted while the Bard himself sat behind the canvas. In one of the most famous depictions, known as the Chandos portrait after its onetime owner, the subject has a full beard, a receding hairline, loosened shirt-ties and a shiny gold hoop dangling from his left ear. Even back in Shakespeare’s time, earrings on men were trendy hallmarks of a bohemian lifestyle, as evidenced by images of other Elizabethan artists. The fashion may have been inspired by sailors, who sported a single gold earring to cover funeral costs in case they died at sea.
10. 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!
11. Back then theaters looked a bit different... here is the exact replica of the Globe theater Shakespeare worked at.
12. There’s a common assumption that Shakespeare’s audiences were filled with commoners and the lower classes of the period. This wasn’t, in fact, the case. As his plays were performed in the afternoon, many attendees were students, gentlemen, courtiers and merchants. Those, in short, who could afford the time away from work.
13. Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet (no, that’s not a typo) died at the age of eleven.
14. Shakespeare allegedly had an illegitimate son, William Davenant, by an innkeeper’s wife in Oxford.
15. Shakespeare's sonnets were written for men. Published in 1609, Shakespeare's sonnet sequence is 154 poems long. The sequence contains some of the most beautiful and enduring love poetry in the English language: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate: / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer's lease hath all too short a date." Pretty smooth, right? Well, one of the five things you didn't know about Shakespeare is that that poem is about two dudes. In fact, 126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are about a deep love between two male friends. Now, it was impossible to imagine someone as a "homosexual" in the Renaissance, which is not to say that men didn't have sex with each other. It just means that people weren't considered "gay" or "straight" in early modern England. Instead, homoeroticism was understood to be a normal extension of male friendship, and that desire is on full display in Shakespeare's sonnets.
16. Shakespeare was rich. Sure, you knew Shakespeare was a great writer, but we're betting that Shakespeare's business acumen is one of the five things you didn't know about Shakespeare. In Renaissance England, playwrights often worked with a set theater and a set group of actors called "companies." This arrangement allowed dramatists to write plays with parts tailored to the particular skills and talents of specific actors in the company.
Shakespeare was the primary dramatist for a company known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later renamed the King's Men). However, unlike his fellow playwrights, Shakespeare was actually a shareholder in the company; so he wasn't just paid a fee for each play he wrote, but he also took in a share of the company's overall profits. Consequently, Shakespeare was wealthier than many of his fellow playwrights. He was rich enough, while living in London, to purchase a second home in Stratford-upon-Avon. He may have warned us that "[a]ll that glitters is not gold," but William was no fool. He took care of business.
17. He Was A Critical Analyzer Of Pop Culture. His work is full of commentaries of what was going on at the time. When the Puritans were starting to get enough of his homoerotic plays Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, a play about a Puritanical Duke who tries to outlaw all sexual misconduct to stifle his own sick urges towards a nun. He also mocked celebrities, including them in his plays. For example, the Bishop of Westchester, featured in King Henry VI, Part I, is satirized for hypocritically making a fortune in prostitution while simultaneously seeking cures for his rampant and numerous venereal diseases. Well, not only was that a real guy, he was also the guy who licensed Shakespeares theater, AKA Wills boss. Meaning the plays subtext basically reads My boss has herpes. Ha! What a dick.
18. He loved di*k jokes. I think an example is enough here, since it's well... in Hamlet. It goes like this:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: No thing.
Ophelia: You are merry, my lord.
