....Shakespeare Videos: Complete List Shakespeare
Books. .Home
Compiled
by
Michael J. Cummings...© 2003, 2012
.
William Shakespeare was born on April 23 and died on April
23, evidence indicates.
.
In
his
will, Shakespeare left his wife his "second-best" bed.
.
Shakespeare's
name
may have meant "Shaker of Spears," indicating warrior ancestry.
.
Boys
and
men played all the parts in Shakespeare's plays in Elizabethan
times.
.
Dictionaries
as
we know them today were not available in Shakespeare's time.
Sir William Davanant (1606-1668), godson of Shakespeare and
poet laureate of England, claimed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son.
.
The
ceiling
of Shakespeare's stages was called "The Heavens."
.
 Shakespeare was said to have enjoyed
playing the part of the ghost in Hamlet.
Shakespeare also performed as Adam in As You Like It.
.
Actors
performing
in Shakespeare's time usually received only copies of their
parts, not entire plays.
.
Shakespeare
was
seventeen or eighteen when he married. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was
twenty-six.
.
The
Globe
Theatre burned down in 1613 after a canon was fired to announce
the entrance of King Henry VIII. The canon fire ignited the thatched
roof. The Globe was rebuilt soon thereafter but torn down in 1644 in
response to Puritan zealotry against theatre performances.
.
Shakespeare's
first
child was born six months after his marriage.
Shakespeare is the name of a ghost town in Hidalgo County,
New Mexico (U.S.). It is a national historic site.
The oldest existing copy of a complete American-made feature
film is that of Richard III, a 1912 silent movie based on
Shakespeare's play. It was produced by M. B. Dudley Amusement Company.
Some researchers claim that Queen Elizabeth I wrote
Shakespeare's plays. Few scholars take this claim seriously.
Between 1890 and 1891, an avid Shakespeare reader decided to
bring to the United States all species of birds in Shakespeare's works
that were not native to the U.S. One of these birds was the starling, a
passerine (perching) bird. It is a destructive bird which ruins grain
and fruit crops. The starling also takes over nests of other birds and
mocks their songs when it sings.
.
Shakespeare
and
other writers of his time probably did most of their writing during
the day to avoid paying for the expensive candles or oil required for
nighttime writing.
.
Because
many
people in Shakespeare's time—including King James I—believed in
the power of witches, Macbeth was a play that unnerved
audiences.
.
No
one
knows how Shakespeare died. Among the possibilities are kidney
disease, murder most foul, and too much to drink.
.
Shakespeare
was
a Roman Catholic when he died, Anglican Archdeacon Richard Davies,
of Lichfield, England, reported about three decades after Shakespeare
died.
.
U.S.
President
Abraham Lincoln enjoyed reading Shakespeare.
Many of the greatest works in classical music were inspired
by Shakespeare plays. Examples are Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo
and Juliet, Giuseppe Verdi's operas Macbeth and Otello
(Othello), and Felix Mendelssohn's orchestral overture A
Midsummer Night's Dream.
The river running through Shakespeare's hometown is the
Upper Avon, not the Avon. In Shakespeare's time, the town was called
Stratford, not Stratford-upon-Avon.
When Thomas Edison was a child, his mother frequently read
Shakespeare to him.
.
Shakespeare's
original
grave marker showed him holding a bag of grain. Citizens of
Stratford replaced the bag with a quill in 1747, perhaps in
anticipation of the tourists who would come to see the final resting
place of the world's greatest wielder or quills.
.
The
motto
of the Globe Theatre was totus mundus agit histrionem (all
the world's a stage).
Twenty-four
of
the twenty-seven moons of the planet Uranus are named after
characters in Shakespeare's plays. The other three moons are named
after characters invented by the British poet Alexander Pope
(1688-1744). The following list identifies the Shakespeare characters
after whom moons are named and the work in which the characters appear.
Bianca (The Taming of the Shrew)
Caliban (The Tempest)
Cordelia (King Lear)
Cressida (Troilus and Cressida)
Cupid (A Midsummer Night's Dream and Other Works)
Desdemona (Othello)
Francisco (The Tempest)
 Ferdinand (The Tempest)
Juliet (Romeo and Juliet)
Miranda (The Tempest)
Mab (Romeo and Juliet)
Margaret (Much Ado About Nothing)
Oberon (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Ophelia (Hamlet)
Perdita (A Winter's Tale)
Portia (The Merchant of Venice)
Puck (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Prospero (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Rosalind (As You Like It)
Setebos (The Tempest)
Stephano (The Tempest)
Sycorax (The Tempest)
Titania (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Trinculo (The Tempest)
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