Our boy Bill

By: Adrienne Onofri Apr. 23, 2004

Ben Jonson wrote, "Neither man nor Muse can praise too much" the work of William Shakespeare. To which all of us connected with the theater would respond, "Amen!" In honor of the birth—and death—of Shakespeare (they both occurred in late April), here's a compendium of Shakespearean trivia. It's easier to dole out factoids rather than facts about the Bard, since the lack of definitive biographical information about Shakespeare is nearly as legendary as the man himself. But we've also included some news about Shakespeare-related projects to look for at the theater, bookstore and on video. Happy birthday, Will!

William Shakespeare was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. His father is usually described as a glovemaker, but he made a fortune off such unscrupulous business ventures as moneylending and illegal wool dealing. John Shakespeare was also the mayor of Stratford for a time.

As for Will's own brushes with the law, his arrest for deer poaching—which some say is the reason he left Stratford for London—is probably a myth. But he did flee his original neighborhood in London to evade taxes.

The mystery surrounding Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway begins with whether he actually wanted to marry her. The bride's name that appears on William Shakespeare's marriage license is Anne Whateley—which has convinced some scholars that Shakespeare loved one woman named Anne but married another (pregnant) one out of obligation. Or it was just a clerical error.

Shakespeare wrote his first poem for his wedding. Many of his sonnets, including "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," were written for a man.

According to Ian McKellen in his one-man show Acting Shakespeare, there are no happy marriages in Shakespeare's plays. (Sir Ian pointed this out as a possible clue to Shakespeare's feelings about his own marriage.)

When today's theater companies perform a Shakespeare play in contemporary dress, they're doing just what Shakespeare and his troupe did…it just so happens that Elizabethan-era apparel was the contemporary dress of their day.

Shakespeare's first published work was the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. His first published tragedy was Titus Andronicus. The histories Henry VI and Richard III were his first produced plays.

Shakespearean characters who became words: Among those in the American Heritage Dictionary are benedict (a longtime bachelor who's recently wed), Falstaffian (jovial) and puckish (mischievous).

Many titles are derived from Shakespeare's words—with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes among the best-known. Hamlet alone has been cribbed for titles of another book by Huxley (Mortal Coils), a Bob Dylan album (Time Out of Mind), a short story by D.H. Lawrence ("The Mortal Coil"), a book of poetry by Ogden Nash and Bram Stoker's first novel (both called The Primrose Path), a Nick Lowe song (Cruel to Be Kind), one of mystery writer Rex Stout's books (How Like a God) and such movies as What Dreams May Come, Leave Her to Heaven, Outrageous Fortune and To Be or Not to Be.

Shakespeare had relatives who lost their lives because they were on the wrong side of the religious divide in Elizabeth I's England, including cousin Edward and his family, who were imprisoned in the Tower of London before being executed on trumped-up charges of treason, and another cousin and well-known poet, Robert Southwell, who was hanged, drawn and quartered. Shakespeare himself was interrogated after a performance of his Richard II, which depicts the deposing of a monarch, incited a rebellion. The playwright was cleared, but the Earl of Essex, who had commissioned the performance, was beheaded. Later, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna was summoned by authorities in Stratford for refusing Protestant communion.

Similar to the current post-Super Bowl crackdown by the FCC, censorship intensified after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and Shakespeare faced a 10-pound fine for every perceived profanity he did not excise from his scripts.

Probably because so little is definitively known about Shakespeare, Joseph Fiennes' title role in Shakespeare in Love is the only portrayal of him in a major motion picture—and that movie's story is, of course, completely fictionalized. Fiennes' Shakespeare in Love rival Colin Firth, incidentally, played William Shakespeare in one of the Blackadder films, the Rowan Atkinson time-travel series that originated on British TV.

Fewer actors have won Oscars for playing a Shakespearean role (Laurence Olivier is the only one) than for playing a Shakespearean actor (Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl, Ronald Colman in A Double Life...).

The first performer to win a Tony for a Shakespearean role was Katharine Cornell in Antony and Cleopatra in 1948. The last person was Ralph Fiennes in 1995's Hamlet (unless you count Brian Stokes Mitchell in Kiss Me, Kate).

While we're on the topic of awards for playing Shakespeare: Judith Anderson won an Emmy as Lady Macbeth twice, in 1955 and 1961 (her costar Maurice Evans also won that year). The last Emmyed Shakespearean was Laurence Olivier in 1984's King Lear.

You can see today's British acting doyennes all together in a 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that was filmed for theatrical release and is available on video. The Peter Hall-directed film features Judi Dench as Titania, Diana Rigg as Helena and Helen Mirren as Hermia (Ian Holm is Puck).

George Bernard Shaw coined the term bardolatry, defined as the act of idolizing Shakespeare. He didn't mean it as a compliment.

Tolstoy was another literary giant who famously dissed Shakespeare. The War and Peace author wrote an entire essay about Shakespeare's flaws, but basically he thought Shakespeare created characters, plotlines and dialogue with no regard for their credibility, society's injustices or morality. Tolstoy described Hamlet as "crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless."

One third of Shakespeare's plays take place in Italy—far and away his favorite setting other than Britain.

The Comedy of Errors, one of those Italy-set plays, is the shortest play by Shakespeare.

Shakespeare purportedly got an idea for The Tempest from the real shipwreck that led to the colonization of Bermuda. Hence, in Bermuda you can explore Prospero's Cave, dine at Caliban's restaurant and swim near a bronze statue of Ariel in the sea.

Only 20 of Lady Macbeth's words in the sleepwalking scene have more than one syllable.

Shakespeare apparently was an avid bowler, as suggested by his numerous uses of bowling terms, including "rub" (as in "Ay, there's the…"), which means an uneven surface. Lest we get an image of Will in a tacky shirt and rented shoes, remember that in his day bowling was done on the lawn, not indoors in an alley.

Shakespeare in the Park no longer refers only to the New York Shakespeare Festival's production in Central Park; many groups perform free Shakespeare at various outdoor locations around New York City in the summer. But if you're a New Yorker who has some bucks to spend on the Bard, and the means of traveling outside the city, head up to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. This year's shows are Macbeth (June 16-Aug. 7) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (July 21-Sept. 5), performed under a tent on the grounds of the Boscobel, an historic 30-acre estate where you can picnic on the lawn—bring your own or preorder from the Festival—before the show. The river view is spectacular! Go to www.hvshakespeare.org for all the details.

Have you seen most of the Shakespeare canon? Repeatedly? Well, you can always move on to the myriad plays inspired by the Shakespeare canon. Now playing in New York, for example, are The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It, a backstage farce by Don Nigro in which a shorthanded troupe of third-rate actors attempts to perform the Forest of Arden comedy (through May 1, 212-560-2241); a musical version of The Tempest for the whole family (weekends till May 9, 212-268-2040); and this Monday only, a reading of The Island, a comedy by Kevin Brewer that shipwrecks two 21st-century gals on an island where a Shakespearean royal family lives in exile (212-592-1885). Searching for Hamlet, in which real-life events in the life of an actor playing Hamlet seem to parallel the events of the play—dad murdered under mysterious circumstances, mom marries his business successor—just wrapped up its run off-Broadway.

Hot off the press: Tales From Shakespeare, a beautiful book published this month by Scholastic, in which Tina Packer—founder and artistic director of the Shakespeare & Company theater in the Berkshires—retells Shakespeare's 10 most popular plays, using some of the Bard's own words. It's a storybook for children and a coffee-table book for adults! Each story is illustrated by a different artist, and the biographical/historical chapter is illustrated with a new portrait of Shakespeare that's more youthful and cheery than the one we usually see. The introduction cleverly intersperses appropriate quotations from Shakespeare in his life story—for instance, "I grow, I prosper" from King Lear to lead off the paragraph about Shakespeare's gaining renown as a playwright and actor in London.

Shakespeare & Company plans to build an exact replica of the Rose Playhouse in Lenox, Mass. Archeologists, architects and scholars from Britain and the U.S. have collaborated on the project, which will result in an open-air, timber-and-thatch, circular theater, just like the one where Shakespeare's plays were first performed. (He moved to the Globe in 1599.)

Shakespeare's Globe, the reconstructed theater in London that opened in 1996 on the site of the original, was also painstakingly re-created…except no one knows for sure what the original looked like. The replica design was based on old maps, building contracts, archeological excavations and writings, including suggestive passages in Shakespeare's plays, like the prologue of Henry V. But virtually nothing gave a clue about what the stage was like, so that was designed mostly based on conjecture.

The original Globe burned down in 1613 after a stage cannon started a fire during a performance of Henry VIII.

Cervantes died the same day as Shakespeare: April 23, 1616. Another connection between the two: One of Shakespeare's lost plays, Cardenio, was based on Don Quixote. All that survives of it is a song.

Sixteen plays were published for the first time in the so-called first folio, produced in 1623. Had it not been for this effort by Shakespeare's theatrical colleagues to collect and print all his works posthumously, much of his legacy would have been lost.

William Shakespeare ranked No. 5 on A&E Biography's list of the most influential people of the millennium.

Lastly, my favorite cheesy Shakespeare pun: Where there's a Will, there's a play!

Photos, from top: statue of Shakespeare in New York's Central Park; Christopher Plummer in this season's King Lear at Lincoln Center (photo by Joan Marcus); the new book Tales From Shakespeare.

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