101 Amazing Facts about William Shakespeare by Jack Goldstein

Author:Jack Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: shakespeare, bard, stratford, hamlet, romeo, juliet, macbeth, othello, as you like it, midsummer, play, playwright, school, project, study, education, interesting, trivia, facts, learn, hathaway, omgfacts
ISBN: 9781783336043
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2014
Published: 2014-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Interesting Facts

It is thought today that there could be as many as twenty lost Shakespeare works.

There are two lost plays that we are fairly sure were written by Shakespeare: The History of Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won. No manuscript survives to this day of either of these plays, and if one were to be found it would surely be priceless.

Most scholars also agree that Shakespeare should also be given joint credit for a play called The Two Noble Kinsmen, a work based on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and was previously attributed solely to John Fletcher.

A number of other plays are also often debated as possibly having been written by Shakespeare, most notably Edward III (which bears striking similarities to Shakespeare’s other historical works) and Sir Thomas More, the latter of which we are confident he revised parts at the very least.

William Shakespeare is often referred to as an Elizabethan playwright, however most of his popular plays were in fact written after Queen Elizabeth’s death and in the reign of James I. This means it would perhaps be more accurate to call him a Jacobean playwright.

Although if you ask most people to say what Shakespeare’s occupation was they’d say ‘playwright’, the man himself listed it as ‘actor’ in a number of documents. We believe that one of the roles he played in his own productions was the ghost in Hamlet.

Shakespeare’s theatre, the Globe, burned down on the 29 th of June 1613 after a theatrical cannon set off during a production misfired, lighting up the wooden beams of the structure. Thankfully, only one man was hurt - and he not seriously - when his burning breeches had to put out by having ale thrown on him. The theatre was rebuilt the next year but was eventually closed down by the puritans in 1642, then pulled down two years later to make way for housing.

The number thirteen is sometimes considered unlucky. It certainly is for the thirteen characters who commit suicide in Shakespeare’s various plays!

A classic ‘image’ of Shakespeare is him at a writing desk, lit by candlelight. However, at the time candles were exceptionally expensive and generally only used for emergencies. It is therefore unlikely that this would be a ‘true scene’!

Some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries were not as enamoured with his work as we are today. In fact, the first written reference we have to one of his works is by theatre critic Robert Greene, who in 1592 said that Shakespeare was an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”!

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