15 facts about William Shakespeare

1. William Shakespeare was born on April 23 and died on April 23.
2. Shakespeare's name may have meant "Shaker of Spears," indicating warrior ancestry.
3. Dictionaries as we know them today were not available in Shakespeare's time.
4. Boys and men played all the parts in Shakespeare's plays in Elizabethan times.
5. Actors performing in Shakespeare's time usually received only copies of their parts, not entire plays.
6. William Shakespeare was said to have enjoyed playing the part of the ghost in Hamlet.
7. William Shakespeare's first child was born six months after his marriage.
8. Shakespeare was 17 or 18 when he married. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was 26.
9. Because many people in Shakespeare's time --including King James I-- believed in the power of witches, Macbeth was a play that unnerved audiences.
10. Some researchers claim that Queen Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays. Few scholars take this claim seriously.
11. William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic when he died.
12. The motto of the Globe Theatre was totus mundus agit histrionem (all the world's a stage).
13. No one knows how William Shakespeare died. Among the possibilities are kidney disease, murder most foul, and too much to drink.
14. When Thomas Edison was a child, his mother frequently read Shakespeare to him.
15. 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.