Interesting Facts

20th May 1506 - Christopher Columbus died in poverty in Spain. 1570 – Cartographer Abraham Ortelius issued the first modern atlas. 1609 – Shakespeare's Sonnets were first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. 1631 – The city of Magdeburg in Germany was seized by forces of the Holy Roman Empire and most of its inhabitants massacred, in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Thirty Years' War. 1873 – Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets. 1902 – Cuba gained independence from the United States. Tomás Estrada Palma became the first President of Cuba. 1927 - Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, N.Y., aboard the Spirit of St. Louis on the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. 1932 – Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland to begin the world's first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a female pilot. She landed in Irel...

23rd April 1564 - The Bard, William Shakespeare, is said to have been born on the 23rd of April. So, if he were still alive, he would be well over 400 years old today. Of course no one really knows the exact date of his birth because these things weren't so well regulated back then, but this date has been chosen for him, and it's the thought that counts.  Happy Birthday Will! We do know that he was baptised on April 26th, and that he died on April 23rd 1616. 

William Shakespeare was probably born on April 23rd, and he died on this day in 1616, 400 years ago. It is also St George's Day in England, and according to the Arden Shakespeare Miscellany, St George is mentioned 16 times in his plays. (The most famous mention is in Henry V: "Cry 'God' for Harry! England and Saint George!") Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Let it pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth an...

Health researchers are blaming Shakespeare for promoting a negative attitudes towards imperfect skin. (Seemingly the language used in his plays has helped cause social stigmas linked to skin conditions.  A research paper from dermatologists  [PDF]   in Nottingham, Leicester and Derby "Shakespeare may be to blame for the negative connotations of skin disease".  They mentioned phrases such as "Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle",  "a pox upon him" and "patch'd with foul moles and eye-offending marks". The fact is, Shakespeare used language in a creative way: Take what is probably the best (worst) insult ever written, from King Lear:- "A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheritin...

A new A-Level English course in the UK will look at the work of some more contemporary wordsmiths. (These will include Russel Brand, Dizzee Rascal and Caitlin Moran. Never mind Shakespeare, we won't forget you.)

According to Professor Helen Fulton, head of English at the University of York, top English students reach university believing Charles Dickens is from the same era as William Shakespeare. (Well I guess they are both old blokes who died a long time ago.)

What has Shakespeare got to do with the Olympic games? Well, next year, as part of the 2012 Olympics arts programme, the South Sudanese Kwoto Theatre Company will perform Shakespeare's Cymbeline in Juba Arabic at the Globe theatre in London. (In fact, beginning on 21 April 2012, the Globe will present a programme of multi-lingual Shakespeare productions for the London 2012 festival. 37 international companies will present every one of Shakespeare's plays in a different language over six weeks. So there you have the link. And talking of links, you can read more about it here:- http://globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com/)

Well, virtual monkeys. Seemingly a computer programmer, Jesse Anderson, programmed a few million virtual monkeys to randomly bash keys on virtual typewriters in an attempt to re-create Shakespeare. (He set out to prove or disprove the long-standing saying of how an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time could write Shakespeare.   The virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. They regularly pump out random sequences of text nine characters long, each string of text is checked to see if it appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.  Using these constraints, mathematicians say it would take “far, far longer than the age of the Universe” for monkeys to write Shakespeare. I haven't got that long, so I'll stick with the original.)

Shakespeare was Sicilian. (Well not so much an interesting fact as an interesting theory. According to Professor Martino Iuvara, 71, a retired teacher of literature, Shakespeare was born in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza, and fled to London because of the Holy Inquisition. There he changed his name to its English equivalent: Crollalanza or Crollalancia literally translates as Shakespeare. It could explain all those plays set in Italy.)

12 of Shakespeare's plays were set either partially or completely in Italy. Can you name them?) Scroll down for the answer:- Julius Caesar Romeo and Juliet Othello The Merchant of Venice Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Cymbeline Much Ado About Nothing The Taming of the Shrew Titus Andronicus The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter's Tale

About 750 copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, which set down 18 plays for the first time, were printed 1623 - some 230 survive. (One was recently sold for £2,808,000. Start checking your attics.)