Wednesday 23rd of April is William Shakespeare's 444th birthday. Well, at least we THINK it is. We know that Shakespeare DIED on April 23 1616 because we have a record of his death, but we only assume his his birthday is on the 23 because he was baptised 3 days later on the 26th of April. It is probably no coincidence that St George's day falls on the 23 April as well!
Shakespeare wrote fantastic plays and poems, and is regarded as England's best and most famous playwright. Some of is most famous plays are A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III. You may even have heard some of his sonnets at weddings such as Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment..) or the very famous Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?).
One thing which Shakespeare did really well was reinvent the English language. He used 29,066 different words in his works in around 100,000 lines of writing- pretty impressive. Did you know tht Shakespeare actually invented a lot of words that we use today? Words like advertising, caked, compromise, elbow, eyeball, lonely, worthless and gossip. If you follow the link you can even see where abouts in his works they appear.
But it's not just words, Shakespeare also invented a lot of phrases we use all the time in our everyday speech. If you've talked about finding out the naked truth, talked about your flesh and blood or turned into a green eyed monster, then you've used a Shakespearean phrase!
Finally, entertain yourself by generating some genuine Shakespearian insults- lots of fun!
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