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Shakespeare Snippets

James Wilkes Booth appeared in the play Julius Caesar, a play dealing with the assassination of a nation’s leader. Four months later he changed history by assassinating President Lincoln. Booth wrote that "he expected to be praised as a real life Brutus".

Of the 17,677 words that Shakespeare uses in his plays, sonnets, and poems, over 1700 were words he either invented or put into print in English for the first time. He gave us: accommodation, addiction, alligator, amazement, assassination, apostrophe, bandit, bedroom, birthplace, bloodstained, bump, cold-blooded, critic, dawn, educate, eyeball, fairyland, fashionable, fortune-teller, generous, hint, laughable, madcap, mountaineer, obscene, perplex, premeditated, priceless, sanctimonious, tranquil, unearthly, unreal, wonderful, upstairs, watchdog, zany.

Many expressions that are still common today, originated as lines in Shakespeare’s plays: bated breath; brevity is the soul of wit; elbow room; eye-sore; fair play; fancy-free; foregone conclusion; foul play; hoist with his own petard; in a pickle; in my heart of hearts; into thin air; laughing-stock; lie low; the naked truth; one fell swoop; own flesh and blood; salad days; send packing; make short shrift; snail paced; wild-goose chase; to thine own self be true; too much of a good thing.

Shakespeare earned an estimated average of less than £20 per year for writing plays. He earned more as part owner of the Globe, at £40 per year.

8 years after his death, Shakespeare’s friends published the First Folio: Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Only about 230 copies of the First Folio are known to have survived. The last copy to come one the market in 2001 sold for 4.1 million pounds.

Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford was still standing in 1847 when Charles Dickens led a campaign to prevent the American circus impresario PT Barnum from purchasing the site.

The vast number of subsequent books, stories, and musical works whose titles are taken from lines in Shakespeare’s plays include: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, Philip K Dick’s Time Out of Joint, D H Lawrence’s The Mortal Coil, Richard Rorty’s The Mirror of Nature, and Michael Redgrave’s In My Mind’s Eye.

It is believed a passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream refers to a real event in the life of the young William Shakespeare. When Queen Elizibeth I visited Kenilworth Castle she was treated to a firework display and a statue of a mermaid on a dolphins back rose from the lake.

Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music...
...And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
The imperial votress referred to in the passage
is Elizabeth (the virgin queen) herself.

Japan, Germany and the USA all had replicas of the Globe theatre before the one in London.

The play, Cardinio, that has been credited to Shakespeare and was performed in his lifetime, has been completely lost to time.

The Stratford tourist trade has benefited from Shakespeare ever since David Garrick organised the first Shakespeare jubilee there in 1769. With the arrival of the railway to Stratford, some 30,000 tourists were able to attend the 1864 tri-centennial jubilee. Festivals became annual events shortly thereafter.

An average of 3000 productions of Shakespeare are performed in Great Britain each year.