Othello was very popular throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and many of the most brilliant actors of the time sought the role of the Moor -- the most famous being the great tragic thespian Edmund Kean, who also gave noted performances as Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Hamlet. His son, Charles John Kean, was also an actor and theatre manager. During one performance of Othello at Covent Garden in 1833, Edmund Kean collapsed on stage into the arms of his son who was playing Iago, and died a few weeks later.

According to Shakespearean scholar Jackson J. Campbell, although Troilus and Cressida is today classified as a comedy, the editors of the First Folio originally scheduled the play to be included in the section containing the tragedies. Due to a conflict with the printer, however, Troilus and Cressida was published after the rest of the tragedies, and thus was placed in between the histories and the tragedies, after Henry VIII and before Coriolanus.

In the ancient Roman calendar the "ides" was the fifteenth day of March, May, July, and October, and the thirteenth day of the other months. On March 15, 44 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators in the Senate House in Rome. In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, Caesar passes through a public square and hears someone shout his name. Hushing the crowd, he asks the voice to speak again. A soothsayer comes into view and warns Caesar to "Beware the ides of March", but, unfortunately, Caesar ignores his premonition: "He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass".

Shakespeare's works contain over 600 references to birds of all kinds, including the swan, bunting, cock, dove, robin, sparrow, nightingale, swallow, turkey, wren, starling, and thrush, just to name a few!

Dr. Simon Forman, the intriguing English astrologer and doctor, left us a valuable detailed record of a performance of Cymbeline in 1611. You can learn more about Simon Forman and read his account of the play here.

Twenty-four clay pipe fragments found near William Shakespeare's home in Stratford may have been used to smoke marijuana, cocaine, and other hallucinogenic substances. For more information click here.

Some believe that Psalm 46 may have been translated by Shakespeare. The King James version of the Bible was printed when Shakespeare was 46 years old. Moreover, the 46th word from the beginning of the psalm is "shake" and the 46th word from the end of the psalm is "spear".

Richard II and King John are the only two Shakespearean plays containing no prose.

The great English poet John Keats died on February 23, 1821. Keats was so influenced by Shakespeare that he kept a bust of the Bard beside him while he wrote, hoping that Shakespeare would spark his creativity. In a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon dated May 10, 1817, Keats wrote:

"I remember your saying that you had notions of a good Genius presiding over you. I have of late had the same thought - for things which I do half at Random are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of Propriety. Is it too daring to fancy Shakespeare this Presider?"

Rodgers and Hart's popular musical, The Boys from Syracuse (first presented on Broadway in 1938) is based on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.

Shakespeare uses "dog" or "dogs" over two hundred times in his works. He also was the first writer to use the compound noun "watchdog", in The Tempest (1.2.390).

From 1788 to 1820, performances of King Lear were prohibited on the English Stage due to the insanity of the reigning monarch, King George III.

Shakespeare's primary source for The Winter's Tale was the prose romance "Pandosto", written in 1588 by Robert Greene. Incidentally, Greene's reference to Shakespeare in his autobiography, Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592), was the first literary reference to Shakespeare on record.

Love's Labour's Lost has the highest percentage of rhyming lines of all of Shakespeare's plays. According to Shakespearean scholar Tucker Brooke, 62.2% of the lines in Love's Labour's Lost rhyme. The closest competitor is A Midsummer Night's Dream, with 43.4% rhyming lines.

Falstaff, generally held to be Shakespeare's greatest comic character, appears in 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. A character named Sir John Fastolfe appears in 1 Henry VI, but he is not the jolly Falstaff featured in the above-mentioned plays.

Shakespeare's friend and fellow actor, Richard Burbage, amazed and delighted audiences with his stirring interpretation of the outrageous villain, Richard III. On March 13, 1602, a lawyer and diarist named John Manningham recorded a now-famous anecdote about Shakespeare and Richard Burbage:

"Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."

There is no record of All's Well That Ends Well having been performed in Shakespeare's lifetime. The first known staging of the play was in 1740, when producers placed a detailed advertisement in the London Daily Post, announcing that "at the Late Theatre in Goodman's-Fields, Saturday, March 7, will be reviv'd a Play, call'd All's Well That Ends Well. Written by Shakespear, and never performed since his Time." The production was a success, and All's Well That Ends Well remained popular throughout the 1740s.

More quick facts to come!

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