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Did you know? – Shakespeare edition

01 Feb 2021

By Patrick de Kretser O reader, where art thou? Here is something that may or may not be your cup of tea – an article discussing Shakespeare. For some of you, just the mere mention of the name is enough to strike fear and trigger feelings of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from years of torment that you may have suffered inside an English classroom. After all, dissecting a play like Hamlet, which is nearly 30,000 words long, is not a fun task for everyone. So for those of you who do not enjoy indulging in the subject of Shakespeare any more than you have to, feel free to give this a pass and flick onto another page of the magazine. But do not worry, I am not planning to get you to analyse lines written in early modern English. Instead, I wish to share some fun facts you might find interesting and can potentially use to help brag about your knowledge the next time you go to an English class. Julius Caesar has more lines in Antony and Cleopatra than he does in his own play Imagine being the title character of your own play and barely having any screen time? Well, Julius Caesar clearly seems to have that problem. The famous Roman General only has three scenes during the entirety of the play Julius Caesar, which makes him the least-featured title character in any of Shakespeare’s work. Caesar has an astronomically bigger role in the play Antony and Cleopatra, which is a rather odd occurrence when you think about it. Quite unfortunate for Caesar in the end, he gets backstabbed by his own senators and cannot even get as much exposure as them in written literature. Hamlet is the second most portrayed character in the history of film and television Shakespeare’s plays have certainly been replicated many times over the years since it was first published. That being said, Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet, was amongst the most critically acclaimed of all his works over the years. Because of this, Hamlet was depicted in countless works of film, television, and theatre which made the title character the second most portrayed in history. The only character to have been portrayed more times was the character of Sherlock Holmes. Shakespeare’s plays have been translated in over 80 different languages worldwide That is quite something when you think about it from Shakespeare’s perspective. Imagine if he ever knew just how far and wide his plays would travel and just how culturally significant the message behind his work would become. An interesting fact about the translated languages is that it also includes Esperanto and Klingon. Esperanto is an artificial language that was created from a mix of various European languages and lingual sounds, while Klingon happens to be a constructed language that comes straight from Star Trek. You read that right, you can actually read Shakespeare’s work in a language that originated from a highly popular sci-fi TV show. The world truly has an endless amount of surprises. The famous phrase ‘stealing thunder’ is an expression which originated from Macbeth Stealing someone’s thunder basically implies that you stole someone else’s idea and passed it off as your own work or accomplishment. In case you didn’t know, that famous saying originated from a famous incident surrounding early stage performances of Macbeth. There was a famous thunder-making machine that was created by a playwright named John Dennis, which he attempted to use for one of his plays that was poorly received by the public and ended up closing after a few performances. After the play closed and Dennis attended a performance of Macbeth in 1709, it turns out that his machine idea had been stolen and replicated on set for Shakespeare’s play. He reportedly stood up and shouted: “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!” which is why the expression “steal someone’s thunder” was derived from this moment. There was a period of seven years where no one knew what Shakespeare was doing Here is an interesting fact which everyone can speculate about and form their own conclusions as to what happened, because historians have seemingly no clue what Shakespeare was doing between the years of 1585 and 1592. Essentially, Shakespeare had fallen off the grid for seven years while he was making a name for himself, and there are no written records to confirm exactly what he was doing during this period. By 1592, he had apparently already become quite popular amongst London society, hence why the speculation as to what he did years prior is understandable. PHOTOS WIKIPEDIA, SHAKESPEARE BIRTHPLACE TRUST, JOURNEY AND DESTINATION BLOG, SECRET LONDON


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