Sir William Davanant (1606-1668), godson of Shakespeare and poet laureate of England, claimed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son. 
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Moons of the planet Uranus are named after characters in Shakespeare's plays. For example, two moons discovered in 1787 were named Oberon and Titania, after characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream. A moon discovered in 1986 was named Juliet, after a character in Romeo and Juliet. Two moons discovered in 1997 were named Caliban and Sycorax, after characters in The Tempest.

The ceiling of Shakespeare's stages was called "The Heavens."  
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Shakespeare was said to have enjoyed playing the part of the ghost in Hamlet. 

Shakespeare also performed as Adam in As You Like It. 
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Actors performing in Shakespeare's time usually received only copies of their parts, not entire plays. 
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Shakespeare was 17 or 18 when he married. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was 26.  
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The Globe Theatre burned down in 1613 after a canon was fired to announce the entrance of King Henry VIII. The canon fire ignited the thatched roof. The Globe was rebuilt soon thereafter but torn down in 1644 in response to Puritan zealotry against theatre performances.  
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Shakespeare's first child was born six months after his marriage.  

The oldest existing copy of a complete American-made feature film is that of Richard III, a 1912 silent movie based on Shakespeare's play. It was produced by M. B. Dudley Amusement Company.

Some researchers claim that Queen Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays. Few scholars take this claim seriously. 

Between 1890 and 1891, an avid Shakespeare reader decided to bring to the United States all species of birds in Shakespeare's works that were not native to the U.S. One of these birds was the starling, a passerine (perching) bird. It is a destructive bird which ruins grain and fruit crops. The starling also takes over nests of other birds and mocks their songs when it sings.    
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Shakespeare and other writers of his time probably did most of their writing during the day to avoid paying for the expensive candles required for nighttime writing. 
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Because many people in Shakespeare's time--including King James I--believed in the power of witches, Macbeth was a play that unnerved audiences.  
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No one knows how Shakespeare died. Among the possibilities are kidney disease, murder most foul, and too much to drink.  
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Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic when he died, Anglican Archdeacon Richard Davies, of Lichfield, England, reported about three decades after Shakespeare died.  
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U.S. President Abraham Lincoln enjoyed reading Shakespeare.

Many of the greatest works in classical music were inspired by Shakespeare plays. Examples are Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, Giuseppe Verdi's operas Macbeth and Otello (Othello), and Felix Mendelssohn's orchestral overture A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The river running through Shakespeare's hometown is the Upper Avon, not the Avon. In Shakespeare's time, the town was called Stratford, not Stratford-upon-Avon.

When Thomas Edison was a child, his mother frequently read Shakespeare to him.
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Shakespeare's original grave marker showed him holding a bag of grain. Citizens of Stratford replaced the bag with a quill in 1747, perhaps in anticipation of the tourists who would come to see the final resting place of the world's greatest wielder or quills. 
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The motto of the Globe Theatre was totus mundus agit histrionem (all the world's a stage).

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......Verse is a collection of lines that follow a regular, rhythmic pattern–in Shakespeare, usually iambic pentameter, a metric scheme in which each line has ten syllables consisting of five unaccented and accented syllable pairs. In its highest form–when the language is lyrical and the content sublime–verse can become poetry, either rhymed or unrhymed. Prose, on the other hand, is the everyday language of conversation, letters, lectures, sermons, newspaper articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles. Prose has no rhyme or metric scheme.

Verse Passage Spoken by Hamlet (Act III, Scene I):
 

................To be, or not to be: that is the question: ................Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer ................The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ................Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, ................And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; ................No more; and by a sleep to say we end ................The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks ..................................................................................

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Prose Passage Spoken by Hamlet (Act II, Scene II):
 

......Slanders, sir. For the satirical rogue says here that old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, should be old as I am if like a crab you could go backward.

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......Now, then, what about single lines–those spoken in conversation as questions, replies, or ripostes? They are in prose if one line has no paired rhyming line or is too abrupt to contain a metric scheme. The following exchange between Hamlet and Guildenstern in Act III, Scene III, of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark contains such short lines absent of meter and rhyme. The exchange begins when Hamlet asks Guildenstern to play a wind instrument called a recorder, which resembles a flute:

............Hamlet Will you play upon this pipe?
............Guildenstern My lord, I cannot.
............Hamlet I pray you.
............Guildenstern Believe me, I cannot.
............Hamlet I do beseech you.

......Obviously, these lines are too short to contain a pattern of meter or rhyme. Moreover, the content is mundane and prosaic. “I pray you” does not a poem make. For these reasons, the passage qualifies only as prose.
......But what of the multi-line passages? Why are some in verse and others in prose? The answer some Shakespeare commentators provide–an answer that is simplistic and not wholly accurate–is that Shakespeare reserved verse for noble, highborn characters and prose for common, lowborn characters. It is true that royalty and nobility often speak in verse and that peasants and plebeians–or wine-swilling hooligans, like Falstaff (Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II)–often speak in prose. But it is also true that noble characters, like Hamlet and Volumnia (Coriolanus), sometimes speak in prose and that lowborn characters, like the witches in Macbeth, often speak in verse. Even the lowest of the low–the beast-man Caliban in The Tempest–speaks often in verse. In The Merchant of Venice, the characters associated with the dirty world of money speak frequently in verse, and the characters associated with the rarefied world of nobility and refinement speak often in prose. Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing is almost entirely in prose, with highborn characters only occasionally speaking in verse.
......Why, then, does Shakespeare alternate between verse and prose? 

Shakespeare used verse to do the following:

One: Express deep emotion requiring elevated language. Because nobles and commoners were both capable of experiencing profound emotion, both expressed their emotions in verse from time to time.
Two: Make wise, penetrating, and reflective observations that require lofty language. Such a passage is a famous one recited by the outlaw Jaques in Act II, Scene VII, of As You Like It. The passage–which begins with the often-quoted line “All the world’s a stage”–philosophizes about the “seven ages” of man, from infancy to senility. 
Three: Present a lyrical poem as a separate entity, like the famous song in Act V, Scene III, of As You Like It. The first stanza of that poem follows:
............It was a lover and his lass,
............With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
............That o’er the green corn-field did pass
............In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
............When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
............Sweet lovers love the spring.
Four: Inject irony. When the highborn speak humble prose and the hoi polloi speak elegant verse, as is sometimes the case in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare may be saying up can be down, and down can be up. In The Merchant, the noble characters are just as reprehensible as–or perhaps even more reprehensible than–the workaday, unsophisticated characters. Portia is often depicted in critical analyses of the play as its noblest character. But a close reading of the play reveals her as a racist and a self-seeking conniver. Thus, Shakespeare makes her tongue wag in prose and verse, revealing her Janus personality.
Five: Suggest order and exactitude. A character who speaks in precise rhythms and patterns is a character with a tidy brain that plans ahead and executes actions on schedule.

Shakespeare used prose to do the following:

One: Express ordinary, undistinguished observations coming from the surface of the mind rather than its active, ruminating interior.
Two: Make quick, one-line replies such as “Ay, my lord” that are the stuff of day-to-day conversations.
Three: Present auditory relief for audiences (or visual relief for readers) from the intellectual and connotative density of the verse passages.
Four: Suggest madness or senility. In King Lear, Lear speaks almost exclusively in verse in the first half of the play. Then suddenly, he lurches back and forth between verse and prose, perhaps to suggest the frenzied state of his aging mind. Hamlet sometimes shifts to prose in front of observers, perhaps in hopes of presenting his feigned madness as real.
Five: Depict the rambling, desultory path of conversation from a tongue loosened by alcohol, as in Henry IV Part I and Henry IV Part II.
Six: Poke fun at characters who lack the wit to versify their lines.
Seven: Demonstrate that prose has merits as a literary medium. In Shakespeare’s day, verse (and its elegant cousin, poetry) was the sine qua non of successful writing. As an innovator, Shakespeare may have wanted to tout the merits of prose. Thus, on occasion, he infused his plays with prose passages so graceful and thought-provoking that they equalled, and sometimes even surpassed, the majesty of verse or poetry passages. Such a prose passage is the following, spoken by Hamlet in Act II, Scene II:
 

......What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

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