Tales of The Bard

Shakespeare: 10 facts you didn't know about the world's most famous poet

How much do we really know about Shakespeare? Thirty-nine plays, over a hundred sonnets, and more words invented than any writer in history; we even believe that his life was so tidy that he was born and died on the exact same date. But most of these facts are mere myths: historians now assure us that we do not know his date of birth, we cannot confirm he came up with those 1,700 words, and we don’t really know how to properly spell his surname. Read on to learn 10 decoded facts about The Bard.

Only six authenticated signatures of William Shakespeare survive. And they weren’t the closing etches in manuscripts or letters: they were scrawled onto legal documents.

All six date from the final four years of his life. But the strangest detail is that no two of them spell his name the same way: variations include "Willm Shakp," "William Shakspē," and "Shakspere." Not one matches the spelling we use today.

It might perplex modern readers, but this was common practice among Elizabethan clerks and writers, who treated spelling as a loose suggestion rather than a fixed rule.

Etymology fans have probably read endless lists of words allegedly invented by Shakespeare. "Upstairs," "bedroom," and "assassination" are among those. As many as 1,700 are attributed to him, but this seems to be, mostly, a myth.

The number comes from the Oxford English Dictionary, which credited him with the earliest known written use of many words, not their invention. Many of these terms were likely becoming orally popular, and what Shakespeare did was use them in his works, effectively documenting those new terms for future generations. None of this makes him less remarkable, though: he used roughly 20,000 different words across his plays and poems.

William Shakespeare's grave carries a warning: "Blessed be the man who spares these stones, and cursed be he who moves my bones." His wishes were respected for hundreds of years. While other tombstones in Holy Trinity Church were shuffled and covered to make room for new burials, his stayed untouched.

Then in 2016, researchers scanned the grave with ground-penetrating radar for a documentary marking 400 years since his death. The results were very strange: his skull appeared to be missing. Even more mysteriously, it lined up with an old, long-dismissed magazine story from 1879 about a trophy hunter stealing it.

The Globe Theatre was built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s playing company. It soon became London’s premier and most famous playhouse, drawing up to 3,000 spectators per show. One day in the summer of 1613, the venue was packed for a performance of Shakespeare's historical play Henry VIII. During a dramatic entrance, a stage cannon fired as planned, but a spark from its wadding landed in the thatched roof.

Within an hour, the entire theater, timber, thatch, and all, had burned to the ground, but despite being studded with attendees, there were no casualties. Legend has it that only one injury was recorded: a man whose breeches caught fire, which he doused with a bottle of ale. Two separate ballads about the fire were printed by the very next day. The Globe was rebuilt within a year, this time with a safer tiled roof.

In August 1596, William Shakespeare buried his only son. Hamnet was eleven, and the burial register at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford records his death with no details. We do know that four years later, Shakespeare wrote the story of a grieving prince obsessed with death and his father's ghost: Hamlet.

Historians never confirmed the connection, and found no proof of Shakespeare explaining it, but many 21st-century cultural works have speculated about this interpretation, such as novels or films that explore the writer’s grief.

Every April 23, tributes note that Shakespeare died precisely on his birthday. There's just one problem: nobody actually knows when he was born.

No birth certificate survives from 1564. Historians have only found a baptism record dated April 26, which could possibly suggest that he was born on the days prior, because, at the time, babies were typically baptized a few days after birth. We do know, however, the date of his death: April 23, 1616. He was 52 years old.

Another myth has been circulating for centuries about his death: that Shakespeare and the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes died on the exact same day, April 23, 1616. Even UNESCO used this seemingly chilling fact to create World Book Day on that date.

But there’s a disappointing catch: in 1616, England was still using the old Julian calendar, while Spain had switched to the newer Gregorian one. The two "April 23rds" were actually ten days apart. To complicate things further, some historians now believe Cervantes died April 22, not April 23, and that the 23rd was actually his burial. Again, the two dates are close enough, but may have been slightly edited for drama.

Scholars have always been puzzled by a strange 7-year-gap of information about his life. Between 1585 and 1592, William Shakespeare simply vanishes from the historical record. The last mention of him before this gap is the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, in Stratford.

Then, in 1592, he is referenced in a text by a rival London playwright calling him an "upstart crow," which proves that by 1592 he had already made it as an actor and writer in the city. What happened in between is anyone's guess: being a schoolteacher, writing plays, spending time with his family, even working as a secret tutor for families in Lancashire have all been proposed. But there still is no evidence to support any of it.

In 1582, eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six and already pregnant with their firstborn daughter, Susanna. Three years later, she also gave birth to twins Judith and Hamnet.

When William died in 1616, his will left his wife one specific item that has always confounded scholars: his "second-best bed." For centuries this was read as a final insult. But historians now argue the best bed was reserved for guests, while the second-best was the actual marriage bed the couple shared for decades.

If two of Shakespeare's actor friends hadn't decided, seven years after his death, to compile his work into one enormous book, half of his plays might not exist today.

Published in 1623, the First Folio contained 36 plays, and eighteen of them, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, had never been printed anywhere before. John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had worked alongside Shakespeare for decades, gathered scripts, prompt books, and old drafts to put it together. Shakespeare himself never published a collected edition of his own plays; he likely saw them as scripts for performance, not literature meant to last.

Pop culture etymologies

11 words popularized by books and movies

We are used to thinking that the words we use daily are derived from Latin or Greek words used centuries ago, or that great authors like Shakespeare coined them. Sometimes, though, these everyday terms have been in use for just a few decades, or are the product of a children’s book or a cartoon, and we are none the wiser. Let’s have a look at 11 words that were first used or popularized in books and movies.

In 2022, ‘gaslighting’ was chosen as the word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, describing the manipulative technique of making someone question their memories, perceptions, and even their reality. While the term is now used for a psychological manipulation, its name comes from a literal gaslight.

In the 1944 movie Gaslight, adapted from a play, a man slowly convinces his wife that she’s going insane to commit her to an asylum. One of his tactics consists of dimming the gas lights in the house while insisting she is imagining the light changes. Despite the term originating in 1944, it only became widely used in the 2010s.

In the 21st century, paparazzi are an annoying but common occurrence for anyone famous, but did you know that their name comes from a 1960s Italian classic film? Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita follows Marcello Rubini, a celebrity journalist, across seven days in Rome.

Rubini is accompanied by the photographer Paparazzo, modelled after scandal-hunting Roman photographers, a name the director chose because it reminded him of an annoying, quick-moving insect. The use of the name as a common term for celebrity photographers was popularized in English by Time magazine shortly after the movie.

Robots are not an oddity in the 21st century and are a common occurrence in movies, books, and other types of media. But the term ‘robot’ has a darker history than many imagine. First used in the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Czech writer Karel Čapek, it was used to describe bio-engineered humans—closer to what we would now call androids—, mass-produced to serve as workers.

Čapek used the Czech word robota, meaning ‘serfdom’, ‘hard work’, and sometimes interpreted as ‘slave’, to name these human-like beings that were efficient, but lacked emotions, critical thinking, and self-preservation instincts, and were thus easier to exploit. The term entered the English language in the late 1930s and later evolved into the idea of a highly advanced machine.

Did you know that the name of this popular search engine is derived from a mathematical term? A ‘googol’ describes a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes, and the founders of Google chose the name —with a slightly different spelling— to reflect the vast amount of information the search engine would make available.

But while the verb form ‘to Google’ was initially used by founder Larry Page in 1998, it only became popular in 2002, thanks to the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where in S07, E04, Willow asks Buffy, "Have you googled her yet?" Google has tried to discourage this use of the term, but what can you do against the power of a cult series?

No one really knows where the term ‘nerd’ originated, but it is widely accepted that it’s a variation of ‘nert’ or ‘nut’, both meaning a stupid or crazy person. It first appeared in print in the 1950s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss, where it is used as the name of a small creature.

By that point, the term became popular as a derogatory way to describe someone brainy or socially inept. However, its later use in sitcoms and films in association with intellectualism and a passion for technology has contributed to lessening the negative connotations of the word.

When Hormel Foods introduced SPAM to the market in 1937, they never imagined it would become the international word for junk emails. The brand name, an abbreviation of ‘spiced ham’, eventually became synonymous with luncheon meat and was featured in a humorous sketch of the BBC comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The sketch features a bar where every dish includes SPAM, which prompts a group of Viking patrons to shout "spam, spam" each time the waitress reads out the menu. The term was then adopted to describe repetitive, unwanted internet messages, and it is now instantly associated with commercial ads and repetitive messages.

Now a common way to take responsibility for something or to admit a fault, this phrase originated in the world of basketball in the 1970s to own an error and keep the game moving. Golden State Warriors’ Manute Bol is commonly credited with popularizing its use in the basketball context, but its spreading to other contexts came through the rom-com classic Clueless.

This 90s reimagining of a Jane Austen novel popularized several San Fernando Valley slang words and phrases through its main character, Cher, and her use of "Oops! My bad" during a driving lesson is probably one of the most iconic Clueless quotes.

We now understand the term ‘nimrod’ as ‘fool’ or ‘klutz’, but its original use was quite different. The Bible describes King Nimrod, one of Noah’s descendants, as a mighty hunter, but the name also carries the meaning of ‘rebellious’ and ‘tyrant’, so across history, ‘nimrod’ has been used to refer to both tyrants and good hunters.

How did it come to mean fool? It is all Bugs Bunny’s fault. In a 1948 Looney Tunes episode, Bugs Bunny mockingly calls Elmer Fudd a nimrod, implying that he is a pathetic hunter. Maybe the audience failed to pick up the biblical reference or the sarcasm, but that was the turning point of ‘nimrod’ from hunter to fool.

J.R.R. Tolkien coined many terms, but we bet you didn’t know he was the mind behind the use of ‘tween’ as preadolescent. While he did not invent the term itself —this shortened version of ‘between’ already existed— he contributed to its association with the stage between childhood and coming of age.

In The Lord of the Rings, ‘tween’ is used to describe hobbits in their twenties, often irresponsible and reckless, no longer children, but still not fully adults until they are 33 years old. As hobbits live longer than humans, this stage is equivalent to preteens and teenagers. After the term was popularized in English, it became synonymous with children in the in-between stage before adolescence.

If you ever thought that ‘pandemonium’ might be related to ‘demon’, you were a hundred percent right. A combination of the Greek pan (‘all’) and the Latin daemonium (‘demon’ or ‘evil spirit’), the word first appeared in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). In the poem, the angels fallen from Heaven create a palace in Hell, called Pandemonium or ‘place of all the demons’.

How did its meaning shift to chaos and mayhem? A few decades after Milton coined it, the term became common to describe places of chaos and uproar, eventually being associated with the chaos itself.

Have you ever heard the term ‘malapropism’? It is often used to describe the incorrect use of a word in place of another that sounds similar, such as confusing ‘amphibious’ with ‘ambidextrous’. Though this is a common speech mistake in any language, its English name comes from the 1775 play The Rivals, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

In the play, the character of Mrs. Malaprop (from the French mal à propos, ‘poorly placed’) frequently uses the incorrect but similar-sounding word, creating confusion and failing to properly communicate. Though the term ‘dogberryism’ —in reference to a Shakespearean character— is sometimes used, ‘malapropism’ has undoubtedly become the most common name for this mistake.