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Ah, Shakespeare. Everyone’s heard of him. Even if you weren’t an English major in college, chances are you had to at least read Romeo and Juliet at some point during your freshman year in high school, and Hamlet and Macbeth probably came along a couple of years later. Maybe you read King Lear or Twelfth Night in college. Maybe not. Maybe you enjoyed reading those stories; maybe the language was a little too cumbersome for your taste. Love him or hate him, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone over the age of 12 who hasn’t been introduced to a Shakespearean play. But what do we know about the man who penned all those plays?
That’s where 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Shakespeare steps in. Author Janet Ware gives us 101 pint-sized tidbits about the man called Shakespeare: trivia about his life, about the language of his plays, about Elizabethan times, and about his plays and poems. The section on Shakespeare’s life contains some of the most interesting bits in the book. For example, did you know that scholars aren’t entirely sure that the man called “William Shakespeare” actually wrote all of those plays? Will Shakespeare had only a grammar school education and never traveled, so many researchers are skeptical that he could have written such sophisticated works. They believe that all of those plays may have been written by someone else: theories range from Edward de Vere (the seventeenth Earl of Oxford) to rival playwright Christopher Marlowe to—get this—Queen Elizabeth I.
The trivia tidbits in this book range from the obvious (men usually played women’s roles in Elizabethan theatre) to the obscure (many of Shakespeare’s plots and characters were lifted from other sources). There are plenty of speculative questions raised, too, although most of them don’t seem to really matter (for example, one section was entitled: “Was Shakespeare gay?”).
The author reminds us throughout the book that there’s a lot we still don’t know about Shakespeare, and we may never know the answers to some questions. But she does raise all of those questions and provides various theories from scholars to help you make up your own mind about him. True Shakespeare enthusiasts may already know a lot of the trivia in this book but may find one or two tidbits of information that they weren’t aware of. Anyone with only a passing interest in Shakespeare, however, may find this book a little dull for their tastes.
Personally, I love to collect trivia, and I love many of Shakespeare’s plays (although I didn’t know much about the man before I picked up this book), and I found the various theories and little-known facts to be fascinating. Pick up a copy of 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Shakespeare, and dazzle your friends with your newfound knowledge.
