TRIVIA FOR BARDOLOGISTS

• Shakespeare’s surviving works add up to a staggering 8,84,647 words and 1,18,406 lines. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play, clocking in at 4,042 lines, while his shortest is with 1,787 lines. Though commonly attributed to the Bard, Shakespeare never wrote or said “Oh what a tangled web we weave / when first we practice to deceive.” The line belongs to Sir Walter Scott, from his 1808 poem “Marmion”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare coined more than 500 new words, many of which are still commonly used in English speech. Popular Will-isms include: amazement, bump, lonely, countless, useful, radiance and lackluster. Shakespeare has been translated into at least 80 languages, including Chinese, Bengali, Tagalog, and Uzbek. “Shakespeare” is spelled 80 different ways in documents dating from the Bard’s time, including “Shaxpere” and “Shaxberd.” The Bard coined the phrase, “the beast with two backs” meaning intercourse in his play Shakespeare and wife had eight children, including daughter Susanna, twins Hamnet, Judith, and Edmund. Susanna received most of the Bard’s fortune when he died in 1616, age 52. Hamnet died at age 11, Judith at 77. Susanna dies in 1649, age 66. Of the 154 sonnets or poems, the playwright penned, his first 26 were said to be directed to an aristocratic young man who did not want to marry. Sonnets 127 — 152 talk about a dark woman, the Bard seems to have had mixed feelings for. The Great Bard suffered breech of copyright. In 1609, many of his sonnets were published without the bard’s permission.