Brush up your Shakespeare.
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
— Cole Porter, “Kiss Me, Kate”
Name a play written by Bartley Campbell. Of course you can’t, nor can just about anyone else alive today. Yet Campbell (1843-1888) was a popular American playwright whose giant ego towered above his talent. His professional stationery depicted two portraits on the letterhead — Bartley Campbell on one side and William Shakespeare on the other — linked by the words “A friendly rivalry.” Today Campbell, a legend in his own mind, is forgotten, while Shakespeare endures and prevails as the one big gun in the canon of English literature that has no rival.
William Shakespeare is the darling of readers, playgoers and critics alike. The critical work directly about the Bard or in some way relevant to him could constitute a library, and in fact does: the superb 280,000-volume Folger Library in Washington, D.C. Even if you somehow devoured that collection, you would still have to read 3,000 discussions of Shakespeare each year to keep up with the new scholarship.
As the Huntsman in “King Henry VI” says, “This way, my lord, for this way lies the game.” Here’s an untrivial quiz on a far-from-trivial author. Supply the basic facts about Shakespeare’s life posed by the following questions:
1. List the dates of William Shakespeare’s birth and death.
2. In what town and country was Shakespeare born?
3. Name the monarchs who reigned in Shakespeare’s country during his lifetime.
4. Name Shakespeare’s wife. “Mrs. Shakespeare” is not acceptable.
5. How many children did the Shakespeares have?
6. With what theater was Shakespeare most intimately connected?
7. What was the name of Shakespeare’s acting company?
8. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. Name three people who, some claim, penned the plays that we attribute to the Stratford man.
9. What is the importance of the following lines (in the original spelling)?:
Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare! Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones, And curst be he yt moves my bones.
10. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries rightly foresaw the magnitude of the Bard’s achievement when he wrote of Shakespeare: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” Name the writer of that sentence.
As Belarius exclaims in “Cymbeline,” “The game is up!” It’s now time to consult the answers.
Answers
1. and 2. Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in the English village of Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, and was probably born three days earlier, on April 23. He died in Stratford on April 23, 1616.
3. Elizabeth I and James I
4. Anne Hathaway (but not the woman who sang and wept in “Les Misérables”)
5. Three: Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith
6. The Globe
7. For most of his career, Shakespeare was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, later known as the King’s Men.
8. Candidates include Sir Walter Raleigh; Edward Devere, the Earl of Oxford; Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; Mary Spenser Herbert and the Earl of Essex.
9. These words are the epitaph on Shakespeare’s grave in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church.
10. Ben Jonson
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com