may have been born on this date in 1564. That’s good enough for NewMexiKen, and good enough for The Writer’s Almanac, where you can listen to a variation of this very text in the mellifluous tones of Garrison Keillor.
Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605).
We don’t know much about his life, but we do know that he started out as an actor and later acted in his own plays. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, and that in Hamlet he played the ghost.
He used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he gave us many of our most common turns of phrase, including “foul play,” “as luck would have it,” “your own flesh and blood,” “too much of a good thing,” “good riddance,” “in one fell swoop,” “cruel to be kind,” “play fast and loose,” “vanish into thin air,” “the game is up,” “truth will out,” and “in the twinkling of an eye.”
Shakespeare has always been popular in America … [though] the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in the United States didn’t take place until 1730 in New York City. It was an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. He fell out of favor after the Revolutionary War, but then pioneers revived his work out West. An illiterate mountain main named Jim Bridger became famous for having memorized most of Shakespeare’s plays, and he would recite them for audiences of miners and cowboys. Many of the mines and canyons across the West are named after Shakespeare or one of his characters. There is a city of Shakespeare in New Mexico, a Shakespeare Mountain in Nevada, a Shakespeare Reservoir in Texas, and a Shakespeare Glacier in Alaska. Colorado has mines called Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona.