Brush Up Your Shakespeare
"When your baby is pleading for pleasure / Let her sample you Measure for Measure"
Apr. 23 - Today is the birthday of William Shakespeare (no relation), born on this day in 1564. Shakespeare was a playwright and poet whose tragedies have been celebrated for centuries. For example, there’s the Tragedy of Julius Caesar, in which a Roman general thinks he’d like to be emperor, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is the Tragedy of Macbeth, in which a Scottish Thane thinks he’d like to be king, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is the Tragedy of Richard II, in which a hunch-banked noble thinks he'd like to be king, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is even the Tragedy of Hamlet, in which a young prince thinks and everyone dies in the end.
(That last is naturally set in Denmark, where the relationship between thinking and dying was most famously chronicled by Soren Kierkegaard and mitigated by the good people of Carlsberg.)
Shakespeare wrote a lot of other plays and died in the end—on April 23, 1616. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable when you consider that he died on the same day he’d been born.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died the very same day as Shakespeare. Cervantes was a brilliant Spanish humorist, best known for his novel Don Quixote, in which an old man suffering from acute mental illness rides around the Spanish countryside hallucinating and then dies.
April 23 is National Sovereignty and Children’s Day in Turkey.
The Bard of Stratford-on-Avon shares his birthday with Valerie Bertinelli (1960), Joyce DeWitt (1949), Sandra Dee (1942), Lee Majors (1940), and Shirley Temple Black (1928).
Happy Tuesday!
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