- His plays have been adapted into movies at least 420 times, more than any other writer.
- Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, at 4,042 lines, and an unabridged duration (without intervals) of at least four-and-a-half hours.
Trivia
This chapter is a free excerpt from Biography of William Shakespeare.
- His plays have been adapted into movies at least 420 times, more than any other writer.
- Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, at 4,042 lines, and an unabridged duration (without intervals) of at least four-and-a-half hours.
- A Comedy Of Errors is his shortest play, with only 1,787 lines.
- The First Folio, the first complete edition of his plays, cost £1 on publication, equivalent to several hundred dollars today.
- The last time one of the surviving First Folios was sold, in 2006, it went for five million dollars.
- A ticket for the yard (standing) at Shakespeare's Globe cost one penny, about $2 today. The Globe replica sells these tickets for £5 – not much of an increase in real terms.
- Shakespeare has been translated into at least 80 languages.
- Shakespeare's complete works add up to 884,647 words, or 118,406 lines.
- Playhouses in Shakespeare's time often doubled as bearpits for bear-baiting. This involved dogs being set on a bear, with the audience usually betting on the outcome. One particularly gruesome variation was putting a chimpanzee on horseback, and setting dogs on them. It is quite hard to imagine how this could happen in a playhouse one day, and then some sublime tragedy that moved the audience to tears could be on the next day.
- There were no toilets in Elizabethan theaters.
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