20 Facts about Shakespeare

Shakespeare used to wake every morning with a cry of “Shakespeare – Activate!”

The Disney cartoon Timon & Pumba was conceived as a direct sequel to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

Julius Caesar was originally devised as a farcical play about a hay-fever inflicted emperor called Julius Sneezer

Shakespeare hated chairs and wrote all his manuscripts in a sort of half-squatting stance.

Shakespeare wrote a sequel to the "The Two Gentlemen Of Verona" called "The Three Gentlemen And A Baby Of Verona". This was followed by "The Three Gentlemen And A Little Lady Of Verona". Neither were performed due to the unavailability of the intended lead actor, Sir Thomas de Selleck.

Contrary to what many people think, Shakespeare is not Hungarian.

Shakespeare is a distant ancester of Shakin' Stevens. As a nod towards his family history, Shakin' Stevens' "Green Door" is actually a re-write of Macbeth.

Shakespeare was an expert at Real Tennis. He was also quite good at Surreal Tennis which involved playing tennis against a dolphin using rackets made out of potatoes and dreams. However, he was absolutely terrible at Unreal Tennis, mainly because this consisted of a playing a game of bowls and had nothing to do with tennis whatsoever.

Until Shakespeare tamed them all, shrews were one of Britain's most vicious carnivores.

When first printed in Japanese, "Richard III" was given a name that translates into English as "Hunchback King B*stard"

"Comedy of Errors" isn't actually very funny

Anne Hathaway’s Cottage is in fact Elizabethan slang for a ladies naughty parts. “Shakespeare spent much of that summer dashing in and out of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage”

From around 1601 Shakespeare insisted on referring to Omelettes as “Hamlets”

In the first ever deal of its kind, performances of "Macbeth" at the Globe theatre were sponsored by "Mr. Havelock's Vegetable And Produce Stall". However, actors complained that having Lady Macbeth dressed as a giant carrot was affecting the gravitas of the play, and the sponsorship was quickly dropped.

In a recent experiment conducted at De Montfort University, scientists sat a 100 chimpanzees in a room with a 100 typewriters for a month in order to see how many of Shakespeare's plays they would reproduce. Unsurprisingly the answer was none. However, by defecating on a piece of paper, one of the chimpanzees managed to produce a passable attempt at Chris Moyles' autobiography.

Shakespeare's beard was false and was worn to hide an embarrassing tattoo of a unicorn he'd had done on his chin whilst he was a teenager.

Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” was the first entertainment to feature the popular toy-line “He-man”

It has been discovered that William Shakespeare’s middle name was Tiberius and between the ages of 19 and 24 he insisted on being introduced as William T Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare and composer William Byrd briefly performed a stage routine together under the name of the "The Two Williams", whereby they would read out humourous news items and close the act with their catchphrase:

SHAKESPEARE: Verily, I bid you a good night
BYRD: And verily, he bids you a good night as well

After losing a bitter argument with Francis Bacon over who could whistle the loudest, Shakespeare became so enraged by bacon that he turned vegetarian.