Dr Julian Thompson, Tutor in English, invites you to join him in celebrating Shakespeare’s 456th birthday!
The RSC has announced that because it cannot celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday on 23 April with physical events in Stratford-upon-Avon, we should try to do it virtually.
William Shakespeare has the distinction of dying on his birthday, which also happens to be St George’s Day, a national festival since 1222.
We know he died on 23 April 1616; it’s a good bet (‘the wish is father of many a tradition’ writes a notable biographer) he was born on 23 April 1564.
Shakespeare’s natal day turned out to be his fatal day.
It’s also intriguing that seventeen years before he died he wrote about the conspirator and Old Republican, Cassius, who also dies on his birthday:
This day I breathed first: time is come round,
Julius Caesar, Act V, Scene III
And where I did begin, there shall I end;
My life is run his compass.
Coincidence, or prophecy?
It’s certainly an opportunity for the scholar’s ‘must’: ‘at the height of his powers. in what was for him an annus mirabilis, 1599, the bard must have rested his quill for a moment as the chilling thought swept over him that one day in the year was already destined to be his death-day, and that, like the fatalistic Cassius, he might end where he began.’
You can just imagine David Mitchell scratching his great dome over that one in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow.
Happy four hundred and fifty sixth birthday and four hundred and fourth Anniversary, William Shakespeare!
Julian Thompson, Tutor in English
Interesting in exploring Shakespeare? Dr Lynn Robson also shares some of her favourite online resources in another of today’s articles.
