Shakespeare's Birthday: Much Ado About A Lot
Monday, April 23, 2012 at 4:01PM | by Otter 
William Shakespeare was generally agreed to have been born on April 23, 1564 (we aren’t positive, but he was baptized on the 26th), and he died on April 23, 1616. April 23rd happens to be the Feast Day of St. George, patron saint and protector of England.
Shakes was a celebrity in his day, the entertainer-in-chief of London. (For fun, take a King James Bible, published in 1611. Turn to Psalm 46. Count 46 words from the beginning of the psalm and 46 words from the back. You get Shakespeare’s name. Just the sort of word-and-number game that the English Renaissance adored.)
He was a playwright, as all the world knows, and knew. But his aspiration was to be a poet. His 154 sonnets are a psalm-cycle to the human spirit, to the human condition, and to human transcendence.
Celebrate.
Go watch Kenneth Branagh’s outstanding adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. Or Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet, or Olivier’s King Lear. Or Ben Kingsley’s Twelfth Night.
Give it up for the man who pushed English farther than it thought it could go, a poet whose day-job changed what we thought possible in language, and therefore who we are, if we attend to him.
