Facts

Five Fascinating Facts about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

by

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. The first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was on Candlemas, 1602.

Candlemas is 2 February – better-known in the United States as Groundhog Day – and was the date on which Christmas decorations were often traditionally taken down in Shakespeare’s time (unlike these days, when it’s traditional to take them down by – oddly enough – Twelfth Night). Shakespeare’s classic comedy of cross-dressing, separated siblings, love, puritanism, and yellow stockings was possibly first recorded in February 1602, though there may well have been an earlier (unrecorded) performance, perhaps a year earlier.

Read more

Five Fascinating Facts about John Milton

by

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. As a teenager, John Milton began writing an epic poem in Latin about the Gunpowder Plot.

John Milton (1608-74) wanted to write an epic poem from an early age. He left his first attempt, in quintum novembris (‘Remember, remember…’), unfinished, but this early work shows how much the idea of Paradise Lost had gestated over a period of some forty years. It is Satan – the villain (antihero?) of Paradise Lost – who suggests the idea of the Gunpowder Plot to the Pope, who then enlists the help of Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and the others.

Later on, in his early thirties, Milton announced his plan to write a great Arthurian epic in English – like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene but with more classical control over the subject and narrative – but he never got around to writing the poem.

Read more

20 Interesting Facts about Drama and Theatre

by

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

We thought it was about time we offered some of our favourite curious facts about plays and drama, so what follows are twenty of the funniest or most fascinating nuggets from the theatre. So if you’ve taken your seat, we’ll dim the lights and raise the curtain on these interesting theatre facts.

Read more

Five Fascinating Facts about Goethe

by

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. One of the first poems Goethe ever wrote was in English.

Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German poet, novelist, and philosopher, he began writing poetry in the English language from an early age. One of his earliest efforts is, fittingly enough, about wanting to become a poet: ‘And other thought is misfortune / Is death and night to me: / I hum no supportable tune, / I can no poet be.’ But poet he would be – although not in English.

Read more