More Tidbits...

Some more tidbits from Scylla and Charybdis:

Groundlings were cool. These were the lower class theater goers in Shakespeare’s day that “ate, drank, drew corks, smoked tobacco, fought with each other, and, often, when they were out of humour, threw food and even stones at actors.” Now that’s theater.

Many scholars think Hamlet, to a great extent, is Shakespeare personified, an autobiographical look at the author himself. With so little to go on (relatively speaking, hardly anything is known about Shakespeare’s life) it might as well be.

Somewhat famously, Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to someone named “W.H.” No one has any idea who this is. Hmmm, and ambiguous reference, wonder where we've seen that before?

Shakespeare’s wedding should probably be regarded as a shotgun wedding by modern standards. He was 18 when he married a 28 year old Anne Hathaway, who bore his first child five month’s after the wedding (do the math). Also, they were most unhappily married, to the point where Shakespeare left her to live in London for a large portion of his adult life. And, like a bad episode of Jerry Springer, he spurned her even after death, writing her out of the first draft of his will (he later gave her his bed…whoopee!) and placing a curse on his gravestone against anyone who would “moves my bones” so as to ensure that she would not be buried next to him.

Here’s how the mythological Minotaur was conceived, according to the annotations: “Minos, king of Crete, offended Poseidon, who revenged himself by making Minos’s wife, Pasiphäe, fall in love with a white bull. To fulfill her passion she concealed herself in a wooden cow that Daedalus prepared for her; the result of the union was the Minataur – half bull, half man.” Seriously, where do they come up with this stuff?