Dimensions
127 x 184 x 21mm
If you look closely, Shakespeare is all around us. From nightclubs to suburban mall food courts, William Shakespeare's literary power is so intense and so widespread that it intrudes into the material world. HOW SHAKESPEARE CHANGED EVERYTHING takes us on a delightful tour through the continuous stream of Shakespeare's influence on the world stage. Packed with fun and fascinating tidbits, this book takes a deep look at how Shakespeare permeates our everyday lives, but, more importantly, how the world as we know it would not exist without Shakespeare.
Did you know:
Starlings, a pesty species of small bird that now plague Central Park, were originally imported and released into New York by Eugene Schieffelin in 1890 as a part of his plan to introduce every bird mentioned by Shakespeare into North America.
A few months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the Nazi Party issued a pamphlet entitled "Shakespeare-a Germanic Writer," and in 1936 there were more productions of Shakespeare in Germany than in the rest of the world combined.
Shakespeare coined somewhere in the vicinity of 1700 words, including: lackluster, fashionable, auspicious, bandit, glow, hush, dawn, gnarled, hobnob, traditional, and even the name Jessica.
Abraham Lincoln read Shakespeare aloud as he was sailing up the Potomac days before his death and, through mysterious coincidence, chose Macbeth to recite, the very play in which Shakespeare is believed to have invented the word "assassination."
Tolstoy hated Shakespeare with a passion. He spent a year rereading all of the plays, considering them deeply, and then wrote a spite-fuelled evisceration of Shakespeare's reputation in a book called Tolstoy on Shakespeare.
