To mark the anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the RSC's Artistic Director Gregory Doran presents some startling facts about Britain's most famous playwright:

Credit: LEFTERIS PITARAKIS

1. Shakespeare caused an air crash

On October 4th 1960 a Lockheed Electra aeroplane setting off from Boston Airport stirred up a flock of 10,000 starlings on the runway. It flew straight into the avian cloud which choked the engines and brought the aeroplane down. The crash claimed 62 lives.

The starling is not a species that is native to North America. It was introduced in 1890 by a Shakespeare nut called Eugene Schieffelin. He wanted Central Park in New York to be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare.

The thrushes and blackbirds struggled to acclimatise, but the starlings thrived. By the late Twenties they had reached the Mississippi and by the Forties had arrived in California. Now they are found from Alaska to Florida, and have ousted many native species, driving off bluebirds and woodpeckers, and forming gigantic flocks of up to a million birds.

So Schieffelin’s romantic gesture not only brought about an air crash, but an ecological disaster too.

But where does Shakespeare ever mention starlings? There is only one reference. It comes in Henry IV Part One when Hotspur, forbidden by the king to mention the name of Mortimer, declares that he will train a starling to say his name and sing it continually in his majesty’s ear.

2. Adolf Hitler wanted to stage a Shakespeare play

In one of Hitler’s 1926 sketchbooks, there is a design for the staging of Julius Caesar. It portrays the Forum with the same sort of “severe deco” neoclassical architecture which would later create the setting for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg.

Hitler’s admiration for the Roman Empire was immense, after a visit to the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla. And his drawing of the Forum suggests his appetite to create a platform worthy of his oratorical skills, paralleling Brutus and Mark Antony, and establish an arena in which to glorify the thousand year Third Reich.

His chief architect, Albert Speer, designed the grandstand of the Zeppelinfeld, in which his Fuhrer could realise these ambitions.

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In 1937, Orson Welles opened his Mercury Theatre Company in New York, by directing a production of Julius Caesar which evoked both contemporary Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

3. Shakespeare’s theatre stank

When Thomas Platter visited London in 1599 and saw a production of Julius Caesar at the newly opened Globe Theatre, he also watched a session of bear-baiting.

The Globe Theatre is a reconstruction of the original theatre built by Shakespeare’s company of players, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The original Globe was destroyed by fire in 1613.

Afterwards he went behind the theatre and saw the dog enclosure, where there were 120 English mastiffs, and stalls containing 12 large bears, one of which was blind, and several bulls. He comments on the stench:

“And the place was evil-smelling because of the lights (offal) and meat on which the butchers fed the said dogs”.

The Hope Theatre which was built on Bankside (just two months after the nearby Globe Theatre burned to the ground in June 1613), alternated bear-baiting and plays.

In Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, the stage-keeper complains about having to share the arena with the bears, and to the shocking smell: “the place be as dirty as Smithfield” he says, “and as stinking every whit”.

• Gregory Doran interview: Getting the RSC just as he likes it

4. The great actress, Sarah Bernhardt, modelled for a statue of Lady Macbeth

Next time you pass the Gower Statue of Shakespeare, which stands in front of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, take a closer look at one of the four supporting figures which surround the plinth.

These bronze characters represent four elements of Shakespeare’s genius: Falstaff chortles for Comedy; Henry V holds the crown aloft for History, Hamlet with Yorick’s skull broods for Philosophy, and Lady Macbeth wrings her hands for Tragedy.

Lord Ronald Gower sculpted this assemblage in his studio in the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. When the great actress “the divine” Bernhardt visited him one day, she advised him precisely how Lady M. should wring her hands. She would play the part later, in 1899.

When the statue was originally unveiled in 1888, it was positioned on the other side of the building, behind the Swan Theatre, and faced the church.

5. Mozart nearly wrote an opera of The Tempest

We know that Giuseppe Verdi spent much of his later life trying to write an opera of King Lear, but it is a lesser-known fact that Mozart contemplated writing a version of The Tempest.

Verdi struggled with his Re Lear project for many years. He told one of his two librettists, “This will be our masterpiece”.

The four-act libretto, by Antonio Somma, still exists. But, finally defeated, Verdi offered the material to fellow composer Pietro Mascagni. Mascagni asked him why he did not write it himself. He replied : ‘The scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath scared me’”.

Frederick Delius wanted to write an opera of As You Like It. Tchaikovsky rejected the idea of writing an opera of The Merchant of Venice, but toyed with the idea of writing one based on Othello.

But perhaps the most intriguing Shakespeare interpretation that never was, must be the opera of The Tempest that Mozart was apparently commissioned to write.

6. Shakespeare was the father of twins

Even so my sun one early morn did shine

With all triumphant splendour on my brow:

But out alack he was but one hour mine,

The region cloud hath masked him from me now.

Sonnet 33

On February 2nd 1585 Shakespeare’s twins were baptised. Their names were Hamnet and Judith. It was the feast of Candlemas, the day when traditionally the Christmas decorations were taken down.

The first folio of Shakespeare's work was published in 1623

Fifteen years later on Candlemas 1600, Twelfth Night was performed at Middle Temple. In that play another pair of twins are separated in a shipwreck, and assume each other have perished beneath the waves.

But at the end, Shakespeare reunites them in one of the most moving moments in the entire canon. His own son, Hamnet, Judith’s twin, had died aged 11 in the late summer of 1596.

It must have been a poignant reminder to Shakespeare that, although he could effect the reunion of the twins on stage, his daughter Judith, just turned 15, would never spend another birthday with her twin.

7. Catherine the Great translated Shakespeare

In 1786, Queen Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, did her own adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, titled “What it is to have Linen and Buck-baskets”.

She had swept away the Winter Palace of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva river, in St Petersburg, to make way for her splendid new Hermitage Theatre. It was here that her adaptation was performed: the first Russian play to credit Shakespeare’s influence. Catherine also translated Timon of Athens.

Other world leaders have attempted to translate Shakespeare’s plays too. Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, translated both Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili.

• Laughable maybe, but never lacklustre: words of the Bard

8. The first ever amateur performance of a Shakespeare play took place in 1623

In the Folger Library in Washington is a handwritten manuscript of an adaptation of two Shakespeare plays, which was performed by a household in Pluckley in Kent in 1623.

Sir Edward Dering put together the two parts of Henry IV for a private performance at his home, Surrenden Manor.

He paid the local rector to write out the play, and laid out the princely sum of 17s and 8d “for heads of hair and beards”, which were presumably wigs and false beards for Falstaff and the rest.

And interestingly enough, this same amateur theatre enthusiast, was the first person we know of to buy a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays when it hit the bookstalls in 1623.

On December 5th he must have been admiring the stock of the publisher Edward Blount at the sign of the Black Bear, or possibly William Aspley’s shop at the Tiger’s Head, or John Smethwick’s shop “under the dial” in St Dunstan’s churchyard on Fleet Street.

For these men were partners in the publication of an important new book, which had just been printed. And young Sir Edward decided he must buy not one copy, but two, at the substantial cost of £2 (oh, and he threw in a volume of Ben Jonson’s works at just 9s).

The Folio had been listed in a catalogue at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the previous year, but the first impression only rolled off the press in the February 1623, and continued to be printed through to November, just a few days before Sir Edward bought his copies, which might therefore have been literally hot off the press.

The only item which cost Edward Dering more that trip up to London was a beaver hat and band which set him back £2 6s. In the same account book he also records his payments to his workforce, and one John Barton gets his half year wages, £2 15s. Just 15s more than his Folios cost him.

9. Shakespeare was performed on the stump of a giant redwood tree

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain describes how two swindlers posing as English actors on their way down the Mississippi stage a night of Shakespeare in the court house of a one-horse town in Arkansas. When the audience drift away before the end, one of them declares: “Arkansas lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare! “

Shakespeare followed the Gold Rush west in the 1840s. There are stories of pioneer companies of actors playing among the ore-rich gulches, to mining camps full of desperados and sharpers of all nations.

There, in a cluster of dingy canvas tents and log cabins, they would set up a stage in some saloon or store, with candles in bottles to serve as footlights. But if they expected an audience unresponsive to Shakespeare and the classics they were wrong.

If they paraphrased lines, the miners would shout out the right ones, and fire their pistols, or fling daggers. But if they performed the Bard well, the miners would thunder their applause and throw buckskin purses full of gold dust.

An actor called McKean Buchanan was a great favourite with the miners in these mountains. He played Macbeth and Richard III in a slouch hat with a great drooping feather, a long black cape and a huge yellow gauntlet, and would roar his way through every role.

He was said to devour portions of the scenery. On tour in California, in Calaveras Grove, a suitable theatre could not be found, so he was persuaded to perform on the stump of a giant redwood tree.

The stump, of the great Discovery tree, is still there.

• Why Shakespeare should be child's play

10. Shakespeare was described as “Our Star of Poets”



“Take him and cut him out in little stars

And he will make the face of heaven so fine,

That all the world will be in love with night”

Jonson called Shakespeare “Our Star of Poets”, and though there are satellites named after Shakespeare characters, there is no star named after Shakespeare himself.

William Lassell began the practice of naming planets' satellites after Shakespeare’s characters in 1851, and there are moons called Titania, Oberon and Puck; Prospero, Ariel, Caliban and even Sycorax (Caliban’s mother); but not a single astral body - moon, satellite or star - named after the man himself.

As the Hubble telescope reveals ever greater depths of space, perhaps a new star can be found which will bear Shakespeare’s name in time for the quatercentenary of his death in 2016. The Royal Astronomical Society take note.

11. Google have hounoured Shakespeare with a Doodle

To mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death on April 23, Google has unveiled a new doodle, celebrating the playwright and some of his most famous plays, including The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

Gregory Doran is Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His book, The Shakespeare Almanac, is published by Hutchinson