Curated playlist
Male Shakespearean characters
- Prince HamletHow old is Prince Hamlet, 30 or 16? A gravedigger's line and a garbled word in the First Folio disagree.
- Touchstone (As You Like It)Touchstone, the jester in Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, once warns a rival that he will kill him "a hundred and fifty ways". The rival is a clumsy country boy, and the threat comes from a man paid to make people laugh. That mix of…
- Henry VIIIHenry VIII broke England from Rome after the pope would not annul his first marriage.
- IagoIago has more lines in Othello than Othello himself. The play's villain speaks 1,097 lines.
- Othello (character)Was Shakespeare's Othello from North Africa or Sub-Saharan Africa? Scholars still disagree.
- Philip II of FranceKing Philip II of France won a battle in 1214 that left King John of England so weak he signed Magna Carta.
- TheseusTheseus entered a maze with a hidden sword and a ball of thread. Inside waited the half-man, half-bull Minotaur.
- John FalstaffShakespeare's Falstaff was first named after a real martyr. A descendant complained, so he changed the name.
- ShylockShakespeare wrote Shylock for an England that had banned Jews for three hundred years. Edward I expelled them in 1290.
- Thomas WolseyContemporaries called Thomas Wolsey, an Ipswich tradesman's son, the other king of England.
- John Howard, 1st Duke of NorfolkA note pinned to his tent warned John Howard not to fight at Bosworth. He rode into battle for Richard III anyway.
- DogberryDogberry's first order is that his night watchmen may sleep on duty. A historian says real watchmen often did the same.