This St George's Day - 23 April 2018 - marks the 402nd anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's greatest contribution to literature is his use of the English language, in which he showed himself an expert both in style and variety. Using as many as 28,000 words in his writing, 1,700 of which he coined himself, the Bard's vocabulary has been dazzling and confounding readers for hundreds of years.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
So can you tell your gaskins from your quatch-buttock? Take the quiz below and find out:
-
Employees are branching out rather than moving up with career minimalismThe explainer From career ladder to lily pad
-
‘It is their greed and the pollution from their products that hurt consumers’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Jane Austen lives on at these timeless hotelsThe Week Recommends Here’s where to celebrate the writing legend’s 250th birthday
-
Othello: a ‘deeply nasty tale of murder and manipulation’The Week Recommends Toby Jones and David Harewood star in Tom Morris’s take on Shakespeare’s tragedy
-
Macbeth: a ‘genuinely scary’ productionThe Week Recommends Daniel Raggett’s nightmarish modern-day staging is set in a boozer in gangland Glasgow
-
Twelfth Night or What You Will: a 'riotous' late-summer jamboreeThe Week Recommends Robin Belfield's 'carnivalesque' new staging at Shakespeare's Globe is 'joyfully tongue-in-cheek'
-
Shakespeare not an absent spouse, study proposesspeed read A letter fragment suggests that the Shakespeares lived together all along, says scholar Matthew Steggle
-
Much Ado About Nothing: Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell deliver 'full-on fiery and fleshy' performanceThe Week Recommends Jamie Lloyd's adaptation of Shakespeare classic leans on '1990s pop favourites'
-
The Merchant of Venice: 'nothing short of gripping'The Week Recommends John Douglas Thompson is 'magisterial' as Shylock
-
8 touring theater productions to mark on your calendar this fallThe Week Recommends A pop icon, Shakespeare reconsidered and a sublime musical about mortality are all on the boards
-
Romeo & Juliet: 'all very clever, but to what end?'The Week Recommends Jamie Lloyd's 'turbo-stylised' production is met with mixed reviews
