I wasn't kidding. And actually, it is accepted documentarily that Shakespeare did, indeed, die on April 23rd. But there is no solid evidence to support April 23rd as his birth date:

>The Early Life Story
of William Shakespeare
Stratford, England, 1564-1569

(Page 2: Shakespeare's Birthday)
An excerpt from "William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius"
by Anthony Holden

Beyond the tedious, class-ridden distraction that its subject never existed, or could not have been the man who wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, or was even (in a tired academic joke) a different man of the same name, Shakespeare biography must chart a wary course through the encrusted myths of more than four centuries — the first being the popular delusion that there is scant documentary evidence about the life of the most remarkable poet the world has been privileged to know. Shakespeare's life is in fact documented in more detail than that of any writer of his age, except to some degree Ben Jonson, as we shall see from these (and many other) contemporary references to his work.

So another myth must be dispelled at the outset. There is no evidence, alas, to support the popular belief that William Shakespeare was born — as fifty-two years later he was to die — on 23 April, the date celebrated in England since 1222 as the feast day of dragon-slaying St George. As the poet's posthumous fame grew, securing a unique niche for his country in the cultural history of the world, it was a natural enough temptation for posterity to unite the birthday of England's national poet with that of its patron saint. But the tradition is based on a false assumption, that Elizabethan baptisms invariably took place three days after the birth.

The instruction given to parents in the 1559 Prayer Book, published five years before Shakespeare's birth, was to have the christening performed before the first Sunday or holy day following the birth 'unless upon a great and reasonable cause declared to the curate and by him approved'. In 1564 the 23rd day of April happened to fall on a Sunday, four days after the feast day of St Alphege and two before that of St Mark — traditionally an unlucky day, so the curate's permission to avoid it may well have been forthcoming. But the contemporary inscription on Shakespeare's tomb in Holy Trinity — that same church where he was christened on 26 April by the vicar of the parish, John Bretchgirdle — reads that he died in his fifty-third year ('obiit anno . . . aetatis 53'). We know that he died on St George's Day, 23 April, so this would seem to imply that he was born before it, however marginally. There are few more satisfactory resolutions of this problem than that of the poet Thomas de Quincey, who suggested that Shakespeare's granddaughter Elizabeth Hall married on 22 April 1626 'in honour of her famous relation' — choosing the sixty-second anniversary of his birth, in other words, rather than the tenth of his death.

© 1999 by Anthony Holden. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius" at Amazon.com. <

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