23 April: Shakespeare's day, English Language Day and World Book Day

Was Shakespeare really born on 23 April?

Nobody knows. The register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon records the baptism of “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” (William, son of John Shakespeare) on 26 April 1564. Births were not recorded. Babies were usually baptised within a few days, so a birth on 21, 22 or 23 April is likely, and 23 April became the accepted birthday in the eighteenth century. It helped that 23 April was already St George's Day, England's patron saint's day, and that it matched his death day.

The death date is firm. Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity on 25 April. His monument in the church says he died in his 53rd year, which fits a birth in April 1564. So the neat story, born and died on the same day, is half record and half tradition.

Shakespeare and Cervantes did not die on the same day

UNESCO often notes that Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, both died on 23 April 1616. That is true on paper only. England still used the old Julian calendar, while Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, ten days ahead. Shakespeare's 23 April was 3 May in Spain. Cervantes, in fact, died on 22 April 1616 and was buried on 23 April, the date Spanish records traditionally give. The two writers died about eleven days apart.

The Peruvian historian Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is also recorded as dying on 23 April 1616 (by the Spanish calendar), which is why UNESCO sometimes names three writers.

What else is marked on 23 April

One confusion to sort out: in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the schools' “World Book Day”, with its book tokens and dressing up as characters, is held on a Thursday in early March, usually the first, to avoid the Easter holidays. UNESCO's World Book Day elsewhere stays on 23 April.

Shakespeare's life in key dates

The First Folio of 1623

Seven years after his death, two actors from the King's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered his plays into one large volume: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, printed in London by William and Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount and on sale by late 1623. It contains 36 plays. Eighteen of them had never been printed before, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra. Without the Folio they would almost certainly be lost.

Perhaps 750 copies were printed. About 235 are known to survive, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington holds 82 of them. The title page carries Martin Droeshout's engraved portrait, one of only two images of Shakespeare with a good claim to be accurate (the other is the Stratford monument). The 400th anniversary of the Folio was marked in 2023.

The Folio opens with a poem by his friend and rival Ben Jonson, which contains the line most often quoted about him: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” (“To the memory of my beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare”, First Folio, 1623).

Shakespeare's own words, and a caution

Shakespeare left almost no statements of opinion in his own voice. His plays put words in the mouths of characters, and those must not be treated as his beliefs: Hamlet's or Shylock's views are not necessarily Shakespeare's. What survives in his own voice is in the poems, the dedications and legal documents. His first published dedication, to the Earl of Southampton, is modest in the style of the time:

The Sonnets, which speak in a first person, end Sonnet 18 with a claim that has turned out true: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” And the words on his gravestone, which tradition says he wrote, warn off anyone who would move his bones: “Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear, / To dig the dust enclosed here” (modernised spelling).

A common classroom claim is that Shakespeare invented thousands of words. Many words are first recorded in his works in the Oxford English Dictionary, but first recorded is not the same as invented: digitised books keep turning up earlier uses. Our article Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? deals with the other big question.

How to mark 23 April in class

• Read the title page: show the First Folio title page and Jonson's poem. Students list everything the page tells them: who printed it, how the plays are grouped, how Shakespeare is presented.
• Calendar check: give students the three 1616 death dates (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Garcilaso) and the ten-day calendar gap, and have them work out the real order.
• Book swap: for World Book Day, each student brings a book to swap, with a card naming one line from it worth reading aloud, in the Catalan Sant Jordi tradition.
• Sonnet 18 in modern English: students translate the sonnet line by line, then discuss what is lost.
• Interview the playwright: students prepare questions about the Globe, the King's Men, the 1613 fire and life in Stratford, and practise them by voice with an AI recreation of William Shakespeare on Yuga. The recreation is built from the documents and his works, but it is not Shakespeare and can be wrong, so cite the records and the texts, and remember that his characters' views are not his.

Our questions to ask William Shakespeare list has more, and Tudor England key figures sets him in his time.