23rd April: William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is thought to have been born on this date. We don't know for sure - he was baptised on the 26th and it was customary in those days for baptisms to take place three days after a birth. Likewise, his exact date of death isn't known for sure but his funeral was on 25 April 1616 and funerals were usually held two days after a death. If this is the case, he died on his 52nd birthday 400 years ago today. Here are some little known Shakespeare facts:

1. He was one of eight siblings. His parents were John and Mary Shakespeare (nee Arden). Aside from William, their children were Joan (who only lived 2 months), Margaret, Gilbert, another Joan, Anne, Richard and Edmund. Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway, was eight years older than him and already pregnant with their first child, Susannah, when they married. They went on to have twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died aged 11; only Susannah had any children, a daughter, Elizabeth, who died child free - so there are no living descendants of William Shakespeare around today.
2. One of Shakespeare’s relatives on his mother’s side, William Arden, was arrested for plotting against Queen Elizabeth I, imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed.
3. Shakespeare didn't only write plays, he performed in them, too. There is evidence he played the ghost in Hamlet and Adam in As You Like It, and that he performed before Queen Elizabeth I and James I who was an enthusiastic patron of his work. Not only that, but he was a successful businessman and property owner in his home town of Stratford on Avon. He also a joint-stock company with his actors meaning he took a share in the company’s profits, as well as earning a fee for each play he wrote.
4. The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s shortest play at 1,770 lines long, a third the length of his longest, Hamlet, which takes four hours to perform.
5. Shakespeare's poetry was written during a plague outbreak which meant all London theatres were closed to prevent the spread of the disease. With no demand for plays, Shakespeare wrote poems instead.
6. Shakespeare has been credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with introducing almost 3,000 words to the English language. Scholars believe he had a vocabulary of up to 29,000 words - twice as many as the average person. According to Shakespeare professor Louis Marder, “Shakespeare was so facile in employing words that he was able to use over 7,000 of them – more than occur in the whole King James Version of the Bible – only once and never again.” According to reports, Shakespeare wrote quickly and with ease; Fellow playwright Ben Jonson said “Whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.” Despite all this, it is believed Shakespeare's parents, and even his children, were all illiterate.
7. Two of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing, have been translated into Klingon.
8. Shakespeare never published any of his plays himself. To his mind they were intended to be performed, not read. After his death, two of his fellow actors – John Hemminges and Henry Condell – recorded and published 36 of them posthumously under the name The First Folio, the source of all Shakespeare books published.
9. Virtually no information exists about Shakespeare’s activities from 1585 to 1592 so this period of time is called “the lost years”.
10. When he died, he left most of his property to Susannah. His wife only got "my second best bed with the furniture”. The “furniture” being the bedclothes. Before he died, he wrote a curse for his gravestone: "Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones." It worked - though it was customary to dig up the bones from previous graves to make room for others, the remains in Shakespeare’s grave are still undisturbed. The only disturbance was when the residents of Stratford had his grave marker altered in 1747 so that it showed him holding a pen instead of a bag of grain.

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The Complete Works of Julie Howlin (so far)

Death and Faxes

Several women have been found murdered - it looks like the work of a ruthless serial killer. Psychic medium Maggie Flynn is one of the resources DI Jamie Swan has come to value in such cases - but Maggie is dead, leaving him with only the telephone number of the woman she saw as her successor, her granddaughter, Tabitha Drake.

Tabitha, grief-stricken by Maggie's death and suffering a crisis of confidence in her ability, wants nothing to do with solving murder cases. She wants to hold on to her job and find Mr Right (not necessarily in that order); so when DI Swan first contacts her, she refuses to get involved.

The ghosts of the victims have other ideas. They are anxious for the killer to be caught and for names to be cleared - and they won't leave Tabitha alone. It isn't long before Tabitha is drawn in so deeply that her own life is on the line.

Paperback - CreateSpace or Amazon 

Or get the E-book: Amazon Kindle (Where you can use the "Look Inside" function and read the first few pages for free!)

Glastonbury Swan

Every few weeks, there is a mysterious death in Glastonbury. They seem completely unrelated - an apparent suicide, a hit and run, a drug overdose, a magic act which goes horribly wrong - but is that what the killer wants people to think?

The police are certainly convinced - but one of the victims is communicating to medium Tabitha Drake that the deaths are linked.

Who is killing all these people and why? 

This is what Tabitha has to figure out - before it is too late to save someone very dear to her.

Paperback CreateSpace or Amazon

E-book Amazon Kindle

Jigsaw

Within these covers you will find murder, mayhem, ghosts, romance, dungeons and dragons and alien vampire bunnies.


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E-book Amazon Kindle

New! From A Jack To A King

A royal palace is burning. The King and Queen are dead. The only hopes for an ancient dynasty flee to England for their lives.

A boy runs from his mother and the people he believes want to mutilate him, and vanishes, seemingly forever.

Gary Winchcombe, the experimental "super-cop" pursues a notorious gang of bank robbers, and starts to discover that his friends and neighbours have secrets he never could have imagined.

Tod Reynard wants to turn his life around. When he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Jade, he knows she might just be the one to help him change his life for the better. He cannot possibly know just how much.

When Jade's twin sister Gloria is kidnapped, old rivalries must be put aside and new associations formed in order to save Gloria's life and restore the rightful order of things.

Available from: Createspace, Amazon, Amazon Kindle