It’s possible to fit everything we know about Shakespeare on to a postcard, right? Wrong.

In fact we know more about Shakespeare than almost any of his theatrical contemporaries, from the fact that he was a serial tax-dodger to the fact that he got Anne Hathaway pregnant when he was just 18 (she was 26).

Abundant evidence lists the law-cases he got involved in, the properties he bought and the plays he wrote – we even have several samples of his signature, and part of a playtext probably in his handwriting (it’s in the British Library).

But how much do you actually know about the world’s most famous playwright?

To celebrate Shakespeare’s 445th birthday on April 23, the editor of the updated Rough Guide to Shakespeare delved into his Shakespearean memory banks and came up with his top ten Bardic brainteasers.

So test your wits with this little lot – and turn yourself into a expert Bardophile in the process …

The 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about William Shakespeare

1. Despite the recent fuss over the recently “discovered” Cobbe portrait, no one is too sure what Shakespeare actually looked like: no life portrait survives, and the two most plausible likenesses, his funeral bust in Stratford and the engraving on the title page of the First Folio, were most likely done long after his death.

2. Shakespeare had a shotgun wedding. He was just 18 when he got Anne Hathaway pregnant with their first child, Susannah (she was 26), and the couple had to obtain a special licence from the Bishop of Worcester in order to get married.

3. … but the second-best bed notoriously bequeathed to Anne might, contrary to rumour, have been a touching gift instead of a bad-tempered brush-off – it was possibly the couple’s marriage bed.

4. Although Shakespeare wrote plays set in France, Scotland, Italy, Cyprus and Vienna, among many other locations, it’s entirely possible that he never left England. That may account for the most embarrassing geographical cock-up of his career: grafting a sea-coast on to land-locked Bohemia (part of the present-day Czech Republic) in The Winter’s Tale. He probably spoke French and Italian as well as Latin and Greek, though.

5. Shakespeare coined around 1,700 new English words, his most successful inventions including “addiction”, “lacklustre”, “priceless” and “mountaineer”. But not all of them stuck: among the many Shakespearean words that have passed out of use are “unsisting” (unhelpful), “immoment” (trifling), “cadent” (falling) and the frankly awful “plantage” (vegetation). Lucky escape.

6. The original ending of King Lear wasn’t performed for nearly 150 years because it was thought too upsetting. In its place was a heavy-handed adaptation by 17th-century playwright Nahum Tate, who blue-pencilled the tragic double death of Lear and his favourite daughter Cordelia. In Tate's version Lear lives out his last years in retirement, while Cordelia gets hitched to Edgar.

7. Shakespeare’s bestselling work in his lifetime was not a play, but the now little-known erotic poem Venus and Adonis, particularly popular with (male) students. It was written when London’s theatres were closed because of plague, a period when Shakespeare’s income looked like it might evaporate.

8. At least two of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio, have disappeared entirely without trace. Love’s Labour’s Won is a follow-up to his early romantic comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Cardenio is thought to have been a version of Don Quixote.

9. Given the playwright’s obsession with twins – several of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, feature them – it’s interesting to observe that Shakespeare fathered them in real life. His only son, Hamnet (the name was relatively common), died at the age of 11, but his sister Judith lived to be 77.

10. A scene from King John, starring the leading British actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was the earliest Shakespeare movie ever made (1899, no less). The most recent mainstream film adaptation is Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It(2007), although two new version of King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino are in the works.

對我們來說想從明信片上知道關于莎士比亞的一切是不可能的

實際上，我們知道的可能比他戲劇性的同時代的人多一些，從一系列的逃稅案的主角到18歲就使26歲的安妮 海瑟薇懷孕。

大量的證據表明，他曾經卷入多宗案件，他買的田產，他寫的幾個戲——在我們看來是他署名的，也許一部分是他的手跡（目前保存在大英博物館）。

我們究竟知道多少關于這個世界上最有名的戲劇家的故事。

4月23日是慶祝莎士比亞445年誕辰，《莎士比亞導讀》深入研究了莎士比亞的記憶庫，搜尋了這位吟游詩人的十件頂級謎題。

所以用這個小小的標簽測試一下你的智慧吧——讓自己進入一個莎士比亞的世界。

1.雖然最近在愛爾蘭科比家族發現的莎士比亞的生前畫像折騰的很熱鬧，但目前沒有人確切的知道莎士比亞的長相：沒有生前的畫像，最著名的似是而非的畫像，是特拉福德的他墓地前的胸像和印在第一對開本封面的畫像，很可能是他死后很久后才出現的。

2.莎士比亞有一個不甚體面的婚姻。他18歲時和懷著他們第一個孩子的安妮 海瑟薇結婚，這對夫妻不得不從伍斯特主教那里得到特許證結婚。

3.而聲名狼藉的關于莎士比亞遺贈給妻子安妮“第二好的床”的遺囑，也許它的含義和那些謠言正相反，是一個感人的饋贈，而不是一個脾氣暴躁的莎士比亞對妻子的否定，“第二好的床”很可能是這對夫婦的婚床。

4.雖然莎士比亞寫的戲地點經常設置在法國、蘇格蘭、意大利、塞浦路斯和維也納，還有其他地區，實際上莎士比亞從來沒有離開過英格蘭。因為從他的劇本可以看出，他的地理知識實在是一團糟：在《冬天的故事》里會給地處內陸的波西米亞（現在的一部分屬于捷克）安一個海岸線。也許他的法語和意大利語說的和拉丁語和希臘語一樣好。

5.莎士比亞創造了大約1700個新英語詞匯，他最成功的發明包括addiction”, “lacklustre”, “priceless” and “mountaineer”。但不是所有的都留下來了：很多莎士比亞創造的詞匯現在已經不用了，比如unsisting” (unhelpful), “immoment” (trifling), “cadent” (falling)，還有十分直白的“plantage” (vegetation)。真是幸運的漏網。

6.《李爾王》的原始結尾在長達150年的時間里沒有上演過，因為人們認為它太悲傷了。17世紀，劇作家內厄姆塔特拙劣的修改了它，使得原作中李爾王和他最愛的女兒考狄利婭兩人雙雙死去的悲劇性結尾化為烏有。在塔特的版本里，李爾王在退休后得以安享天年，而考狄利婭則和埃德加終成眷屬。

7.莎士比亞最賣錢的作品不是他的劇作，而是他少有人知的情詩《維納斯和阿多尼斯》，這首詩在男學生中間廣受歡迎。這首詩是在倫敦的劇場因為瘟疫而被迫關閉期間寫的，那個時期莎士比亞的收入迅速縮水。

8.至少有兩個莎士比亞的戲，《愛得其所》和《卡登尼歐》，徹底失傳。《愛得其所》是他早期愛情喜劇《愛的徒勞》的續篇，而《卡登尼歐》被認為是《堂吉訶德》的譯本。

9.雙胞胎總是在這位劇作家的戲里發揮攪亂乾坤的作用——他的好幾個戲，包括《錯誤的喜劇》《第十二夜》，都重點描繪了雙胞胎——我們發現很有趣的是，莎士比亞在現實生活里也確實有一對雙胞胎。他唯一的兒子，哈姆奈特（真是相當普通的名字），在11歲時死了，而他的龍鳳胎姐妹朱迪思則活到77歲。

10. 由英國演員赫伯特 比爾博特 特納先生領銜主演的《約翰王》，是目前已知的改編的最早的莎士比亞的電影（不晚于1899）。最近的改編自莎士比亞的電影是肯尼斯 布萊納執導的皆大歡喜（2007），還有最新版本的《李爾王》正在拍攝，由安東尼 霍普金斯和阿爾帕西諾領銜主演。