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.

对我们来说想从明信片上知道关于莎士比亚的一切是不可能的

实际上，我们知道的可能比他戏剧性的同时代的人多一些，从一系列的逃税案的主角到18岁就使26岁的安妮 海瑟薇怀孕。

大量的证据表明，他曾经卷入多宗案件，他买的田产，他写的几个戏——在我们看来是他署名的，也许一部分是他的手迹（目前保存在大英博物馆）。

我们究竟知道多少关于这个世界上最有名的戏剧家的故事。

4月23日是庆祝莎士比亚445年诞辰，《莎士比亚导读》深入研究了莎士比亚的记忆库，搜寻了这位吟游诗人的十件顶级谜题。

所以用这个小小的标签测试一下你的智慧吧——让自己进入一个莎士比亚的世界。

1.虽然最近在爱尔兰科比家族发现的莎士比亚的生前画像折腾的很热闹，但目前没有人确切的知道莎士比亚的长相：没有生前的画像，最著名的似是而非的画像，是特拉福德的他墓地前的胸像和印在第一对开本封面的画像，很可能是他死后很久后才出现的。

2.莎士比亚有一个不甚体面的婚姻。他18岁时和怀着他们第一个孩子的安妮 海瑟薇结婚，这对夫妻不得不从伍斯特主教那里得到特许证结婚。

3.而声名狼藉的关于莎士比亚遗赠给妻子安妮“第二好的床”的遗嘱，也许它的含义和那些谣言正相反，是一个感人的馈赠，而不是一个脾气暴躁的莎士比亚对妻子的否定，“第二好的床”很可能是这对夫妇的婚床。

4.虽然莎士比亚写的戏地点经常设置在法国、苏格兰、意大利、塞浦路斯和维也纳，还有其他地区，实际上莎士比亚从来没有离开过英格兰。因为从他的剧本可以看出，他的地理知识实在是一团糟：在《冬天的故事》里会给地处内陆的波西米亚（现在的一部分属于捷克）安一个海岸线。也许他的法语和意大利语说的和拉丁语和希腊语一样好。

5.莎士比亚创造了大约1700个新英语词汇，他最成功的发明包括addiction”, “lacklustre”, “priceless” and “mountaineer”。但不是所有的都留下来了：很多莎士比亚创造的词汇现在已经不用了，比如unsisting” (unhelpful), “immoment” (trifling), “cadent” (falling)，还有十分直白的“plantage” (vegetation)。真是幸运的漏网。

6.《李尔王》的原始结尾在长达150年的时间里没有上演过，因为人们认为它太悲伤了。17世纪，剧作家内厄姆塔特拙劣的修改了它，使得原作中李尔王和他最爱的女儿考狄利娅两人双双死去的悲剧性结尾化为乌有。在塔特的版本里，李尔王在退休后得以安享天年，而考狄利娅则和埃德加终成眷属。

7.莎士比亚最卖钱的作品不是他的剧作，而是他少有人知的情诗《维纳斯和阿多尼斯》，这首诗在男学生中间广受欢迎。这首诗是在伦敦的剧场因为瘟疫而被迫关闭期间写的，那个时期莎士比亚的收入迅速缩水。

8.至少有两个莎士比亚的戏，《爱得其所》和《卡登尼欧》，彻底失传。《爱得其所》是他早期爱情喜剧《爱的徒劳》的续篇，而《卡登尼欧》被认为是《堂吉诃德》的译本。

9.双胞胎总是在这位剧作家的戏里发挥搅乱乾坤的作用——他的好几个戏，包括《错误的喜剧》《第十二夜》，都重点描绘了双胞胎——我们发现很有趣的是，莎士比亚在现实生活里也确实有一对双胞胎。他唯一的儿子，哈姆奈特（真是相当普通的名字），在11岁时死了，而他的龙凤胎姐妹朱迪思则活到77岁。

10. 由英国演员赫伯特 比尔博特 特纳先生领衔主演的《约翰王》，是目前已知的改编的最早的莎士比亚的电影（不晚于1899）。最近的改编自莎士比亚的电影是肯尼斯 布莱纳执导的皆大欢喜（2007），还有最新版本的《李尔王》正在拍摄，由安东尼 霍普金斯和阿尔帕西诺领衔主演。