Happy Birthday, Shakespeare?

Late April is a time when one reliably hears a little more about Shakespeare than is common, and when otherwise normal people participate in various Shakespeare-themed activities, which serve to commemorate Shakespeare's (likely enough) birthday on April 23, 1564. Recent anniversary years have spawned noticeable events. The Robinson Shakespeare Club at Notre Dame sponsored a 24-hour read-a-thon, and for several weeks the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, housed in the Shakespeare family home in Stratford-upon-Avon, invited lovers of Shakespeare to post YouTube clips in which they expressed or explained said love. In The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Arts & Academe" column last year, American poet Heather McHugh was the latest of the countless who have paid literary homage to Shakespeare: McHugh, the kind of inventive wordsmith and pun- and etymology-lover that would make an Elizabethan poet proud, composed her own sonnet with lines that were anagrams of corresponding lines in one of Shakespeare's sonnets.