Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Think everybody loved Shakespeare back in the day? Guess again. Some people totally made fun of him. Take Robert Greene, for example, who got up in Shakespeare's grill for writing all that blank verse in Henry VI, Part 3 (source). If only he could see Shakespeare now.
Ever wonder where the saying "off with his head" comes from? Well, look no further than Henry VI, Part 3: Shakespeare invented this little puppy here, and it stuck (source).
People might not be that familiar with this play today, but back in Shakespeare's day, the Henry VI plays were super popular (source).
The play so nice he wrote it thrice... at least that's what the Reduced Shakespeare Company had to say about it. Some scholars think Shakespeare did re-write large chunks of the play from an earlier draft (source).
Shakespeare didn't come up with the story on his own: he took a bunch of ideas from Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed's histories, William Baldwin's The Mirror for Magistrates, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc, to name a few (source).
Even Captain Picard likes Henry VI, Part III. Pages from it line the walls of his room on the Enterprise (source).