The earliest record of the character Father Christmas comes from a play written by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Ben Jonson.

Ben Jonson was convicted of killing an actor named Gabriel Spenser in 1598.

Jonson escaped the death penalty (which was still in action in England at the time) through a legal loophole called “Benefit of the  Clergy,” in which he only had to read a Bible verse to show his literacy. Instead of being hanged, Jonson was branded on his thumb and released.

After his death some 39 years later, Ben Jonson was buried standing up at Westminster Abbey, possibly because they were short on space.

When Shakespeare’s Globe Theater burned down in 1613, nobody was injured except a man whose trousers caught fire. The man put them out with a bottle of beer.

The fire at the Globe itself was believed to have been started by a misfiring stage cannon.

The word “background” was originally a theatrical term, used for the rearmost part of a stage, the greatest distance from the audience.

While the protagonist of a play is the most important character, the second-most important is called the “deuteragonist.”

JM Barrie’s classic story Peter Pan was originally written as a play for children in 1904. The fairy character of Tinkerbell was produced on stage by someone in the wings holding a mirror next to a lamp and reflecting a circle of light against the backdrop.