Recalling the Bard 400 yrs on

If April is the 'cruellest month', as dubbed by T S Eliot in his The Waste Land, then today's (April 23) celebration across the world has sidelined the cruelty for the time being. This is nothing but turning the sorrow into joy on this occasion to recall William Shakespeare who breathed his last this day 400 years ago. And in the same week two years ago the whole literary world also celebrated 450th birth anniversary of the Bard of Avon.
There is no doubt Shakespeare is the most talked-about, discussed, researched and also debated literary figure in the world. Termed 'King of all the kings' and 'greatest poet and dramatist', he topped the list of books published on global writers as more than 15,000 books are there on Bard of Avon, followed by Charles Dickens. Although no work of Shakespeare is there on any current list of 'top 10 most read books,' or 'top 10 best selling books', the appeal of Shakespeare is never ending.
Some 0.88 million words have been used by Shakespeare while the number of vocabularies is 29,066. Of these, few words were used only once while frequencies of using some words were 10,000 to 15,000. For instance, the word 'America' is used only once and in the second scene of the third act in 'The Comedy of Errors.'
The complete works of Shakespeare contain 118,406 lines. Again, the longest drama of Shakespeare is 'Hamlet' which has 3,901 lines. Hamlet is also the most talkative or dialogued character who has dialogues of 1,422 lines. It is also the most preferred character by actors so far. The character Falstaff has dialogues of 1,178 lines in 'Henry IV (Part-I & II).' He also appears in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' where he has dialogues of 436 lines. In combined, Falstaff has 1,614 lines of dialogues just more than Hamlet's.
There are many Bengali translations of the dramas and poetry of Shakespeare. One of the pioneers to translate Shakespeare into Bengali is Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar who translated The Comedy of Errors' in 1841 and the title was 'Vrantibilash.'
The wave of celebrating Shakespeare's 450th birth and 400th death anniversaries has reached different corners of the world. For example, two years ago, Narayanganj, a river-port city closer to Dhaka, remembered Shakespeare at a low-key programme. But, it was for the first time the city people saw such a celebration for the first time. Sudhijan Pathagar, a 51-year old public library, organised the event where school students were invited to participate in drawing and quiz competitions. A lively discussion took place on the occasion. Shakespeare admirers also read and recited from his works. Though no such celebration is taking place this year the library is encouraging readers to read Shakespeare and its reading room is especially decorated with portraits of Shakespeare today.  
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