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Cue the music. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate, rough winds to shake the darling buds of May,

and summer's lease hath all too short a date,

sometime too hot, the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed,

and every fair from fair sometimes declines, by chance, on nature's changing course untrimmed.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou oest,

nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, when in eternal lines to time thou growest. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. That's the sonnet, of course, by the great

William Shakespeare, our national poet.

We believe he was born on the 23rd of April 1564.

We don't know that.

We know that he was baptized on the 26th, so we just guess that that's when he was born.

That's when we celebrate his birthday.

We do know that he died on the 23rd of April 1616.

Well, we can't bring you Shakespeare, our national poet, even though this week is his

birthday week.

I thought, what's the next best thing?

If we can't bring them Shakespeare, who can we bring them?

Well, I thought, well, we do have a poet laureate. And we've had a lotriot ship dating back to 1616, which was the year

that Shakespeare died. That's when a pension was provided to Ben Johnson, a poet and playwright

who knew Shakespeare, was a friend of Shakespeare. The first official poet laureate was John Dryden,

...