Shakespeare's legacy manifests in all sorts of ways. Freya Parr shares what she's recently spotted through her beady bardy binoculars.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief
He might be a national treasure, but Bill Nighy recently revealed some news that will make him the enemy of librarians across the land. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's This Cultural Life, Nighy revealed that when he was preparing to audition for drama school, he stole the complete works of Shakespeare from a local library.
He had been asked by the Guildford School of Acting to prepare two pieces for his audition: one by Shakespeare and one by a modern playwright. Along with a friend, Nighy admits to haven ‘stolen the complete works of Shakespeare, and we stole the complete works of George Bernard Shaw which we thought was sort of modern. We could have borrowed it like everybody else, but for some reason, we were sort of developing a criminal mentality.’
He also revealed that he learned two female parts for the audition: Eliza Doolittle from Shaw's play Pygmalion, and the role of Cesario in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, not realising that the part was actually the female character Viola disguised in male clothing. The audition panel, he says, looked ‘a bit confused’, and he was invited back ‘with more suitable material’. We can only hope he took out a library card for the second round of auditions.
To die is to be a counterfeit
It's the news we've all been dreading. It turns out, artificial intelligence chatbots have become so sophisticated that they can imitate Shakespeare to fool many human readers, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Researchers asked OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 to generate the poems in the style of Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Chaucer, TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Emily Dickinson and the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. 1,634 study participants were asked to read 10 poems – five by the real poet and five written by the chatbot in the style of the poet – and they were asked to identify which were real and which were fake. The participants guessed correctly only about 46% of the time, the results reveal.
In fact, the participants who didn't know anything about the poets or their work gave higher ratings, on average, to those written by the chatbot than by the poets themselves.
*Bangs head against table and shakes fist at sky, while tossing smartphone across the room*.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
Love's Labour's Won is one of Shakespeare's highly speculated lost works, but what if it had been found? A new exhibition in Manhattan has assembled a range of books that don't exist, from Shakespeare's lost play to Byron's destroyed memoirs and the lost translation of Homer's single comic epic.
Imaginary Books is on display at the Grolier Club in New York City, showcasing an extremely rare collection of books – none of which actually exist. They all exist only in the realm of the imaginary.
Better three hours too soon than a minute too late
If given an infinite amount of time, a monkey could write the complete works of William Shakespeare by randomly pressing keys on a typewriter. Well, that was originally the theory. The ‘infinite monkey theorem’ has been a thought experiment used to explain the principles of probability and randomness – but it's recently been called into question by two Australian mathematicians.
Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Faletta have found that the time it would take a monkey to replicate Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and verse would be longer than the lifespan of our universe, so simply isn't possible. Shame.