How Irn-Bru ended up in a Shakespeare play and other Bard's birthday Glasgow facts

The answer is – well, probably not. However the city does have some interesting Shakespeare connections.

Here’s our light-hearted look at the top six.

(If you can think of any more, get in touch with Times Past - we would love to hear from you.)

1 There have been two statues of Shakespeare in Glasgow – one sat in the foyer of the Citizens Theatre until work started on the building’s refurbishment, and it will now have pride of place on the Gorbals venue’s new roof alongside Burns and the four muses; the other – of the playwright leaning on a pile of books – adorned the facade of the Alston Street Playhouse in Grahamston in 1764. (This part of Glasgow was demolished to make way for Central Station.) When the Playhouse burned down, the Shakespeare statue was removed and installed at the Royal on Dunlop Street in 1782, until it, too, burned down. The statue was rescued and to this day sits in the gardens of a private home in Carmunnock.

2 A group of Scottish students, inspired by Ghanaian theatre group Act for Change, took part in a University of West of Scotland Shakespeare project in which they had to record extracts from the Bard’s works in their own locations, using their own cultural objects and references. They chose Pericles, and one group working on Act 2 Scene 1 chose to reinterpret the fishermen who discover Pericles washed up on the shores of North Africa as a group of recently unemployed Glasgow dock workers who find a stranger in the River Clyde. In the original, it’s the discovery of his father’s armour that leads Pericles to rediscover his purpose. In the Glasgow version, it’s a life-saving bottle of Irn-Bru and the text was adapted to read: “It hath been a shield/Twixt me and death; bangin’ hangover cure.”

3 Elizabeth I often enjoyed private performances by troupes of actors, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – of which Shakespeare was a member – was one of her favourites. It is a matter of historical record that King James welcomed a group of “players” to Edinburgh around 1600 – perhaps a visit intended to build goodwill with the Scottish king - and defended their right to perform, despite the Presbyterian Church’s severe condemnation. As a well-known poet and playwright, it seems likely Shakespeare would have been part of this visit – he may well have wanted to impress James, after all, with one eye on securing patronage from the future King of England. There is no evidence regarding where the English actors performed, but it may have been at the Tennis Court theatre at Holyrood Palace.

4 Glasgow has a Shakespeare Street, a Macbeth Street and a Stratford Street.

5 Glasgow holds a hugely successful outdoor Shakespeare festival – Bard in the Botanics has been running for 21 years, and since its very first event, has staged more than 100 productions to audiences of more than 150,000 people.

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6 Glasgow University holds a much-sought-after First Folio edition of the collected plays of William Shakespeare, published in 1623 - seven years after Shakespeare’s death. It is one of only 232 surviving Shakespeare First Folios, which have been described as ‘the most minutely studied published works in history’. The Glasgow edition is a particularly important example due to the annotations in the margins, which suggest the (anonymous) author actually saw the plays being performed contemporaneously. The book was bequested to Glasgow University by Partick insurance underwriter William Euing, along with the rest of his library, when he died in 1874.