William Shakespeare

Revision as of 11:36, 23 February 2005

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616). The English player, playwright, and poet whose outstanding literary genius and extraordinary universality have established him as the world's greatest playwright and poet.

In January-February 1947, as the result of their accidental exposure to "the Rinton reverse time ray" (see Rinton), Lois Lane and Clark Kent, the man who is secretly Superman, are catapulted through the time barrier to the city of London in the year 1606, where Kent changes to Superman in order to rescue William Shakespeare from a gang of men determined to give the famous playwright a vicious beating for caricaturing their leader as the cowardly buffoon Falstaff. During their sojourn in the early seventeenth century, Clark Kent and Lois Lane establish the "world's first daily newspaper," Ye Daily Planet, and share a box at the Globe Theatre with Shakespeare at the opening of his play Macbeth. In the course of the adventure, Shakespeare deduces that Clark Kent is secretly Superman and announces his intention to write a play about it, but the Man of Steel persuades the renowned dramatist to keep his dual identity secret, repaying him for the favor by using his super-memory to "create" Macbeth for Shakespeare at super-speed so that the playwright will have a new play prepared in time for its already-scheduled opening (S No. 44/3: "Shakespeare's Ghost Writer!").