ODDS & ENDS.

April 23 is an extraordinarily charged holy day. The world's preeminent playwright and best psychologist burst his way onto the world's stage on this day back in 1564. William Shakespeare, born in the out-of-the-way English village Stratford-upon-Avon, went on to pen mighty plays and sonnets. Many a line from his works are easily mistaken for sacred scripture. His words have been known to find their way into preachers' sermons who, unbeknownst, proclaim them as Holy Writ. Add to Shakespeare's kudos: theologian!

Although he certainly had a flare for the dramatic, even this astounding personality could not have arranged his April 23 birth date to coincide with the Feast of Saint George, also celebrated this same day. Saint George, patron saint of Shakespeare's country of origin--England--is worthy of a Shakespearean play.

George's biography, as accurate as some of the history in Shakespeare's plays, places his birth in present-day Turkey and assigns a death date around 303 A.D. in Palestine. His occupation, perhaps a soldier in the Roman Army, took him traveling all the way to England. His claim to fame, slaying dragons, is the common thread that runs through the stories around his life and legacy.

In the Middle Ages, when plays were still performed in churches, the life of Saint George was a popular dramatic subject. Regretfully, the thespians were kicked out of sanctuaries long before Shakespeare made his dramatic debut. I've often wondered: Did a small but influential group of priests who preached lousy sermons eliminate their competition by banning these fascinating miracle, morality, and mystery plays from their precincts? Imagine the preachers' consternation if Shakespeare's plays had been performed in church. Even the best preacher would have met his match.

Even though Shakespeare's plays were wildly popular in his lifetime, after his death some people began to doubt that he wrote his own plays. Many theories have been put forth to strip him of his own authorship. Luckily, my best English teacher at Brother Rice High School in Chicago, Brother Austin Devane, was insistent that Shakespeare indeed wrote all the work attributed to him. I still remember his admonition, "If you remember just one thing from this English course, let it be that William Shakespeare wrote William Shakespeare's plays." He thought Calvin Hoffman's 1955 book The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare" set the record straight.

Saint George, at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, didn't fare as well as Shakespeare at the hands of Brother Devane. His feast day was suppressed--along with many others--in the years immediately following Vatican II. The people of England, of Greece--where Saint George is revered as the "Great Martyr" and April 23 a national holiday--of Portugal, Venice, and Genoa, whose patron he is, and throngs of local people everywhere who went to churches and schools named St. George didn't buy this wanton dismissal of their dragon-slaying patron saint. The Roman church eventually backtracked, allowing an "optional memorial" of this great saint, putting themselves back in line with the Anglican and Orthodox rites of catholicism who never attempted to murder a saint called George.

Believe that, like Saint George, you too can slay dragons. And read some holy writ penned by a man called Shakespeare on this great holy day, April 23.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.