April 23rd….Shakespeare’s day. We can’t be absolutely certain (church records for Shakespeare's baptism and funeral have been extrapolated to give the 23rd as the likely date for both his birth and death), but it seems somehow fitting for the man who almost singlehandedly made tragicomedy a workable concept—who could, for example, put some of the most mordantly funny lines in the English language into a play (Hamlet) that is concerned with the question of whether