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Our greatest English-language author found this time of year refreshing, writing that “April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.”

April is special around the library, too, for not only is it a harbinger of spring, it’s also home to National Library Week, National Poetry Month, and Shakespeare’s uncertain natal date. His birthday is usually celebrated on his death day, April 23.

That date’s approach usually inspires an e-mail reminder about it from my high school drama teacher, Bill Overton. A much younger man when I was his student, Mr. O retired some years ago without dampening his enthusiasm for theater and Shakespeare, regularly trodding the boards in one Shakespearean role or another.

This year’s message from Mr. O arrived yesterday, a delightful collection of many of the wonderful dramatic lines Shakespeare wrote that have evolved intro cliches. It also brought to mind the myth of his actual birthday.

 We know Shakespeare died on April 23, but as Anthony Holden states in “William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius,” “There is no evidence, alas, to support the popular belief that W.S. was born — as fifty-two years later he was to die, on April 23,” even though his “life is in fact documented in more detail than that of any other writer of his age.”

We do know that “Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, married on 22 April, 1626, ‘in honor of her famous relation,’” choosing the 62nd anniversary of his birth, in other words, rather than the 10th of his death.

It’s strange how advancing years heighten awareness of the freshness of youth, as attending the amazing Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy at the Carlson Center reminded me. The international troupe of gymnasts, jugglers, contortionists and strongmen wowed the audience with their breakneck speed, grace and daring, while titillating us with clowning and beauty. I couldn’t help but be struck by the Cirque’s similarity to the commedia del arte troupes of the Renaissance described in Mr. Overton’s class.

The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama defines commedia del arte as “a lively, lusty theatrical show that included mime, acrobatics, jokes, tirades, slapstick, soliloquies tricks, romance, dance, and music.”

That sums up Cirque Dreams, as well, and underscores the assuring sight of cultural continuance that their performance engendered. The roots of commedia and cirque are the same and absolutely ancient since they’re both grounded in miming, which predates language.  Mimes were central to Greek and Roman theater, although they were far cries, so to speak, from Marcel Marceau. Ancient mimes, including commedia performers, were traditionally masked, but they also sometimes employed their voices.    In Greece they were often employed as comic relief before tragedy performances, relying on improvisation, stock characters, pratfalls and bawdiness.

The commedia troupes bloomed with the Renaissance in Italy in the early 1500s. They were often literally families of actors, and the most popular companies went by nicknames, like the Confidenti and the Uniti, and their leaders wrote the basic scripts that were performed and improvised upon for two hundred years.

“The most famous company,” according to Marion Geisinger’s “Plays, Players, & Playwrights,” “was probably the Gelosi” (or “jealous”), led by Francesco Andreini and his wife Isabella. “She was a cultured, witty, and beautiful woman,” Geisinger writes, “and the heroines of these plays were generally named Isabella after her.”  After a commedia troupe visited London in 1546, many commedia references began appearing in the emerging English theater. Shakespeare had Isabella appear in “Measure for Measure,” for example, and the McGraw-Hill article notes that he “borrowed commedia characters, pranks and settings for his comedies and delighted in using Italian plot devices: fantasy, masquerade, mistaken identity and young people who turn out to be long-lost sister and brother were all devices used in the original commedias.”

Iconic characters, like Harlequin, Pantalone and Scaramouche, born in the Italian commedias still resonate with modern audiences. Harlequin appeared with Cirque Dreams in the form of the lead clown, and he and his fellow performers swept away the imaginations of a crowd of hip, 21st century Fairbanksans as thoroughly as their predecessors affected the most gullible Italian bumpkins 500 years earlier.

Even in these high-tech times, sometimes, as Shakespeare wrote, “Old fashions please me best.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.