AS usual, Saturday passed with little fuss. No floats, no marching bands, no flypasts. Poor old St George. Why are we always so neglectful of his big day?

Because, many argue, the Christian martyr and dragon slayer never set foot in this country. And St George is patron saint of half a dozen principalities as well as England, so it's hard to claim him for our own.

Even without the saint, however, there is another good reason for keeping April 23 as our national day. It is William Shakespeare's birthday. And also the day of his death, the playwright's sense of poetic symmetry remaining till the last.

Shakespeare Day would perhaps be a more popular national event than the St George damp squib. After all, Will is the finest exponent of our greatest gift to the world - the English language.

Even those who found school Shakespeare agonising can surely get behind the man who invented the words "puke" and "bedroom".

The bard, of course, was a fiction writer. He might excel at English literature, but Michael Bennett would give him D minus for his history.

To mark the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death, Michael has launched a new exhibition and book at his Richard III Museum in Monk Bar, revealing how the playwright was all wrong about the king.

"Having been in the York Shakespeare Project production of Richard III, I kept thinking during rehearsals, 'this must be wrong, surely', but my focus was always on my part in the production," said Michael.

"I decided that 'one day' I would get round to analysing the entire play scene by scene, offering an impartial break-down of its historical accuracy."

That day came in February 2005. And Shakespeare's birthday seemed the perfect moment to share his findings with the world.

"I would be the first to agree he was our greatest playwright, but would argue he was no historian."

Mike, who regularly puts the record straight with performances of his one-man show An Audience With King Richard III, says Shakespeare's play on the same subject is riddled with inaccuracies.

His line-by-line analysis discovered many anomalies, including...

u In the play, Richard seduces Anne Neville in 1483 in Act One, Scene II - in reality they had been married for 11 years by this time and had a young son, Edward;

u In the play, Richard organises the murder of his brother, Clarence, in Act One - in reality Clarence had been sentenced to death and executed five years earlier;

u In the play, Richard spends much of the summer of 1483 in London organising his nephews' murders - in reality he spent July to November travelling the country on his "Royal Progress" - the customary tour made by recently-crowned monarchs.

The problem, Michael concludes, is that Shakespeare spin doctored the story to suit his audience, more than a century after King Richard's death. "It is written entirely from a Tudor perspective, with Sir Thomas More as its principal source.

"Elizabeth I, the queen at the time of much of Shakespeare's writings, was Henry Tudor's granddaughter.

"Shakespeare would have been ill advised to aim his play at anything other than a Tudor audience."

Richard III was "an extremely popular king in York", according to the entry in the York Book, co-authored by Michael.

"As Duke of Gloucester, he would visit York as many as six times a year, staying at the Augustian Friary in Lendal, where the main Post Office now stands."

A great benefactor to the Minster, Richard was mourned by the city after his death on Bosworth Field in 1485. The York Book notes a contemporary tribute in the city records: "King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, was thrugh grete treason... piteously slain and murdred, to the great hevynesse of this citie."

The museum's Shakespeare display is one of several new exhibits including Getting The Hump, an analysis of whether or not Richard was deformed, Location, Location, Location, a look at whether the Battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire was actually fought at that site and Meet The Family, about Richard's children, legitimate and otherwise.

Shakespeare's Richard III: Fact and Fiction by Michael S Bennett is on sale at the museum, price £4.99

The Richard III Museum, in Monk Bar, York, is open daily from 9am until 5pm, and costs £2.50 for adults, £1.25 concessions, accompanied children free

Updated: 09:21 Monday, April 25, 2005