Celebrate the birth of the Bard with one of these Shakespeare-inspired films.

Happy birthday William Shakespeare, who would be 451 this year. And what better event than Shakespeare’s birthday to watch some fantastic, and some truly terrible, films? Click through to see eight movies that you may not know are based on Shakespeare’s plays.

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And Shakespeare isn’t the only thing some of these films have in common. We have the sequels: The Lion King and The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, both based off different plays. And two films, 10 Things I Hate About You and O, both star Julia Stiles, who seemed to make a bit of a habit of modernized Shakespeare adaptations in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Of course the truth is, we actually don’t know when William Shakespeare was born. Traditionally, we celebrate his birthday on April 23. Maybe that’s because we like the symmetry, as he died on April 23, 52 years later. We do know that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, so April 23 would make sense.

And William Shakespeare’s birthday isn’t the only controversial issue surrounding the famous poet. There’s the whole issue of, who actually wrote all those plays anyway? In addition to William Shakespeare, other proposed authors include Sir Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. It’s an issue that continues to fascinate the world; there’s even a historical thriller, Anonymous, based on the idea of contested authorship.

Regardless of who actually authored them, the plays have certainly stood the test of time. If none of these Shakespeare-inspired movies take your fancy, there’s always a constant stream of more loyal film adaptations, many of which star fandom favorite actors. Try Much Ado About Nothing (2012), directed by Joss Whedon and starring Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker alongside half of the Whedon-verse. There is also the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2009 production of Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart that was, luckily for us, filmed for television. And 2015 will see a new film adaptation of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.

— More Shakespeare: Why Shakespearean web series Nothing Much To Do is a must-watch
— More movies: Actors whose careers were killed by one terrible movie