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Five Things People Believe About William Shakespeare That Simply Are Not True
Putting myths about the Bard to rest
I’ve written about William Shakespeare a few times in the past, from a rant about the Globe Theater slapping a trigger warning on a performance of Romeo and Juliet a few years ago to a story about how memorizing lines from the plays can actually be dangerous. My favorite story by far is one I wrote as quiz asking whether a quote was the Bard or The Smiths (it wasn’t as easy as you might think). Writing about Shakespeare is always fun because everyone knows about him.
But do we really know him? It seems counterintuitive, but perhaps it is because he is so famous 400 years after he lived that we get so many things wrong about him. And whether you attend performances of Shakespeare in the Park every summer or would never pick up a copy of King Lear again, it’s important that we get the facts about one of the greatest writers in the history of the world right. Below are five myths about William Shakespeare we need to correct now.
1. Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around some people’s pathological need to deny that a creative genius could be, well, a creative genius. Often this is nothing more than envy, plain and simple. With Shakespeare, this…
