9 Misconceptions About Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was wildly prolific. According to one estimate, his complete works add up to 884,647 words. And all these hundreds of years after his death, people still reference him and his works constantly. No one did it like The Bard, so it’s no surprise that some myths about him and his writing have seeped into our culture over time. Let’s debunk some of the biggest ones.

1. Misconception: Historians debate whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare.
2. Misconception: Shakespeare invented 1700 words. 
3. Misconception: Saying Macbeth in a theater is dangerous.
4. Misconception: Shakespeare’s plays all contained original storylines. 
5. Misconception: Shakespeare worked alone.
6. Misconception: Wherefore means “where.”
7. Misconception: As Hamlet says, “to be or not to be,” he’s holding a skull.
8. Misconception: Shakespeare was a playwright during Elizabethan times.
9. Misconception: The Globe Theatre was round.

Misconception: Historians debate whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote a lot. He was also from the country town of Stratford-upon-Avon and didn’t go to university. So could this one “simple” guy write all these impressive high-brow works? Certainly it was someone like Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I, or Edward de Vere instead, right? But no: The general consensus from historians is that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. There’s no compelling evidence otherwise.

It’s worth noting that Shakespeare died in 1616, and conspiracy theories that he didn’t write his plays didn’t emerge until the 18th century, many years after his death. In 1623, just a few years after he died, the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was put together by actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who knew him for years and were in his will. The title page has an image of Shakespeare and attributes the plays to him. Heminge and Condell are just some of Shakespeare’s peers who knew him and attested to him writing his works—writers Ben Jonson and John Webster being two others. 

Plus, historians do see Shakepeare’s background as lining up with his writing. He was probably educated, even if he didn’t go to university. And he spent plenty of time in London learning to become a writer by doing relevant things like watching plays. 

Misconception: Shakespeare invented 1700 words. 

We can trace this misunderstanding back to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was published in volumes starting in 1884 and completed in 1928. The dictionary contained definitions of words along with their first recorded usages. But many of these citations were written by volunteers, who often turned to Shakespeare, in no small part because he’s a far more accessible source of 16th and 17th-century words than most of his contemporaries are. 

Today’s lexicographers have a lot more data and technology—and they know Shakespeare didn’t coin that many words. (Jonathan Culpeper, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University, has spent decades researching Shakespearean language. He believes Shakespeare coined around 400 words.) 

Some words and phrases continue to mistakenly circulate as attributed to Shakespeare; you can find some common ones below:

•  Addiction 
• Assassination 
• Bedazzle 
• Bold-faced
• Deafening
• Dishearten
• Manager
• Uncomfortable
• Puke
• It’s Greek to me
• Give the devil his due
• Expectation is the root of all heartache

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Misconception: Saying Macbeth in a theater is dangerous.

If you’ve ever found yourself a little nervous to say the word Macbeth in a theater, fear not: That whole superstition is based on a complete lie. In 1898, British theater reviewer and noted satirist Max Beerbohm wrote an article for the Saturday Review in which he encouraged people to stop performing the old Shakespeare classics that have been done to death, like Hamlet and Macbeth. And in his piece, Beerbohm dropped in this little nugget: “Hal Berridge, the youth who was to have acted the part of Lady Macbeth, ‘fell sudden sicke of a pleurisie, wherefor Master Shakespeare himself did enacte in his stead.’”

Beerbohm attributed that knowledge to 17th-century writer John Aubrey. The problem is, as far as anyone can tell, Aubrey never said that, Hal Berridge never existed, and Shakespeare never played that part. Since Beerbohm’s article, stories have perpetuated about Macbeth being cursed and even saying the word being unlucky. People in the theater world often opt to call it “The Scottish Play” to be safe.

Misconception: Shakespeare’s plays all contained original storylines. 

The vast majority of Shakespeare’s plays weren’t original. They were based on other material, like previously written stories and plays. A few plots seem to be original, such as: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest. 

What about Romeo and Juliet? That’s based on an older Italian story. Hamlet? That story had been kicking around since around the 12th century. Othello? That stems from a tale called “Un Capitano Moro.”

And this wasn’t some dirty little secret at the time. As a law student named John Manningham wrote in a diary entry about seeing a Shakespeare play in 1602: 

“At our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, much like The Comedy of Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni.”

But Shakespeare didn’t just rip these stories off—he altered plots, developed characters, added new characters, changed endings, and more. 

Misconception: Shakespeare worked alone.

It’s a misconception that Shakespeare was a solo genius who worked alone. He collaborated with other writers on his plays, not to mention the collaboration that’s inherent to putting on a stage production. How many of his plays had co-writers is unknown, but linguistic experts can piece together evidence based on different writers’ quirks. 

Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen; you can tell who probably wrote which scene based on the fact that Shakespeare preferred to use the word them where Fletcher would write “em.” The two also wrote Henry VIII together. 

It’s also widely believed George Peele helped out with Act 1 of Titus Andronicus. And Shakespeare wrote Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton, and possibly All’s Well That Ends Well.

Misconception: Wherefore means “where.”

An image you’ve probably seen countless times is Juliet decrying, “O Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou Romeo?” It sounds like, “Where you at, Romeo?” And some performances even have Juliet physically searching for Romeo as she says those lines. 

But, at the time Shakespeare was writing, wherefore essentially meant “why.” Juliet is asking, “Why are you Romeo?” because it’s his name, attached to a family that’s feuding with hers, keeping them apart. That’s why she goes on to say, “Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” and later, “What’s in a name?”

Shakespeare thus likely meant something along the lines of “why” because he uses wherefore in some of his other plays. In King John, Philip the Bastard asks, “But wherefore do you droop? Why look you sad?” He’s asking, “Why do you droop?”

Misconception: As Hamlet says, “to be or not to be,” he’s holding a skull.

Sometimes in pop culture, you encounter a Hamlet who’s holding a skull and reciting the “to be or not to be” speech. (Billy Madison is one example.) But Hamlet holds a skull during his speech in the churchyard that begins, “Alas, poor Yorick!” It happens in Act 5, Scene 1. “To be, or not to be—that is the question” comes two acts before that, in Act 3, Scene 1. 

Neither part is a soliloquy, at least in the strictest definition of the word that requires the speaker to be alone on stage. Of course, it depends on the production. But at the end of the “to be or not to be” speech, Hamlet addresses Ophelia. And in the churchyard, Hamlet talks to Horatio. 

Misconception: Shakespeare was a playwright during Elizabethan times.

It’s true Shakespeare wrote during Elizabethan times, but that’s not the whole story. People love to think about Queen Elizabeth I and her relationship to Shakespeare and his plays—look no further than the fact that Dame Judi Dench won an Academy Award for just less than 10 minutes of portraying the monarch in Shakespeare in Love. But the queen died in 1603, around 13 years before Shakespeare, so he had another royal to deal with: King James VI and I. 

Shakespeare wrote some of his most popular plays during the King James era, including Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello. And Shakespeare scholars even point to parts of his plays that were probably meant to appeal to James’s specific interests, including using the War of Cyprus as a backdrop in Othello and making the witches so prominent in Macbeth. 

Misconception: The Globe Theatre was round.

The first Globe Theatre was completed in 1599. Shakespeare was a part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men company, which built the venue. And he may or may not have called it a “wooden O” in the prologue of Henry V. That being said, it wasn’t exactly a circle. It was a many-sided polygon.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many sides it had. We don’t have access to the original because it burned down in 1613 during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII when a prop cannon lit the roof on fire. And we don't have historical documents that describe the architecture of the building. But, in 2022, a group of researchers published their attempt at a digital model of the original Globe Theatre; they concluded that the building was most likely a 20-sided polygon.