Primrose Road

1. Shakespeare was different from other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights.

Shakespeare was the most published (though not most prolific) of 16th/17th century playwrights, and Hemings and Condell were probably the first -- but definitely not the last -- to harness the "selling power" of Shakespeare's name. The ol' Bard did, however, borrow his plots from other plays and from the same sources that his contemporaries did; he also, much like them, wrote Senecan revenge tragedies that incorporated fascinating turns of plot and character. In fact, if anyone writes radically distinct revenge tragedies, it's Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine Part II erases the supernatural element (a ghost) from the classic son-avenges-father tale.

A few years ago, there was a webpage (which I cannot find at the moment!) that demonstrated how difficult it is to differentiate Shakespeare's words from those of other 16th and early-17th century playwrights. The "sounds like Shakespeare" argument often fails to hold water because almost every writer "sounded like" Shakespeare.

2. Shakespeare wasn't different from other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights.

At the same time, Will is also probably one of the most naturalistic playwrights of his time: his characters often act on humanlike instinct. When they rely on reason (Hamlet) or tradition (Titus Andronicus), they fail miserably. 18th century Romantics adored naturalism and therefore adored Shakespeare, whose sensitive, intellectual (kind of whiny?) Hamlet character reminded them of themselves. 20th century Freudophiles adored Shakespeare's thinking characters for many of the same reasons.

So in some ways, Shakespeare was just different enough from, say, Marlowe or Middleton to win an important place in British and American cultural narratives.

3. Shakespeare was a creative writer who invented plots and characters.

No, he never wrote a first draft of Romeo and Juliet called "Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter." (Those scenes in Shakespeare in Love are meant to poke fun at this misconception -- in the same vein, Shakespeare also did not visit a psychoanalyst. ;)) Romeo and Juliet's direct source was Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, itself drawing on a host of Italian tales. Much like his contemporaries, Shakespeare also found material for his own work in Holinshed's Chronicles and the Gesta Romanorum. This was a period of early capitalism, before the principles of copyright and intellectual property took hold, and if you were a playwright, borrowing was the way to go.

4. Because he didn't live with her in Stratford, wrote sonnets about a love triangle among two men and a woman, and willed her his "second-best bed," Shakespeare didn't love his wife.

First, Shakespeare's sonnet sequence does not necessarily reflect or resemble "real life": the perception that fiction writers must quite literally "write what they know" is a post-Freudian one. But even if Shakespeare really was involved in a love triangle of sorts, it is important to remember (as Lawrence Stone and Catherine Belsey have pointed out) that the past was not all "Puritannical" (in the present-day American sense of the word) and that concepts of the family did not begin to rigidify until after Shakespeare's time. When Shakespeare writes about marriage -- for example, in Measure for Measure -- he's concerned about the institution become more and more rigid and legislated. An extra-marital affair was not necessarily an indicator of marital strife.

Also, people at the time often willed their "best" items to their children, not their spouses. Following the custom of his time, he would have saved the "best" for his children; indeed, Shakespeare left much of his property to his older daughter Susanna Shakespeare Hall.

Interestingly, shortly after Shakespeare's death, we see an example of marriage becoming more of a legislated institution when his younger daughter's husband, Thomas Quiney, has to make a court appearance because of an adultery charge. (Rumor has it that Tom Q. was not quite an upstanding gentleman, though.)

5. Shakespeare wrote almost every word attributed to him.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, no. Because copyright and intellectual property were not yet widely circulating concepts (in fact, copyright belonged to printers, not writers), writing was a collaborative process. Printed plays could be analogized to the "movie scripts" sold on folding tables in the East Village today; they weren't authoritative, and rarely represented "shooting scripts." And scholars have recently determined that Thomas Middleton edited, revised, and added to Macbeth, a fact that has been incorporated into Oxford University Press's recent Middleton Project.