Why are Shakespeare's plays not historically accurate?

Answer 1

Modern plays are mostly based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. While they contain certain aspects of the original play, there are also modifications. One can simply say that these plays are modified because of Hollywood, to be able to help the audience associate themselves with the play more and make it easier to understand.

Answer 2

Because Shakespeare lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. That's a long time ago. And back then, they had no computerized records or file cabinets full of stuff. If someone sent you a letter, you probably used it to light your pipe. There was no need to keep it. Even when people thought they ought to keep records of things, these records can get lost. I'm sure there once were records of the students at the King's New School in Stratford, but a fire or some other disaster destroyed them. And during his time, nobody thought that anybody would be desperate to know every little detail of the life of William Shakespeare, actor and playwright.

As a result, we don't have records of much of Shakespeare's life. This is not abnormal; we know even less about most of his contemporaries. Nor is it surprising; what is surprising is that so much information about him has actually been preserved. Nevertheless, there is always room for ambiguity, and where there is room for ambiguity, there is room for a PhD thesis for one of the huge number of scholars in this field.

As entertaining (and lucrative, if you are one of the aforementioned PhD students, or someone else with a vested interest in such speculation) as such possibilities may be, true historians always go for the most likely account of the events of the past, based on the evidence. And actually, using that basis, historians are pretty sure about most of their conclusions about Shakespeare.

Answer 3

A number of reasons.

We have clear evidence of a play co-written by Shakespeare and Fletcher (The Two Noble Kinsmen). This suggests that they were collaborating toward the end of Shakespeare's career.

At the same time, a fledgling writer would have collaborated with an established one. This suggests that one or more of the early plays may have been collaborations.

Some plays are of uneven quality. Pericles is the most notable. Unevenness of quality may suggest multiple authors.

There is no reason to believe that any of the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare was entirely written by anyone else.

Answer 4

The reasons why Shakespeare's plays which are based on historical events are not historically accurate are threefold. First, the historical sources which he used are not accurate themselves. For example, the witches in the story of Macbeth did not come from Shakespeare's imagination, but from Holinshed's Chronicles, the history book he used as a source. Second, Shakespeare was constrained by the medium he was working with. Although a series of events may have taken place over a period of years, Shakespeare had to present them in two or three hours of stage time. It therefore was expedient to merge similar historical figures into one, to merge similar events together, and to telescope the lapse of time, just to fit the whole story into the runtime of a play. Thirdly, Shakespeare was primarily concerned with entertaining his audience, not being accurate. If it made a better story, Shakespeare would include it. For example, there was no such person as Sir John Falstaff. However, his presence makes the Henry IV plays the theatrical successes they were and are.Shakespeare was and is not alone in presenting historical facts inaccurately when using them as a basis for a drama. All historical dramas, whether for the stage, like Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George, or for film, like Elizabeth: The Golden Age, or any of the numerous other films about Elizabeth I are profoundly affected both by the need to compress historical time and action, and the need to present stories which are entertaining rather than accurate.

Answer 5

He was known to "borrow" lines and plots from other writers.