Methodology

How this site was built, and how it handles uncertainty.

What this is

A reference site about William Shakespeare (1564–1616): his life, his plays, his language, and his afterlife — built for students, readers, the curious, and educators. Reference tone: neutral, plain, respectful. No bardolatry, no debunking.

How quotations are verified

1. Every line presented as a quotation was checked against a real text of the plays in the public-domain First Folio textual tradition (Open Source Shakespeare; Project Gutenberg editions as a second check).
2. Citation format: play + act + scene (e.g., Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1). Line numbers vary by edition; act and scene are stable across them.
3. Paraphrases and summaries are labeled as such and never placed in quotation marks as his words.
4. Famous misquotations are corrected in place (“glisters” not “glitters”; “wherefore” = “why”; “Et tu, Brute?” as Shakespeare’s invention, not history).
5. Anything that could not be verified to a real passage was cut — not published as a quote.

How dates are handled

Two categories, always labeled:

• Documented: parish registers, court records, Stationers’ Register entries, printed title pages (e.g., baptism 26 April 1564; Folio 1623).
• Estimated: composition dates for the plays (e.g., Macbeth c. 1606), which triangulate publication, performance records, topical allusion, and stylistic evidence. Ranges are honest; single years are editorial conveniences.

Where documents and inference meet, both are shown and the uncertainty is named, not smoothed over. The traditional birth date of 23 April 1616/1564 is labeled traditional, not documented.

Attribution discipline

• “The record shows…” = what documents establish.
• “Scholars conclude…” = mainstream scholarly consensus (with the field named where it matters).
• “Biographers infer…” = reasonable inference from thin evidence, labeled as such.
• “Anti-Stratfordians argue…” = the skeptical position on authorship, presented with its evidence and its problems.
• Legends (the deer-poaching, the “second best bed” slight) are told as legends, with their first tellings dated.

The authorship-question policy

The site follows the scholarly consensus (the Stratford man wrote the plays) while presenting the skeptical case accurately and without mockery. Consensus here means convergence of documentary evidence, contemporary testimony, and textual scholarship — not a vote, and not a claim that every question is closed. See reception.

Images

• See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.
• The alleged Marlowe portrait is shown with its attribution flagged as disputed.
• AI-generated imagery appears only in the stream’s character section, in the style of the owner’s Vizlings character sheet, and is always captioned “AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.”
• No image is a stand-in for a different real object; no fake portraits, no faked historical scenes.

Uncertainty policy

Claims that rest on thin or disputed evidence carry an explicit label — “traditional,” “legend,” “inferred,” “debated,” “disputed” — from research through publication. A later stage never upgrades uncertainty into fact.

Corrections

Found an error? This is a static reference build; verified corrections are fixed in the editorial source, noted in the changelog below, and re-shipped in the next dated build.

Changelog

• 2026-09-26 — v1 initial build (12 pages, 17 images, QA passed).

Source notes

• Method adapted from the Digital Jesus reference-site template’s methodology (quote verification, dating policy, attribution discipline), reworked for a literary-historical subject, 2026-09-26.
• Textual authorities: First Folio (1623); Open Source Shakespeare; Project Gutenberg editions — see sources.