The "Not By Shakespeare" Challenge

Ok gang, we’ve talked about this before, and now it’s time to do something about the epidemic of mis-attributed Shakespeare quotes on the net.  It’s one thing to see misinformed high school students retweeting “When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew” as if it came from Romeo and Juliet. But when you start googling for “shakespeare quotes” and that shows up in most lists that are supposedly compiled by experts? That’s upsetting to me.

I’ve taken the best of our discussions on the topic and put them together into an e-book called, Not by Shakespeare : Correctly Attributing The Most Popular Things That Shakespeare Didn’t Say and made it available for download. It’s free and it’s only about 7 pages.  Many of my regular readers will no doubt already know everything that it says, but I’d love it if people can do me the favor of reading/downloading and maybe rating it? Helps the rankings.

The challenge is this : Bookmark that. Or download your own copy, your choice.  But now be on the lookout, be it via Twitter or Facebook, email signatures or Google searches. When you spot one of these incorrectly attributed quotes, send the person a nice note and a link to this document.  Let’s see if we can fix the problem.  I’d expect that most people don’t really care who said it, but at least now they know and I bet they’ll stop calling it Shakespeare next time.