Status: Not Shakespeare
I woke up this morning to this quote making Twitter’s “Top Retweets” section of my feed – that’s when somebody says something that gets repeated by over 100 other people.
Yikes.
This expression is much older than Mr. Shakespeare. To be fair, it was popularized in the West when Abraham Lincoln used it, and he was known to quote a fair bit of Shakespeare. But Lincoln apparently cited his source (somewhat), and it wasn’t Shakespeare he referred to:
(You need to scroll down a bit, the embedded Google books reader will only take us to the page, not the exact paragraph we want.)
So the expression is at least as old as “Jewish folklore” or perhaps a Persian Sufi poet circa 1200A.D. Either way it’s much, much older than Shakespeare.