I found a book about how Shakespeare didn't really write any of those stories or poems.
EDIT : & I was the first one! I just forgot to click the Reply button! C:
no i told jerry in a private message before i posted it on here.
the deal with shakespeare is, it was hard to get paper because it was so rare and expensive back then. so he just wrote one manuscript and had his actors memorize their lines. because so few people were literate back then, they had a much higher ability to memorize things than we do. they could basically memorize all their lines in a day, so that they could get the play on the stage and start making money-- theatres have always been poor. if you think about it, a ballerina (me being one) has to memorize full ballets and perform them all the time, and often they must know many, many ballets to keep the repertoire going. so it's similar to Shakespeare's actors-- they had to have five or six plays all memorized, multiple parts, performing one or two different ones every day at one oclock.
so the way that his plays were recorded was one of two ways: his actors would write out their lines and compile them, or the audience members would memorize the lines or write them down. this is why there are so many different editions of shakespeare's plays. it's because there were multiple people stealing/recording his work.
another interesting fact: every wonder why newspaper pages are that big rectangular size? they hadn't very well figured out how to mass produce paper, so they were still in the system of using sheep hides as a means to write and print on. each sheep hide, folded in half the long way, could yield two rectangular sized sheets, each being the size of basically what our newspapers are today. naturally, sheep hides were not always readily available, and very expensive to obtain. thus books, consisting of hundreds of sheep, were extreeeemely expensive. this meant that only the rich people could afford books, which meant that only rich people could read and become cultured. Also, you'll notice that old books tend to be bigger.
i'd love to share shakespeare information, and lots of history about those times, so pm me if you ever need material for class or something.