This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and the worldwide commemorations and plaudits abound. But not everybody’s using the occasion to puff up the playwright.  David McInnis, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Melbourne, has published an essay in the university’s online journal “Pursuit,” noting that some phrases attributed to Shakespeare aren’t actually his. Mr. McInnis used technology like Early English Books Online, which has full texts of early writing, to show that some coinages attributed to Shakespeare by sources like the Oxford English Dictionary appeared long before he used them.  “As the 400 celebrations are going I kept seeing those internet memes, you know those ones: ‘Shakespeare invented all these phrases and words,’” Mr. McInnis said in a phone interview. “That’s nice, but I don’t think that’s the most important thing about Shakespeare.”  His article touches on several well-known phrases that he says aren’t actually Shakespeare’s: “A wild-goose chase,” for example, which the O.E.D. says was first used by Shakespeare, appeared earlier in a 1593 book on horses, Mr. McInnis found. The play “As You Like It” is often cited as the source of the phrase “without rhyme or reason,” but that actually appeared in print decades before Shakespeare wrote.  Some coinages Mr. McInnis investigated do have their origins in Shakespeare, he said, like the phrase “to make an ass of me,” used by Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when his head is, for a spell, transformed into a donkey’s. “All for one and one for all” appears to have its origins in Latin texts but seems to have first been used in English by Shakespeare. Mr. McInnis said that coinage in particular surprised him; he had always thought it came from “The Three Musketeers.”  Mr. McInnis emphasized that his paper, aimed at a popular audience, includes findings already acknowledged in some academic circles. He suggested that it’s only a matter of time before another scholar finds evidence that phrases like Bottom’s actually predate Shakespeare.  He emphasized that by offering context to these words he was not trying to denigrate Shakespeare’s genius.  “Shakespeare’s popularizing things, that’s his gift,” Mr. McInnis said. “He’s popularizing them because he’s using them so brilliantly. He makes them powerful.”
The scholar David McInnis delves into which phrases attributed to Shakespeare were used by him first — or not.