Reasons why checking your sources is important
Recently I came across a question from a patron: Which play is the Shakespeare quote "The earth has music for those who listen" from?
Sounds like a simple question with a simple answer, doesn't it? Only problem -- that quote doesn't exist anywhere in Shakespeare's complete works. I checked. Several times. There are quite a few searchable Shakespeare databases out there as well as print concordances. It's not there. Shakespeare never wrote it.
However, if you do some creative Google searching, particularly in Google Books as well as Amazon's "Search within this book" feature, you find tons of seeming reputable, and in some cases peer-reviewed scholarly books, who make use of this quote and attribute it, apparently unthinkingly, to Shakespeare. I did come across two places in which the quote was attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Santayana, respectively. However, full text searches of what was indexed of their works failed to come up with the quote either. It's possible that one or the other of them either said it in an interview or speech or wrote it in a letter or essay that is not indexed, but short of travelling to the libraries in which their manuscripts are housed and reading through everything, I doubt further verification is possible.
So, let this be a lesson to all of you out there. At some point, some person either heard that quote and went, 'that sounds like Shakespeare' or else made it up entirely and wanted to lend some authority to it. Either way, I imagine if one had the desire and time to do a true retrospective, all the numerous false attributions could probably be traced back to a single erroneous assertion that future writers simply took on faith. And the more people who copied the false attribution without verifying it, the more future writers felt safe in doing the same. After all, if everyone says Shakespeare said it, they can't all be wrong, right?
*sigh*
CHECK YOUR SOURCES, PEOPLE!!!
Sounds like a simple question with a simple answer, doesn't it? Only problem -- that quote doesn't exist anywhere in Shakespeare's complete works. I checked. Several times. There are quite a few searchable Shakespeare databases out there as well as print concordances. It's not there. Shakespeare never wrote it.
However, if you do some creative Google searching, particularly in Google Books as well as Amazon's "Search within this book" feature, you find tons of seeming reputable, and in some cases peer-reviewed scholarly books, who make use of this quote and attribute it, apparently unthinkingly, to Shakespeare. I did come across two places in which the quote was attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Santayana, respectively. However, full text searches of what was indexed of their works failed to come up with the quote either. It's possible that one or the other of them either said it in an interview or speech or wrote it in a letter or essay that is not indexed, but short of travelling to the libraries in which their manuscripts are housed and reading through everything, I doubt further verification is possible.
So, let this be a lesson to all of you out there. At some point, some person either heard that quote and went, 'that sounds like Shakespeare' or else made it up entirely and wanted to lend some authority to it. Either way, I imagine if one had the desire and time to do a true retrospective, all the numerous false attributions could probably be traced back to a single erroneous assertion that future writers simply took on faith. And the more people who copied the false attribution without verifying it, the more future writers felt safe in doing the same. After all, if everyone says Shakespeare said it, they can't all be wrong, right?
*sigh*
CHECK YOUR SOURCES, PEOPLE!!!