Shakespeare in Fiction

"To build, or not to build? That is the question."

William Shakespeare, being the important literary figure that he is, shows up frequently as a fictional character—so frequently, in fact, that a number of standard conventions have developed about how he's portrayed.

Many of them revolve around the trope of Biography à Clef. Most of the fiction about Shakespeare has him experiencing things that mirror his writing, with the implication that they served as inspiration. Specifically, often many of these things are portrayed as true:

• Hamlet the play is a reaction to the death of Hamnet Shakespeare (his only son).
• Shakespeare knew some Jews, or a Jew, which is why The Merchant of Venice is supposedly Fair for Its Day. Sometimes the Jew in question is Rodrigo Lopez, who was a physician to Queen Elizabeth until he was convicted of treason.
• Some woman Shakespeare knew was the real Dark Lady from his Sonnets. As one contender, Emelia Bassano, was of Sephardi ancestry, this might overlap with the Merchant of Venice one above. (For some reason there aren't nearly as many fictional presentations of the beautiful young man who's the other central figure in the Sonnets.)

There are also a number of other common threads in Shakespearean fiction:

• The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream are related somehow—possibly because Puck and Ariel are connected.
• Christopher Marlowe's death is significant, or possibly faked.
• Shakespeare's marriage was of at best questionable happiness (because he only left his wife his "second best bed" in his will, and because he spent most of his life in London while she was in Stratford-upon-Avon). His wife gave birth less than nine months after their marriage, so it's often presented as a Shotgun Wedding. It's worth mentioning that Shakespeare scholars dispute both these factoids: apparently the second-best bed was the bed a couple would typically sleep in (the best was kept for guests - like the best dinner plates) and under the laws of the time, the wife would automatically inherit a large share of the estate. As for the marriage, Shakespeare and his wife had been formally engaged for a number of months before the marriage ceremony and at the time, engaged couples were seen as married in all but name. (This crops up as an important plot point in Measure for Measure.)
• One or both of the lost plays, Love's Labour's Won and the Fletcherian collaboration Cardenio, play some important role in the plot.
• Very little Shakespearean fiction actually subscribes to any of the standard unorthodox perspectives in the authorship controversy, but often the existence of the controversy is referenced somehow—either by having one of the standard candidates give Shakespeare writing advice, or by coming up with a new (and probably completely absurd) candidate for authorship.

Compare William Fakespeare, where an author who is Shakespeare in all but name appears in the work.

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Fiction where Shakespeare appears as a character includes:

Audio Drama

• Big Finish Doctor Who:
  • The Kingmaker (in which Shakespeare travels back to the time of Richard III and dies at Bosworth Field, so Richard takes his place and writes the plays).
  • The Time of the Daleks features a woman who invents a time machine in order to go back and see Shakespeare's plays when they were first performed. She manages to screw up the timeline so that the plays were never written. The character credited as "Kitchen Boy" is actually a very young William Shakespeare.

Comic Books

• Blake and Mortimer: In The Testament of William S., Shakespeare is a posthumous character. The story is set in 1958 and is an investigation about the mystery surrounding Shakespeare's real authorship of his works. It turns out that William Shakespeare is actually the collective pen-name of two friends, an English peasant named William Shake (who became the official face of their duo) and an Italian aristocrat named Guillermo Da Spiri. Since his family forbade him to befriend this kind of commoners, Da Spiri couldn't use his real name to sign their plays, thus the pen-name "William Shake-Speare" ("Guillermo" being the Italian equivalent of "William"). It's also revealed that "Shakespeare" simulated his death in 1616 and fled England with his friend Da Spiri, living in Italy under a fake identity for a couple of decades..
• Comic Book Deathwatch: Paul Cornell's Elizabethan take on Judge Dredd, one of the members of Deathhwatch is a familiar-looking playwright called Will, who nobody takes seriously as a writer.
• Doctor Who Magazine: The comic strip "A Groatsworth of Wit" (by Gareth Roberts, who also wrote "The Shakespeare Code") has the Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene (a colleague of Shakespeare, who wrote a pamphlet attacking his plays) travel to the 21st century, where he's horrified to learn that the upstart actor he was so disparaging of is thought of as the greatest playwright of the age, whereas he's just barely remembered as the guy who said It Will Never Catch On.
• Jago: Ralf König's comic tells, among other things, how Shakespeare came to write Othello in a complicated plot that also heavily borrows from Macbeth, involving three witches and an ambitious actor who will stop at nothing to play Jago. The play originally was going to be called Öthellü, the Turk of Istanbul, but because Gus Phillips is infatuated with a black sailor, the lead character is changed to a moor. Shakespeare himself is in a deep funk because the two objects of his affection, the Earl of Southampton and Emilia Bassano, have fallen for each other. König helpfully provides endnotes pointing out his historical and literary allusions and quotes.
• Kill Shakespeare: Hamlet is asked by Richard III to kill a wizard who may or may not be real: William Shakespeare, who is worshiped throughout the country.
• Marvel 1602: In Marvel 1602: Fantastick Four, Shakespeare is kidnapped by Otto von Doom to record his voyage to Atlantis.
• The Sandman (1989): Shakespeare makes a deal with Dream — he's given writing ability, and in return Dream will get two plays from him (which end up being The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream). Hamnet dies after being captivated by the real world version of Titania, and it's implied that this leads to Hamlet (and Shakespeare's ability to write a death that made the audience cry). It's hinted that The Tempest is a bit of vanity on Dream's part; "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," etc. Prospero has a lot in common with Morpheus... Dream wanted The Tempest to end the way it did because, unlike Prospero, he will never be able to abandon magic and leave his own "island".

Fan Fiction

• In the Death Note Crack Fic Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami, his name is spelled "Shakespeer", he speaks in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, and he was The King of England. When threatened, he talks in "Pomes". They are painful.
  "You cant shootest me with an gun
  It would not be very fun
  I will call the gard to stop you
  They will all stab you
  With there knives
  And then you will not have any lives!"
  But the poem was too long and by the time he got to the end he was dead.
• Children of Time's second episode is a retelling of the Doctor Who episode described below in the Live-Action TV folder. The fun of it is getting to see him interact with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Watson fanboys, and Will actually does a bit of fanboying back. He also ends up deducing that Holmes and Watson are from the future, and becomes the first person ever to say "Elementary, my dear Watson."
• The works of Detsniy Off Skiword follow the footsteps of the above mentioned Dark Yagami, with "Shakespear"(Among other spellings), being The King of England, even in the Ace Attorney world of 20 Minutes into the Future, continuing to speak in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, planning on trips to the Red Light District, and also randomly referring to himself as ore-sama. He also shows himself as a king who does take action, as when 'Bill Hacks' launches an inter-dimensional invasion of London, Shakespeare turns up to help in the resulting fight.

Film — Live-Action

• The Roland Emmerich film Anonymous (2011) (no relation) involves the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays. William Shakespeare shows up as a Jerkass hack actor who steals credit for Oxford's work and killed Marlowe. The film was trashed critically upon release.
• Bill, a comedy version of how Shakespeare found success, including the idea that he thwarted a Spanish plot to blow up Elizabeth I.
• Shakespeare in Love, obviously. The entire movie is about real-world events that inspired his play. For example, Marlowe's death looks like it's important. Shakespeare claims to be Marlowe at a ball where he gets between Lady Viola and her fiancé, so he later ends up thinking that the fiancé had Marlowe killed. It turns out to be a Red Herring; when Shakespeare shows up at Marlowe's funeral, the fiancé's reaction inspires the scene with Banquo's ghost in Macbeth. Lady Viola (who dresses as a boy in order to be able to act) is the inspiration for the character of the same name in Twelfth Night. She may also be the beautiful young man of the Sonnets.

Literature

• Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth by Elizabeth Bear are an urban fantasy duology with Shakespeare and Marlowe as protagonists. They start with Marlowe's (apparent) death, and much is made of the (very real) Marlowe references in As You Like It. Interestingly, Hamnet's death in these books is also the Puck's fault—this may be a Shout-Out to The Sandman (1989).
• King of Shadows by Susan Cooper is about a modern boy actor who's sent back in time to play Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and bonds with Shakespeare. At the end, he realizes that Shakespeare was almost certainly thinking of him when he wrote the part of Ariel in The Tempest.
• "We Haven't Got There Yet" by Harry Turtledove is a short story in which Shakespeare attends a performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead performed by an involuntarily time-traveling acting troupe from 2066.
• Turtledove also wrote Ruled Britannia, a novel set in an Alternate Universe where the Spanish Armada conquered England. Ten years later, Shakespeare is writing plays under the Spanish occupiers, but is simultaneously contracted by both them and the English resistance to write plays to either commemorate the dying King Philip or inspire rebellion against him. In the end he chooses the latter, and his play Boudicca sparks a revolution. Published under the slogan "To be free, or not to be free?"
  • Ann offhand reference indicates that Shakespeare is working on Love's Labours Won. Some of his plays were at least partially altered - in this timeline, Hamlet was instead titled Prince of Denmark.
• Oscar Wilde's story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." is about the young man of the sonnets.
• Plots and Players by Pamela Melnikoff makes the Lopez scandal a major part of its plot.
• The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe, and Shakespeare's Spy, by Gary L. Blackwood, are a trilogy about a boy who is initially hired to transcribe Hamlet before it is legally published. The second book revolves around the writing of Love's Labour's Won, which in this version turns out to be a working title for All's Well That Ends Well.
• Simon Hawke's Shakespeare and Smythe mystery series includes A Mystery of Errors, The Slaying of the Shrew, Much Ado About Murder, and The Merchant of Vengeance. They're all about Shakespeare solving mysteries which have a remarkable resemblance to the plots of his plays (and are set before the plays are written).
• Discworld: He appears in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe: a timeline lacking him retards human progress as they fall victim to The Fair Folk, so the wizards have to ensure his birth - A Midsummer Night's Dream makes the elves figures of fun in the human imagination and they fade from a position of influence.
• In Foucault's Pendulum, Shakespeare shows up in Belbo's metafictional writing about the Plan, as part of a complex chain of faked authorship. In an inversion of the standard crackpot theory, he writes the books that in reality were written by Francis Bacon. This means he doesn't have time to write his own plays, so Edward Kelley writes them for him.
• Isaac Asimov's "The Immortal Bard": A physics professor at a faculty mixer brags to an English professor that he invented a time machine that can bring historical figures into the present. Out of all the ones he tried, Shakespeare was the only one who could handle being out of temporal water and didn't ask to be sent back right away. However, one day the professor was approached by a very pissed-off Shakespeare who demanded to be sent back to his own time, having never felt so insulted in his life. The English professor, who clearly doesn't believe a word of this story, asks what could possibly make Shakespeare so angry. He took the English professor's class on Shakespeare... and flunked.
• The Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde are set in an alternate England where great literature is as popular and divisive as pop music or football; one of the common con scams the Literary Detectives have to investigate is people with alleged copies of Shakespeare's "lost works" Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won. There are also "Will-Speak" machines, tacky arcade gadgets with a bust of Shakespeare similar to the fortune-telling ones from our world, and at one point the Goliath Corporation attempts to produce new Shakespeare plays by cloning the man thousands of times over and putting them all at typewriters - a reference to the old idea that a troupe of monkeys on typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. At the end of The Eyre Affair, it turns out that no-one wrote the plays, and they're simply the result of a stable time loop.
• Though Shakespeare has been dead for years by the time of 1632, Doctor Abrabanel mentions that the Earl of Oxford was the real playwright, though William Shakespeare certainly existed and may have had a hand in some of the lesser plays. In the Grantville Gazette sequel short story ''Ya' Gets Yet Money and Ya' Gets Yer Choice," Shakespeare's grandsons claim that Dr. Arabanel lied about the Earl of Oxford being the true author of Shakespeare's plays as revenge for never being paid for medical services he performed for Shakespeare. Arbanel refers to his claims about Oxford being the author as a joke gone too far.
• In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Shakespeare appears from the third book onward. John Dee is stated to have been responsible for the death of Hamnet.
• The Shakespeare Secret by J. L. Carrell. The entire plotline is based around Shakespeare!
• My Name Is Will by Jess Winfeld (of the Reduced Shakespeare Company), in which a young Shakespeare is a character— and so is Willie Shakespeare Greenburg, a 21st century grad student and shrooms mule trying to prove Shakespeare was a secret Catholic.
• Shakespeare is the main character in Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess (yes, that Anthony Burgess). Set in The Dung Ages but with a mostly believable plot, it is centred around the Fair Lord and the Dark Lady (following the theories that she was actually black and that the Fair Lord was the Earl of Southampton). Burgess also wrote Dead Man in Deptford, about Christopher Marlowe.
• The short story "The Undiscovered", by William Sanders, depicts an Alternate History where Shakespeare, while drunk and broke, mistakenly stows away on the expedition to locate the Roanoke colonists and is stranded in North America. He writes a version of Hamlet on birchbark, but when the Cherokee he's living with consider it a comedy, he gives up and lives a quiet rest of his life.
• The final book of The 39 Clues, Into The Gauntlet deals with him — which means he's a Cahill from Mardigals branch.
• In The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, three knights stroll along with Bastian, singing "When That I was and a Little Tiny Boy" (which we know from Twelfth Night), which they learned from a previous human visitor to Fantasia/Fantastica, "name of Shexper, or something of the sort."
• The Nick Revill mysteries of Philip Gooden involve a young actor who has some interaction with Shakespeare and other theatre contemporaries, and some of the novel plots mirror Shakespeare's plays.
• In the Horus Heresy novels he is mentioned a couple times as 'Shakespire'. In Prospero Burns it's revealed that they only believe he wrote three plays.
• No Bed For Bacon, a humorous novel that may have inspired Shakespeare in Love, takes a Historical Hilarity approach to the period. It makes reference to the authorship controversy by inverting it. Rather than Bacon writing Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare helps write Bacon's essays in addition to his play-writing work.
• In the Fate/Apocrypha project, Shakespeare is summoned as the Caster Servant of the Red Faction. A master of story writing, Shakespeare's main desire is to witness a grand tale of unparalleled beauty. Since he never was an actual magic-user of any type, he has very little ability in direct combat; however, he can effectively power up his Master, and his skills and Noble Phantasms can be deadly if used properly.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • The Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel Empire of Glass depicts Shakespeare working as a secret agent (so was Christopher Marlowe, who faked his death and is alive and well in Venice) and the Doctor getting involved with the premiere performance of Macbeth.
  • One Eighth Doctor Adventures novel has the Doctor mention that he "loved Shakespeare", get embarrassed, and correct that to "loves Shakespeare" (connoting he's just a fan of Shakespeare's work instead), then recite Hamlet's "man delights not me" speech as a way of changing the topic.
  • The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Theatre of War has a group of archaeologists uncover a theatre whose archive includes several famous lost plays, including Love's Labour's Won (though we don't get any details, because everybody's more interested in a lost masterpiece from the 23rd century).
  • He doesn't appear outside of a cameo in the Missing Adventure Managra, but he's an important background figure. The action itself revolves around a jealous, much less talented rival who crafts terrible plagiarised versions of Shakespeare's plays, which somehow manages to attract the attention of an Eldritch Abomination (or what seems to be one, anyway).
  • The Shakespeare Notebooks purports to be a recently discovered notebook in which Shakespeare collected all his encounters with the Doctor. It also contains Doctorised versions of his plays and sonnets (such as an 'early draft' of a scene from Cymbeline with a truly incredible twist about Imogen), although whether they are based on 'real' adventures is extremely ambiguous.
  • The Short Trips: Companions short story "Apocrypha Bipedium" set shortly after the audio Time of the Daleks has the young Shakespeare read The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
  • In the story "All Done With Mirrors" in Short Trips: Past Tense the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane end up helping Christopher Marlowe fake his own death and become William Shakespeare. The Doctor gives him a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (which he'd used as a Pocket Protector) and tells him only to read it 'when he gets stuck'.
  • Shakespeare appears twice in The Brilliant Book 2012, with one piece saying he flirted with Amy during a performance of Romeo and Juliet and another, set during "all of time happening at once" in "The Wedding of River Song", making him the head scriptwriter on EastEnders.
• The McGuffin of the Gervase Fen detective novel Love Lies Bleeding, by Edmund Crispin, is a rediscovered manuscript copy of Love's Labour's Won.
• The last 13 stories in the anthology Shakespearean Detectives ed. Mike Ashley feature Shakespeare himself rather than his characters. These include a couple riffing on the authorship controversy, one where his own death is investigated, and one where (a version of) Hamlet becomes a private detective during his exile in London, and befriends the man he refers to as "The Player King".

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder:
  • Briefly mentioned in the Blackadder II episode "Potato" as helping Queenie with the title of her terrible poem "Edmund".
  • In the Time Travel special for the Millennium, Blackadder Back And Forth, Edmund beats up Shakespeare in revenge for 400 years of schoolchildren who have to put up with his plays. And for being indirectly responsible for "Ken Branagh's endless, uncut, four-hour version of Hamlet".
    Shakespeare: Who's Ken Branagh?
    Blackadder: I'll tell him you said that. And I think he'll be very hurt.
  • After getting back to 1999, Edmund discovers that this messed up history, making Shakespeare give up writing and be recognized as the inventor of the ballpoint pen (which Edmund left behind by accident), so he has to go back and redo his visit, being much nicer to Will that time around.
• Doctor Who:
  • Shakespeare is seen briefly through a Chronoscope in the First Doctor story "The Chase".
  • In the Fourth Doctor story "City of Death", the Doctor is shown reading a manuscript of Hamlet (which he hand-wrote for Will, who had sprained his wrist writing sonnets) and claiming that he helped compose the famous "To be or not to be" speech.
  • "The Shakespeare Code" is centered around the first (and only) performance of Love's Labours Won (which turns out to have been destroyed because Shakespeare was manipulated into writing it as a summoning ritual for a group of Eldritch Abominations). Among other references, it has a pub named the Elephant that Shakespeare frequents (Twelfth Night has an inn of the same name). It plays Shakespeare as akin to a rock star of the Renaissance with a genius-level intellect, who deduces from mere observation the nature of the Doctor and Martha's relationship, certain incongruities, a great deal of the Doctor's personality, and the facts that a) both are from the future, b) the Doctor is an alien. Martha Jones turns out to be the Dark Lady of the sonnets. They also play with Shakespeare's suspected bisexuality (i.e, he hits on both Martha and the Doctor).
• In the Fantasy Island segment "Room and Bard", an aspiring actress wants to give a performance "worthy of Shakespeare himself." She travels back to Elizabethan England and helps Shakespeare out of a jam with her acting ability.
• In Good Omens (2019), the scenes showing Aziraphale and Crowley's friendship developing over the millennia includes them seeing a poorly-attended performance of Hamlet at the Globe, with Shakespeare exhorting his actors to carry on even though the audience pit is almost deserted. Aziraphale loves it; Crowley says he prefers the comedies, but agrees to miracle it into a success as a favour to the angel.
• Shakespeare appears in multiple episodes of Horrible Histories. Highlights include him fighting an insult duel where he knocks his opponent out with the quality of his insults (before being knocked out by the man's wife), and singing a song where he shows off many of the words and phrases he introduced to the language.
• He's brought into the present-day in an episode of Mentors, where he goes by the alias "Bill Wagstaffe" and tries to write a TV pilot before going back to his own time.
• Red Dwarf:
  • Will Shakespeare is the greatest playwright in the parallel universe as well, though he is not a he: Her full name was Wilma Shakespeare.
  • Rimmer has a collection of books he treasures, and among them The Complete Works of the bard. Unfortunately, he hasn't read any of them. When asked to quote something, he cites the great monologue that starts with "NOW" something-something-something... (Rimmer also thought his first name was Wilfred. Then again, Lister hadn't even heard of him).
• The Sandman (2022): In one of the scenes where Dream meets with Hob Gadling, he encounters a young playwright named "Will Shaxberd" in the tavern.
• In The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "The Bard", a TV writer uses black magic to conjure Shakespeare to the present to write a TV movie. He does, but becomes so pissed off at Executive Meddling and the demands of the leading actor (Burt Reynolds as an Expy of Marlon Brando), he storms out.
• In The Twilight Zone (1985) episode "Act Break", a man gets an artifact that grants one wish per user. He wishes to be partners with the greatest playwright ever, then realizes he made a grave mistake when he gets sent back in time and meets Shakespeare. Shakespeare then uses the artifact to enslave the man and make him his ghostwriter.
• Upstart Crow, a comedy series written by Ben Elton and starring David Mitchell as Shakespeare, revolves around his early career before he really hits it off. Complete with numerous It Will Never Catch On moments, adventures curiously similar to his later works which end up inspiring him in a completely different direction, and an inversion of the conspiracy theory that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays.
• Prospero from The Tempest is the Big Bad of season 2 of The Librarians 2014, having been written so well he has a life of his own. In the Season Finale, Flynn and Eve travel back in time to Elizabethan England and discover that Prospero took over Shakespeare's body, feeding on his own resentment that he was growing old. They manage to defeat Prospero in the present and restore Shakespeare to the past without distrupting the Stable Time Loop.

Music

• Mitch Benn's "Macbeth (My Name Is)" says that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be a rapper under the name Wordmaster Will.

Tabletop Games

• A Dragon article about using real historic artifacts as epic-level magical items in Dungeons & Dragons includes the First Folio, which gives a +30 bonus to Perform checks, as well as enabling you to cast enthrall and emotion.

Theatre

• A Cry of Players by William Gibson^note (no, not that one) is about Shakespeare leaving Stratford to become an actor.
• Equivocation by Bill Cain features Shakespeare as the lead character, and revolves around his attempts to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. Much Lampshade Hanging and Seinfeldian Conversation ensue. The final speech also implies that several of his plays were actually inspired by stories originally devised by his daughter, Judith.
• The School of Night by Peter Whelan is primarily about the events leading up to Christopher Marlowe's mysterious death. Shakespeare features primarily as foil to Marlowe in terms of his work being remembered.
• The musical Something Rotten! has Shakespeare as a rock star in his time, with chanting crowds cheering for him and his sonnets and plays being delivered like popular songs. The musical centers around a much-less successful playwright named Nick Bottom struggling to beat Shakespeare to his next hit - a musical called "Omlet".
• Shakespeare walks in and out of the Flying Karamazov Brothers' 80s production of Comedy Of Errors. In one scene, while Antipholus of Ephesus discusses his plans to visit a courtesan he knows, Shakespeare walks on stage holding a cardboard sign bearing the word "PLOT". In the final act, in response to the line "Behold, a man much wronged!" Shakespeare walks onstage and bows.

Video Games

• In The Simpsons Game, Shakespeare appears as an angel guarding the gates to Fluffy Cloud Heaven. You have to beat him up to enter.
• Shakespeare appears in the 1997 version of Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, voiced by Charles Martinet incidentally. When a VILE agent steals his original scripts, you and Renee Santz have to help Richard Burbage fix the Globe's wall.
• Shakespeare shows up as a character in some generations of Mabinogi. He apparently fell off a boat, landed in Erinn, and his progression from "some nerd with a stick" to "the most badass Milletian ever" is shown through roleplaying quests, where you play as Shakespeare himself. He wrote Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in-universe, and you can use his scripts to insert yourself into the play to save him. He wrote The Merchant of Venice after returning to Real Life, based on events that happen in the game.
• Shakespeare also appears as one of the bosses in Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell.

Webcomics

• In Times Like This, Shakespeare shows up twice: as part of an insurance commercial, and inserting a suggestion by Matt into "The Tempest".
• Shakespeare in Irregular Webcomic! is an office worker who writes Harry Potter Self-Insert Fic in his spare time. His office mates include Mercutio, a Small Name, Big Ego; and Ophelia, who has a crush on him but doesn't quite get his interests. It's strongly suggested he's the real Shakespeare, who was kicked out by the time traveling scientists in the 'Scientific Revolution' storyline because they found out he wasn't a scientist. They kicked him out in the 1990s because they couldn't be bothered to go back to the 1500s.
• In Thinkin' Lincoln, Shakespeare's skull (as opposed to the floating heads of the rest of the cast) is portrayed as a neurotic loser with self-confidence issues...until he hulks out.
• Shakespeare sometimes shows up in Dinosaur Comics, using all lowercase letters and Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
• In Hark! A Vagrant he appeared as a Professional Butt-Kisser: See the joking portrayal of him from him likely writing Macbeth to appeal to King James I.
  Witch: Banquo's sons will be kings, yes
  Each one will get handsomer and handsomer until King James I
  King James: (starry-eyed) Did that really happen
  Shakespeare: Yes

Web Video

• Epic Rap Battles of History pits Shakespeare against Dr. Seuss, where he apparently possesses a Sophisticated as Hell method of rapping, and a Motor Mouth:
  Shakespeare: "Come bite my thumb, I hope you know the stakes! I'll put a slug between your shoulder blades, then ask "through what light yonder poser breaks?" I hath been iambic on that ass, ye bastard! My rhymes are classic. Your crap is drafted by a kindergartner high on acid! Ye hoebag, you're an old white Soulja Boy with no swag, and no gonads: egads, it's so sad! And to top it off, you're not a doctor! I've never seen a softer author. You crook, you, I bet you wrote the Twilight books too!"

Western Animation

• In the Looney Tunes cartoon "A Witch's Tangled Hare," Bugs Bunny comes across a man resembling Shakespeare who is upset because he isn't a good writer. Bugs Bunny points out, "But you're William Shakespeare," and the man reveals that his name is actually Sam Crubish.
• An animated statue of him makes an appearance in Gnomeo & Juliet.
• He appeared many times on Histeria!. The show also had a song about him called "As Told By the Bard".
• In The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror III", Shakespeare appears as a zombie, along with George Washington and Albert Einstein. (Homer kills all three, but only Shakespeare gets a line out first.)
• In the Time Squad episode "Child's Play", Shakespeare is a playwright that is being forced to make kids plays, and worse kids plays that are only for profit and selling toys and are"cute and cuddly" and follow guidelines and feedback from Larry and his sleazy manager/ producer who tell him to take out whatever that could possibly be offensive. Luckily Otto straightens him out by saying that if he just writes what he knows he's supposed to write he'll be fine. And thus the playwright makes plays that are successful and for everyone like he's supposed to.
• Gravity Falls: In "Headhunters", a dummy of William Shakespeare is among the figures at the Mystery Shack's long-abandoned wax museum exhibit.

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