Interesting, Paul. Per Wikitree Shakespeare is an ancestor, but I claim no unusual knowledge of his life. I do know that many early 1600s ancestors came from the British Midlands, settled in New England, and were middle class, yet extraordinary given the political turmoil and migrations of the day (perhaps they might be like the middle class rise of the WW II "greatest generation") I've read extensively about Shakespeare and visited Stratford on Avon a few times. I believe that he was quite talented (a unique wordsmith...when he didn't have a word he made one up), yet he also drew heavily from previously works that were lost to history. If one reads Chaucer or Boccaccio, one realizes that theirs are surviving works drawing from stories then hundreds of years old, lasting only through word of mouth and subsequent reworkings (and thus C & B are pretty much hosts of old anthology series w added gift of gab). A Shakespeare analogy might be "what if 400 years from now, 'Twilight Zone' was one of the only surviving TV shows, and became quite popular". You could say that Rod Serling was quite talented, rose from the ordinary WW II middle class to host an anthology series that housed some original material, but a much greater percentage of reworked parables & SciFi from others. Yet the people of 2421 would only believe that Rod Serling was an incredible genius who invented twisted tales/SciFi (and some of the accompanying language).