Alyssa Mineau

Shakespeare’s Historical Accuracy

History is something that we all have to learn about. But what does it mean to be historically accurate? Why does it matter? Historical accuracy means to pay close attention to the details of a certain time period. So if one was writing about the middle Ages, they would not talk about automobiles. Historical accuracy is important since people want to believe what they read. Without historical accuracy, what can we actually believe? Shakespeare is a great example of an author that people go for historical accuracy; but can we actually believe everything he writes about? Romeo and Juliet as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not historically accurate for the reasons that the character reference Greek and Roman gods, family relations that are accurate are shown, and the way women we’re presented in the stories is not accurate.

Everywhere within Romeo and Juliet as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Greek and Roman gods are referenced in order to draw comparisons to characters problems. For example, when Romeo says “Well, in that hit you miss. She’ll not be hit with Cupid’s arrow…From Love’s week childish bow she lives uncharmed” (I. i. 209-212), he is talking about Cupid, who is the Roman god of physical love. He shot love arrows that would make people fall in love with the first person they saw. This, however, would not have actually happened during this time in real life. Both plays take place in Italy in about the 1500’s, which at the time, were either Lutheran or Catholic, all controlled by the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church would not have allowed people to speak about other gods, nor would the people following that church do it either because “no account was more important than the ac...

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...e character beliefs, family relations, and treatment of woman in Romeo and Juliet as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With the amount of inaccuracy in both of these stories, Shakespeare cannot be trusted with writing historically accurate literature. Everyone at the time was either Lutheran or Catholic, and would not be allowed to talk about other deities, especially to the extent that the characters do. People would be married in their late twenties, not the early teens, and they were not forced into marriage. Lastly, women were depicted as care-givers, wives, or sex objects, which was not true at the time. We cannot rely on Shakespeare to accurately depict a realistic social norm of the 1400-1500’s in Athens and Verona. The lack of historical accuracy in Romeo and Juliet and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is poisoning the minds of literature students everywhere.