It's true that Shakespeare is widely credited with coining more than 1700 words – from blanket, bedroom and bandit to eyeball, elbow and exposure, to lonely, luggage and lustrous, to scuffle, swagger and submerge. It makes you wonder how people got by when they tried to explain where they slept or how they felt when no one else was around.

No one can say for certain if he coined these words or not, of course, but doubting scholars seem intent on ''making a famine where abundance lies" (Sonnet 1). In the mid-20th century, when Shakespeare's reputation for being a novel wordsmith was especially high, the Oxford English Dictionary credited the Bard with being the first to use more than 3000 words. Today this has dropped to about 2000.

All of which is still rather magnificent, splendid, imposing and grand ... making up all them words. 

Maybe he didn't outright invent new words. Many scholars wonder if Shakespeare was perhaps the first to write down many words that were in common use in 16th century London, or that he might have given a playful spin to existing words, rather than coining them from nothing. 

Dr David McInnis​ is the Gerry Higgins lecturer in Shakespeare studies in the English and Theatre Studies program at the University of Melbourne. He wonders if Shakespeare ''could invent so many words and have people understand what he was talking about; the words had to have currency ... so he may have popularised them or his spin on them may have been memorable, which isn't the same as inventing them."

Well at least he came up with some original storylines, yeah? Maybe not Julius Caesar or Henry IV, V, VI or VIII or Antony and Cleopatra ... 

Dr McInnis​ says very few of Shakespeare's plays ''were original in our sense of the word. In the Renaissance, they were rebirthing the classics; originality meant a return to origins. There were different priorities ... being able to demonstrate how you would vary something that was familiar. King Lear had a happy ending until Shakespeare got his hands on it."

Indeed, says McInnis​, there was a King Lear playing in London at the time Shakespeare was writing his own version. The other King Lear, whose author was and remains anonymous, ended with Cordelia and King Lear surviving.

What about Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art the origins of that famous teen tragedy Romeo and Juliet? 

McInnis​ points to the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, where the entire story, including the very unhappy ending, is told to the audience before the action begins. ''Romeo and Juliet was a classic love-death myth ... it wasn't the first time anyone in England had heard the story before."

The story of Romeo and Juliet was popular in novella form in Italy and France, before Arthur Brooke turned it into in a narrative poem which Shakespeare freely adapted. It's the beauty of Shakespeare's language – "Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs" – and the way he brings the characters to life that makes it truly great.

A fellow who writes ''To thine own self be true" can at least be counted on to have written his own work, yeah? 

Not all the time, no. ''Going back to Shakespeare's plays, we're finding some of them were written with other people and giving them credit," says Dr McInnis. ''Something we've acknowledged recently is that collaboration was more the norm than the exception. And there's been a lot of work done recently on how complex that process of collaboration could be. Someone would have the idea, and they would divide up the play; one playwright might write act one and three, some playwrights were good at ends and beginnings."

Shakespeare wrote for a a ''playing company", The Lord Chamberlain's Men. Today he might have been a team writer for The Simpsons or Downton Abbey.

Since the late 19th century, Titus Andronicus was accepted to have been co-authored with George Peele; Pericles was co-authored with George Wilkins. It's also said that the collaborations dragged down the quality of the work – while the masterpieces, such as Hamlet, were his work alone.

Macbeth is an exception. Thomas Middleton later added a song and a scene involving the chief witch, Hecate.

Whoa. Adding stuff to Shakespeare's work later on seems a bit out of order. 

It gets worse. During the 17th century, McInnis says, Shakespeare's plays were being performed using his name, but not his script. His original writings were almost lost until the 18th century, when scholars began reviving them in accessible printed form, with standardised spelling and punctuation.

At the same, Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge began to champion his work. ''They were keen on him because he had wonderful insights into the human mind, because of his genius and creativity, but also because he was very much in touch with the natural world. These were all features that the romantic poets valued, so they singled him out from the other playwrights of his day. And that was the beginning of Bardology: the rise of Shakespeare's individual greatness."

For local celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death go to http://shakespeare400.unimelb.edu.au/