Owen Wilson's Shakespeare quote from new sofa ad is made up

“People are usually happiest at home,” says Owen Wilson, while appearing in a new ad for sofa company Sofology.

“You wanna know who said that? Shakespeare. Isn’t that crazy? Mind blown.”

“I wonder what made him happy at home,” he goes on. “Well, the same stuff that makes us happy; talking, thinking, texting. Cuddling on ye olde sofa. Waxing that little beard.”

Which is all fine, except that it turns out that it’s not a quote from Shakespeare at all.

Via The Guardian, theatre critic Mark Fisher has made pretty short work of debunking the notion that these are the words of The Bard, though it appears to have fooled even the experts.

“My colleague Michael Cox raised the question with the front-of-house staff of Shakespeare’s Globe and even they thought the quote was legitimate until pressed to name a source,” he writes.

“Only after a 20-minute search on the education department’s database did they conclude it was made up.

“The best they could offer was ‘When I was at home I was in a better place,’ from As You Like It. Another contender could be Henry V’s ‘Men are merriest when they are from home’, although it carries the opposite meaning.”

Now we’re starting to wonder whether Shakespeare *did* enjoy texting after all…

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