Shakespeare died unknown, apparently. His plays weren’t being performed. There wasn’t a publisher holding his rights. His works wouldn’t get put in print until a while after.
I do believe that once a thing is written, it exists independently of the author. It has a life in the mind of each reader who gives it attention. That attention is where the book finally lives. A precious little bit of a widely read work really belongs to the author.
Which makes the true authors of Shakespeare’s legacy the ones who came after, who gave the plays their attention, who loved them, who offered them a world to live in. They are in a real sense the true heroes of the story, because they had no horse in the race. They came for the love of the work, and until they came, the works were nothing, almost dead.
Just to make explicitly clear that this is all a cry of spurned vanity, waiting for a publisher feels like this.