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The 210 attached to Shakespeare has no author and no method. What makes the gap interesting is that the one study everyone assumes it came from deliberately left him out.
This is an achievement estimate about a man whose childhood is almost entirely undocumented, which is precisely why Cox excluded him. It is placed below Voltaire and Goethe here because both of those have documented early records and Shakespeare has none.
Set the claim aside for a moment. If someone genuinely scored in this range, here is what that would represent.
Average is 100 by construction, and about two-thirds of people fall between 85 and 115. Take the test to place your own score on this scale.
| Score range | Classification | Share of people | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|---|
| 85 – 114 | Average | ~68% | The range most people fall into. |
| 115 – 129 | Above average | ~13.6% | Roughly one person in seven. |
| 130 – 144 | Gifted | ~2% | The threshold most high-IQ societies use. |
| Above 144 | Highly gifted | ~0.1% | Figures above this range are extrapolated from the curve rather than measured. |
Percentages are approximate and describe a normal distribution. The same number means different things on tests with different standard deviations.
Thirty questions gives you a measured position on this exact scale — your score, your percentile and the ability breakdown behind it.
Find out in 30 minutes →William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, the son of a glover and alderman. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582. Nothing reliable is known of him between 1585 and 1592, when he appears in London as an actor and playwright already attracting professional jealousy.
He became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 and part-owner of the Globe in 1599. He was a working commercial dramatist, not a court poet, and the plays were written to fill a playhouse against direct competition.
He wrote thirty-eight plays and 154 sonnets, retired to Stratford as a prosperous man, and died there in April 1616. The First Folio, collected by two of his fellow actors, appeared in 1623.
The estimate above rests on this record. Every entry here is a matter of public fact, which is more than can be said for the number itself.
Following a claim back to its first appearance is the part almost nobody does — and it is what most people are actually asking.
The interesting thing about Shakespeare’s IQ is not the number. It is the absence the number was invented to cover.
Catharine Cox’s Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses is where most historical IQ figures come from, and it is the source this section cites for Voltaire at 190, Goethe at 210 and Mozart. Her method was to read biographical material for evidence of childhood attainment — what a subject could do, and at what age — and score it against the Stanford-Binet. It required a documented childhood, and it is the reason Shakespeare is not in the book.
What survives of his early life is a baptism record, a marriage licence bond, and the reasonable inference that he attended the King’s New School in Stratford because he was entitled to. There are no letters, no school reports, no anecdotes recorded at the time, and seven years between 1585 and 1592 for which there is no record at all. Cox could not have scored him, so she did not try.
The 210 filled that vacuum anyway, and it is telling that it matches Goethe’s Cox figure exactly. Where a real method declined to produce a number, the internet supplied one and borrowed the authority of the study that refused.
One caution in the other direction: the widely repeated claim that Shakespeare coined more than 1,700 words is heavily contested by modern corpus scholarship, which finds many of those first attestations simply reflect the fact that his texts survive and his contemporaries’ do not. That figure is not used in the estimate above.
How we read a number →The study usually assumed to be the source of the 210. Shakespeare is not in the sample; the method required documented childhood records.
The collected text on which the achievement estimate rests.
Essentially the whole documentary record of his life outside the theatre. Cited to show how little there is.
No school reports, letters or contemporary anecdotes survive, and seven years between 1585 and 1592 are undocumented. No historiometric study has produced a figure for him.
First-appearance date for the 210 pending audit.
Unsourced, and frequently presented as though it came from Cox. It did not.
The figures that circulate for William Shakespeare, what we were able to confirm, and where the two diverge.
That Shakespeare’s IQ was 210, a figure carried by nearly every celebrity IQ aggregator and frequently given as the highest of any writer.
No study, psychologist or publication has been identified as the origin of the 210. It is generally assumed to come from Catharine Cox’s 1926 historiometric study of 301 eminent figures — the source of the numbers for Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart. It does not: Shakespeare is not in Cox’s sample. Her method required documented childhood records, and his do not exist.
A fifty-point spread with no method attached to any of it. Where the underlying record is empty, the numbers drift furthest.
Want a number that does hold up? Every figure on this page is somebody’s claim. Take the 30-question test and get a percentile you can check rather than a figure you have to trust.
Unknown, and unmeasurable. He died three centuries before intelligence testing existed, and unlike other historical figures profiled here he was never assigned a figure by any published historiometric study.
No identified source. It is widely assumed to come from Catharine Cox’s 1926 study, which is where Voltaire’s and Goethe’s numbers come from — but Shakespeare is not in Cox’s sample.
Her method scored documented childhood attainment against the Stanford-Binet, so it needed a documented childhood. Shakespeare’s barely exists: no school reports, no letters, and a seven-year gap in the record from 1585.
No. He probably attended the King’s New School in Stratford, to which he was entitled as an alderman’s son, and there is no record of any further formal education.
That claim is contested. Modern corpus scholarship finds many first attestations reflect which texts survived rather than who coined the word, and this page does not use the figure.
Voltaire and Goethe, both of whom do have Cox figures and documented childhoods, and Isaac Asimov.
You can find out in about fifteen minutes. The IQ Metrics assessment is 30 questions, scored on the same 100-mean scale used throughout this page, so your result and the estimate above are at least expressed in the same units — one measured, one inferred. Once you have a number, the leaderboard shows where it would sit, and how we score and norm it explains the benchmarking.
From the documented record rather than a test — the method is named above and set out in full under how we read a number. Compare it against the other writers profiles, starting with Voltaire.
Portrait © Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0. The background-removed portrait above is a derivative work and is likewise offered under the same licence. · Portrait © Debbie Rowe / The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0. The background-removed portrait above is a derivative work and is likewise offered under the same licence. · Portrait by Christopher Smith, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — a work of the U.S. federal government, public domain. Background removed for the portrait above.
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