Did King Arthur really take a sword out of a stone and have knights at a round table?
Arthur was the subject of many stories in the Middle Ages, most dating from the 11th, 12th, and 13th century. He was supposed to have actually lived in the 5th and or 6th century. Most of these stories contain many incidents that are obviously fantasy. The stories were written by poets who had less concern about the reality of their tales than Shakespeare did. Shakespeare was obviously concerned this his stories and character felt real (ignoring the fact that they were in blank verse), but probably did not particularly care at all that Hamlet was supposed to have lived in Jutland (not Denmark) in the early 5th century and would not have been student at Wittenburg and that Banquo in “Macbeth” was probably invented by an earlier writer with the purpose of being an ancestor to the line of James I, or that King Duncan was reputed to be a horrible king, and probably younger than Macbeth, and that almost all Scottish kings died murdered by their successor. This is the kind of thing that poet
