Shakespeare would have felt more than a touch of "the whips and scorns of time" if he had been around to collect his royalty cheque from public libraries yesterday.
After 450 years of fame and despite the backing of a mammoth school textbook industry, the Bard was trumped by the creators of Squirrel Nutkin, Winnie the Pooh, Goosebumps, hobbits, and that tight-trousered Mr D'Arcy.
Shakespeare's payout under the public lending right, computed by the number of his titles borrowed from libraries, would have been £3,535 - barely enough to throw a good party at his restored Globe theatre in London.
This means that just over 500,000 copies of his work are officially estimated to have been borrowed last year.
His royalty is a humiliating £25 less than Jane Austen's and is dwarfed by the £5,229 that would have arrived on Beatrix Potter's doorstep this week and the £6,000 which would have gone to AA Milne.
Milne qualified for the maximum payment, for authors reckoned to have clocked up 1m or more library loans for the year, under the Public Lending Act.
The lending rights office, in Stockton-on-Tees, carried out the calculations to celebrate a recent government promise of an extra £2m funding next year. It stressed how vital the yearly royalty cheque was for the 75% of living British writers who earn less than half the £20,000 national average wage.
Shakespeare came seventh in the hypothetical top 20 of cheques for dead classic authors. He was also beaten by Daphne Du Maurier, JRR Tolkien and Charles Dickens. But he would have had the satisfaction of trouncing Ernest Hemingway, EM Forster and the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Among living authors, real-life top cheques of £6,000 went to a serried list of 12 children's, romantic, thriller and adventure writers with over 1m borrowings.
The late Catherine Cookson again headed the list; and her title The Solace of Sin, one of a store of books published after her death, was the year's most-borrowed fiction book. One reviewer wrote that it "covers topics such as forbidden passions, family secrets and conflict".
The US children's author RL Stine, who specialises in safe horror stories, came second to Cookson and is now a fixture in the list. Otherwise the top 12 is full of familiar faces, including Danielle Steel, Josephine Cox, Dick Francis and Agatha Christie. Enid Blyton, the creator of Noddy and Big Ears, who died 33 years ago, continues to hang on as 12th favourite.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was the most borrowed children's fiction title. But JK Rowling was not among the top 20 children's authors, lending weight to the theory that readers prefer to buy rather than borrow her astronomical bestsellers.
Bill Bryson's Notes from a Big Country beat three Delia Smith cookbooks and a driving test manual as the most popular non-fiction title.
Off the shelf
Most borrowed classic authors
1 AA Milne, 2 Beatrix Potter, 3 Daphne Du Maurier, 4 JRR Tolkien, 5 Charles Dickens, 6 Jane Austen, 7 William Shakespeare, 8 Thomas Hardy 9 George Orwell, 10 Anthony Trollope, 11 Ernest Heming-way, 12 EM Forster 13 Arthur Conan Doyle, 14 CS Forester 15 DH Lawrence, 16 Rudyard Kipling, 17 John Buchan, 18 Louisa M Alcott, 19 E Nesbit, 20 George Eliot
Top 12 authors with over 1m borrowings
1 Catherine Cookson, 2 RL Stine, 3 Danielle Steel, 4 Josephine Cox, 5 Dick Francis, 6 Janet & Allan Ahlberg, 7 Jack Higgins, 8 Ruth Rendell, 9 Agatha Christie, 10 Roald Dahl, 11 Lucy Daniels, 12 Enid Blyton
