The first sentence of this week’s Sunday Times leader — apropos the troubles at its now-defunct stablemate, the News of the Screws — quoted “that old fool Claudius In Hamlet” on the propensity of sorrows to come “not single spies but in battalions”. How ironic these words now seem in the light of the ST’s own alleged involvement in the deepening hacking scandal. But it’s the description of the man saying them that interests me today.

Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s most famous play will know that its “old fool” (and identified as such by Hamlet) is not his murderous uncle Claudius but the pompous courtier Polonius — though this hardly seems an appropriate description for a man who sagely observes: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

The leader writer was perhaps mixing up Hamlet’s Claudius with the Roman emperor of the same name. Stuttering, limping Claudius — famously depicted on television by Derek Jacobi (see above) in the adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius — was first branded a fool in Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars. In fact, modern historians consider him to have been as unfairly maligned as Desdemona’s old dad.

Show-offy allusions to works of the Bard can have the opposite effect from what is intended without a thorough checking of the facts. I thought this as I read William Rees-Mogg’s recent Memoirs (HarperPress, £30) in which he describes how “Macbeth sends his murderers to kill Lady Macduff and [her] son”. In fact, the killers put to the sword the entire family — surely a sizable one, since Macduff later refers to the slaughter of “all my pretty chickens”.

Both Lord Rees-Mogg and the leader writer might do well to heed the advice of Sam and Bella Spewack in their book for Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”