Recent research by John MacNeill Miller and Lauren Fugate has debunked the story that Eugene Schieffelin was a Shakespeare superfan. They found no evidence to support this claim. The connection between Schieffelin and Shakespeare was actually made by nature writer Edwin Way Teale, who got the timing wrong. The Shakespeare Garden, a botanical homage to the Bard, was not planned until a decade after Schieffelin's death and 22 years after he released the starlings.