Shakespeare's wisdom is not.

POP1

Mark Antony in his funeral oration over the body of Julius Caesar speaks the following lines:

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
 I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
 The evil that men do lives after them,
 The good is oft interred with their bones."

Wait. That can't be right.  When people die, we forget the bad things they did and remember only the good.  Isn't that the exact opposite of what Mark Antony said.

POP2

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. "Speak no ill of the dead."

Francis Bacon, writing his "Essays" at around the time the play Julius caesar was written, in his essay on "Death" likewise says the opposite of what Mark Antony said.  He writes "Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy: Extinctus amabitur idem."  The Latin quotation, written by Horace, translates into - the same man who was envied in his life will be loved after his death.

In his notebook, Promus 1594-96, Bacon writes: "When he is dead he will be loved."

POP3

So where's the so-called wisdom of Shakespeare when we know from experience that when people die we remember only the good things about them?

The answer is this - Shakespeare is a playwright and, as such, he writes fiction.  The words he puts into the mouths of his characters should be understood in the context of what the particular character in the play is trying to achieve, which in Antony's case is to manipulate the mob into ignoring all the negative things that have just been spoken by Brutus about Caesar, and to bring the mob back around to focus on all the good that Caesar had done, with the intention of turning them against the slayers of Caesar.   Shakespeare's fiction should not be construed as Shakespeare's personal opinion or wisdom.

The Promus again - "Poets invent much."