Did all the wonderful tales that Shakespeare told through his plays have their inception in Shakespeare’s brain? Did he fashion all those tales from scratch? In fact, the plots of most of his plays are borrowed from various sources. This, however, does not diminish his brilliance. The bard’s genius lies more in the fabulous way he presented those tales than his originality.
The sources of his plays with Greek and Roman themes such as Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens are Plutarch, a Greek biographer, and Ovid, a Roman poet. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, written probably in the second century, has many biographies of famous men. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on the other hand is a series of mythical stories.
Raphael Holinshed was an English chronicler, meaning a historian, who lived in 16th century England. He undertook an ambitious project of writing the history of the world and was successful in completing only a small portion, which he published in 1577 as The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Shakespeare borrowed the themes of most of his historical plays and the plots of Macbeth, King Lear and Cymbeline from Holinshed’s Chronicles.
The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio was another major source of Shakespeare’s plays. Boccaccio was an Italian writer and poet, whose Decameron is a collection of hundred stories told by seven young women and three young men. Many of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances have been inspired from the stories of this book. He has borrowed tales from Arthur Brooke, a 16th century English poet, and Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th century Danish historian, too. Another great book that inspired Shakespeare was, certainly, the Holy Bible.
Picture Credit : Google