Shakespeare’s Sources and Influences

Shakespeare almost never invented a story from scratch. Of his thirty-seven plays, only a handful have plots that cannot be traced to a prior source — and those are mostly minor works.

Hamlet came from a Scandinavian legend retold by a French writer. King Lear came from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Holinshed. Othello came from an Italian novella. Romeo and Juliet came from an earlier poem. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his most apparently fanciful creations, wove together Ovidian mythology, English fairy lore, and a frame narrative borrowed from classical comedy.

This is not a limitation. It is how the art form worked, and how Shakespeare worked within it. The question is not where he got his plots but what he did with them — and the answer to that question is where his originality actually lives.

Plutarch and the Roman Plays

For his Roman plays, Shakespeare drew primarily from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which he read in Thomas North’s 1579 English translation from the French. Plutarch was a Greek biographer writing in the first and second centuries AD, and his parallel lives of Greek and Roman statesmen were one of the most widely read texts in Renaissance Europe.

Shakespeare used Plutarch as source material for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and he used it closely — more closely than he typically used any other source. Enobarbus’s famous description of Cleopatra on her barge in Antony and Cleopatra is lifted almost directly from North’s Plutarch, with Shakespeare doing little more than breaking the prose into verse. The speech is so famous as Shakespeare’s that it is easy to forget it is essentially a translation.

What Shakespeare added to Plutarch was not plot — the plots are largely intact — but interiority. Plutarch’s Caesar, Brutus, and Antony are public figures observed from the outside. Shakespeare’s versions of the same people think aloud, contradict themselves, feel doubt and ambition in ways that classical biography did not try to render. The soliloquy is Shakespeare’s instrument for doing to historical figures what Plutarch’s form could not.

Holinshed and the English Histories

For the history plays, Shakespeare’s primary source was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, first published in 1577 and expanded in 1587. Holinshed was not a sophisticated literary work — it was a massive, somewhat unwieldy compilation of historical narrative, including much that was legendary or outright invented — but it gave Shakespeare the raw material for the English history cycle: Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI in three parts, Richard III, and King John.

Shakespeare’s relationship to Holinshed is transformative rather than faithful. He compresses decades into scenes, invents characters like Falstaff entirely, and reshapes historical figures to serve dramatic rather than historical purposes. Richard III as Shakespeare writes him is a conscious theatrical villain, fully aware of his own monstrousness and delighting in it, in ways that the historical Richard of Gloucester was not. The characterisation is Shakespeare’s, built on Holinshed’s scaffold.

For Macbeth and King Lear, Holinshed was also the source — though the historical Lear predates reliable historical record and Holinshed’s account of Macbeth is significantly different from Shakespeare’s version. Shakespeare found in Holinshed the names, the outline, and sometimes the moral framework, then wrote the psychology.

Ovid and the Mythological Imagination

Ovid’s Metamorphoses — read at school in Latin and available in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation — is the classical text most deeply absorbed into Shakespeare’s imagination. Its influence is not confined to specific sources for specific plays; it permeates the texture of his poetry, his imagery, his sense of how transformation works as a narrative and metaphorical principle.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws directly on Ovid for the Pyramus and Thisbe story performed by Bottom and his companions, but it also draws on Ovid’s general world of metamorphosis — bodies changing, desire making people strange to themselves, the boundary between human and animal more permeable than reason allows. The Winter’s Tale‘s statue scene — Hermione turned to stone and then restored to life — is Ovidian in its mythological logic even though it has no direct Ovidian source. Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s most popular publication in his own lifetime, is explicitly Ovidian, retelling and extending the myth from Metamorphoses X.

Ovid taught Shakespeare that transformation is the primary narrative of desire — that to love is to be changed, and that the change is rarely comfortable.

Italian Novellas

For the comedies and several of the tragedies, Shakespeare turned to Italian narrative fiction — the novella tradition represented by Boccaccio’s Decameron, Matteo Bandello’s Novelle, and Cinthio’s Hecatommithi. These collections were widely available in French and English translations and were a standard resource for Elizabethan playwrights looking for plot material.

Othello comes from a story in Cinthio’s Hecatommithi — the tale of a Moorish general, a scheming ensign, and a faithful wife murdered on suspicion of infidelity. Shakespeare took the plot largely intact but made one decisive change: in Cinthio, the ensign (Iago’s counterpart) is motivated by frustrated desire for Desdemona. Shakespeare removed this motivation, giving Iago instead a surplus of plausible reasons and no single sufficient one, which makes him far more unsettling than Cinthio’s character.

Much Ado About Nothing draws on Bandello for the plot of the slandered bride; All’s Well That Ends Well takes its main story from Boccaccio; Romeo and Juliet originates in Bandello via Arthur Brooke’s 1562 English poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. Shakespeare knew Brooke’s poem closely and followed it in many respects — while adding the vital characters of Mercutio and the Nurse, both of whom are largely his invention.

Seneca and the Tragic Tradition

Seneca’s tragedies — written in Latin in the first century AD, not designed for performance, and rediscovered by Renaissance scholars — were the primary classical model for Elizabethan tragic drama. They provided the conventions that Shakespeare both used and, eventually, transformed: the revenge plot, the ghost demanding satisfaction, the tyrant’s soliloquy, the chorus, the concern with fate and fortune’s wheel.

Hamlet‘s ghost, Macbeth‘s witches, the revenge structures of Titus Andronicus — these all have Senecan precedents. But Shakespeare’s relationship to Seneca was not imitation. It was inheritance and revision. Where Seneca’s characters declaim, Shakespeare’s characters think. Where Seneca’s form is static and rhetorical, Shakespeare’s is dynamic and unpredictable. The most Senecan play Shakespeare wrote is probably Titus Andronicus, his earliest and most formally experimental tragedy; by Hamlet, the Senecan inheritance has been so thoroughly absorbed and redirected that it is barely visible on the surface.

Contemporary Playwrights

Shakespeare worked in a competitive theatrical world, and the influence ran in both directions. Christopher Marlowe, whose career overlapped with Shakespeare’s until his death in 1593, was the dominant theatrical voice of the late 1580s and early 1590s. Marlowe developed the sustained blank verse speech as a vehicle for a new kind of theatrical language — expansive, poetic, capable of carrying both philosophical ambition and emotional intensity. Shakespeare inherited this form and transformed it.

The influence of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy — the first great revenge tragedy of the English stage — is visible in Hamlet, which revisits Kyd’s central preoccupations (the ghost, the delay, the play-within-a-play) in a completely different register. Shakespeare knew what Kyd had done and was deliberately thinking alongside it.

What Transformation Means

The word usually applied to Shakespeare’s handling of his sources is “transformation,” and it is the right word, but it is worth being specific about what it means in practice. It means three things in particular.

First, he deepens character. Plutarch’s Brutus is honourable and mistaken; Shakespeare’s Brutus thinks aloud about his mistake in a way that makes his honour the cause of it. Holinshed’s Macbeth is a usurper; Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a man who knows, before he commits the murder, exactly what kind of person he is about to become and commits it anyway. The inner life is Shakespeare’s addition to material that had none.

Second, he complicates motivation. Cinthio’s Iago has a clear reason for what he does; Shakespeare’s Iago offers many reasons, none fully satisfying, and the gap between the offered reasons and the catastrophic actions is where the character lives. Holinshed’s Richard III is simply villainous; Shakespeare’s Richard is villainous and self-aware, narrating his own villainy to the audience with a theatrical pleasure that implicates them in it.

Third, he raises the stakes of the language. A source gives him a story. What he adds is poetry — the specific, irreducible formulation that makes a moment feel not just dramatised but permanently expressed. The barge speech in Antony and Cleopatra is Plutarch’s material. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety” is Shakespeare’s addition, and it is not paraphrase but a leap into a different order of language altogether.

The sources explain the plots. They do not explain the plays.

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