Shakespeare's Bookshelf: Major Works That Influenced Shakespeare

Shakespeare read alot and drew from many sources over the course of his career as a playwright. While Shakespeare drew from many sources and read widely, we can focus for the moment upon four major sources for Shakespeare's plays and for his style. Books were widely read in Elizabethan England. Universities had libraries full of the classics of Greece and Rome. More contemporary works by European writers of the Renaissance, including collections of stories and essays, were translated and made available to the reading public. So lets take a look at a few of these works from which Shakespeare drew his characters and stories.

LIVES OF THE NOBLE GREEKS AND ROMANS by Plutarch

Shakespeare took characters for his Tragedies from both history and from literature. He borrowed from Holinshed's Chronicles as well as from Italian Novellas and ancient Greek and Roman playwrights for style as well as substance. Plutarch's Lives of The Noble Greeks and Romans, more commonly known as Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, was used for the stories and characters featured in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Julius Ceaser.

CHRONICLES OF ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND IRELAND by Raphael Holinshed

Shakespeare recreated for the Theater the stories of some of England's most famous kings. Shakespeare mainly drew from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was the revised second edition of 1587 which Shakespeare used as reference and source for his History plays. Holinshed's Chronicles was actually a work of a group.

Holinshed worked under the auspices of three members of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers (or the Stationer's Company for short), which was the Printer's Guild for the City of London. Holinshed employed Edmund Campion, William Harrison, John Hooker, and Richard Stanyhurst. The Chronicle's were published in 6 volumes.

COLLOQUIES by Erasmus of Rotterdam

Grammar Schools were open to the public and free. They were the equivilent of today's Public Schools. Unlike today's Public School's diverse curriculum of math, sciences, the arts, and athletics, the Grammar Schools of Elizabethan England taught only one subject: The Reading and Writing of Latin. Special Textbooks were written to cater to this specific need of the Grammar Schools.

The Grammar Schools used contemporary textbooks which included basic Latin Grammar as well as collections Latin phrases from famous Greek and Roman texts. The students of Grammar Schools learned such skills as letterwriting. Students also became familiar with Latin drama and rhetoric. Shakespeare would have read the famous Roman poet Horace's poems, Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid, Ovid's collection of Greek myth Metamorphosis, and histories written by Ceaser, Sallust, and Livy. Classical dramas were performed at the end of each term by the senior class, including comedies by the Roman playwright Plautus, among others.

Another popular text used in the study of Latin was Erasmus of Rotterdam's Latin studybook published in 1516 entitled Colloquies. Erasmus' Colloquies is a collection of various types of dialogues. Some are instruments to teach students proper salutations, forms of well-wishing, family discourse, how to enquire about another's health, how friends enquire about each other after one has returned from a journey, and the like. Other Colloquies are dialogues that focus on philosophical and theological subjects, and others are similar to small tales. This collection of 64 dialogues undoutedly had an influence on Shakespeare both during his childhood studying at the public Grammar School and when he was an actor and playwright.

PALACE OF PLEASURE by William Painter

Shakespeare took stories for his Comedies and Tragedies from collections of popular Italian and French Novelle, stories or tales, translated into English. Willaim Painter published his Palace of Pleasure in 1566, a collection of 46 stories taken from such writers as Herodotus, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Boccaccio, Matteo Bandello, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, Queen Marguerit de Navarre, and others. Painter published a second volume of his Palace of Pleasure in 1567 which contained thirty-five more tales. From these two volumes alone, Shakespeare and other English playwrights had many stories to choose from to adapt to the English Stage.

There are of course other sources we must look to, from the Epic Poems of Greece and Rome as well as their Comedies and Tragedies, as well as collections of stories and essays by Renaissance writers. But the Four works above are all we need to Source a majority of Shakespeare's plays as well as his unique style of writing dialogue.