Shakespeare's Main Story Sources
The Influence of Holinshed's Chronicles and Plutarch's Lives
Jun 18, 2009
Scholars agree universally that, when he sat down to pen his epic English history plays and his stirring dramas of ancient Greece and Rome, William Shakespeare had a pair of significant source volumes open beside him.
Histories of the English Kings
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, first published in 1577, provided much of the material for Richard the Third, Henry the Sixth and the other plays about England's kings, as well as for Macbeth and Cymbeline. The Chronicles was a massive work that attempted to cover everything from the beginning of recorded time up to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First.
But, as an authentic source, it had "grievous shortcomings," such as the inclusion of gossip, rumors, anecdotes and myths as historical fact. Even if he was aware of these flaws, however, Shakespeare was unfazed by them and used the Chronicles also for his new versions of the old plays about King Lear and King John.
Tales of Ancient Rome and Greece
The Bard of Avon had great affection and admiration for the classic Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans by the first-century Greek writer Plutarch of Chaeronea. Thomas North's 1579 translation of the French edition was Shakespeare's bible for the creation of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens.
It's ironic that three of those four plays concerned Romans, because Plutarch, who spent his whole life in provincial Greece and was a brilliant chronicler of his native land, was a flawed historian of Rome. But he was concerned less with historical events than with the lives of notable individuals, and that was why Shakespeare found the book so valuable.
Everything Else
Holinshed's Chronicles and Plutarch's Lives were Shakespeare's most significant sources, but they hardly were the only two he used. After all, the plays produced from them make up less than half the Shakespearean canon. Scholars estimate that the Bard of Avon was influenced in his writing by as many as 200 works, including Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Aesop's Fables and the Christian Bible, as well as the writings of Ovid, Plautus, Cinthio, Belleforest, Thomas Lodge and many others.
One might wonder how Shakespeare managed to turn out so many dramatic masterpieces if he was doing so much reading!
Sources:
- Holinshed's Chronicle as Used in Shakespeare's Plays, ed. Allardyce & Josephine Nicoll (1927)
- Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (1964)
- A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, F.E. Halliday (1964)
- The Shakespeare Miscellany, David & Ben Crystal (2005)
 |
