Encyclopędia Britannica's Guide to Shakespeare
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Shakespeare, William

Shakespeare the poet and dramatist > Poetic conventions and dramatic traditions > Shakespeare's literary debts

Shakespeare's most obvious debt was to Raphael Holinshed, whose Chronicles (the second edition, published in 1587) furnished story material for several plays, including Macbeth and King Lear. In Shakespeare's earlier works other debts stand out clearly: to Plautus for the structure of The Comedy of Errors; to the poet Ovid and to Seneca for rhetoric and incident in Titus Andronicus; to morality drama for a scene in which a father mourns his dead son and a son his father, in Henry VI, Part 3; to Christopher Marlowe for sentiments and characterization in Richard III and The Merchant of Venice; to the Italian popular tradition of commedia dell'arte for characterization and dramatic style in The Taming of the Shrew; and so on. Soon, however, there was no line between their effects and his. In The Tempest (perhaps the most original of all his plays in form, theme, language, and setting) folk influences may also be traced, together with a newer and more obvious debt to a courtly diversion known as the masque, as developed by Ben Jonson and others at the court of King James.

Of Shakespeare's late works, Cardenio (now lost) was probably based on incidents involving the character Cardenio in Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Since that great work had been translated into English in 1612 by Thomas Shelton, it was available to Shakespeare and John Fletcher when they evidently collaborated as authors on Cardenio in 1613. Fletcher turned to Cervantes in several of his later plays.

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