Shakespeare's Sources — Where Did He Get His Stories?
Almost none of Shakespeare's plots were invented from scratch. He borrowed, adapted and transformed stories from history, classical poetry, Italian novellas and earlier plays. This was entirely normal in Elizabethan England, where originality meant what you did with a story, not where the story came from.
Holinshed's Chronicles — The History Plays
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, revised 1587) was Shakespeare's main source for most of the English history plays, and for Macbeth and King Lear. Holinshed gave him the framework: the names, the events, the rough sequence of reigns.
What Shakespeare added was motive, character and dramatic structure. Holinshed's Macbeth is not the same character as Shakespeare's — he rules competently for years before being overthrown. The compressed, guilt-driven figure of the play is entirely Shakespeare's invention. The same is true of Lear: Holinshed's version ends with Lear restored to his throne. Shakespeare changed the ending, and changed everything.
Ovid — The Comedies and Romances
The Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses was one of the most widely read books in Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare knew it well — probably in both the original Latin and Arthur Golding's 1567 English translation. A Midsummer Night's Dream contains the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, lifted directly from Ovid. The Tempest draws on Ovid's description of the witch Medea's speech for Prospero's "Ye elves of hills" incantation.
Ovid gave Shakespeare a vocabulary of transformation, enchantment and erotic comedy that runs through the comedies and late romances. The idea that people can be changed — turned into donkeys, enchanted against their will, transformed by love — is Ovidian before it is Shakespearean.
Italian Novellas — Othello and The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice draws on "Il Pecorone" (The Simpleton), a collection of Italian tales by Giovanni Fiorentino written around 1378, for the bond story involving a pound of flesh. Othello came from "Un Capitano Moro" (A Moorish Captain), a story in Giambattista Cinthio's Hecatommithi (1565).
In Cinthio's version there is no handkerchief — the Iago-figure uses different means to destroy the marriage. Shakespeare added the handkerchief, one of the most devastating props in dramatic history. A piece of embroidered cloth becomes the entire engine of tragedy.
The Earlier Hamlet
An earlier play about Hamlet existed before Shakespeare's version. Scholars call it the Ur-Hamlet — Ur being the German prefix for "original." It was probably written in the 1580s, possibly by Thomas Kyd, who also wrote The Spanish Tragedy. Nobody has found a copy.
What is certain is that audiences knew the Hamlet story before Shakespeare wrote it, which means the audience at the Globe already expected certain events. Shakespeare's method was to take that expectation and make the audience doubt every assumption they had brought through the door. The Ur-Hamlet apparently had a ghost. Shakespeare kept the ghost, but gave it a speech that changes what ghosts do in drama.
Romeo and Juliet — Via Italy and France
Romeo and Juliet came to Shakespeare through a chain of sources. The core story appears in Luigi da Porto's Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (1530), was retold by Matteo Bandello in 1554, translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559, and then into English by Arthur Brooke in a long narrative poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Shakespeare almost certainly worked primarily from Brooke's version.
Brooke's Romeus and Juliet are together for several months before things go wrong. Shakespeare compressed the entire story into four days. That compression is everything: it makes the tragedy feel like something that could not have been stopped even if everyone had been trying.
What This Tells Us About How He Worked
Shakespeare's method was transformation rather than invention. He took existing material — sometimes thin, sometimes rich — and asked what made the characters tick. He deepened psychology, intensified language and found the dramatic core that the source material had missed or left undeveloped.
The question "where did he get the story?" is far less interesting than "what did he do to it?" A list of sources explains the plot. It does not explain why King Lear ends the way it does, why Iago has no clear motive, or why Hamlet cannot act. Those are the parts Shakespeare invented.
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