Shakespeare the Plagiarist

Shakespeare the Plagiarist

Shakespeare was a man of many accomplishments. Many were in his writings; others were in his great director and playwright skills. The play Hamlet is one of the most re-created and re-written books to date. Hamlet is still being performed in theaters around the world. Even though many people perceive Shakespeare as a literary genius, we can not give him sole credit for his plays and sonnets.

With a few exceptions, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. Sometimes he used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles). Sometimes he worked from the stories of comparatively recent Italian writers, such as Boccaccio - using both well-known stories (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing) and little known ones (Othello). Shakespeare has been proven, by many authors, to have borrowed from the Arts, the Histories and the Sciences. (Britannica Online, http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5005/75/12.html)

"The first collection of information about sources of Elizabethan plays was published in the 17th century. Gerard Langbaines account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) briefly indicated where Shakespeare found materials for some plays."(Britannica Online)

It has been shown in this book that Shakespeare quoted his contemporary Christopher Marlowe in As You Like It. He casually refers to the Aethiopica ("Ethiopian history") of Heliodorus (which has been translated by Thomas Undertown in 1569) in Twelfth Night. Chapman's vigorous translation of Homer's Iliad impressed him, though he used some of the material rather sardonically in Troilus and Cressida. He derived the ironical account of an ideal republic in The Tempest from one of Montaigne's essays. He obviously read Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Imposters and remembered lively passages from it when he was writing King Lear. The beginning lines of sonnet 106 indicates that he had read Edmund Spencer's poem The Faerie Queene or comparable romantic literature.

"The source of Hamlet was an earlier play, now lost, known as The Source of Hamlet or, more fashionably Ur-Hamlet." ( Satin, 385) The favorite choice for authorship of Ur-Halmet is Thomas Kyd, author of the "Spanish Tragedy". (Britannica Online) "The Spanish Tragedy" is one of the most popular Elizabethan plays, which kept its place on the stage in spite of parody, resembles Hamlet so closely that it would...

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...fering that they have gone through to be where they are today. When we look at Shakespeare the legend it is hard for us to separate him from the man he was. We see him as a literary genius and not as a man who did as every other single writer in his time period did. Great poets and writers before him have borrowed their way to success. What makes Shakespeare any different? I think the main thing we have to remember when defining Shakespeare both as a Man and as a Playwright is that the two entities can not be separated, for he who is man has to abide by man's rules in order to survive.

Works Cited

1- Satin, Joseph , "Shakespeare and his Sources". Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1966, 381-396

2- "William Shakespeare : The Poet and the Dramatist. Shakespeare's Reading" Britannica Online. http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5005/75/12.html

3- Muir, Kenneth, "Shakespeare's Sources". Methuen & Co. LTD, 1957 v.1 110-121

4- Olson, Donald W. et. Al., "The Stars of Hamlet", Sky and Telescope, Cambridge: Nov 1998, 96:5 68-73

5- "Shakespeare Critisism", C 1991 Gale Research inc., V.13 296-303

6- Robertson, John M. , Montaigne and Shakespeare , London Press. 1909, 254-256