Question

How did Shakespeare use sources when he wrote his plays? Your answer should be at least one hundred words.

Answer 1

Shakespeare wasn't above mining other authors for his plays. The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio provided material for All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet served as the source for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Chaucer provides source material for The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Midsummer Night's Dream. There are even plays based on the works of other playwrights. Hamlet owes a debt to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and an earlier play alluded to in other sources, commonly called the Ur-Hamlet. The Merchant of Venice can be seen as a reflection of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and King Lear is a direct descendant of the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir. There are plenty of examples of this throughout the canon; more than half of Shakespeare's plays show traces of an earlier work by another playwright or author