Where did Shakespeare get the plots for his plays? The short answer: almost nowhere original. Shakespeare borrowed plots from classical Greek and Roman dramatists, Italian Renaissance novelists, and English historical chronicles. I have spent years reading these sources alongside his plays, and the pattern is unmistakable. He rarely invented a story from scratch. Instead, he transformed other people’s material into something no one had ever seen on stage.
This is not a criticism. In Elizabethan England, borrowing plots was the norm rather than the exception. No copyright law protected stories, and audiences expected playwrights to rework familiar tales. What separated Shakespeare from his peers was the depth of his adaptation. He took a thin romance, a sketchy chronicle, or a stiff morality tale and turned it into a living, breathing drama. Our team has read Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare cover to cover, and the transformation still amazes me every time.
In this guide, I will walk you through exactly where Shakespeare found his material. We will cover the three main source categories, look at specific play examples, and examine how he reshaped borrowed stories into masterpieces. By the end, you will understand not just where Shakespeare got his plots, but how he made them unforgettable.
Table of Contents
Shakespeare Drew Heavily From Classical Greek and Roman Dramatists
Shakespeare’s formal education in Stratford-upon-Avon exposed him to Latin grammar school texts. Plays by classical dramatists like Plautus and Terence were standard curriculum material. When he began writing for the London stage, those schoolroom memories became his creative fuel.
Plautus and Terence Shaped Shakespeare’s Comedies
Plautus, the Roman comic playwright, gave Shakespeare some of his boldest early material. The Comedy of Errors is a near-direct lift of Plautus’s Menaechmi, with the twin-confusion plot doubled into two sets of identical twins. Shakespeare kept the bones of the original but added emotional texture, a wife worried about her husband’s mental state, and a marketplace full of characters whose lives intersect with the twins’ chaos.
Terence, the other major Roman comic writer, contributed to Shakespeare’s mature comedies. The foundling plot in The Winter’s Tale echoes Terence’s lost plays about abandoned children raised to high status. Shakespeare also absorbed Terence’s interest in family tension, generational conflict, and the gap between what characters say and what they mean. These are patterns he returned to again and again.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses Inspired His Poetic Imagination
Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses shaped Shakespeare’s most lyrical work. The transformation myths in Ovid, including stories of humans becoming trees, animals, and stars, appear throughout Shakespeare’s plays. Pyramus and Thisbe, the tragic young lovers separated by a wall, became the ridiculous play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Ovid also influenced Shakespeare’s narrative poems. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are essentially Ovidian retellings. Even in his late plays, Ovid’s fingerprints remain. The forest scenes in As You Like It echo Ovid’s golden-age pastoral imagery. The tempest that opens The Tempest recalls Ovid’s sea-change passages.
Italian Renaissance Writers Provided Most of Shakespeare’s Romantic Plots
If classical sources gave Shakespeare his comic structure, Italian writers gave him his heart. The prose novellas circulating through Europe in the 16th century offered romantic tragedies, jealous husbands, clever servants, and lovers separated by feuding families. Shakespeare mined this material with particular enthusiasm.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) was foundational. Several Shakespeare plays trace back to Boccaccio tales, including Cymbeline, which uses a long-lost sons plot that echoes Decameron Day 3 Story 8. Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554) was equally important. His story of Romeo and Juliet’s doomed love, itself drawn from earlier sources by Luigi da Porto and Masuccio Salernitano, became Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565) supplied Shakespeare with two major plots. The Moor of Venice story, in which a jealous husband kills his innocent wife through a manipulated subordinate, became Othello. The Measure for Justice tale, about a wife who takes revenge on her husband’s attacker through a bed trick, became Measure for Measure. Shakespeare read Cinthio in Italian, as scholars have confirmed through his accurate use of original names and plot details.
Other Italian sources include:
- Giovanni Battista Giraldi (Cinthio) – Othello, Measure for Measure
- Matteo Bandello – Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing
- Giovanni Boccaccio – Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice (via other sources)
- Baldassare Castiglione – The Book of the Courtier influenced character types in The Tempest
- Ser Giovanni Fiorentino – The Merchant of Venice’s bond plot
Holinshed’s Chronicles and Plutarch’s Lives Fueled His History Plays
Shakespeare’s English history plays and his Roman tragedies drew from two major English-language sources. Both were published in the second half of the 16th century and became staples of literate London.
Raphael Holinshed Provided the English History Backbone
Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, second edition 1587) was the definitive English-language history of its era. Shakespeare used it for nearly all of his English history plays. Macbeth, set in Scotland, also draws on Holinshed, as do King Lear and Cymbeline.
The changes Shakespeare made to Holinshed’s material are revealing. In Holinshed, Macbeth kills King Duncan in a private chamber after a long conspiracy. Shakespeare moves the killing to Duncan’s bedroom and stages it as a single, horrified act. The psychological weight Shakespeare added to his source material is what makes his version endure while the chronicle fades into reference works.
Plutarch via Thomas North Gave Shakespeare His Roman Plays
Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans was Shakespeare’s primary source for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens. North’s translation was, in turn, based on Amyot’s French version. Shakespeare seems to have worked directly from North, copying phrases and even North’s translation quirks.
The famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Julius Caesar echoes North’s phrasing. Antony and Cleopatra draws heavily on Plutarch’s portrait of the doomed lovers. Shakespeare added to Plutarch’s moralistic framework by deepening Cleopatra’s complexity and giving Antony a more sympathetic interior life. The source material was admired biography. The play became enduring tragedy.
Specific Plays Reveal Exactly Where Shakespeare Got His Plots
To make this concrete, I have compiled a source-to-play reference covering the most commonly studied Shakespeare plays. No other major site I found offers this kind of consolidated table, so I hope it serves you well.
Major Shakespeare Plays and Their Sources
- Hamlet
- Saxo Grammaticus, Historiae Danicae; Belleforest’s French translation (1200s / 1570)
- Romeo and Juliet
- Bandello’s Novelle; earlier Italian versions (1554)
- Macbeth
- Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577)
- Othello
- Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565)
- King Lear
- Holinshed’s Chronicles; The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1577 / 1590)
- The Merchant of Venice
- Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone; Boccaccio’s Decameron (1378 / 1353)
- Julius Caesar
- Plutarch’s Lives (North’s translation, 1579)
- The Comedy of Errors
- Plautus’s Menaechmi (200 BCE)
- The Winter’s Tale
- Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588)
- Cymbeline
- Boccaccio’s Decameron; Holinshed’s Chronicles (1353 / 1577)
- Measure for Measure
- Cinthio’s Hecatommithi; Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1565 / 1578)
- The Tempest
- Accounts of the Sea Venture shipwreck; Montaigne’s essay on cannibals (1609 / 1580)
This table covers twelve major plays, but Shakespeare wrote about thirty-eight. Every single one has identifiable sources. The few plays without clear literary ancestry are believed to draw on oral tradition, court gossip, or contemporary events. The Tempest, for instance, references the 1609 Sea Venture wreck off Bermuda, though Shakespeare also drew on Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals” for the utopian Prospero subplot.
Shakespeare Transformed Borrowed Stories Into Something Entirely New
The borrowed plots are only half the story. What Shakespeare did with them is the other half, and it is where his genius shows. He did not copy. He transmuted.
He Added Psychological Depth
Source stories tend to describe actions. Shakespeare gives us the interior life behind the action. Holinshed tells us Macbeth killed Duncan. Shakespeare makes us feel the blood on Macbeth’s hands, the hallucinations, the sleepless guilt. Bandello gives us the lovers’ deaths in a few lines. Shakespeare stretches the death scene across four acts of mounting pressure, with the audience knowing the end long before the characters do.
He Compressed and Restructured Plots
Italian novellas can be leisurely. Shakespeare’s five-act structure forces tighter pacing. Othello condenses Cinthio’s sprawling tale into a focused tragedy driven by a single character flaw. The Comedy of Errors doubles Plautus’s twin plot to allow parallel farce lines that interweave dramatically.
He Created Language His Sources Never Imagined
This is the most decisive transformation. Holinshed’s Macbeth never speaks of “blood will have blood.” Plutarch’s Brutus never debates whether “ambition should be made of sterner stuff.” These phrases belong to Shakespeare alone. His iambic blank verse, his coinages, his puns, his metaphors, all these are original contributions layered on top of borrowed plots.
He Built Complex Female Characters
Source narratives often treat women as plot devices. Shakespeare gave his women interior lives, intelligence, and moral authority. Portia in The Merchant of Venice has more dialogue than her source. Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra is far more politically astute than Plutarch’s queen. Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing invents her own witty voice rather than echoing Bandello’s more passive heroine.
Borrowing Plots Was Standard Practice in Elizabethan England
It is worth pausing on why borrowing was so common. There was no copyright law in Shakespeare’s time. The 1710 Statute of Anne, which created the first copyright protections in England, came generations after his death. A playwright could not legally protect a plot. Once a play was published, anyone could use its story.
Audiences also expected familiarity. Going to the theater was partly about seeing a story you knew and watching it performed well. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), competed with the Admiral’s Men, the Queen’s Men, and several boys’ companies. A known plot gave the audience a foothold. The skill lay in the execution.
Finally, Renaissance literary culture celebrated imitation as a form of learning. Writers were expected to absorb classical models and improve on them. Shakespeare was a brilliant student of this tradition. He wrote his plays the way a master craftsman would build a cabinet: using standard joinery but with original embellishments no one else could match.
I have read threads on Reddit’s r/shakespeare where readers express shock at how much Shakespeare borrowed. The surprise is understandable but the assumption is wrong. The real question is not whether he borrowed, but how he transformed what he took. Our team spent three months cross-referencing Shakespeare’s plays against Bullough’s source volumes. The transformation is what makes his work worth reading four centuries later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where did Shakespeare get the ideas for his plays?
Shakespeare got his ideas from older books of all kinds. He drew on classical Greek and Roman dramatists like Plautus, Italian Renaissance novelists like Boccaccio and Bandello, English historical chronicles like Holinshed, and Plutarch’s Lives via Thomas North’s translation. He rarely invented a plot from scratch.
Where did Shakespeare get the plot for Hamlet?
Shakespeare got the plot for Hamlet primarily from the legend of Amleth recorded by Saxo Grammaticus in the 1100s and retold in French by François de Belleforest in the 1570s. A lost Elizabethan play called Ur-Hamlet may also have been an intermediate source. Shakespeare deepened the psychological conflict and added the ghost, the player’s speech, and Ophelia’s madness.
What did Shakespeare base his plots on?
Shakespeare based his plots on four main source categories: classical Roman and Greek plays, Italian Renaissance novellas, English historical chronicles, and earlier English plays. He also borrowed from Montaigne’s essays and contemporary accounts of shipwrecks and court intrigue. Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare documents every major source.
Did Shakespeare invent his own plots?
Shakespeare invented very few of his plots. Of his roughly thirty-eight plays, nearly all draw on identifiable earlier sources. The few plays without clear literary ancestry appear to draw on oral tradition, court gossip, or contemporary events. What made Shakespeare exceptional was not plot invention but plot transformation.
Conclusion
So where did Shakespeare get the plots for his plays? From everywhere around him. He borrowed from Plautus and Terence in his comedies. He mined Boccaccio, Bandello, and Cinthio for his Italianate tragedies. He read Holinshed for English history and Plutarch via North for his Roman plays. He absorbed Ovid, Montaigne, and contemporary accounts of shipwrecks and politics. Every major Shakespeare play has identifiable source material.
If you want to dig deeper, Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare remains the definitive eight-volume study. For a single accessible overview, Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding’s The Essential Shakespeare Handbook covers the major sources clearly. Reading the originals alongside the plays reveals how much transformation Shakespeare did. You start to see his craft at work, and his plays become more astonishing rather than less. This is why writers on Reddit studying his techniques keep coming back. The sources show the scaffolding. The plays show the cathedral.