Shakespeare's Sources: Raphael Holinshed etc.
[Acquired: Atlantis Books, Rotorua, Thursday, September 7, 2018]:
Raphael Holinshed. Chronicles. Introduction & Selection by Michael Wood. 1577 & 1587. London: Folio Society, 2012.
The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne. Trans. John Florio. 1603. 3 vols. The World’s Classics, 65-67. London: Henry Frowde, 1904.
William Painter. The Palace of Pleasure: Elizabethan Versions of Italian and French Novels from Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Straparola, Queen Margaret of Navarre, and Others. 1566-67, 1575. Ed. Joseph Jacobs. 1890. 3 vols. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966.
Plutarch’s Lives. 1517. Trans. Sir Thomas North. 1579. The Temple Plutarch. Ed. W. H. D. Rouse. 10 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1898.
Shakespeare’s Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and Coriolanus in the translation of Sir Thomas North. Ed. T. J. B. Spencer. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,That's all very well. No doubt it's true that Ben Jonson did make more of a show of his classical learning, but when it comes to works in the vernacular, 'sweetest Shakespeare' was a bit more than 'Fancy's child.' He certainly made extensive use of Holinshed's Chronicles (1577, expanded 1587), since they were the basis not just of his history plays, but also of King Lear.
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.
- Milton, 'L'Allegro'
What else do we actually know that he read? Well, Plutarch's Parallel Lives, clearly - presumably in Sir Thomas North's then recent 1579 translation from Amyot's French version, rather than in the original Greek ('little Latin and less Greek,' remember?) They were the source for his four Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony & Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus ...
Then there's John Florio's translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays, which first appeared in 1603. Montaigne's essay on the cannibals definitely influenced The Tempest. There are also echoes of him in some of the other late plays.
Another vital source for Shakespeare was William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566-67, enlarged edition 1575), a somewhat random assortment of French and Italian short stories and novellas translated into English from a variety of sources (including Boccaccio's Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron). Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well definitely came from there, along with Romeo and Juliet and The Rape of Lucrece.
That doesn't exhaust the subject, of course. Shakespeare's sources were many and various, as Geoffrey Bullough recorded in his presumably definitive 8-volume compilation Narrative And Dramatic Sources Of Shakespeare:
- Volume I: Early Comedies, Poems, Romeo and Juliet
- Volume II: The Comedies 1597-1603
- Volume III: Earlier English History Plays
- Volume IV: Later English History Plays
- Volume V: The Roman Plays
- Volume VI: Other Classical Plays
- Volume VII: Major Tragedies
- Volume VIII: Romances
This, however, I do not possess (alas) - unlike all the other tomes mentioned above.
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- category - Drama: Theatre
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