Shakespeare did not usually invent the incidents in his plays, but borrowed them from old stories, ballads, and plays, wove them together, and then breathed into them his spark of life.

If he borrowed money from Shakespeare or with his help, he would now have been able to repay the loan.

Shakespeare borrowed the story from several tales in Holinshed's Chronicles, a popular history of the British Isles known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Oxford had borrowed the name from a third Shakespeare, the man of that name from Stratford-upon-Avon, who was a law student at the time, but who was never an actor or a writer.

Shakespeare borrowed from Plautus as Plautus borrowed from his Greek models.

For instance, in The Tempest, Shakespeare borrowed from a manuscript by William Strachey that detailed an actual shipwreck of the Virginia-bound 17th-century English sailing vessel Sea Venture in 1609 on the islands of Bermuda.

Shakespeare also borrowed heavily from a speech by Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses in writing Prospero's renunciative speech ; nevertheless, the combination of these elements in the character of Prospero created a new interpretation of the sage magician as that of a carefully plotting hero, quite distinct from the wizard-as-advisor archetype of Merlin or Gandalf.

William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear ; parts of it were also dramatised by John Day and James Shirley.

In William Shakespeare's play King Lear, ( iv, i, 60 ), mention is made of " Hobbididence, prince of dumbness " in a list of diverse fiends, whose names Shakespeare borrowed from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures ( 1603 ).

This insult in this verse has been borrowed by a number of other writers, including Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers, Somerset Maugham in Catalina, and in the title of François Mauriac's Le noeud de viperes.

After training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and deciding to act, he borrowed the name Exton from the character " Sir Piers Exton " in the William Shakespeare play Richard II.

William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear ; traces of the work's influence may also be found in Hamlet and The Winter's Tale.

* Titus Andronicus, main character in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, possibly named after one of the above-listed emperors

Shakespeare may have changed this aspect of his character in order to please King James, who was thought at the time to be a descendant of the real Banquo.

But Shakespeare may also simply have altered Banquo's character because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder.

For example, the complete works of Shakespeare, about 1250 pages in print, can be stored in about five megabytes ( forty million bits ) with one byte per character.

Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare.

In Stratford-upon-Avon, the owners of Shrieves House, the former Three Tunns Tavern and now a museum, claim William Shakespeare based the character Falstaff on William Rogers, one of the Sargeants of the mace and close friend of the Shakespeares.

( The name of his TV role alludes to Peter Quince, a Shakespeare character who leads a company of bad actors in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Second, Shakespeare may have altered Banquo's character simply because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder ; there was, however, a need to give a dramatic contrast to Macbeth — a role which many scholars argue is filled by Banquo.

This opinion recurs in critical literature, and, according to Caroline Spurgeon, is supported by Shakespeare himself, who apparently intended to degrade his hero by vesting him with clothes unsuited to him and to make Macbeth look ridiculous by several nimisms he applies: His garments seem either too big or too small for him – as his ambition is too big and his character too small for his new and unrightful role as king.

Shakespeare omitted the character of the traitorous Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl of Oxford in The Life and Death of King John, and the character of the 12th Earl of Oxford is given a much more prominent role in Henry V than his limited involvement in the actual history of the times would allow.

According to Marples, Shakespeare drew directly from Plautus “ parallels in plot, in incident, and in character ,” and was undeniably influenced by the classical playwright ’ s work.

Menaechmi, on the other hand, “ is almost completely lacking in a supernatural dimension .” A character in Plautus ’ play would never blame an inconvenient situation on witchcraft — something that is quite common in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare uses the image of Proteus to establish the character of his great royal villain Richard III in the play Henry VI, Part Three, in which the future usurper boasts:

* Puck ( A Midsummer Night's Dream ), a Shakespeare character

Bowdler announced his desire to make Shakespeare accessible " without incurring the danger of falling unawares among words and expressions which are of such a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty "; a character in Patience declares, " I believe I am right in saying that there is not one word in that decalet which is calculated to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty.

Shakespeare was either unaware of or indifferent to this, and adopted, then adapted some of their features, including the five act structure and the aforementioned train of bad decisions, culminating in an eventual ' stoic calm ' of the protagonist, in which the character virtuously accepts the consequences of their error ( s )-" Lay on, Macduff ," in " Macbeth ".

The editors of the Oxford and Norton Shakespeare believe the name of Imogen is a misspelling of Innogen — they draw several comparisons between Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing, in early editions of which a ghost character named Innogen was supposed to be Leonato's wife ( Posthumus being also known as " Leonatus ", the Latin form of the Italian name in the other play ).

Edward is a character in the play Richard III by William Shakespeare.

It was arguably the most popular play of the " Age of Shakespeare " and set new standards in effective plot construction and character development.

Elizabeth is a character in the plays Richard III and Henry VI Part 3 by William Shakespeare.

* Eldon Quick ( born 1937 ), American character actor, an alumnus of the American Shakespeare Festival

* All Julius Caesar Provides a summary of the play, background on Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, including historical background on Julius Caesar, and a character analysis of Caesar.

Unlike his sources, Shakespeare gives Banquo no role in the King's murder, making it a deed committed solely by Macbeth and his wife.

What Shakespeare writes here thus amounts to a strong support of James ' right to the throne by lineage, and for audiences of Shakespeare's day, a very real fulfillment of the witches ' prophecy to Banquo that his sons would take the throne.

The Banquo portrayed in historical sources is significantly different from the Banquo created by Shakespeare.

Around 1760 he turned to Shakespeare, depicting a scene from Macbeth where Macbeth and Banquo encounter the witches, noteworthy as being one of the first paintings to portray theatrical characters in a landscape.

The phrase is famously used in the Day of Judgement sense by William Shakespeare in Macbeth, where on the heath the Three Witches show Macbeth the line of kings that will issue from Banquo:

William Shakespeare was clearly describing the House Martin when Banquo brings the nests and birds to the attention of Duncan at Macbeth's castle, Inverness: " This guest of summer,

The Jews had been banished from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return before 1655, when Shakespeare had been dead for thirty-nine years.

Harris J. Griston, in Shaking The Dust From Shakespeare ( 216 ), writes: `` There is not a word spoken by Shylock which one would expect from a real Jew ''.

It is not between Euripides and Shakespeare that the western mind turns away from the ancient tragic sense of life.

These conceptions and the manner in which they were transposed into poetry or engendered by poetic form are intrinsic to western life from the time of Aeschylus to that of Shakespeare.

They read the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott, and many others, they examined articles from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, and The Edinburgh Review and read history, geography and biographies.

Perhaps the manuscript by Shakespeare is a distinct work of art from the play by the troupe, which is also distinct from the performance of the play by this troupe on this night, and all three can be judged, but are to be judged by different standards.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada production ran from June 11 to November 7, 2009, with Des McAnuff directing and Wayne Cilento as choreographer.

As well as stories from the Old Testament, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, she grew up with Aesop ’ s Fables, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, the folk tales and mythology of Scotland, the German Romantics, Shakespeare, and the romances of Sir Walter Scott.

Journalist Bee Wilson states that the image of a community of honey bees " occurs from ancient to modern times, in Aristotle and Plato ; in Virgil and Seneca ; in Erasmus and Shakespeare ; Tolstoy, as well as by social theorists Bernard Mandeville and Karl Marx.

Shakespeare often used Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland — commonly known as Holinshed's Chronicles — as a source for his plays, and in Macbeth he borrows from several of the tales in that work.

Like the Authorized King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, many words and phrases from the Book of Common Prayer have entered common parlance.

* Tom Shakespeare, Genetic Politics: from Eugenics to Genome, with Anne Kerr ( New Clarion Press, 2002 ).

The upshot is that scholars cannot assert with any confidence how much material Shakespeare took from the Ur-Hamlet ( if it even existed ), how much from Belleforest or Saxo, and how much from other contemporary sources ( such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy ).

Whether Shakespeare took these from Belleforest directly or through the Ur-Hamlet remains unclear.

Hamlet's " What a piece of work is a man " echoes many of Montaigne's ideas, but scholars disagree whether Shakespeare drew directly from Montaigne or whether both men were simply reacting similarly to the spirit of the times.

Oxford editor George Hibbard argues that, since the contemporary literature contains many allusions and references to Hamlet ( only Falstaff is mentioned more, from Shakespeare ), the play was surely performed with a frequency that the historical record misses.

David Garrick at Drury Lane produced a version that adapted Shakespeare heavily ; he declared: " I had sworn I would not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act.

< div class =" references-small "> All references to Hamlet, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare Q2 ( Thompson and Taylor, 2006a ).

References to the First Quarto and First Folio are marked Hamlet Q1 and Hamlet F1, respectively, and are taken from the Arden Shakespeare " Hamlet: the texts of 1603 and 1623 " ( Thompson and Taylor, 2006b ).