William Shakespeare

1564–1616 · England

“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”

Shakespeare39 works in canonDrama, Poetry

#1of 111Best Authors

Influence98th pct

Popularity99th pct

Peak-work percentile in the canon.

Influence

The lineage through William Shakespeare

Drew From(19)

who shaped William Shakespeare

OvidAncient Rome

via Metamorphoses

Titus Andronicus is Ovid's Philomela story staged at full volume — the Metamorphoses is the book the play hands its audience
The rapists Chiron and Demetrius take Tereus as their conscious model, cutting out Lavinia's tongue and her hands so she can't weave the truth
Read the Philomela myth (Book VI) first and the play's whole machinery of mutilation and revenge clicks into place

PlutarchAncient Greece

via Plutarch's Lives

Antony and Cleopatra is built directly on Plutarch's Life of Antony, read through Sir Thomas North's 1579 English
The shimmering 'barge she sat in' set-piece — silver oars, purple sails, the wind made lovesick — is North's prose lightly lineated into Shakespeare's verse
Read the Life and you watch the raw material become poetry almost phrase by phrase

Giovanni BoccaccioMedieval

via The Decameron

The entire plot comes straight from one of Boccaccio's tales — Giletta di Narbona, Decameron Day 3, Novella 9
The king's cure, the rejected husband, the bed-trick: Shakespeare took them whole from Boccaccio via William Painter's English Palace of Pleasure
Read the source tale and you see exactly what Shakespeare kept, and what he darkened into something stranger

Michel de MontaigneRenaissance

via The Complete Essays

Gonzalo isn't improvising — he's quoting Montaigne
His commonwealth speech lifts Of the Cannibals almost verbatim from Florio's 1603 translation, the single clearest case of Shakespeare citing Montaigne
Read the essay first and you'll catch the irony Shakespeare is playing with — Montaigne's earnest meditation on the New World turned into a castaway's idle daydream

Geoffrey ChaucerMedieval

via The Canterbury Tales

This is Shakespeare's most direct and unquestionable use of a Chaucerian source — the plot is the Knight's Tale, dramatized
The Prologue tips its hand: "Chaucer, of all admir'd, the story gives" — the play knows exactly whose shoulders it stands on
Read the Knight's Tale first and you watch two writers, two centuries apart, hand the same story of rival cousins back and forth

Daniel

via Daniel

The trial scene runs on the Book of Daniel: Shylock cries "A Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel!" the moment the verdict seems his
Portia, the wise young judge who reverses the case, takes Daniel's own Babylonian name — Balthasar
The model is Daniel rescuing Susanna by cross-examination — knowing that scene sharpens the bitter irony of who's quoting it

Francesco PetrarcaMedieval

via Canzoniere

The tradition Shakespeare is pushing against — Petrarch's Canzoniere founded the Petrarchan sonnet and its idealizing conventions
Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") is a direct mockery of the Canzoniere's stock metaphors — eyes-like-the-sun, lips-like-coral
Read Petrarch first and the subversion lands: you can't hear Shakespeare's joke without the idiom he's deflating

MatthewBible

via The Gospels

Portia's famous "quality of mercy" plea is the Sermon on the Mount turned into legal rhetoric — "Blessed are the merciful" made flesh
Her appeal that "that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy" leans on the Lord's Prayer's "forgive us our debts" (Matthew 6)
The play's mercy-versus-justice spine is a theological argument; reading Matthew first tells you which side the Gospel is on

HomerAncient Greece

via The Iliad

Behind this sour, disillusioned war play stands Homer's Iliad, which Shakespeare knew through Chapman's 1598 translation
The bones are Homeric — Achilles sulking in his tent, Hector marching to his death — but Shakespeare strips out the heroism and lets Thersites jeer at all of it
Read the Iliad first and you feel exactly what Troilus and Cressida is corroding: the epic ideal of glory it refuses to grant

Niccolò MachiavelliRenaissance

via The Prince

Richard is the canonical "Machiavel" of the Elizabethan stage — the cold, charming schemer the era built out of The Prince
Shakespeare names the source himself: in 3 Henry VI, Richard vows to out-teach "the murderous Machiavel"
Machiavelli's argument — that a ruler's effectiveness, not his virtue, is what counts — is the logic Richard lives by; reading The Prince shows you the textbook behind the villain

Luke

via Acts

The play's Ephesus is Acts 19's Ephesus — Shakespeare relocated his Plautine farce there precisely to overlay Luke's city of sorcerers and exorcists
The witchcraft motif and the exorcist Doctor Pinch draw directly on Acts 19:13-29, where would-be exorcists meet a city steeped in magic
Read the source and the comedy's free-floating sense of bewitchment stops being a joke and starts looking deliberate

VirgilAncient Rome

via The Aeneid

Hamlet's Player's Speech is Virgil, explicitly: 'Aeneas' tale to Dido,' the fall of Troy from Aeneid Book 2
Shakespeare has the actor recite Priam's slaughter and Hecuba's grief as a play-within-the-play — and it's that Virgilian image that goads Hamlet into shame at his own delay
Knowing the source episode sharpens the scene: this is the most famous tragedy borrowing its emotional pivot from the Roman epic

Christopher MarloweRenaissance

via Dr. Faustus

Richard's pre-Bosworth unraveling — the haunting, the "despair and die" — echoes the damnation-language of Faustus's final hour
Marlowe had done it first: a doomed man, alone with his conscience, watching the time run out
Reading Dr. Faustus first shows you what Shakespeare transposed — Marlowe's private agony of the soul made into a tyrant's public collapse

MosesBible

via Genesis

The garden of England in Richard II is Eden — and Richard's reign is the Fall that wrecks it
The gardener becomes 'old Adam's likeness'; the queen asks 'what serpent hath suggested thee / To make a second fall of cursed man?' — Shakespeare is reading Richard's deposition straight through Genesis 3
Knowing the Eden story first lets you hear why Gaunt's 'demi-paradise' lament cuts so deep

UnknownBible

via Job

Behind the heath stands Job — the great man broken, demanding an answer the universe won't give
Shakespeare reworks Job's theodicy into theater: the innocent's suffering (Cordelia for Job), the formidable figure reduced to rags and questions
Read Job first and Lear's storm-speeches sound like a man asking what the whirlwind never quite answered

ApuleiusAncient Rome

via The Golden Ass

Bottom's ass-head and his night with Titania are a rework of Apuleius's man-turned-donkey, bedded by a noblewoman who can't get enough of the beast
Shakespeare almost certainly knew it through Adlington's 1566 translation, whose phrases echo through his work
The Golden Ass gives the Dream's strangest joke its pedigree — the transformation isn't whimsy, it's a 1,400-year-old comic inheritance

Paul

via 1 Corinthians

Bottom's "most rare vision" speech in Act 4 is a scrambled echo of Paul: "the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen"
The straight version is in 1 Corinthians 2:9 — Paul's words for a glory too great to report
Shakespeare gives the sublime line to his most ridiculous character and lets him fumble it. Read Paul first and the gag is sharper

David

via Psalms

Henry's great Agincourt thanksgiving is the Psalms speaking through him — he names Psalm 115's "Non nobis" and orders it sung
"O God, thy arm was here; not to us... ascribe we all" echoes Psalm 44's insistence that the victory was God's, not the soldiers'
The Coverdale and Geneva Psalms were Shakespeare's most-quarried scripture; reading them first lets you catch the borrowed cadence under the king's piety

Samuel

via Judges

When Henry VI, Part 1 wants to swell a fighter to legend, it borrows the language of Judges — naming Deborah and Samson, the warrior-deliverers of ancient Israel
The play's documented spine is the Tudor chroniclers; Judges supplies a few deliberate flashes of biblical scale laid over them

Inspired(7)

who William Shakespeare shaped

Herman MelvilleThe Age of the Novel

via Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Ahab is a Shakespearean tragic hero by design — built on the Lear/Macbeth model of the great man undone by his own will
Melville bought a seven-volume Shakespeare set in early 1849, his "edition in glorious great type," and marked Lear more heavily than almost any other play
Scholars credit Lear with the deepest creative impact on him — its storm, its rage against the heavens, its ruined king all surface again on the Pequod

Ivan TurgenevThe Age of the Novel

via Fathers and Sons

Turgenev turned Hamlet into a type — the skeptic of negation, paralyzed by his own self-awareness — in his 1860 essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote'
Two years later he poured that type into Bazarov, the brilliant nihilist whose egoism leaves him unable to love
Fathers and Sons is Hamlet transplanted to provincial Russia: read the play and you've already met Bazarov's ancestor

Emily BrontëThe Age of the Novel

via Wuthering Heights

The one secular book Emily Brontë names inside Wuthering Heights — Lockwood says his threats "smacked of King Lear"
Brontë had the run of her father's Shakespeare and is reported to have been reading Lear as she wrote; its storm-lashed madness and inheritance-poisoned revenge are stamped all over Heathcliff
Lear gave her the template for a tragedy of houses torn apart from within — bloodline, betrayal, and a man raging on the moor

Jane AustenRomanticism

via Emma

Lysander's line — "The course of true love never did run smooth" — becomes Emma Woodhouse's pet quotation two centuries later
Austen lifts the play's whole engine: meddling with other people's hearts and watching it tangle hilariously
Emma is Puck without the magic, certain she can make love run smooth where Shakespeare swore it never could

Johann Wolfgang von GoetheRomanticism

via Faust, First Part

Goethe named Shakespeare one of the three formative influences of his life, and Faust wears the debt openly
Gretchen is Goethe's Ophelia — the woman the hero takes up and ruins, undone into madness, her brother killed avenging her
The borrowing is direct down to the staging: Mephistopheles sings one of Ophelia's mad songs, and Faust's churchyard scene plays as a dark echo of Hamlet's graveyard

Fyodor DostoevskyThe Age of the Novel

via Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky read Hamlet in Russian and French and wrestled with it in his notebooks — How terrible! How petty is man! Hamlet! Hamlet!
Raskolnikov is his Russian Hamlet: the brooding intellectual paralyzed by a deed, conscience turned against itself
Where Shakespeare's prince agonizes over a murder he must commit, Dostoevsky recasts the type as the modern murderer agonizing over one he has

Bram StokerThe Age of the Novel

via Dracula

Stoker knew this play in his bones — he managed Henry Irving's Lyceum, where Hamlet was a fixture, and reviewed Irving's Hamlet back in 1876
He salts Dracula with it: Harker's journal invokes the ghost of Hamlet's father and confesses he never grasped a line of the play until he lived it at the Count's castle

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Likenesses

Portraits

The funerary effigy in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, erected by 1623 — the second of the two likenesses with a serious claim to authenticity, made for people who knew him.

The complete 1623 First Folio title page carrying the Droeshout engraving and the 'Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies' lettering — the iconic full-page context for the canonical portrait.
Martin Droeshout, 1623

In their words

Famous Quotes

“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”
— Juliet, Act II, sc. ii (balcony scene), Romeo and Juliet

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
— Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
— Jaques, As You Like It, As You Like It

“Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.”
— Caesar, Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar

Biography

About William Shakespeare

English playwright and poet, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he wrote approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and several longer poems. His works — from Hamlet to King Lear to The Tempest — explore the full range of human experience with a depth and linguistic inventiveness that has never been surpassed.

William Shakespeare, Ranked

According to

Where to start with William Shakespeare →

11A Midsummer Night’s Dream William Shakespeare~1595ShakespeareGruelingQuick1182481ComedyEnglish
13Hamlet William Shakespeare~1600ShakespeareGruelingQuick2189896TragedyEnglish
20Othello William Shakespeare~1603ShakespeareGruelingQuick1898876TragedyEnglish
23King Lear William Shakespeare~1605ShakespeareGruelingQuick1879572TragedyEnglish
26Macbeth William Shakespeare~1606ShakespeareGruelingQuick1229487TragedyEnglish
42Richard II William Shakespeare~1595ShakespeareGruelingQuick1602224History PlayEnglish
43Twelfth Night William Shakespeare~1601ShakespeareGruelingQuick1422060ComedyEnglish
52Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare~1595ShakespeareGruelingQuick1758899TragedyEnglish
54The Tempest William Shakespeare~1611ShakespeareGruelingQuick1198762RomanceEnglish
59Love's Labour's Lost William Shakespeare~1594ShakespeareGruelingQuick153818ComedyEnglish
69All's Well That Ends Well William Shakespeare~1604ShakespeareGruelingQuick1641518ComedyEnglish
72Much Ado About Nothing William Shakespeare~1598ShakespeareGruelingQuick1511860ComedyEnglish
77Julius Caesar William Shakespeare~1599ShakespeareGruelingQuick1412161TragedyEnglish
78King Henry IV, Part 1 William Shakespeare~1596ShakespeareGruelingQuick1762224History PlayEnglish
80The Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare~1596ShakespeareGruelingQuick1522060ComedyEnglish
81Measure for Measure William Shakespeare~1604ShakespeareGruelingQuick1561818ComedyEnglish
94As You Like It William Shakespeare~1599ShakespeareGruelingQuick1551958ComedyEnglish
112Antony and Cleopatra William Shakespeare~1606ShakespeareGruelingQuick1782032TragedyEnglish
120Richard III William Shakespeare~1593ShakespeareGruelingQuick2092258History PlayEnglish
129Henry V William Shakespeare~1599ShakespeareGruelingQuick1872350History PlayEnglish
137The Winter's Tale William Shakespeare~1610ShakespeareGruelingQuick1781616RomanceEnglish
138The Taming of the Shrew William Shakespeare~1591ShakespeareGruelingQuick1501659ComedyEnglish
142Troilus and Cressida William Shakespeare~1602ShakespeareGruelingQuick1861817SatireEnglish
150The Comedy of Errors William Shakespeare~1594ShakespeareGruelingQuick1051620ComedyEnglish
152Coriolanus William Shakespeare~1608ShakespeareGruelingQuick1971732TragedyEnglish
156King John William Shakespeare~1596ShakespeareGruelingQuick1481422History PlayEnglish
163Timon of Athens William Shakespeare~1606ShakespeareGruelingQuick1301014TragedyEnglish
173The Two Gentlemen of Verona William Shakespeare~1590ShakespeareGruelingQuick122819ComedyEnglish
174Henry IV, Part Two William Shakespeare~1597ShakespeareGruelingQuick1831422History PlayEnglish
176Titus Andronicus William Shakespeare~1592ShakespeareGruelingQuick1481214TragedyEnglish
178The Merry Wives of Windsor William Shakespeare~1597ShakespeareGruelingQuick1561220ComedyEnglish
179Cymbeline William Shakespeare~1610ShakespeareGruelingQuick1971116RomanceEnglish
180Pericles William Shakespeare~1607ShakespeareGruelingQuick1321016RomanceEnglish
181The Two Noble Kinsmen William Shakespeare~1613ShakespeareGruelingQuick181915RomanceEnglish
188Henry VI, Part 1 William Shakespeare~1592ShakespeareGruelingQuick1541422History PlayEnglish
189King Henry VI, Part 2 William Shakespeare~1591ShakespeareGruelingQuick1821321History PlayEnglish
190King Henry VI, Part 3 William Shakespeare~1591ShakespeareGruelingQuick1741220History PlayEnglish
199Henry VIII William Shakespeare~1613ShakespeareGruelingQuick1761023History PlayEnglish
Shakespeare's Sonnets William Shakespeare1609PoetsGruelingQuick121——LyricEnglish