8-1ShakespearesInfluences

Shakespeare’s Influences on his writing

Shakespeare is very well known for writing all of his amazing plays. Do you ever wonder what gave him the ideas to write his plays? According to Ryan Patrick and James Mayhew, authors of the book Shakespeare’s Storybook, “Shakespeare was known for taking popular stories that he could have heard from his family, his friends or even his teachers and making them into poems and plays. He would sometimes write plays that followed the story exactly as he first heard it or he would change the story to make a completely new version. One of Shakespeare’s earliest plays is The Taming of the Shrew. He based it on many similar stories. There are many folktales and ballads relating to this popular tale during his day so it is difficult to know which version he used. Shakespeare set his story in Italy, but there are clues that suggest it could be based on an Irish or British story, including the characters and some places that they visit” (44). The main message of the play is that a “good match of equals” is important in marriage. Shakespeare believed in that message, too. Shakespeare’s best known love story is Romeo and Juliet. The idea of this story could have been based on a poem called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. He could have also could have sprung an idea in “Palace of Pleasure.” This book contained many stories that Shakespeare later made into plays. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library website, the section entitled "Very tragical mirth: Romeo and Pyramus, Juliet and Thisbe” explains that Shakespeare tells the same story in the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and Pyramus and Thisbe, only one story is tragic and the other comic. Some people even believe that the story was a real story about two feuding families from medieval Verona.

According to Ryan Patrick and James Mayhew, authors of the book Shakespeare’s Storybook, “Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. The play is based on a story from a history book written by the Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, 800 years ago, and Grammaticus based his book on an old Viking saga. Shakespeare decided to change the hero’s name to Hamlet instead of Amlethi. He could have made this change because it is easier to say or he may have chosen it for personal reasons. Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died five years before when he was 11. He could have based the main character’s name off his son’s name. The same year Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his father died. Some people believe that he was thinking of his dead father and son when he wrote Hamlet. The Play is about the sorrow a son feels for his dead father and about what goes wrong when people are bad or selfish. Things were also going wrong in England at the time. Harvests failed, people starved, jobs were lost, and nobody believed that Elizabeth I and her Government could solve these problems” (52). Shakespeare was definitely a great playwright, but he did pick up some of his amazing ideas from stories around the time in Elizabethan England.

-Emily Bach