Portrait of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

1564–1616 · England

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

Shakespeare39 works in canonDrama, Poetry
#1of 111Best Authors
Influence97th 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

  • 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 TurgenevRussian 19th Century

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
  • 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 AustenRomantics

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
  • 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
  • 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 StokerVictorian

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 most famous painted Shakespeare and the only portrait the National Portrait Gallery judges may be painted from life; the earring-and-open-collar image that founded the NPG collection.

John Taylor (attributed), 1610

Bust-length engraved portrait of Shakespeare in a starched lace collar, balding above a high domed forehead, facing the viewer.

Martin Droeshout, 1623

In their words

Famous Quotes

“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”

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

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

“Et tu, Brute? Then fall, 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 Groblé

  1. 11A Midsummer Night’s Dream~1595William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·66 pagesInfluence24Popularity81ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  2. 13Hamlet~1600William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·122 pagesInfluence97Popularity95ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  3. 20Othello~1603William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·106 pagesInfluence88Popularity75ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  4. 23King Lear~1605William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·105 pagesInfluence95Popularity72ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  5. 26Macbeth~1606William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·68 pagesInfluence94Popularity87ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  6. 40Richard II~1595William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·90 pagesInfluence22Popularity25ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  7. 41Twelfth Night~1601William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·79 pagesInfluence20Popularity59ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  8. 49Romeo and Juliet~1595William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·98 pagesInfluence87Popularity99ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  9. 51The Tempest~1611William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·67 pagesInfluence87Popularity61ShakespeareRomanceEnglish
  10. 56Love's Labour's Lost~1594William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·86 pagesInfluence8Popularity18ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  11. 67All's Well That Ends Well~1604William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·92 pagesInfluence15Popularity19ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  12. 69Much Ado About Nothing~1598William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·85 pagesInfluence19Popularity60ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  13. 75Julius Caesar~1599William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·79 pagesInfluence22Popularity61ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  14. 76King Henry IV, Part 1~1596William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·98 pagesInfluence23Popularity24ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  15. 78The Merchant of Venice~1596William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·85 pagesInfluence21Popularity60ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  16. 79Measure for Measure~1604William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·87 pagesInfluence19Popularity19ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  17. 90As You Like It~1599William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·87 pagesInfluence20Popularity58ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  18. 108Antony and Cleopatra~1606William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·100 pagesInfluence21Popularity33ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  19. 116Richard III~1593William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·117 pagesInfluence23Popularity58ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  20. 125Henry V~1599William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·104 pagesInfluence24Popularity51ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  21. 133The Winter's Tale~1610William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·100 pagesInfluence17Popularity17ShakespeareRomanceEnglish
  22. 134The Taming of the Shrew~1591William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·84 pagesInfluence16Popularity59ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  23. 138Troilus and Cressida~1602William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·104 pagesInfluence18Popularity18ShakespeareSatireEnglish
  24. 145The Comedy of Errors~1594William ShakespeareHard·Short·59 pagesInfluence16Popularity20ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  25. 147Coriolanus~1608William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·110 pagesInfluence18Popularity32ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  26. 151King John~1596William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·83 pagesInfluence14Popularity23ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  27. 158Timon of Athens~1606William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·73 pagesInfluence10Popularity14ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  28. 168The Two Gentlemen of Verona~1590William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·69 pagesInfluence9Popularity20ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  29. 169Henry IV, Part Two~1597William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·103 pagesInfluence15Popularity23ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  30. 171Titus Andronicus~1592William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·83 pagesInfluence12Popularity15ShakespeareTragedyEnglish
  31. 172The Merry Wives of Windsor~1597William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·87 pagesInfluence12Popularity21ShakespeareComedyEnglish
  32. 173Cymbeline~1610William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·110 pagesInfluence11Popularity16ShakespeareRomanceEnglish
  33. 174Pericles~1607William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·74 pagesInfluence11Popularity16ShakespeareRomanceEnglish
  34. 175The Two Noble Kinsmen~1613William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·102 pagesInfluence9Popularity15ShakespeareRomanceEnglish
  35. 182Henry VI, Part 1~1592William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·86 pagesInfluence14Popularity22ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  36. 183King Henry VI, Part 2~1591William ShakespeareGrueling·Medium·102 pagesInfluence13Popularity22ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  37. 184King Henry VI, Part 3~1591William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·97 pagesInfluence13Popularity21ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  38. 193Henry VIII~1613William ShakespeareGrueling·Short·99 pagesInfluence10Popularity24ShakespeareHistory PlayEnglish
  39. Shakespeare's Sonnets1609William ShakespeareModerate·Short·77 pagesInfluence—Popularity—PoetsLyricEnglish