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We don't really know much about what Shakespeare read, but the stories in his plays come from popular novels of the time. Romeo and Juliet comes from a verse-novel by Arthur Brooke, Romeus and Juliet.

Shakespeare also seems to have loved history books. His history plays are based on Holinshed's Chronicles, Hamlet is from Saxo Grammaticus' History of Denmark, and his Roman and Greek plays come from the Greek historian Plutarch.

Shakespeare was very familiar with contemporary dramatists - as you would expect. His favourite Latin poet seems to have been Ovid (there was a famous translation by William Golding, which everybody loved), and among English poets he seems to have a soft spot for Chaucer and Gower.

Shakespeare never says anything nice about Edmund Spenser (who was the big cheese in English poetry around Shakespeare's time). I think I agree with him there.

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16y ago

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