Shakespeare found nature an inspiration, and peoples' different reactions to love and life. While most stories in those days finished with a 'happily ever after,' Shakespeare realised that a total opposite could happen, so Shakespeare explored the many ways a romance story could end.
The ideas for Shakespeare's plots were almost all taken from earlier stories, poems or plays. The English histories as well as the semi-historical King Lear and Macbeth were drawn from Holinshed's Chronicles. The story of Romeo and Juliet was from a poem written by Arthur Brooke in 1562. Hamlet was probably based on an earlier play which was itself based on a story by Saxo Grammaticus. We have an alternate Taming of the Shrew which is very similar to Shakespeare's. Roman historians provided the source for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
Nowadays we tend to think that it was the stories which Shakespeare created, so that he deserves credit for any story of a brother of a king who murders the king and marries the widow. This is not so. Shakespeare created words for these people to say, which words showed them to be much more complex than any characters created beforehand and most created since.
Historical Political figures.
What Renaissance ideas did Shakespeare's work address?
Shakespeare was not known for his ideas. He was known for his plays, which were indeed immediately popular.
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It is said that Shakespeare used the writings of Plutarch for ideas for his ancient history plays.
Ovid Holinshed Plutarch
What Renaissance ideas did Shakespeare's work address?
Shakespeare was not known for his ideas. He was known for his plays, which were indeed immediately popular.
somewhere
He got most of his ideas from books he had read.
From the things and people around him.
It is said that Shakespeare used the writings of Plutarch for ideas for his ancient history plays.
Shakespeare often got ideas from history or he adapted already-written plays.
We have no record of Shakespeare's early life, and any ideas about what experiences he had and whether they formed his character are complete guesswork.
Ovid Holinshed Plutarch
well, make it interactive, and make it revolved around poetry :)
He got his ideas almost exclusively from books he had read and other plays he had seen. Very few of his plays are inspired by his his own experiences.
He didn't, really. Some highly pretentious authors, like Harold Bloom, have claimed that he did, but what Bloom is claiming is that Shakespeare invented Victorian literary criticism, which is not only ridiculous but impossible. With Shakespeare, people take their own ideas to the plays and find them reflected there and articulated better than they could articulate them themselves. Shakespeare, in his own words, "holds the mirror up to nature" but he does not create nature. He did not create Harold Bloom's Victorian outlook on literature, but when Bloom looks at Shakespeare, he finds his outlook reflected back to him, and imagines that Shakespeare must have invented it.