William Shakespeare in Haverford Special Collections (HC)

This work was the source for many of Shakespeare's history plays and some other plays with historical bases, such as Macbeth. This is the edition that he consulted.

This edition of the Bible, which gets its name from being translated in Geneva, Switzerland by Protestant exiles from England, was the edition used by Shakespeare to check his biblical references.

The Decameron is an Italian tale, in which ten friends flee to the countryside to escape the Black Death, and spend their time telling each other stories--each telling a story each of the ten days of the book. Shakespeare turned the ninth tale of the third day into All's Well That Ends Well.

This translation of Plutarch's Lives, as this is often known, served as the basis for Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. When writing Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare lifted entire speeches from this work.

Shakespeare copied Ovid avidly. Almost all of his allusions to Classical myth are believed to be based in Ovid, and the plots of many plays, including Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and The Comedy of Errors, are based on Ovid's poetry. Shakespeare's debt to Ovid, however, is most obvious in his poetry--the Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, his narrative poems, along with his Sonnets.

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida was influenced by Homer's Illiad--indeed, they are both set in Troy.

Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is based on the same tradition as Shakespeare's Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Philip Sidney's Arcadia, as it is commonly known, is a prose work that influenced parts of Shakespeare's King Lear, as well as elements of Hamlet and The Winter's Tale.