There seems to be a number of different sources from which Shakespeare pulled to create The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Continue reading “Sources: Diana, Gisippus, and a Friar named Laurence”
No Source of Confusion Here
Love’s Labor’s Lost is one of the few plays that don’t seem to have a literary source (The Tempest is another that comes immediately to mind). As we discovered yesterday, the title certainly lends no clues… to anything much really.
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Source of Lies
So, given Shakespeare’s inaccuracies in Richard the Third, it’s interesting to look at what he used as sources for his version of “history” (more interesting, still, since the full title is The Tragedy of Richard the Third).
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Sources
According to most critics, the source material for most of Shakespeare’s histories (including The First Part of Henry the Sixth) was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Holinshed was only one of a three main authors of the work (the other two being William Harrison and Richard Stanyhurst), and their work was first printed in 1577, about fifteen years before the composition of 1HenryVI.
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Will’s a Thief, I tellya, a THIEF!
Bad poets borrow, good poets steal
— attributed to T.S. Eliot