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Michael Spradlin is our guest blogger during the week of October 27th. If you have any questions for Michael Spradlin, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about The Youngest Templar:

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Yes, both of the plots for my Horatio Wilkes mysteries were stolen from Shakespeare--but in my defense, he stole them first.

There's a long tradition of course of authors borrowing stories and themes (and sometimes even characters) from other writers and giving them their own spins, and Shakespeare was no different. In fact, he was one of literature's greatest practitioners of the lifted plot!

Hamlet, for example, has a number of antecedents. Hamlet-like tales have been around for centuries, but Shakespeare's tale relies heavily on the Icelandic legend of "Amleth," and the Spanish story of "Ambales." Both stories feature a prince's feigned madness, his accidental killing of the king's counselor in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of the uncle. Later, Saxo Grammaticus took those legends and wrote his Vita Amleth, "The Life of Amleth," in the 1200s. He added the girlfriend, the mother's hasty marriage to the uncle, and the death of two retainers. The Grammaticus version was widely available in Shakespeare's day. By the 1500s, a french guy named François de Belleforest took Saxo's play and rewrote it into French, doubling the length and adding the main character's melancholy to the mix.