Stealing Shakespeare by Alan Gratz

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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.

Now, at some point in here, scholars think there was an "Ur-Hamlet," a missing link between these precedents and Shakespeare's "Hamlet." No text of this play survives, and we have no idea how much of the language Shakespeare lifted, but it was most certainly the first to involve a ghost. Was it perhaps an early version written by Shakespeare himself?

It's hard to tell.

It's also hard to date Hamlet, (just ask Ophelia! Ba-dum-dum) but most scholars think it was written in 1601 or 1602. That Shakespeare borrowed from other stories is clear; that he took those stories and made them one of the great classics of Western literature is what marks him a genius. What did he add to the mix? His amazing poetic language, for one. But he also trimmed out the all-knowing narrator of previous takes, tightened the time frame from years to a few weeks, gave Hamlet his famous indecisiveness, changed the setting to Denmark, added the Laertes and Fortinbras characters, came up with the "play's the thing" scene, and, in his most startling change, turned Hamlet into a tragic hero by whacking him in the end. (Sorry if I ruined it for you.) All previous tales up until that time had Hamlet enacting his revenge--and then taking his rightful place as King of Denmark.

And Macbeth? Don't get me started on Macbeth. Yes, there was a real Macbeth, but he didn't much resemble the ambitious anti-hero of Shakespeare's play. Rather than being a power-mad tyrant, he OVERTHREW a power-mad tyrant in battle and was ELECTED King of Scotland--and ruled generously and effectively until he too was killed in battle by a usurper. As for the rest--including the witches--Shakespeare stole that from Holinshed's Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande, and Ireland.

And Holinshed, by the way, stole his material from Hector Boyce's History of Scotland.

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Alan Gratz, Something Wicked, young adult fiction, Shakespeare,Macbeth, mystery,books, Penguin Books