Did anyone steal Shakespeare's plays

Answer 1

Shakespeare is believed to have collaborated on some of his plays. He may have collaborated with Greene on early plays like Titus Andronicus, or with Fletcher on later plays such as Pericles or Henry VIII. The play The Two Noble Kinsmen is explicitly said to have been a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher.

Although Shakespeare apparently did write most of his plays on his own, he did not invent the stories of most of them (The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream are exceptions). He got them from older plays (Hamlet), poems (Romeo and Juliet), Italian Stories (Othello), Roman Plays (The Comedy of Errors), and history books like Holinshed's Chronicles (Henry VI) and Plutarch's Lives (Julius Caesar). Although he did not originate the stories, he used his genius to put them into unforgettable dramatic form.

As for the suggestion that Shakespeare was a front man for some mysterious ghost writer like Bacon or Oxford, there is no evidence at all that such a thing happened, and considerable evidence that Shakespeare the actor and man from Stratford did in fact write at least part of the plays attributed to him.

Answer 2

Shakespeare borrowed freely from existing material in those days before copywrite laws. For instance Romeo and Juliet already existed as a folk story, a poem and a novel before Shakespeare got to work. And Macbeth's sleep speech bears more than a passing resemblance to Sir Philip Sidneys sleep Sonnet.

Answer 3

It depends to a certain extent what you call "stealing". Two of Shakespeare's plays (The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear) have very similar plays with very similar titles which were published at about the same time as Shakespeare's and are called The Taming of A Shrew and King Leir. The authors of these might have stolen from Shakespeare, or Shakespeare might have stolen from them, or they might be different versions of the same play--we don't know.

Both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet were first published in Quartos that are quite different from the second one and make a lot less sense. It has been speculated that someone with a terrific memory in the audience or one of the minor actors sold his recollections of the script to a publisher.

Of course, those people who have worked to legally abolish the concept of public domain for any recent works of literature might well hold that since nobody pays royalties for using Shakespeare's works any more or asks permission to use them, we are all stealing his plays every time we use them.

Answer 4

Yes, although he had help with some of them, especially the last few which he co-wrote with John Fletcher. (The Two Noble Kinsmen is particularly credited to both of them.)

None of the plays which we now accept as Shakespeare's (with the exception of the aforementioned Two Noble Kinsmen) was ever credited to anyone other than Shakespeare, and all of them were at one point or other credited to Shakespeare. In many cases a large and diverse group of different publishers, literary critics and bureaucrats all credit the same plays to Shakespeare. There is lots of evidence that the Shakespeare in question was closely associated with The Lord Chamberlain's Men, and the only person of that description is William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon.

Answer 5

No it is not, well not entirely. All of the 38 plays which credited with were written at least in part by Shakespeare. There is no sane reason to doubt that. But some of the plays were or might have been partly written by someone else. Some of the later plays, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, were co-written with John Fletcher, who became Shakespeare`s replacement after he retired. Fletcher may have contributed to Pericles and Timon of Athens. Thomas Middleton added a number of highly commercial songs-and-dance numbers to Macbeth. Some people think George Peele may have helped with Titus Andronicus.

Answer 6

Yes. A number of his plays were based on existing plays. Hamlet, in particular, is thought to have been based on an earlier Hamlet play. In the case of The Taming of the Shrew, scholars are not sure whether it is based on the contemporary The Taming of a Shrew, which is a totally different play with the same plot, or the other way around. The same can be said of King Lear and King Leir, although the Leir play is likely earlier and formed one of Shakespeare's sources.

Answer 7

He used nothing but. Only A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest are relatively original. In some cases he paraphrased the lines from his sources.

Answer 8

No Neo you are the one