Can /lit/ clear something up for me, my English teacher told me Shakespeare plagiarized everything he 'wrote'.

>>7359807
Your English teacher is retarded.

>tfw screaming "What a piece of work is a man!" monologue alone out the window into a storm

ok let's do it

who's there?

>>7359821
I want to be Laertes.

Ask said teacher him/herself....engage the teach in a socratic debate...using how, when, who, where questions to stand by the assertion that Shakep. was a plagiarizer.

>>7359821
Banana

>>7359807
Romeo and Juliet
>Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. Its plot is based on an Italian tale, translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562, and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but, to expand the plot, developed supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris.

Hamlet
>The story of Hamlet ultimately derives from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier (hypothetical) Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet, though some scholars believe he himself wrote the Ur-Hamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet we now have.

Macbeth
>Shakespeare's source for the tragedy is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth. In recent scholarship, the events of the tragedy are usually associated more closely with the execution of Henry Garnett for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

>>7359807
I bet your teacher thinks Shakespeare was some kind of stiff classical author, instead of the drunken dick-joke master he was.

>>7359807
Your English teacher is an idiot who doesn't understand what plagiarism is.

>>7360067
Deriving a story from previous sources is pretty fucking standard. Also, deriving isn't the same as plagiarizing. If your ENGLISH teacher doesn't know that, they needs to find a new job.

>>7360080
The person you replied to (me) is not the same person to whom I replied--that should have been fairly obvious. I was just demonstrating what the poster's professor was probably referring to.

>>7359807
Is your teacher an African-American?

>>7359814
iktfb

>>7360073
drunken dick jokes are only one small part of Shakespeare's extremely broad understanding of humanity

Shakespeare is as much a "stiff" (whatever that means) classical author as anybody when he writes about Caesars. His characters are glorious, all of them. Monarchs or jesters, noble or poor.

>>7360067
Don’t forget Othello.

>>7360354
>>7360076
>>7360073
>>7359810
>>7360080

Holy shit, ITT /lit/ is completely tone-deaf and autismal

Shakespeare fans often lovingly refer to Shakespeare as "the world's greatest plagiarist." It's a JOKE. We're well aware of the conventions of the time. Shakespeare came up with very few of his own plotlines, and the ones he did come up with were comparatively weak.