Sources for Shakespeare

Source.

Below is an incomplete library of literary borrowings available online which informed the dramatist-poet's plays.

Adding more clutter to the commentaries on Shakespeare is much like writing an ode to the Gideon Bible then placing it in a motel drawer. I`ll avoid it.

Medieval Morality Plays
Everyman

Plutrach
Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North in Ten Volumes (1579) - The edition actually used by Shakespeare.
Plutrach's Lives as translated by John Dryden. Slightly more readable and modern edition.


Saxo Grammaticus
The Danish History, Books I-IX by Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned").

Hector Boethius
Hector Boethius, Scotorum Historia (1575 version).

Reginald Scot
Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft


King James I
Daemonologie 1599 by King James I

Seneca
Seneca's Tragedies in English
Original texts of Seneca's works at 'The Latin Library'
Works by Seneca the Younger at Project Gutenberg
Essays by Seneca at Quotidiana.org
Seneca's essays in English (at Stoics.com)
Many quotes by Lucius Annaeus Seneca via brainyquote.com.
List of commentaries of Seneca's Letters
Incunabula (1478) of Seneca's works in the McCune Collection
Seneca on Anger: written and presented by Alain de Botton
SORGLL: Seneca, Thyestes 766-804, read by Katharina Volk, Columbia University. Society for the Oral reading of Greek and Latin Literature (SORGLL)

Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus' A Geograczphical History of Africa

Ovid
The Fifteen Books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1567- Arthur Golding

Tacitus
The Annals by Tacitus

c/f Take a Virtual Tour of the Dictionary Shakespeare May Have Owned and Annotated