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Shakespeare's Sources

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Shakespeare often spun new stories out of old, offering a fresh perspective on things already read or seen. He mined popular books such as Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (first published in 1577) and John Harington’s 1591 translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Shakespeare also wove into his work references to current events, books, maps, and artifacts that would have been familiar and meaningful to early modern audiences and readers, but are often opaque to modern readers or spectators.

Other references are less specific, but nevertheless would have served as a touchstone for audiences. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, filled with humor about education and language, Shakespeare mocks a pedantic schoolmaster with a joke about a hornbook, a common tool used to teach children to read:

Armado [to Holofernes]: Monsieur, are you not lett’red?
Moth: Yes, he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?
Holofernes: Ba, pueritia [a boy], with a horn added.
Moth: Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
—Love’s Labour’s Lost Act V, Scene 1

This dialogue is constructed on the model of education used at the time. Schoolmasters taught boys to put the consonants in order before every vowel, and to repeat them over together—out loud— as thus: “ba, be, bi, bo, bu.” After they learned to say them, they learned to spell them in order, as the schoolmaster prompted, “What spells ‘b-a’?”