Julius Caesar Plagiarism

William Shakespeare and his plays are almost universally known. But… how much of this famous playwright’s work is actually original? Many of his plays draw heavily on older literature, some in ways that might be called plagiarism by today’s standards. One work that Shakespeare uses in several plays is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Latin: Metamorphōseōn librī: "Books of Transformations"). This is actually a single poem that consists of 15 books and over 250 stories that chronicle the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare actually uses one of these stories, Pyramus and Thisbe, in his play Midsummer Night’s dream. Romeo and Juliet, another of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, also draws on this story.
A Midsummer Night’s dream contains perhaps the most obvious use of Ovid’s work.
Within the play, a group of characters called the mechanicals actually act out a bastardized version of the story “Pyramus and Thisbe”. While it is meant to be a tragedy with a similar theme of forbidden romance to the overall play, Shakespeare actually makes comic. He does this by making the actors simple workers, who end up being hilariously clumsy and awkward. Perhaps one reason Shakespeare has a play within a play is to emphasize the idea of forbidden romance. Another potential reason is to show a contrast between the happy ending of the main play and the tragic ending of Pyramus and Thisbe
The interesting part of Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Pyramus and Thisbe story is how he turns the tragedy into a comic production. Some think this was meant to be mocking. He may be mocking himself and/or playwrights in general with the pathetic production. He also may be doing the same for actors, who were not thought very highly of during that time. I, however, think there is another possibility; might Shakespeare be giving credit, or a ‘shout out’ to Ovid, who played such a large part in his
work?
Published in 8 AD, Ovid’s version of Pyramus and Thisbe is the oldest one surviving. There is, however, evidence of even earlier versions where Pyramus turns into a river and Thisbe into a nearby spring. The story is about two lovers who are forbidden to marry because of a feud between their parents. They communicated through a crack in the wall shared by their houses and agree to run away. A misunderstanding at their meeting point, however, lead Pyramus to believe Thisbe was dead, though she wasn’t. Pyramus then committed suicide and Thisbe did the same when she returned and found him dead. In this version, Pyramus’s blood stains the white berries of the mulberry bush he died under, causing mulberries to be red from that time on. This story is also thought to have inspired Shakespeare’s witting of Romeo and Juliet.
Two of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, have significant ties to Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe.
They differ however in how they use the story. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare copies the overall story line but changes most of the details. For example, he includes lovers from two feuding families, but in his play, they are from noble families. On the other hand, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he turns the story into a plot device in the form of a play-within-the-play. The main points of the story are retained, and it reflects several event in the overall play, but it becomes almost comedic due to the poor acting of the mechanicals. Although the same story plays an important role in both plays, it is used very
differently.
This only goes to show, even the best writers are inspired by those before them. As great a writer as he is considered to be, even Shakespeare borrowed from earlier work. Although in some cases, he did a little more than borrow. Besides Pyramus and Thisbe. He also uses several of Ovid’s other stories in his plays to varying degrees. How original are Shakespeare’s works?