Celebrating Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, Jan Moran Neil suggests using his plots as springboards for your own stories
What do the comedian Frank Carson and William Shakespeare have in common? As Carson in his Belfast brogue used to say: Ach, it’s the way I tell them. Meaning that his jokes may not be original but his success was founded on the way he told the story. Many of the plots from Shakespeare’s history plays were sourced from the 16th century chronicler Holinshed and the Greek historian Plutarch. Just as the Bard borrowed plots from many sources and placed them into his own contemporary setting, recent generations of writers have done the same with his plots.