l his borrowings, to placate public
opinion by changing the names and the environment of his characters.

The Elizabethan audiences were less exacting. If a play about King
Lear were written and acted with some success, they thought it
perfectly honest for another dramatist to use this material in building
up a new and better play on the story of King Lear. They cared {106}
even less when the dramatist went to other dramas for hints on minor
details. The modern audience, if not the modern world at large, holds
the same view. So long as the mind of the borrower transforms and
makes his own whatever he borrows, so long will his work be applauded
by his audience, whatever be the existing state of the copyright laws
or of public fastidiousness.

Hence we do not to-day hunt up the sources of Shakespeare's plots and
characters in order to prove plagiarism, but in order to understand
just how great was the power of his genius in transmuting common
elements into his fine gold.

It is customary to say: "Shakespeare did not invent his plots. He was
not interested in plots." So far is this from the truth that the
amount of pains and skill spent by him in working over any one of his
best comedies or tragedies would more than suffice for the construction
of a very good modern plot. It is more true to say of most of his
work, "Shakespeare did not waste his time in inventing stories.[1] He
took stories where he found them, realized their dramatic
possibilities, and spent infinite pains in weaving them together into a
harmonious whole."

There is one other point to remember. The sources of Shakespeare's
plays were no better literary material than the sources of most
Elizabethan plays. Shakespeare's practice in adapting older plays was
{107} the common practice of the time. We can measure, therefore, the
greatness of Shakespeare's achievement by a comparison with what others
have made out of similar material.

Just as Shakespeare's plays fall into the groups of history, tragedy,
and comedy, so his chief sources are three in number: biography, as
found in the _Chronicle_ of Holinshed and Plutarch's _Lives_; romance,
as found in the novels of the period, which were most of them
translations from Italian _novelle_; and dramatic material from other
plays.

+Holinshed+.--Raphael Holinshed (died 1580?) published in 1578 a
history of England, Scotland, and Ireland, usually known as Holinshed's
_Chronicle_. The two immense f