Elizabethan audiences had no expectations that the plots invented for the rowdy stages of London playhouses would be completely new and original. When Shakespeare developed the scripts of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and other Roman plays, he adapted his plots from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. In relying on a historian’s translation of these biographies (which Plutarch wrote for readers in the 1st-century A.D.), Shakespeare followed the literary fashion of his time. In How the Classics Made Shakespeare, the eminent scholar and critic Jonathan Bate nimbly revisits how the world’s greatest playwright relied upon sources like Plutarch and Ovid, but he offers a deeper, erudite investigation into how the sonnets, narrative poems, and plays are inspired by other canonical “ancients” such as Cicero, Horace, Seneca, and Virgil. This latest book cogently builds upon Bate’s ambitious work, Soul of the Age, a biography of Shakespeare’s mind, and his earlier Shakespeare and Ovid.