analyses the multiple ways Shakespeare used material from Roman history and Latin poetry in his plays and poems. Three important tragedies deal with the history of the Roman Republic: , and . From the tragedies of Seneca, Shakespeare took the theme of evil in the ruler, as in Richard III and Macbeth. The comedies of Plautus lie behind the early play . From Ovid, Shakespeare took nearly all his Greek mythology, as in the miniature epic . Shakespeare, who knew Latin very well, introduced some 600 new Latin-based words into English.weiterlesen