He stole nearly every plot
ROMEO and JULIET is a direct reworking of a 1562 English poem by Arthur Brooke, which was itself translated from an Italian story that had been in circulation for decades. The VERONA setting, the feuding families, the friar, the sleeping potion and the ending were all already there.
The same goes for most of them. MACBETH and the history plays come from Holinshed's Chronicles, HAMLET from a Danish legend by way of a lost earlier play, Julius CAESAR from Plutarch — sometimes almost word for word, with Plutarch's prose rearranged into verse. Originality of plot was not what a Renaissance audience valued. The TEMPEST is one of the very few where nobody has found a source, and scholars have been picking at that gap ever since.
What the Globe was actually like
The GLOBE held around 3,000 people in a space smaller than a modern cinema. A penny bought you standing room in the yard, in the open air, in front of a stage at chest height; more money bought a seat under cover. Performances ran in daylight, in the afternoon, with no lighting and almost no scenery. That is the reason characters keep announcing where they are and what time it is.
The audience was not quiet. They ate, talked, and responded. Boys played all the female parts, including JULIET, OPHELIA and CORDELIA. And in 1613 the original THEATRE burned down during a performance of Henry VIII when a cannon fired for effect set the thatched roof alight; the building was gone in about an hour, with one man's breeches reportedly put out with a bottle of ale.
The word-invention claim needs trimming
You will often read that Shakespeare invented 1,700 words. The real figure is much lower and unknowable. What the Oxford English Dictionary recorded was the *earliest surviving written use*, and Shakespeare's plays survive unusually well while the pamphlets, sermons and letters of his contemporaries mostly do not.
As older texts get digitised, words keep getting reassigned away from him. He is still a real inventor — he turned nouns into verbs constantly, which is a real habit and part of why the language feels fast — and phrases like in a pickle and wild-goose chase do first appear in his work. But he was drawing on a language that was expanding rapidly around him, not building it alone.
The plays and people in the grid
The four great tragedies are here — HAMLET, MACBETH, OTHELLO and King Lear, represented by his daughter CORDELIA — along with PROSPERO from The TEMPEST, the WITCHES, a GHOST, and FALSTAFF, the fat knight so popular that Shakespeare reportedly wrote him a whole extra play by royal request and then killed him offstage.
Also in the grid: TRAGEDY and COMEDY, the SONNET form, the BARD himself, and STRATFORD-upon-AVON, where he was born, retired wealthy, and left his wife his second-best bed in his will — a detail that has generated four hundred years of argument and probably just meant the marital bed rather than the guest one. Our tudors page covers the England he was writing in.