Arthur Brooke

Arthur Brooke (died 1563) was an English poet and author of The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), the poem on which Shakespeare based Romeo and Juliet. It is written in rhymed verse and was taken from the French translation of one of the stories in Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554–73; French trans., 1564–82). Brooke altered the original; for example, he developed the character of the nurse, changed various aspects of the last scene, and introduced Fortune as the controlling agent of the lovers’ lives. That Shakespeare also incorporated these changes indicates it was Brooke’s poem he used as a source and not the original story of Bandello. Brooke’s poem also included a preface that expressed his stridently Protestant views of the Roman Catholic church and its moral corruption.

Brooke died in a shipwreck in 1563 while crossing to join the English troops in France. Modern editions of Brooke’s poem include Romeus and Iuliet (1875), edited by P.A. Daniel, and Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (1957), edited by Geoffrey Bullough.