Quoth Lord Byron in an 1814 letter to James Hogg:
Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all. Suppose any one to have the dramatic handling for the first time of such ready-made stories as Lear, Macbeth, &c. and he would be a sad fellow, indeed, if he did not make something very grand of them. [...] You think, no doubt, that A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! is Shakespeare’s. Not a syllable of it. You will find it all in the old nameless dramatist. [...] [N]ot one of his is or ever has been acted as he wrote it; and what the pit applauded three hundred years past, is five times out of ten not Shakespeare’s, but Cibber’s.
Dig the tone; you can almost hear Byron (called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” by Lady Caroline Lamb) holding forth.
For what it’s worth, I think Byron’s criticism about ‘unoriginal snippets’ and ‘rehashing of old plots’ is neither here nor there; you can pretty much say that of any artist. This passage comes just after Byron calls Paradise Lost the “very finest poetry that has ever been produced in this world”—needless to say, the ‘story’ of Paradise Lost is hardly original.
However—notwithstanding Harold Bloom’s fawning about Shakespeare having ‘invented the modern human’ (quelle idée!)—there is some merit to the claim that Shakespeare’s plots can be simplistic compared to other ‘great literature’. The man was writing for the box-office after all.
But the masterful explorations of human psyche and sheer quality of expression more than compensate for that. Would you rather have a ‘more clever’ story in Macbeth, or would you rather have Lady Macbeth wailing “here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!” Not to mention Macbeth’s hysterical histrionics:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
[...]
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
[...]
I gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back.
