Shakespeare for the Source Seeker

In preparation for our "lost play" project, I did a little bit of background research about the origin of Shakespeare's plays. As Professor Burton taught us in class, most of his plays are based off of something; the histories, quite obviously, are based off of real events, at least to some degree. Where do the rest of them come from? Well, I read a lot of people's opinions, including Wikipedia, all of whom had some different ideas, but I thought going old school Encyclopedia style might be a good idea, and I found a super interesting article in the Encyclopedia Britannica (that was my favorite in high school because our library's copy was brown and looked really old and legit--full of much wisdom) here. But I'll spare you the trouble of reading it unless you're interested by summarizing some of the main points that I thought would be pertinent for our final project.

• Sources of Plots:
• --old stories (Hamlet and Pericles)
• --relatively recent Italian writers (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello)
• --popular prose fiction(As you Like It, The Winter's Tale)

• Even historical plays needed some source to tell him the history:
• --for Roman historical plays, Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
• --For the English historical plays, chronicles of Edward Hall and Holinshed for the plays based upon English history.
• Some of the historical plays had been done before by other people, like King Lear and Henry V.
• Many of his plays have been lost (as mentioned in class)Shakespeare was a genius and likely had access to lots of books. He was obviously well read and used bits and pieces of lots of works, and made reference to lots in his works (like the Illiad, Montaigne, and many others contemporary and more ancient), including the Bible. (So the whole Job thing from Andrew's post would work)
• Even though he got the basic plot or idea from these many sources, he took plenty of literary licence and got rid of things that weren't dramatic enough and developed characters from "brief suggestions" from his source invented totally new characters to support the story as needed. He totally rearranged the plot for "more-effective contrasts of character, climaxes, and conclusions".

So the moral of the story is, we have good basis for doing a lost play, and having some little known fable from Africa or Greek myth or anything serve as the foundation for the plot is totally believable and in line with where Shakespeare actually got his material. We've just got to make it dramatic, and there's no problem with taking all the literary licence we need. Also, as an interesting side note and further support for the legitimacy of what we're doing, when I googled lost play, the majority of the things that popped up were about a lost Shakespeare play. If google thinks it's plausible, it really must be.