Tolkien derived the characters, stories, places, and languages of Middle-earth from many sources. Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien was substantial, despite Tolkien's professed dislike of the playwright. Tolkien disapproved in particular of Shakespeare's devaluation of elves, and was deeply disappointed by Shakespeare's prosaic explanation of how Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane Hill in Macbeth. Tolkien was influenced especially by Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he used King Lear for "issues of kingship, madness, and succession". He arguably drew on several other plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part 1, and Love's Labour's Lost, as well as Shakespeare's poetry, for numerous effects in his Middle-earth writings. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien may even have felt a kind of fellow-feeling with Shakespeare, as both men were rooted in the county of Warwickshire.
Shakespeare as a source
Tolkien's dislike of Shakespeare
J. R. R. Tolkien, a philologist and medievalist as well as a fantasy author, recorded that he disliked William Shakespeare's work. In a letter, he wrote of his "bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays of the shabby use made in Shakespeare [in Macbeth] of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill'". He attributed his creation of a world containing tree-giants or Ents to this reaction, writing "I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war."
In another letter, Tolkien wrote that "I now deeply regret having used [the term] Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome."
The scholar of humanities Patrick Curry argues that what set Tolkien against Shakespeare was his "'denaturing' of Elves", his explaining away of their distinctive character. Curry was alluding to Angela Carter's analysis of the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare's wood is
Curry states that Middle-earth is exactly not like that "English wood". He quotes Carter's explanation that "Nineteenth-century nostalgia disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. Or rather, denaturing those beings until they came to look like those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Conan Doyle."
Tolkien, in other words, wanted Middle-earth to be full of the supernatural, with trackless woods full of powerful beings, such as Elves. In Curry's view, such a world has restored to it "the same sense of wonder that Keats experienced upon encountering Chapman's Homer", reconnecting to the ancient but living tradition of an almost forgotten England.
Tolkien's interest in Shakespeare
In his essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien cites three of Shakespeare's works, namely A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and King Lear, as of interest to the question of what a fairy-story actually is.
Both Macbeth and King Lear are tragedies that involve the supernatural as a necessary part of the action: in John Beifuss's view, in each case "the natural order is overthrown [by supernatural characters, theme, or imagery] and the consequences of this upsetting spread over all the action of the play". The Tolkien scholar Michael Drout writes that while Tolkien's professed dislike of Shakespeare is well-known, he was certainly influenced by Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and his use of King Lear for "issues of kingship, madness, and succession" was hardly surprising.
Plays
King Lear
The Tolkien scholar Michael Drout argues that the section of The Return of the King in which war comes to the land of Gondor, and its kingship comes into question, has a series of literary connections with Shakespeare's King Lear.