To be sure, William Shakespeare had a unique talent for creating believable characters and settings, but he also drew from a wide range of historical sources to write his plays. Surveying such masterworks as Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard II, and Henry VIII, Dick Riley traces their origins in Plutarch; Suetonius, author of The Twelve Caesars; the English histories of Raphael Holinshed; and John Foxe, whose Book of Martyrs memorialized the struggles of English religious reformers.