While Shakespeare’s works are a popular source for modern rifacimentos, many of the plays were themselves reworkings of old stories, newer works, and details of history. “King Lear” is a rifacimento of the anonymous 1594 comedy “The True Chronicle History of King Leir,” which told the story of the early King Leir of Britain. Even “Romeo and Juliet” was a rifacimento of Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet” (itself a rifacimento of an Italian story). In these cases, Shakespeare chose to emphasize elements of his own choosing — to develop and elevate characters that were perhaps marginal in the original text and to invent characters that didn’t previously exist.