@jasminetarkheena 

Does Romeo and Juliet have any similarities to Narnia?  Perhaps the language of the play itself is like the old fashioned language of Narnia in the characters’ medieval way of speaking. The dialogue in the plays is somewhat similar to Narnian English.  And Narnia has stories of people escaping hardships in countries where injustice is permitted. Or maybe Aravis is a kind of Juliet wishing to escape Calormen and help others to escape. People who like Narnia are often those who like these kind of stories which are similar to medieval fantasy and fairy tales. I wonder what would have happened if Narnia had a pair of tragic lovers.  It would have made the stories darker in tone, but of course Lewis usually would have preferred an uplifting ending.

@jasminetarkheena 

I'm sorry, but I'm surprised at a lot of your suggestions. Here are two straight off:

There are no fairies in a wood in The Silver Chair. There are Talking Beasts doing a choreographed snowball fight. It is far from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I'm afraid there is nothing about horses in Richard III - apart from the title character becoming unhorsed in the final battle. One line is not enough to parallel with two Talking Horses who are major characters in Horse & His Boy.

@narnian78 I actually didn't think about that one. Some of the dialogue in Narnia is similar to Shakespeare.  I guess you could make up a story about a Tarkaan and Tarkheena coming from different families who hate each other. 

@coracle I need to make some clarification. What I meant to say is that the Narnia woods are full of gods and goddesses dancing. It wouldn't be a surprise if Midsummer Night's Dream had gods and goddesses dancing in the woods.

I guess there could be some of The Winter's Tale, too. It's winter when The Silver Chair takes place.

@jasminetarkheena perhaps the most similar one to A Midsummer Night's Dream is the part of Prince Caspian where the girls are with Aslan when the trees and their inhabitants wake-up for a romp. 

It's very hard to match Shakespeare to Narnia, but there are certainly many elements in each that remind us of other. In the same way we can often see similarities between folklore of different countries. Perhaps an important part of it is our common humanity and how we live our lives in connection with others. 

@coracle I knew about Prince Caspian being similar to Hamlet. I actually didn't think about the romp where Aslan frees the school children and wakes the trees. 

The difference is that Miraz didn't marry his sister-in-law nor is there a ghost of Caspian IX telling Caspian X to take vengeance on Miraz. 

While both Othello and The Last Battle deal with manipulation, I don't think there is so much jealousy (unless you count Shift being jealous of King Tirian for having the right to rule Narnia or Rishda being jealous of King Tirian or or Shift or some other Calormene who is above him, if there was any). 

@jasminetarkheena  You mentioned The Winter's Tale earlier, along with The Silver Chair.
It's not the presence of winter that makes these two similar, but some of the plot. There are also elements of HHB.

In the play, a queen is accused of unfaithfulness, and her newborn daughter is taken away to another country by a lord who dies as they arrive. She grows up in a simple rural home with poor shepherds, not knowing she is a princess. Meanwhile the queen is kept hidden away from the king, who is told that the queen has died. Years later it is all resolved with the queen and the princess returning due to the efforts of others.
   

@coracle Oh yeah. Caspian X's queen is killed and Prince Rilian is hidden away (stolen by The Lady of the Green Kirtle).

I don't think there was ever a time that Prince Caspian wore black, like Hamlet (not that I can remember).

Unfortunately I would have to disagree with the entire thesis of this post - In fact, i would not only have to suggest that there are zero similarities between Narnia and Shakespeare, but there are actually many active dissimilarities.

Point 1 - The two most common themes in all of Shakespeare's plays are Love and Tragedy. By contrast, Narnia features zero romantic plots, and none of the stories could be described as Tragedies.

Point 2 - Shakespeare's plays are famous for being written in iambic pentameter. Narnia is not written in verse, and the few elements of poetry that do exist in the stories are not in iambic pentameter.

Point 3 - All of Shakespeares plays are notable for having a 5 Act structure. None of the Narnia stories follow a 5 Act Structure.

Point 4 - Almost all of the Narnia stories use quest/journey based narratives. To my mind none of Shakespeares plays do.

I think even if you were to just focus on the general notion of what people mean when they say that something is "Shakespearean", they generally mean it to be a story full of high drama, court intrigue, overwrought moments of emotion and portentous theatrically - particularly the use of soliloquies and other larger than life dialogue elements. All of which is diametrically opposed to the smaller, softer, more intimate nature of most of the Narnia stories.

Overall the Narnia stories do pull from a lot of diverse sources of inspiration, including real life histories, mythologies, and literature - however I would say with almost near certainty that Shakespeare is not one of those influences.

There are more similarities of Shakespeare’s plays and Narnia than one might think, although they may be less obvious. The Tempest had a retiring magician named Prospero, and he was somewhat like Ramandu and Coriakin in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream both had forests in their settings and I think there is a magical quality about the location of both plays which is something like Narnia. A lamppost would have been good as a part of the landscape of the Forest of Arden.  Lantern Waste was a woodland something like Shakespeare’s Arden.  My guess is that Arden was based on a real natural place which had a similar magic in its location.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream has more magic in it.  There is a magic like Narnia in many of the forests in our world, and that would include those which inspired Shakespeare to write his plays. It is like the forests we have here in Michigan in that there is a kind of enchantment about them. 🙂

I think the best conclusion is:

Lewis was very familiar with English literature (as well as the classics)  and had a photographic memory, so anything he wrote will have had elements in common with other literature across time and other countries. 

It would therefore be surprising if his stories did NOT remind readers of other work. 

But we would be incorrect to draw direct parallels with specific works by Shakespeare or other writers. 

I think another connection between Narnia and Shakespeare is Measure For Measure and The Last Battle. Both has the concept taking the name of God (or Aslan in Narnia's case) and use it for personal gain.

Shift keeps telling Puzzle and other Narnians, "This is the will of Aslan" or "This is what Aslan wants you to do". Angelo from Measure for Measure says things like, "This is the will of God" or "God wants me to do this".

And a concept like that actually happens in real life.

Posted by: @jasmine_tarkheena

I think another connection between Narnia and Shakespeare is Measure For Measure and The Last Battle. Both has the concept taking the name of God (or Aslan in Narnia's case) and use it for personal gain.

Shift keeps telling Puzzle and other Narnians, "This is the will of Aslan" or "This is what Aslan wants you to do". Angelo from Measure for Measure says things like, "This is the will of God" or "God wants me to do this".

And a concept like that actually happens in real life.

I feel like that and the other Shakespeare connections you've suggested are really big stretches. I mean that's a pretty generic theme. Probably lots of stories have that. 

Do you think maybe you're just seeing these things because you like both Narnia and Shakespeare so you feel there must be a connection between them? You can enjoy all kinds of stories, you know. They don't have to have themes and plot points in common.  

Posted by: @col-klink

I feel like that and the other Shakespeare connections you've suggested are really big stretches. I mean that's a pretty generic theme. Probably lots of stories have that. 

I guess you could say that. There are similarities as well as some differences. In a way, Shift and Rishda might be similar to Angelo, except for the lusting after the main heroine.

Posted by: @col-klink

Do you think maybe you're just seeing these things because you like both Narnia and Shakespeare so you feel there must be a connection between them?

There's no denying that William Shakespeare was a great play writer of the 15th or 16th century. Since C.S Lewis was a literary scholar, he would have known Shakespeare's plays well.

Posted by: @col-klink

You can enjoy all kinds of stories, you know. They don't have to have themes and plot points in common.

That is probably true. 

@jasmine_tarkheena 

You said,
There are similarities as well as some differences. In a way, Shift and Rishda might be similar to Angelo, except for the lusting after the main heroine.

Since this is the most significant thing that anyone remembers from that play, perhaps this was not a strong similarity.

English and other European literature of the last few centuries has a lot of cheats and hypocrites, especially men who misuse vulnerable women. This doesn't mean that any one writer has been inspired by any other writer. It means they have observed life, and have written about what they saw, either in sadness or with a desire to encourage better behaviour from the examples..