Biographical Similarities

So I found a decent website published by the Center for Faulkner Studies. It confirms that Shakespeare was a great influence on Faulkner's writing. Faulkner once said that "Shakespeare's work provides 'a casebook on mankind'. He also said "if a man has a great deal of talent he can use Shakespeare as a yardstick". Shortly before Faulkner's death he said that all writers "yearn to be as good as Shakespeare".

There is a great section of the article that discusses the biographical similarities between Will and Will.
"The parallels in the lives and careers of the two writers are remarkably striking. Both were born in provincial small towns but found their eventual success in metropolitan cities, Shakespeare in London and Faulkner in New York and Hollywood. Both had a great love of nature and the rural outdoors. Neither received a great deal of formal education. Both started out as poets but shortly turned to other narrative forms, Faulkner to fiction and Shakespeare to drama. Both had extramarital affairs that were reflected in some of their writings. Each wrote both tragedies and comedies, and in each case their final work was a comedy, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Faulkner’s The Reivers. A number of dominant themes and emphases are common to both writers, including the imaginative use of historical materials, the incorporation of both tragic and comic views of life, and the paradoxical tension between fate (in Faulkner’s case, determinism) and free will. Moreover, both writers exhibit a fascination for experimental form and language, flouting conventional rules to create new narrative structures and delighting in neologisms, puns, and other forms of word play. Finally, both writers were acutely interested in the paradoxical relationship of life and art."