The Pedant's Return
Why the Things You Think Are Wrong Are Right
Chapter One
Art and Literature
PLAYWRIGHT WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE STOLE HIS PLOTLINES
The tradesman's son who, in 1578, left school at the age of fourteen and who married at eighteen (after getting a local girl pregnant) is nowadays regarded as the greatest dramatist of all time. Therefore, as Andrew Dickson writing in The Rough Guide to Shakespeare says, "It can be a surprise to learn how much Shakespeare depended on sources and allegories for his plays and poems." John Michell, author of Who Wrote Shakespeare?, tells us that Shakespearean scholars have always admitted that "Shakespeare borrowed freely from contemporary as well as ancient authors." Said contemporaries of the up-and-coming playwright also noticed this tendency to borrow. One such was Ben Jonson, whom the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as the "second most important English dramatist" of the time. Jonson authored an epigram called On Poet-Ape that tells of a fellow writer who "would pick and glean, / Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown / To a little wealth, and ...
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