English Audio Request

Plagiarism: in the words of someone else… there's little new in literature
TS Eliot: 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.' Photograph: Al Gretz/Hulton Archive
When the French novelist Camille Laurens lost her son in childbirth in 1995, she responded with a moving account of her trauma, Philippe, which touched a nerve with her public. A few years later the infinitely more successful Marie Darrieussecq published a novel, Tom Est Mort, the story of a woman whose baby dies after a terrible birth agony. Laurens, in a fury, accused Darrieussecq of "psychological plagiarism". Ever since, these two writers have been at each other's throats, trading elevated Gallic insults, to the scandalised fascination of Paris.
In the latest twist, Darrieussecq has published not just another novel but a scholarly treatise about literary theft in general and Laurens in particular. Darrieussecq, who is also a psychoanalyst, claims that her rival was trying symbolically to "assassinate" her with accusations of plagiarism and that, unconsciously, she was exhibiting "a crazed desire to be plagiarised", a savage dig at the senior woman's faltering career.
All very thrillingly French, you might think, but you would be wrong. In the bitter history of plagiarism, there is an equally vicious exchange from the records of Elizabethan literary London that leaves Laurens and Darrieussecq very much in the slow lane.
In 1593 Robert Greene, a prominent playwright and braggart, the author of Orlando Furioso and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, was dying in penury at the age of 32. But before his inevitable rendezvous with the churchyard near Bedlam, in Bromley, Kent, he dashed off a pamphlet, A Groat's-worth of Wit Bought With A Million of Repentance, in which he settled some old scores.
Having accused Christopher Marlowe of atheism, Greene then turned his attention to the literary jack-of-all-trades whose outrageous success really stuck in his throat. This "rude groom" was not merely too full of himself ("in his conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country"), he was a provincial arriviste and inveterate plagiarist, "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers".