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This denunciation of young William Shakespeare was a deranged polemic by a dying man, but actually it was not so far from the mark. If all writers are pickpockets, then Shakespeare was an inveterate "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles", like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. He swiped the best bits of Antony and Cleopatra (notably "The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water…") direct from Plutarch, and took 4,144 out of 6,033 lines in Parts I, II and III of Henry VI verbatim or in paraphrase from other authors. Apart from A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, the plots for all his plays were ruthlessly appropriated from other, often classical, sources.
There is evidence that Shakespeare was wounded by Greene's attack, but his heirs blithely followed his example. Milton cribbed from Masenius. Later, Laurence Sterne cribbed from Robert Burton, Samuel Coleridge from Schelling, and TS Eliot from all and sundry (in The Waste Land). JRR Tolkien borrowed heavily from the Norse sagas. Four hundred years later, the Darrieussecq--Laurens row is a stark reminder that plagiarism is one of literature's seven deadly sins, possibly its deadliest.
But why the fuss? Plagiarism is a puzzling vice. No writer, if he or she were honest about it, would ever deny that, when they come across a good thing in someone else's work, consciously or unconsciously they store it up for a rainy day. "Literature," the American journalist James Atlas likes to say, "is theft." He's right. The history of books and writing supports this provocative assertion to the hilt.
Virgil was once spotted scanning a volume of Quintus Ennius. Challenged on this, the great poet replied that he was merely "plucking pearls from Ennius's dunghill", a magnificent retort echoed in Eliot's "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal". No one today remembers poor old Ennius, and I've just lifted this anecdote from Anne Fadiman's essay on plagiarism, "Nothing New Under the Sun". Fadiman, in turn, probably inspired the novelist Jonathan Lethem to write "The Ecstasy of Influence", a magazine article on "cryptomnesia" in which, wittily, virtually every line was stolen, warped or cobbled together from other (acknowledged) sources.