Among the many slurs directed at the playwright William Shakespeare, it is claimed he was a plagiarist. The Tempest, we are told, is his only truly original play. Robert Greene famously called Shakespeare “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”.
Plagiarism software has recently been used to analyse Shakespeare’s texts and has found, among other things, that he “borrowed” liberally from a book called A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels by George North.
“Shakespeare not only uses the same words as North, but often uses them in scenes about similar themes, and even the same historical characters,” explains the New York Times.
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