Was Shakespeare A Plagiarist?

If we could ask Christopher Marlowe, he might say “yes.” OTM’s Mike Pesca, however, argues that most readers today take an Elizabethan approach to intertexctuality:

“Plagiarism is constantly in the news these days, as it was in 2006 when Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life was exposed as less then original. But, as we know, claims of literary plagiarism go back centuries. So why do people still get so worked up about it? Mike Pesca reflects on the past, present and future of plagiarism.

Meanwhile, Slate editor Jack Shafer discusses the dirty dozen excuses for plagiarism cited by journalists who are caught out:

Slate editor-at-large Jack Shafer has been covering the plagiarism beat for some time and he’s found that throughout every scandal the excuses remain the same. On the heels of two plagiarism scandals last month, he talks about a list of twelve common plagiarism excuses he calls “the dirty dozen.”

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