Mark Antony, in Antony and Cleopatra, hears about Cleopatra's first appearance to him:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne / Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that / The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, / Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made / The water which they beat to follow faster, / As amorous of their strokes.1
It is one of the most beautiful passages in English literature. It is also Plutarch.
If you look at the Thomas North translation of Plutarch that was around in Shakespeare's time, you find essentially the same passage in prose form. Shakespeare took it. He tweaked it into iambic-pentameter verse. He added a great deal of alliteration. He sharpened the rhythm. And then he had one of the most quoted passages in his canon.
Forsyth: He's quite clearly taking from Plutarch. What he does really is he adds an awful lot of alliteration — which is another very clever thing because human beings love alliteration — and turns it into one of the most beautiful bits of poetry in the English language. But it's sort of stolen.1
The framing: He's like a thief who breaks into your house and tidies it up.1
Shakespeare's process here is paradigmatic, not aberrant. He worked from sources — Plutarch for the Roman plays, Holinshed for the English histories, Italian novellas for the comedies, sometimes existing playscripts for the tragedies. His originality is not at the level of plot or even of much of the dialogue. His originality is at the level of how he reshapes what he takes.
The reshaping has three moves visible in the Cleopatra passage:
Move 1 — Form-shift. Plutarch's prose becomes iambic pentameter. The semantic content is largely preserved; the kinesthetic vehicle becomes verse. The verse-form does work the prose could not do.
Move 2 — Sound-engineering. Alliteration is added. Burnished throne / Burned — the b's chain. Beaten gold — more b. Purple the sails, perfumèd — p's now. The alliteration was not in Plutarch; Shakespeare layered it on, and it is part of why the passage stays in cultural memory.
Move 3 — Rhythm-tightening. Iambic pentameter constrains; the discipline of the meter forces choices that prose did not. The constraint produces specific compressions and decisions that the looser prose form did not require.
Forsyth offers a smaller-scale demonstration of how sound-engineering works. Full fathom five thy father lies — the line from Ariel's song in The Tempest. Five f sounds in the first phrase. Memorable. Atmospheric.
Your father is 9.8 meters underwater means exactly the same thing. Doesn't work at all. Because it doesn't have the alliteration.1
Same semantic content. Different sound-architecture. The semantic-equivalent line dies; the alliteration-rich line lives. The alliteration is doing work no other element of the line is doing.
The Shakespeare-as-thief framing gives working writers two practical permissions:
Permission 1 — Take freely from sources. The originality is not in the content; the originality is in the reshaping. A writer who feels obligated to invent everything from scratch is operating under a constraint Shakespeare did not accept. Borrow plots; borrow images; borrow whole passages from non-copyrighted sources — and reshape them.
Permission 2 — Reshape via sound and form. The reshaping is not just paraphrase. The reshaping does specific kinesthetic work — adds alliteration, tightens rhythm, shifts register, fits to a stricter form. The transformation of Plutarch-prose into Shakespeare-verse is operationally what makes the borrowed material yours.
These permissions are operationally consequential for contemporary writers. The over-emphasis on originality-of-content in modern prose-craft pedagogy distracts writers from the reshaping-craft that actually distinguishes great writers from competent ones.
Forsyth and Macfarlane's relational-writing-methodology diverge on whether the writer's job is reshaping pre-existing material or generating from relational presence. Shakespeare reshaped Plutarch from his desk; Macfarlane writes from years of river-immersion. Both produce great prose, but the upstream activities are completely different. The split reveals two genuinely different theories of where writing comes from.
Forsyth converges with Karlsson's recognition that great writing is recombinant on the principle that originality is reshaping more than invention. Both writers refuse the romantic-genius framing of originality. Both insist that the work of the writer is to add specific value to material that already exists.
Shakespeare-as-thief maps onto two adjacent domains where the same reshape-rather-than-invent principle appears: creative-practice (the visual-arts collage and appropriation traditions) and business (the LLM-era debate about how derivative-but-reshaped work should be valued).
Creative-Practice (Visual Arts): Collage and Appropriation Art Tradition — 20th-century visual-art traditions (cubist collage; Rauschenberg combines; Sherrie Levine's rephotography) explicitly built their practice on appropriation-with-reshaping. The work is not original-content but is original-form-imposed-on-existing-content. Shakespeare's relationship to Plutarch is structurally identical. The visual-arts tradition gives writers a more developed vocabulary for thinking about reshape-as-creativity than the literary-tradition's romance-of-originality framing provides. The structural identity: both traditions recognize that creativity can live in transformation rather than in invention from nothing. The insight neither domain generates alone: writers who study collage and appropriation art can articulate what their own borrowing-and-reshaping is doing with a precision the originality-romance tradition does not offer.
AI-Collaboration: LLM Derivativeness as Craft Question — the contemporary debate about LLM-assisted writing often hinges on the question of whether derivative-but-reshaped work is valuable. The Shakespeare-as-thief framing reframes the question: derivative-but-reshaped is exactly how Shakespeare worked. The question is not whether the source-material is original but whether the reshaping is valuable. An LLM-assisted writer who reshapes LLM-generated content via specific sound-engineering, form-shift, and rhythm-tightening may be doing something structurally akin to what Shakespeare did with Plutarch. The structural identity: both situations require evaluating creative work by the reshape-quality rather than by the source-purity. The insight neither domain generates alone: the Shakespeare-as-thief framing offers a more historically-grounded way to think about LLM-assisted writing than the contemporary originality-purity discourse. It also raises a sharp question: what reshape-quality is sufficient to make LLM-assisted prose count as authored?
A third connection worth marking: Shakespeare-as-thief has structural similarity to Orlean's research-then-think-then-write method — both treat the gathering of material as a distinct phase from the reshaping that produces the work.
The Sharpest Implication
If Shakespeare's originality lived in reshape-craft (form-shift, sound-engineering, rhythm-tightening) more than in invention-of-content, then the contemporary prose-craft pedagogy's emphasis on original-content as the primary writer-virtue is operating under a romantic-tradition assumption that distorts how great writing actually gets made. The uncomfortable implication: writers who struggle to produce original content because they don't know what to write about may be looking for the wrong thing. The first move may not be generate original content but find rich material and reshape it. Shakespeare did not invent from nothing; he stole-and-tidied. Many great writers do the same. The originality-as-virtue framing has misdirected several generations of writers about where their craft-investment should go.
Generative Questions