"Borrowing"

Atlas Obscura recently posted an article about a potential Shakespearean source text: an unpublished work by a 16th century ambassador. Scholars are using the same anti-plagiarism software that colleges use to count the similarities between George North's 1576 treatise A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels and Shakespeare's Richard III and King Lear. Their conclusions are not definite, but there are enough similarities to indicate that Shakespeare probably would have been kicked out of English 101 for cheating, and with good reason.