ABSTRACT
Whatever William Shakespeare read or heard, he quoted, and people in turn started quoting his texts as soon as they were performed and published. The English books that Shakespeare read offered him unmediated access to authorship, content and phrasing, without the translations and adaptations that conditioned his perception of the Bible and the classics. Shakespeare got a lot of lively language out of Pierce Penniless but the most wonderful instance of how he appropriates and moderates Nashe’s crude, forceful phrases is an image that is neither Thomas Nashe’s nor Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist John Marston, the contemporary who quotes him most, was active as a writer for just one intense decade between studying law and taking holy orders. Shakespeare-as-Terence has a threefold identity. He is a borrower who uses Plautus and other sources, a writer who produces ‘sweet’ poetry and a lender who offers eminently quotable texts and ‘fine filed phrase’ to ‘new-composers’.
