I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for
Shakespeare to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays
of Plautus made by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use
the Menaechmi as the model of The Comedy of Errors. He does not
borrow phrases from it, as he does from North's Plutarch.

Venus and Adonis owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple
patches, scattered in different parts of the Metamorphoses. Lucrece
is based on the then untranslated Fasti of Ovid. I do not think
Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for himself; or too
proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some poor young
University man in London. That is a simple and natural means by
which he could help himself when in search of a subject for a play or
poem; and ought not to be overlooked.

Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare's wide and
profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark: "Nothing
which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with
certainty that he read the Greek classics in the original, or even
that he possessed enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those
classics in the Greek text." {71a} In that case, how did
Shakespeare's English become contaminated, as Mr. Collins says it
did, with Greek idioms, while he only knew the Greek plays through
Latin translations?

However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove
Shakespeare's close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic
literature by a method of which he knows the perils--"it is always
perilous to infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may
be mere coincidences." {72a} Yet this method is what he practises