More Intelligent Life lays it out for you.
From the piece...
Golden Rule
Use other people’s material. Shakespeare was the rewrite man Hollywood can only dream of. Give him Plutarch’s 80-page essay on Mark Antony and he’ll give you the 3,500-line tragedy “Antony and Cleopatra”. He was unencumbered by modern anxieties of originality, only inventing the plot for “The Tempest” and one or two others. Unlike some rewrite men, he doesn’t tidy up the original, he untidies it. He takes plays with happy endings and leaves them ambivalent, he obscures motive (Coleridge wrote of Iago’s “motiveless malignity”) and adds seemingly extraneous characters and glancing scenes. He introduced 2,000 new words (“horrid”, “lonely”, “zany”) and many everyday phrases (“flesh and blood”, “cruel to be kind”). His work occupies an eighth of the “Oxford Dictionary of Quotations”.
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