SIR WILLIAM TAKESPEARE

Bard 'pinched lines from rival poet'

- by AARON TINNEY

WILLIAM Shakespeare lifted some of his best lines from another poet, book sleuths claim.

They say a string of scribbled notes in the margins of a tome lost for centuries prove the Bard cribbed from Italian writer Dante.

Literary boffin Marianna Iannaccone found the copy of Dante's Divine Comedy in the British Library after a 10-year search. It was owned by John Florio a 16th Century Anglo-Italian writer and translator.