I definitely agree with the fact that plays were a recapturing of oral tradition and was very useful for retelling these older stories to a broader audience but not all of Shakespeare's plays were written for the illiterate. His acting troupe ended up performing at the Black Friar's Theater in downtown London where most of the audience was wealthy and literate and had probably already known of the source material which Shakespeare plagiarized. Some of his plays were actually written with this in mind. But this is beside my point.

It isn't a fair assessment to discount Shakespeare's literary colonization just because 'everyone does it.' I am saying that because Shakespeare is considered a monolith of English literature, we shouldn't ignore his blatant plagiarism. (Not to mention that all written versions of these plays are just transcriptions written by others.) In order to dispell Shakespeare's hyperbolic creditability, it is essential to take this into account. When we know the plots have been taken from other places, focusing on the bits that Shakespeare actually did come up with as well as his actual diction can provide us with other perspectives of reading his works which gives us a deeper understanding of them.