If this de minimis defense cannot prevail, then neither can defendants’ copious recital of omissions, variations and incidents foreign to both the play and the public domain. The simple handshake transformed on the screen to a heaving ejaculatory introduction between the leading couple is after all classic, in the vulgar sense, ‘Hollywood’ usage of a property assuming of course that the rights to the context of the handshake have first been secured, just as the picture’s entirely gratuitous rape scene is an excusatory contrivance for the obligatory nudity presumably contemplated in the female star’s seven figure contract. ‘Incident springs out of character, and having occurred it alters that character,’ writes the English novelist E M Forster, and ‘characters, to be real, ought to run smoothly, but a plot ought to cause surprise.’ Thus in the play we see plot emerging from character, whereas in the picture the characters are mere puppets of the plot, and defendants will prosper no better with reciting prolonged instances of the play’s dialogue which do not occur in the picture, than in pointing the accusing finger at plaintiff for his cavalier lifting of dialogue and even whole scenes from the works of Plato, for as elucidated by Judge Hand in Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures, supra: ‘Borrowed the work must indeed not be, for a plagiarist is not himself pro tanto an “author”; but if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, he would be an “author,” and, if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats’s. (Citations omitted.) True, much of the picture owes nothing to the play . . . but that is entirely immaterial; it is enough that substantial parts were lifted; no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate. We cannot avoid the conviction that, if the picture was not an infringement of the play, there can be none short of taking the dialogue.’