What could Shakspeare have done worse?
Terence has his "inceptio est amentium, non amanthim." Many similar instances will occur to the learned.

It is well known that Aristotle treats very seriously of puns, divides them into several classes, and recommends the use of them to orators.
A bad taste seizes with avidity these frivolous beauties, and even perhaps a good taste, ere surfeited by them: they multiply every day more and more in the fashionable compositions: nature and good sense are neglected: labored ornaments studied and admired: and a total degeneracy of style and language prepares the way for barbarism and ignorance.
Hence the Asiatic manner was found to depart so much from the simple purity of Athens: hence that tinsel eloquence which is observable in many of the Roman writers, from which Cicero himself is not wholly exempted, and which so much prevails in Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Martial, and the Plinys.
On the revival of letters, when the judgment of the public is yet raw and unformed, this false glitter catches the eye, and leaves no room, either in eloquence or poetry, for the durable beauties of solid sense and lively passion.

The reigning genius is then diametrically opposite to that which prevails on the first origin of arts.

The Italian writers, it is evident, even the most celebrated, have not reached the proper simplicity of thought and composition; and in Petrarch, Tasso, Guarini, frivolous witticisms and forced conceits are but too predominant.

The period during which letters were cultivated in Italy was so short, as scarcely to allow leisure for correcting this adulterated relish.
The more early French writers are liable to the same reproach.