Shakespeare's Resources

Geoffrey Bullough's The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75) established a vocabulary and a method for linking Shakespeare's plays with a series of texts on which they were thought to be based. Shakespeare's resources revisits and interrogates the methodology that has prevailed since then and proposes a number of radical departures from Bullough's model. The tacitly accepted linear model of 'source' and 'influence' that critics and scholars have wrestled with is here reconceptualised as a dynamic process in which texts interact and generate meanings that domesticated versions of 'intertextuality' do not adequately account for. The investigation uncovers questions of exactly how Shakespeare 'read', what he read, the practical conditions in which narratives were encountered and how he re-deployed earlier versions that he had used in his later work. Far from being a study of 'inert' material, the study of resources is dynamic, raising questions about traditional formulations of 'source' study as attempts to locate and reconstruct the plays form the 'bones' of earlier narratives.