Shakespeare's Resources
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2021
Language: eng
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9781526157867
Description: 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.