Shakespeare's Resources

Geoffrey Bulloughs The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75) established a vocabulary and a method for linking Shakespeares plays with a series of texts on which they were thought to be based. Shakespeares Resources revisits and interrogates the methodology that has prevailed since then and proposes a number of radical departures from Bulloughs 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. -- .