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Rethinking Shakespeare
Source Study
This book asks new questions about how and why Shakespeare engages
with source material and about what should be counted as sources in Shake-
speare studies. The essays demonstrate that source study remains an indis-
pensable mode of inquiry for understanding Shakespeare, his authorship
and audiences, and early modern gender, racial, and class relations, as well
as for considering how new technologies have and will continue to redefine
our understanding of the materials Shakespeare used to compose his plays.
Although source study has been used in the past to construct a conservative
view of Shakespeare and his genius, the volume argues that a rethought
Shakespeare source study provides opportunities to examine models and
practices of cultural exchange and memory and to value specific cultures and
difference. Informed by contemporary approaches to literature and culture,
the essays revise conceptions of sources and intertextuality to include terms
like “haunting,” “sustainability,” “microscopic sources,” “contamination,”
“fragmentary circulation,” and “cultural conservation.” They maintain an
awareness of the heterogeneity of cultures along lines of class, religious affil-
iation, and race, seeking to enhance the opportunity to register diverse ideas
and frameworks imported from foreign material and distant sources. The
volume examines not only print culture, but also material culture, t heatrical
paradigms, generic assumptions, and oral narratives. It considers how digi-
tal technologies alter how we find sources and see connections among texts.
This book asserts that how critics assess and acknowledge Shakespeare’s
sources remains interpretively and politically significant; source study and
its legacy continue to shape the image of Shakespeare and his authorship.
The collection will be valuable to those interested in the relationships be-
tween Shakespeare’s work and other texts, those seeking to understand how
the legacy of source study has shaped S hakespeare as a cultural phenome-
non, and those studying source study, early modern authorship, implications
of digital tools in early modern studies, and early modern literary culture.
Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor in the Department of E

nglish
at the University of New Hampshire, USA.
Melissa Walter is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the

University of the Fraser Valley, Canada.
Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
24 Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse

Eleven Days at Newington Butts
Laurie Johnson
25 Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion

Edited By Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich
26 Shakespeare’s Suicides
Dead Bodies That Matter
Marlena Tronicke
27 The Fictional Lives of Shakespeare

Kevin Gilvary
28 Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Jonathan Goossen
29 Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference

Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World
Patricia Akhimie
30 Casual Shakespeare
Three Centuries of Verbal Echoes
Regula Hohl Trillini
31 Shakespearean Temporalities
History on the Early Modern Stage
Lukas Lammers
32 Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study

Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies
Edited by Dennis Austin Britton and Melissa Walter
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

Source Study
Audiences, Authors, and Digital
Technologies
Edited by
Dennis Austin Britton and
Melissa Walter
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-1-138-12307-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-64906-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study 1
Part I
Source Study, Sustainability, and Cultural Diversity 17
1 Toward a Sustainable Source Study 19

L ori H umphrey N ewcomb
2 Contaminatio, Race, and Pity in Othello 46

D ennis Austin B ritton
3 Translating Plautus to Bohemia: Ruzante, Ludovico

Dolce, and The Winter’s Tale 65
J ane T ylus
4 Veiled Revenants and the Risks of Hospitality:

Euripides’s Alcestis, Bandello, and Shakespeare’s Much
Ado About Nothing 90
S usanne L . Wofford
Part II
Sources and Audiences 125
5 Traces of Knowledge: Microsource Study in Cymbeline

and Lear 127
M eredith B eales
6 Reconstructing Holinshed: History and Romance

in Henry VIII 142
D imitry S enyshyn
vi Contents
7 Shakespeare’s Transformative Art: Theatrical Paradigms
as Sources in All’s Well that Ends Well and Macbeth 159
W. David K ay
Part III
Authorship and Transmission 181
8 Diachronic and Synchronic: Two Problems of Textual

Relations in The Comedy of Errors 184
K ent C artwri g ht
9 Greek Sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Rome: Titus Andronicus

and Iphigenia in Aulis 206
P enelope M eyers U sher
10 Multiple Materials and Motives in Two Gentlemen

of Verona 225
M eredith S kura
11 The Curious Case of Mr. William Shakespeare and the

Red Herring: Twelfth Night in Its Sources 238
M ark H oulahan
Part IV
Source Study in the Digital Age 251
12 Shakespeare Source Study in the Age of Google:

Revisiting Greenblatt’s Elephants and Horatio’s Ground 253
B rett Greatley- H irsch and L aurie J ohnson
13 “Tangled in a Net”: Shakespeare the Adaptor/

Shakespeare as Source 279
J anelle J enstad
14 Lost Plays and Source Study 297

David M c I nnis
Afterword 317
J ohn D rakakis
Index 327
Acknowledgments
Putting together a collection like this, based as it is on studying Shake-

speare’s sources and imbrication in intertextuality, brings into focus the
collaborative nature not only of this book but of all writing. We will
put aside our temptation to thank all writers and writing materials ever
to have existed, or the entire corps of Shakespeare scholars, living and
dead, and content ourselves with more recent sources. We are grate-
ful for the conviviality of Shakespeare Association of America (SAA)
meetings, where this collection originated in a conversation between
Dennis and Melissa between sessions at SAA Bellevue, WA (2011). We
thank the members of the SAA seminar on “Shakespeare and the New
Source Study” (Toronto, 2013). Curtis Perry’s early and ongoing sup-
port has been invaluable; he was a respondent for this seminar and has
provided input regarding the manuscript of this book as well. We are
likewise grateful to Ian Smith for comments on the proposal for this
SAA seminar. Dennis would like to thank his early modern colleagues
at University of New Hampshire, Douglas Lanier, Rachel Trubowitz,
and Reginald A. Wilburn. Melissa would like to thank the members of
the Theatre Without Borders group, whose thinking on transnational
theater has been formative for her. She is also grateful to the Office of
Research and Graduate Studies and the College of Arts at the University
of the Fraser Valley. We would both like to thank Susanne Wofford for
welcoming us so strongly to early modern studies. We are grateful to
the anonymous readers at Routledge whose comments helped shape the
final copy of this collection. Thank you also to Liz Levine for her initial
interest in the work, and to Andrew Weckenmann, Timothy Swenarton,
Assunta Petrone, and Kyle Madigan for their editorial work and produc-
tion support. Many thanks to John Drakakis for his enthusiasm about
the collection and for writing the afterword. Finally, we offer our sincere
gratitude to the wonderful contributors to this volume whose work has
inspired and enlivened us.
Notes on Contributors
Meredith Beales is completing a monograph on Early Modern medievalism

and the place of British antiquity on the Tudor and Stuart stage; her es-
say in the present collection is drawn from her work on Cymbeline and
antiquity. She is currently teaching at the University of British Columbia
in Vancouver.
Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor of English at the University
of New Hampshire. His published work examines early modern
English encounters with Spaniards, Muslims, and Jews—exploring
in particular the connections between race and religion in the for-
mation of national identity. In addition to a variety of journal ar-
ticles and book chapters, he is the author of Becoming Christian:
Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2014), a study of literary represen-
tations of non-Christian to Christian conversion, emerging ideas of
racial difference, and Reformation theology in the works of Spenser,
Harington, Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Massinger. He is currently
working on a monograph, tentatively entitled “Shakespeare and Pity:
Emotion, Human Difference, and Early Modern English Drama.”
Kent Cartwright is Professor of English at the University of M aryland.
He is the author of Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the
Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
and other works; the editor of A Companion to Tudor L iterature
(London: Blackwell, 2010); and the editor of The Comedy of Errors,
Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Profes-
sionally, he has served as department chair, trustee of the Shakespeare
Association of America, and president (2015) of the Association of
Departments of English. He is currently working on a book on Shake-
speare’s comedies.
John Drakakis is Emeritus Professor at the University of Stirling, and
currently visiting professor at the University of Lincoln. He is the ed-
itor of the Arden 3 Merchant of Venice and is the general and con-
tributing editor of the revision of Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic
x Notes on Contributors
Sources of Shakespeare (forthcoming). He has published widely on
Shakespeare, and was the editor of Alternative Shakespeares (1985).
He is also the general editor of the New Critical Idiom series, and a
member of the editorial boards of a number of international scholarly
journals. Most recently he has jointly edited with Dale Townshend and
contributed to the Arden Critical Reader volume on Macbeth (2013),
and contributed chapters to collections of essays on Shakespeare and
Greece (2017) and Shakespeare and Italy (2017). He has received an
Honorary Fellowship from Glyndwr Wrexham University, and an
Honorary D.Phil from The University of Clermont-Auvergne. He is
also an elected Fellow of the English Association.
Brett Greatley-Hirsch is University Academic Fellow in Textual Studies
and Digital Editing at the University of Leeds. He is Coordinating
Editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, co-editor of the journal
Shakespeare, and a trustee of the British Shakespeare Association.
His recent publications include Style, Computers, and Early M odern
Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017; with Hugh Craig), and essays for The New Oxford Shakespeare:
Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 2017), The
Shakespearean World (New York: Routledge, 2017), and The Cam-
bridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016). His current projects include an edition of
Hyde Park for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley, an elec-
tronic critical-performance edition of Fair Em (with Kevin Quarmby),
and a quantitative literary history of Renaissance play-editions for the
Arden Shakespeare Studies in Language and Digital Methodologies
series.
Mark Houlahan teaches Shakespeare and Theory at the University
of Waikato, Hamilton New Zealand, where he is Convenor of the
English Programme. Most recently, he has co-edited the essay collec-
tion Shakespeare and Emotions (2015) with Bob White and Katrina
O’Loughlin, and with David Carnegie, two editions of Twelfth Night
for the Internet Shakespeare Editions and the Internet Shakespeare/
Broadview series. His chapter here is an outgrowth of those editions
and is part of a larger project on Shakespeare’s infinite variety with
his “sources.”
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Victoria and Executive Director and Coordinating Platform Editor of
the Internet Shakespeare Editions (internetshakespeare.uvic.ca). She
founded and directs The Map of Early Modern London (mapoflon-
don.uvic.ca). With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she
co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She
has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML
Notes on Contributors xi
and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice for the ISE. Her ar-
ticles have appeared in Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary
Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and
The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed
chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early
Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture
in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the
Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England
(Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early
Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Making Humanities
Matter (Minnesota); and Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating
Gazetteers (Indiana). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Laurie Johnson is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the
University of Southern Queensland, Australia and current Presi-
dent of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association.
He is the author of Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse: Eleven Days at
Newington Butts (2018), The Tain of Hamlet (2013), and The Wolf
Man’s Burden (2001), as well as editor of Embodied Cognition
and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (with
John Sutton and E velyn Tribble, 2014) and Rapt in Secret Studies:
Emerging Shakespeares (with Darryl Chalk, 2010). He is on the edi-
torial board of the journal Shakespeare and has published numerous
articles and book chapters on Cultural History, Cyber Studies, Ethics,
Literary Theory, Phenomenology, Shakespeare Studies, Theater His-
tory, and other related areas.
W. David Kay is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illi-
nois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Ben Jonson: A Literary
Life (London: Macmillan, 1995), the editor of John Marston’s The
Malcontent for the New Mermaids (London: A & C Black, 1998),
and the co-editor, with Suzanne Gossett, of Chapman, Jonson, and
Marston’s Eastward Ho! for The Cambridge Edition of The Complete
Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian
Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
He is currently at work on a study of Jonson’s major comedies.
David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the
University of Melbourne. He is author of Mind-Travelling and Voyage
Drama in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2013), co-editor
with Claire Jowitt, of Travel and Drama in Early Modern England:
The Journeying Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
and is editing Dekker’s Old Fortunatus for the Revels Plays series. With
Matthew Steggle, he edited Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (New
York: Palgrave, 2014), and he is currently preparing a second co-edited
collection (Lost Plays and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time)
xii Notes on Contributors
and a monograph on lost plays. With Roslyn L. Knutson and Matthew
Steggle, he is founder and co-editor of the Lost Plays Database.
Lori Humphrey Newcomb is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She studies the readers of early modern
print, especially drama and prose romance. She has considered the rela-
tionship between plays and prose sources in Reading Popular Romance
in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);
“The Sources of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Patterns
of the Pericles Tales,” in Staging Early M
odern Romance, ed. Mary
Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (New York: Routledge, 2009); “Prose
Fiction,” The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writ-
ing, ed. Laura L. Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009); “A Looking Glass for Readers: Cheap Print and the Senses of
Repentance,” Writing Robert Greene, ed. Kirk Melnikoff and Edward
Gieskes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); and “Literary Restoration: Francis
Kirkman and the Canons of Pre-War Drama and Romance,” Analytic
and Enumerative Bibliography 12.3–4 (2001).
Dimitry Senyshyn’s research focuses on intertextuality, genre, and
reception in early modern English theatre. He has co-edited an
old-spelling edition of The True Tragedie of Richard the Third for
Queen’s Men Editions and the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and
is currently co-editing a modern-spelling edition of Sir Clyomon
and Sir Clamydes. He contributed to the preparation of the REED
Inns of Court volume, and he has published in Theatre Research
in Canada, Early Theatre, and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and
its Reception.
Meredith Skura is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English at Rice
University. She is the author of The Literary Use of the P
sychoanalytic
Process (1981), Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing
(1993), and Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (2008),
as well as articles on early modern literature and culture.
Jane Tylus is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature
at New York University and General Editor of I Tatti Studies in the
Italian Renaissance. Her recent work includes Siena, City of S ecrets
(Chicago, 2015) and with Karen Newman, the co-edited Early
Modern Cultures of Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2015). She is currently working on a book-length project
entitled “Saying Goodbye in the Renaissance” as well as on a transla-
tion of Dacia Maraini’s Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza.
In recent years she has been a visiting professor at the Scuola Normale
Superiore in Pisa, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, and Yale University.
Penelope Meyers Usher is a doctoral candidate in English at New York Uni-
versity. Her dissertation, “Violent Metamorphosis: The I ndeterminate
Notes on Contributors xiii
Body in Early Modern English Tragedy,” explores tragic corporeality
and the ways in which bodies are made indeterminate and unrecogniz-
able by violence. Her most recent publications are “Pricking in Virgil:
Early Modern Prophetic Phronesis and the Sortes Virgilianae,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.3 (2015): 557–71; and “‘I
Do Understand Your Inside’: The Animal Beneath the Skin in Webster’s
Duchess of Malfi,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 30
(2017): 557–71. Her research interests include: classical reception, vio-
lence, anatomy and dissection, guts, and gore.
Melissa Walter is Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Val-
ley in Abbotsford, British Columbia, located on the unceded lands of
the Stó:lō people. Her research has focused on early modern drama
and prose fiction in a transnational perspective, especially Shake-
speare and the Italian novella. She is editing The Two Gentlemen of
Verona for Internet Shakespeare Editions. In addition to articles on
early modern prose fiction and drama, she has published on concepts
of translation in The Dialogues in the English and Malaine Lan-
guages (1614) and Fletcher’s Island Princess.
Susanne L. Wofford is the Dean of the Gallatin School and Professor of
English at NYU. She is a cofounder of the Theater Without Borders
International Research Collaborative and has served as the Presi-
dent of the Shakespeare Association of America and on the boards
of the International Spenser Society, the Consortium of Humanities
Centers and Institutes, as well as on MLA Executive committees.
Her research interests include Shakespeare, Spenser, and Renaissance
Epic and comparative European drama. Her current work focuses
on Shakespeare and European drama and on the influence of ancient
drama on the dramatic traditions of Early Modern Europe. Publica-
tions include: The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the
Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Epic Traditions in
the Contemporary World: The Politics of Community (co-ed. Jane
Tylus) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Shakespeare:
The Late Tragedies (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1995); and
Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1994). Recent articles include: “Hymen and the Gods
on Stage in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Italian Pastoral,” in
Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ash-
gate, 2014); “Foreign Emotions in Twelfth Night,” in Transnational
Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), both
co-edited by Henke and Nicholson; and “Foreign” in 21st Century
Approaches to Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Source Study
Shakespeare criticism of the past thirty years has often suggested—

sometimes implicitly, and at other times very explicitly—that source
study is old fashioned and no longer useful. Following the death of the
author and the illness of the New Bibliography, scholars working on
early modern drama in particular were generally more interested in dis-
courses of power than in questions of authorship and literary produc-
tion. Whereas some critics of epic and lyric poetry found ways to use the
study of imitation to explore political or cultural topics such as imperial
ideology and gender, even as other scholars of these genres maintained
a more culturally conservative stance and focused solely on issues of
literary transmission, Shakespeare scholars rarely seized opportunities
to discuss sources, literary production, and power relations in the same
conversation.1 In addition, the New Historicism and cultural studies led
some scholars to focus their analysis on culture and texts at a given mo-
ment, rather than tracing the relationships of texts through time. The
tide is changing, however, revealing that Shakespeare source study is
neither dead nor a thing of the past. The forthcoming new edition of
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, first edited by Geoffrey
Bullough (1957–75), suggests that sources are of interest once again. 2
Recent work provides new models for bringing together what might be
considered an “old source study” and more contemporary approaches to
textual and cultural analysis.3 Meanwhile, databases and digital tools
are making more texts available; technology is allowing us to access
many more and potentially not-yet-recognized sources to find new con-
nections among texts and to think anew about our methodologies and
practices.4 And lately, scholars of drama are recognizing that attention
to sources is not incompatible with investigations of power relations;
scholars are exploring the intersections of early modern political, gen-
dered, sexual, and racial subjectivities, conditions of theatrical practice,
and the materials from which Shakespeare produced his plays. 5
The assumption that the study of sources must indicate an approach
to Shakespeare, language, and culture that is outdated or incompatible
with contemporary cultural inquiries is thus out of step with much cur-
rent practice. Nevertheless, what a source is, the varying relationships
between Shakespeare’s works and others’, and the cultural politics in
which Shakespeare source study emerged in the first place need further
theorizing.6 The authors of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study at-
tempt to address this lack. Collectively, we assert that how critics assess
and acknowledge sources remains interpretively and politically signifi-
cant; source study and its legacy continue to shape the image of Shake-
speare and his authorship that our profession constructs. Essays in this
collection attend to the implications of how and why Shakespeare en-
gages other texts, articulate theoretical lacunae in previous approaches
to source study and offer new models, introduce new sources for
Shakespeare’s plays, rethink questions of literary transmission and the-
atrical production, and consider the implications of digital tools and the
possibility that they will reveal a vast number of sources. The essays also
invite scholars to think more precisely about the varying textures of the
relationships between Shakespeare’s works and other texts.
Returning to the Sources: Authorship,

Audience, Cultural Diversity
When considering sources, we should agree with King Lear that “nothing
can come from nothing.”7 Shakespeare’s plays do not come into b eing ex
nihilo, but rather are created from the generative words, images, stories,
and theatrical conventions that came before them. Catherine Belsey re-
vives our attention to the fact that Shakespeare’s works
are derivative in one significant way or another. How could it be oth-

erwise? Writing, any writing, is unthinkable outside the existence of
shared conventions of storytelling or staging, genre and decorum,
not to mention the language itself in which they are intelligible. In
that sense, all writing finds its origins somewhere else and its limited
originality resides in its difference from what has gone before.8
Uncontroversial as any of this seems, scholars interested in sources

have had to address the critical antipathy toward source study; Stephen
Greenblatt’s and Harold Bloom’s statements about source study—calling
it and those who look for sources, respectively, “the elephant’s grave-
yard of literary history” and “those carrion-eaters of scholarship”—are
infamous.9
More recently, critics have argued that both Greenblatt and Bloom were
doing source study without acknowledging it. In response to Greenblatt
in particular, Douglas Bruster writes, “Frequently depending on source
study, the New Historicism is a version of this methodology,” and sug-
gests that Greenblatt’s “‘Shakespeare and the Exorcist’ is what source
study looks like after Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams,
and Pierre Bourdieu.”10 In her discussion of Shakespeare’s sources in
criticism dealing with race and colonialism, Ania Loomba also describes
the relationship between the New Historicism and source study:
Rather than something that distilled and transcended its sources,

the literary text began to be understood as existing in a similar
plane and in dialogue with other historical and cultural materials.
It thereby became a source for understanding history and culture.
For self-avowedly political critics, to think about literature thus was
to expand its contours and importance, while for opponents this
approach devalued the unique properties of literary utterance….
Nowhere was this more evident than when issues of race and co-
lonialism began to be raised. Could early modern images of Native
Americans be considered sources for The Tempest?11
Loomba importantly notes that the methodology of source study was

instrumental to critics interested in race and colonialism, turning as they
often did to early modern travel writing.
Yet it is important to note that the “self-avowedly political critics”
usually aligned themselves with the New Historicism and rarely if ever
admitted that they were doing a type of source study. In part, the rejec-
tion of source study was based on the notion that its frequent or tradi-
tional goal was to find what material Shakespeare used so as to portray
Shakespeare’s unique genius.12 As various essays in this collection show,
however, source study acknowledged as such does not need to ignore pol-
itics and power relations. In fact, there has been a strand of source study
that seeks to value the “source” texts and is interested in power since at
least the eighteenth century, even though it has had a slightly intermittent
history: a very early English compiler of S hakespeare’s sources, Charlotte
Lennox, argued in her Shakespear Illustrated (1753) that Shakespeare
often made changes for the worse to his sources. L ennox encouraged the
reading of the novellas and romances on which Shakespeare based many
of his plays, and she defended women’s dignity and criticized the plau-
sibility of Shakespeare’s female characters according to the Augustinian
standards of her time.13 We believe, nonetheless, that there is still much
more to say about the role of source study in Shakespeare criticism. The
chapters of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study ask us to think more
self-consciously about the relationship between current work in source
study and that which has come before, about what can be considered
a source and why, and about questions of authorship, literary trans-
mission, and the heterogeneity of early modern literature and culture.
Collectively, the authors of this collection t herefore acknowledge our
indebtedness to both older work, like Bullough’s, and recent work, like
that of Belsey, Bruster, and Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith in “What
is a Source,” that is uncovering with some precision S hakespeare’s vari-
ous modes of engaging sources.14
But why draw special attention to problems surrounding Shakespeare
source study? After all, one might question whether Shakespeare’s uses of
sources are different in any quantifiable way from, say, Marlowe’s. While
scholars have certainly considered the sources of plays like Dido, Queen
of Carthage and Doctor Faustus, they tend to do so without trepidation.
It is primarily when dealing with Shakespeare’s plays that scholars find the
need to justify doing source study. Some scholars may do so to avoid being
associated with conservative, “old fashioned” approaches to literary study,
but anxieties about investigating Shakespeare’s sources are also tied to con-
cerns about promoting Shakespeare’s exceptionalism. Although it seems
unlikely that today many scholars of early modern English literature would
openly proclaim that Shakespeare is better than all the rest, early modern
English literary studies—our publications, journals, and conferences—are
nevertheless primarily devoted to Shakespeare. Unwittingly, perhaps, our
anxieties about S hakespeare source study are linked to our inability (or
unwillingness) to divorce our current understandings of Shakespeare from
the long history of what Shakespeare has “stood” for: the quintessential
genius, the greatest writer in English, and England and Englishness. His
writings have been considered metonymic of literature and the humanities
themselves, having been called a “secular scripture”15 and even credited
with inventing the “self” and “the human.”16 These types of claims have
been used at various points on the political spectrum, from conservative
humanist and imperialist arguments,17 to feminist psychoanalytic read-
ings,18 to post-colonial critiques, to approaches that apply liberal human-
ist notions of rights and selfhood to all people, to post-structuralist and
post-humanist analyses.19 It seems impossible at this point to disentangle
Shakespeare from all that he has come to stand for.
Yet it is precisely because Shakespeare continues to stand for so many
things that attention to his sources becomes so important. How we
understand Shakespeare and his relationship to source materials can
help us rethink Shakespearean and early modern dramatic production;
it replaces the image of Shakespeare as solitary literary English genius
with that of a playwright who is much more collaborative, much more
transnational in his interests, much more engaged with his audience, and
much more engaged with the diversity of cultural texts and ideologies.
A return to source study can facilitate rather than impede attempts to
rethink the politics of Shakespeare’s exceptionalism; a rethought source
study can help revise our vision of Shakespeare.
“The Return of the Author” is, indeed, one reason why source study
has returned to the forefront of Shakespeare studies. 20 Shakespeare
scholars remain interested in Shakespeare’s processes of composition
and the writer’s “intention,” however difficult they may be to recover. Of
course, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsly’s “Intentional F allacy”
and Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” have argued for the impos-
sibility of knowing the intention of any author. Additionally, speaking
of Shakespeare’s intentions presents challenges because discussions of
authorial intention often rely on making links between an author’s biog-
raphy and his or her literary production; with so much of Shakespearean
biography being speculative in nature, delving into Shakespearean inten-
tion may seem like a ridiculous enterprise.21 Yet, as David Schalkwyk
suggests, thinking of intention “As a heuristic notion that shapes but
does not seek to govern interpretation … may well be useful, and as a
way of deciding which signifiers an author wished to use, it may even be
indispensable.”22
At the intersection of biography and authorial intention, recent work
by Lynn Enterline and Janet Clare, for example, reminds us that imitation
was an essential part of the grammar school education that we believe
Shakespeare received. 23 Their work allows us to consider how the early
modern educational system and the cultural practices of translation, the
keeping of commonplace books, and the retelling of well-known stories
influenced creative processes.24 Arguing that source study can help us
understand Biblical allusions in Shakespeare, Hannibal Hamlin offers
that “The precise intentions of an author may be ultimately unknow-
able, as epistemologists tell us, but we can at least approach such knowl-
edge by studying how an author has used and adopted other works in
creating their own.”25 Attention to intention, then, allows us to consider
that authors choose some signifiers and sources and not others, and it
allows us to examine the significances of those choices.
Several essays in this collection engage issues of intention or attempt
to imagine the composition process. As they do so, they take a first step
in fulfilling what Bullough hoped would be an outcome of his invaluable
gathering of sources; he hoped that source study would “help us appre-
ciate Shakespeare’s craftsmanship or methods of composition.”26 These
essays also add to the existing vocabulary that attempts to define the
varying relationships between one text and another.
This collection focuses on Shakespeare’s drama rather than his
poetry, partly because the plays are where the majority of the energy of
Shakespeare studies is expended, but also because Shakespearean dra-
ma’s combination of plot, poetry, and personation before a live audience
complicates what has traditionally been understood as a source. Drama,
an oral art and embodied practice that leaves some textual traces, is
“transmitted by other than merely textual means,” raising questions of
evidence and creating uncertainty and thus space for interpretation. 27
Although poetry coteries and print publication of prose and poetry in-
volved some collaboration as well as co-authorship or murky authorship,
early modern playmaking was arguably a more deeply collaborative
practice, and therefore it creates a more complex picture of both the
identities of authors and their processes of composition.
For Shakespeare source study, the playwright’s authorship and modes
of composition cannot be separated from audience; the success of a
commercial theater is inextricably tied to its audience enjoying and un-
derstanding its plays. Oral culture formed a significant knowledge base
for both Shakespeare and his audiences, and attending to sources that
were communicated orally can enhance our understanding of cultural
dynamics in Shakespeare’s plays. For instance, once scholars acknowl-
edge that many members of the audience of The Merchant of Venice
knew both the correct casket and Portia’s rhetorical trick for defeat-
ing Shylock via folktales, they gain new clarity about the way the play
indulges some audience members’ “sense of mastery at the expense
of cultural outsiders.”28 Recent changes in how scholars understand
Shakespeare’s audiences, their heterogeneity, and what they may and
may not know are relevant to twenty-first century source study, as schol-
ars continue to consider the interplay between what Shakespeare does to
source material and what audiences may already know about a source.
It is important to keep well in mind the heterogeneity of early modern
audiences, which were composed of people with a diversity of back-
grounds, literacies, and religious and political convictions.
Given the importance of oral culture for Shakespeare’s audiences, per-
haps an element of a more capacious approach to source study could be
the willingness to be less beholden to positivism and entertain sources
for which there is no evidence of textual transmission. We mention this
even as digital tools increase the likelihood that material links can be
traced. With or without big data, a suspicion that there must be a source
for a particular dramatic phenomenon can lead to a recovery of new
material details. Louise George Clubb’s work on theatergrams, for ex-
ample, has led to renewed attention to and assessment of the significance
of the mobility of actors, language teachers, and books in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, including, for instance, the evidence of ac-
tors, including the well-known Italian actor Drusiano Martinelli and the
English clown Will Kemp, travelling between Italy and England. 29 This
work reminds us that sources are not only textual but also dramaturgi-
cal, circulated among theater practitioners.
We thus hold that theatrical conventions should also be included in
our concept of source. This insight builds on the work of Clubb and
William N. West; West has suggested that theater is “made out of other
performances … belonging to a horizontally organized repertoire, never
completed and slowly changing.”30 Thinking about Shakespeare’s plays
in terms of intertheatricality means acknowledging the ways in which
a play exists as a shifting process and an assemblage of parts and set
pieces, rather than a fixed thing, and acknowledging how its meanings
and effects shift with audience experiences and knowledges. Several
authors in this collection focus on theatrical contexts and investigate
changing elements that make up plays, although the collection remains
primarily focused on the unit of “the play.”
Related to the issue of what can be counted as a source, Robert M
iola
includes the “source remote” and the “indirect influence of traditions” in
his “Seven Types of Intertextuality,” a catalogue of ways in which texts
may connect.31 In Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of S hakespeare’s
Sources, Stuart Gillespie usefully broadens what can be considered a
source. He argues that “a source can be derived from ‘scenic form, the-
matic figuration, rhetorical strategy, structural parallelism, ideational or
imagistic concatenation’ as well as more straight-forward kinds of ‘verbal
iteration.’”32 While Gillespie retains a focus on literary texts, if we require
evidence of textual transmission we may miss important oral sources
and elements such as theatrical paradigms or generic assumptions that
are key to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences’ understandings
of plays, and therefore, possibly, to Shakespeare’s process of composi-
tion.33 In addition, we may miss opportunities to register diverse ideas
and frameworks imported from foreign material and distant sources. Yet
a willingness to look beyond evidence of textual transmission does not
mean that we should jettison scholarly attention to practices of transmis-
sion; doing so would mean ignoring the material reality of past cultures.34
As the essays in the final section of this collection show, digital databases
and search technologies are among the tools we now have for seeking
material evidence of practices of transmission. Search technologies have
so significantly increased our ability to see links between Shakespeare’s
works and other texts that the questions surrounding source study—
especially those concerning issues of transmission and what counts as a
source in the first place—have a new type of urgency.
Choosing what counts as a source, nonetheless, is always an interpretive
and political act.35 We are forced to confront the impossibility of identify-
ing a true ur-source,36 and we realize that any statement about origin or
source is also a claim about Shakespeare’s works. As Gregory Macachek
notes, cultural systems “cannot be fully understood synchronically. Part
of what cultures do is select from among the works that were valued in the
past, assign contemporary significance to these works, and pass them on
to the next generation.”37 Source study should include within its purview
not only the fact of a source being rewritten or responded to in a new text,
but also a critical awareness of this process of selection; it should consider
why particular stories are retold in the first place, even as it acknowledges
that the critic’s identification of one text rather than another as a source
is subject to the process of selection that Macachek describes. What does
it mean to say, for example, that the Bible is a source for Shakespeare’s
plays? Why not also discuss the language that translators of the Bible drew
upon in establishing early English Bibles, or the narrative or mythic struc-
tures that writers of the Gospels employed? As Miola notes,
The Bible, its stories, and its language passed into common currency
of knowing, thinking, speaking, and writing by ubiquitous refer-
ence, allusion, quotation, proverb, ballad, hymn, broadside, treatise,
polemic, pictorial representation (in tapestry, stained glass, paint-
ing, and sculpture), mediation, and circulation. 38
But we might also wish to consider the import of claiming that a text
like the Bible is one of Shakespeare’s sources for the way it either may
include or exclude potential readers and audiences—relevant when we
acknowledge that the language of the Bible is not universally shared
among present-day readers and audiences of Shakespeare’s plays. It is at
this point that the explication of Biblical links in Shakespeare becomes
informative yet nevertheless politically charged.
Contemporary source study does not assume that the meaning of
Shakespeare’s text is determined in a quasi-allegorical manner by its
sources. It is wise to consider types of relationships between texts as
well as instances where one author draws on another.39 Nevertheless,
different interpretative and political effects result from identifying the
Bible, or Virgil, or Boccaccio, for instance, as a source for a play rather
than, say, identifying a broadsheet ballad as a source. Popular forms
of culture, such as ballads and pamphlets that early modern audiences
would have been familiar with, need to be recognized as important
sources. Source study thus might also consider the intracultural and in-
terclass relations that are imbedded in the relationship between source
texts and Shakespeare plays. Doing so likely also means acknowledging
that early modern “high” and “low” culture often were not separate (for
instance, consider the reading of jestbooks by elite men and women) and
abandoning—once and for all—the assumption that Shakespeare drew
only on “high” culture.40
Source study also requires intercultural analysis, whether to under-
stand ways in which early modern theater is “foreign” or to better under-
stand the context of Shakespeare’s sources. As Susanne L. Wofford has
argued, “transportation of intercultural knowledge” can occur without
authorial agency or knowledge; as well, sometimes audiences may receive
foreign cultural practices without recognizing them as such, contributing
to the ways in which theater is both foreign and local or of the self.41 In-
tercultural analysis can also change our understanding of S hakespeare’s
authorship, as understanding sources in their own contexts can help us
avoid misrepresenting both their significance and Shakespeare’s act of
authorship. For instance, as Karina F. Attar points out, many an edition
and article has mentioned or included the tale of Disdemona and the
Moor, tale 3.7 of the Hecatommithi by Giambattista Giraldi (known
as Cinthio) as a source for Othello; yet the general consensus of many
studies is that Shakespeare rewrites “a vicious morality tale into a trag-
edy that acknowledges the issues of race, place, and gender.”42 By read-
ing Cinthio’s tale in the context of the novella tradition, especially the
representation of Moors and of interracial couples, and by acknowledg-
ing the interplay between the story, its introductory narrative, and its
framing letter, Attar arrives at quite a different conclusion; she shows
how the novella is already subverting expectations about race and gen-
der. When we understand Cinthio’s tale in context, we see Shakespeare’s
authorship differently; we see it as building incrementally on the novella
rather than as a radically more complex act of social and psychological
characterization. Close and careful reading of sources means reading
with understanding of their original contexts, which may themselves be
multilayered, as well as with awareness of potential gaps in transmissions
of contexts.43 The authors of this collection are most certainly interested
in Shakespeare, but believe that attempts to understand Shakespeare can
proceed in a way that decolonizes source texts and Shakespeare’s au-
thorship from the hegemony of Shakespeare-as-unique-genius.
Source study, then, has the potential to help foster the sustainability
of early modern literary and cultural diversity. Thomas R. Adams and
Nicolas Barker ask us to consider that “work that does not survive will
not be read again and thus will not be written again”—and it will be
lost to human understanding.44 Or, using the terminology popularized
by Richard Dawkins and embraced by several authors in this volume,
“memes” (“complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable
units”) depend on “the existence of a continuous chain of physical
vehicles…. As with genes, immortality is more a matter of replication than
of the longevity of individual vehicles.”45 Source study can actually be
used to ensure that a diverse array of early modern texts remain acces-
sible, especially in our teaching and in the image of Shakespeare that
scholars translate for popular consumption. As scholars and teachers,
we make an important contribution when we make available a source
that has not been acknowledged and that provides a more complex pic-
ture of early modern culture. At the same time, since source study can
function to appropriate and elide or to preserve cultural diversity, it is
important for scholars to theorize an ethical practice. The point is not
to displace Shakespeare—both because of the genuine pleasure so many
receive from his works, and also because many of our paychecks depend
upon his continued popularity within and without the academy—but
rather to use Shakespeare to resist the shrinking and narrowing of the
humanities. Shakespeare can be used to help assure that various types
of stories and understandings of the world—some other than his own—
continue to have a place.
A perfect source study may be impossible at the end of the day. Like
fully accounting for the intertextuality that gives meaning to any text
or utterance, identifying sources is an enterprise that disperses into dif-
férance, spreading genealogies, and the silences of history.46 Yet, like
translation, and with affinities to that practice, which likewise may
seem impossible but happens all the time, source study is something that
people do.47 A rethought source study acknowledges that describing a
source is an interpretive act. It is not enough for us now to say that a
source contributes to Shakespeare’s vision, as if the whole point of all
other cultures and texts was to create his genius. Nonetheless, because
Shakespeare still stands as a great author/genius that wider publics still
deem “necessary” reading, it is valuable to trace the indebtedness of his
works to texts and cultural processes, and to think carefully about how
we conceptualize his relations to them.
Notes
1 See James, “Shakespeare, the Classics, and the Forms of Authorship.” James
describes the survival of imitation studies in scholarship on lyric and epic
during the rise of the New Historicism (81–84). For scholarship on epic that
combines source study with considerations of gender and/or politics, see,
for example, Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights, Quint, Epic and Empire, and
Watkins, The Specter of Dido.
2 For example, see the 2015 Shakespeare Survey, “Origins and Originality,”
especially Maguire and Smith’s “What is a Source” and Belsey’s “Revisit-
ing the Elephant’s Graveyard.” Other works that evince a revival of source
study include Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books; Martindale and Taylor eds.,
Shakespeare and the Classics; Sheen, “‘Why Should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat,
Have Life”’; Logan, Shakespeare’s Marlowe; Marrapodi, Italian Culture
in the Drama and Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, and particularly
the latter’s first essay by Miola, “Seven Types of Intertextuality” (13–25);
Lopez, “Eating Richard II”; the essays under “How To Do Things with
Sources,” in How to Do Things with Shakespeare, ed. Laurie Maguire;
Perry and Watkin, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages; Hillman, French
Origins of English Tragedy, as well as his French Reflections in the Shake-
spearean Tragic; Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare; Guy-Bray, “Sources”;
Houlahan, “Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories”; and Clare, Shakespeare’s
Stage Traffic. A need for a reframed approach to source study is signaled
by the 2007 edition of PMLA dedicated to “Polyphony,” which includes
Macachek’s article on “Allusion.”
3 For instance, Macachek proposes more specific terminology for different
types of allusion and argues for the need to use such terms and textual anal-
ysis (which has been frequently associated with a decontextualized literary
history) in a historically and culturally contextualized practice (“Allusion,”
534). In discussions of “intertheatricality,” West emphasizes “analogue”
over “allusion” (“Intertheatricality,” 157). And Maguire and Smith discuss
efforts to rename sources that do not get beyond “our limited practical un-
derstanding of what a source might be” (“What is a source?” 16–17).
4 For an example of a recent work that applies digital tools to questions of
authorship and source, see Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of
Authorship, ed. Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney.
5 See for example Greenhalgh, “Love, Chastity, and Woman’s Erotic Power”;
Chaudhury, “Circumscribed by Words”; Robinson’s discussion of Othello in
his Islam and Early Modern English Literature; Nicholson, “Ophelia Sings
like a Prima Donna Innamorata”; Skura, “Reading Othello’s Skin”; Wof-
ford, “Foreign Emotions on the Stage of Twelfth Night”; Fox, Ovid and the
Politics of Emotion; Newcomb, “The Sources of Romance”; Tylus, “Imitat-
ing Othello”; Lupton, “Paul Shakespeare”; and Britton, “From the Knight’s
Tale to The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
6 Maguire and Smith make a similar suggestion regarding the need for scrutiny
of the relationship between the Shakespearean text and potential sources in
“What is a Source,” 16; their theoretical intervention focuses on authorial
processes and memory.
7 Shakespeare, King Lear, ed, Foakes, 1.1.90.
8 Belsey, “Revisiting the Elephant’s Graveyard,” 62.
9 Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcist”; Bloom, The Map of Misread-
ing, 17. To be fair to Greenblatt, it appears he realized he went too far. He
removed the statement about the elephant’s graveyard when “Shakespeare
and the Exorcist” was incorporated into Shakespearean Negotiations. Ad-
ditionally, Bloom, who is not discussing Shakespearean source study, is de-
scribing anxiety surrounding source study rather than calling scholars who
do source study “carrion eaters.”
10 Bruster, 31. Hamlin also notices that Greenblatt and Bloom were doing
source study without acknowledging it in The Bible in Shakespeare, 82.
11 Loomba, “Shakespeare’s Sources,” 131–32.
12 Bruster provides an extensive discussion of reasons why new historicists re-
jected source study; see Quoting Shakespeare, 27–36.
13 See Doody, “Shakespeare’s Novels.”
14 See also Guy-Bray, who examines Shakespearean sources alongside those of
Marlowe and Jonson, and emphasizes that “the sources from which these
playwrights adapted their plays are not replaced by the plays they inspired”
(“Sources,” 149).
15 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 3. Additionally, Shake-
speare’s texts have themselves at times been treated as offering the kind of
“single, timeless, originary truth” that, as Quint argues, was associated by
Renaissance writers with the kind of “source” (such as a scripture or a clas-
sical text) that could (seem to) fix meaning transhistorically and obviate
historically contextualized reading (Origin and Originality, 23)—or with
carrying this type of meaning forward from the Bible or classical literature.
16 Again, see Bloom, Shakespeare, 2–14.
17 See Loomba and Orkin’s introduction to Post-colonial Shakespeares (esp.
1–3) for a pithy summary of these issues.
18 For the latter, see for instance Adelman, Suffocating Mothers and Stone,
Crossing Gender in Shakespeare.
19 Schalkwyk, Hamlet’s Dreams, 12–25, and his “Foreword” to South African
Essays. Also see Distiller, South Africa.
20 See Belsey, “The Elephant’s Graveyard Revisited,” esp. 63, and the forum in
Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008), “The Return of the Author,” and especially
James’s “Shakespeare, the Classics, and the Forms of Authorship.”
21 See Drakakis’s “Intention and Editing,” 365–67.
22 Schalkwyk, “Giving Intention its Due,” 323.
23 Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom; and Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage
Traffic.
24 James describes the survival of imitation studies in scholarship on lyric and
epic during the rise of the New Historicism (“Shakespeare, the Classics, and
the Forms of Authorship,” 81–84).
25 Hamlin, The Bible, 82–83.
26 Bullough, “General Introduction,” in v. 8, 345. Here, Bullough is expand-
ing on Kenneth Muir’s hopes for source study in Shakespeare’s Sources.
Comedies and Tragedies, 1957. It is important to note, however, that both
Bullough and Muir, unlike the authors in this collection, were interested in
uncovering the composition processes in order to understand “the mystery
of his artistic genius” (Bullough, 346).
27 Henke, Pastoral Transformations, 33.
28 Artese, Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, 99. A further question might be how
many audience members could have connected the story of the pound of
flesh and the caskets to Buddhist narrative—one might wonder if a J esuit or
a merchant who had come in contact with Buddhist narratives while in In-
dia could have found himself in the audience. The Golden Legend, a widely
known compendium of Saint’s lives, included the story of Barlaam and Josa-
phat, a Christianized life of the Buddha. See Voragine, The Golden Legend:
Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan. The stories of the
caskets and of the pound of flesh also have affinities to a story told about
King Asoka, who told a counselor to try to sell a human head in the market
place, instigating an exploration of different kinds of value. See Burnouf,
Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme Indien, 333–35.
29 Material traces of Kemp’s travels appear in the pamphlet “An Almond for
Parrat,” which refers to Will Kemp as “Signor Chiarlatano,” or in the 1607
play, The Travels of Three English Brothers, which shows Kemp and Italian
actors performing together. It is not that the information about travelling ac-
tors is brand new: Chambers discusses the relevant records (see Elizabethan
Stage, 2:261–65 and 273–75), and Cartwright’s essay in this volume pro-
vides a useful overview of evidence of contact between English and Italian
actors and dramatic traditions. But the comparative readings of Clubb (in
Italian Drama In Shakespeare’s Time) and others have led to renewed at-
tention to and exploration of these connections. See, for instance, Henke’s,
“Transporting Tragicomedy” and Pastoral Transformations.
30 West, “Intertheatricality,” 154.
31 Miola, “Seven Types,” 20.
32 Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books, 3. Gillespie quotes from Miola’s “Shake-
speare and his Sources,” 71.
33 On other plays as sources for Shakespeare’s plays, see Kay’s essay in this
collection and Maguire and Smith’s “What is a Source.”
34 See Bruster’s rebuttal to the New Historicist disclaiming of source study and
Newcomb’s essay in this collection.
35 And in fact, attention to sources is a basic interpretive move that critics
made in relation to Shakespeare’s plays from the plays’ first performances.
As Houlahan points out in this collection, early commentary on Twelfth
Night took the form of a kind of source study, as John Manningham com-
pared the play to Gl’Inganni.
36 See Houlahan’s amusing comparison to the hunt for the real source of the
Nile (“Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories,” 157).
37 Macacheck, “Allusion,” 534.
38 Miola, “Shakespeare and the Bible,” 124.
39 Guy Bray, “Source,” 133; Strier, “Another ‘Source,’” 226; and Quint, Ori-
gin and Originality. Quint discusses a Renaissance shift away from a quasi-
allegorical tracing of the meaning fixed by a source text like the Bible or a
classical author, towards a more historicized, contextualized understanding
(21–31).
40 See for instance Brown, “Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript
Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange.”
41 Wofford, “Foreign,” 481. And see Wofford’s essay in this volume, 90–123.
42 Hadfield, William Shakespeare’s Othello, 7; quoted in Attar, “Genealogy of
the Character,” 48.
43 Following Attar, Britton’s essay in this collection close reads sources for
Othello and considers them in their local generic context.
44 Adams and Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” 60n, quoted
by Newcomb in this collection.
45 Dennett, “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination,” 127 and 131.
46 For helpful discussions of intertextuality, including an explanation of Kriste-
va’s strong sense of the term as well as later uses, see Macachek, “Allusion,”
523. See also Miola, “Seven Types of Intertextuality,” 13–21.
47 See Ricoeur, On Translation, 13. Ricoeur links translation to “say[ing]
the same thing in another way” (25), while also suggesting that translation
highlights the “indefinite diversity” of language (24).
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Chapter VII. Music and Plastic. (1) The Arts of Form 217
Music one of the arts of form, p. 219. Classification of the arts impossible
except from the historical standpoint, p. 221. The choice of particular arts
itself an expression-means of the higher order, p. 222. Apollinian and
Faustian art-groups, p. 224. The stages of Western Music, p. 226. The
Renaissance an anti-Gothic and anti-musical movement, p. 232. Character
of the Baroque, p. 236. The Park, p. 240. Symbolism of colours, p. 245.
Colours of the Near and of the Distance, p. 246. Gold background and
Rembrandt brown, p. 247. Patina, p. 253.
Chapter VIII. Music and Plastic. (2) Act and Portrait 257
Kinds of human representation, p. 259. Portraiture, Contrition, Syntax, p. 261.
The heads of Classical statuary, p. 264. Portrayal of children and women,
p. 266. Hellenistic portraiture, p. 269. The Baroque portrait, p. 272.
Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo overcome the Renaissance, p. 273.
Victory of Instrumental Music over Oil-Painting, corresponding to the victory
of Statuary over Fresco in the Classical, p. 282. Impressionism, p. 285.
Pergamum and Bayreuth, p. 291. The finale of Art, p. 293.
Chapter IX. Soul-image and Life-feeling. (1) On the

Form of the Soul 297
Soul-image as function of World-image, p. 299. Psychology of a counter-
physics, p. 302. Apollinian, Magian and Faustian soul-image, p. 305. The
“Will” in Gothic space, p. 308. The “inner” mythology, p. 312. Will and
Character, p. 314. Classical posture tragedy and Faustian character
tragedy, p. 317. Symbolism of the drama-image, p. 320. Day and Night Art,
p. 324. Popular and esoteric, p. 326. The astronomical image, p. 329. The
geographical horizon, p. 332.
Chapter X. Soul-image and Life-feeling. (2) Buddhism,

Stoicism, and Socialism 339
The Faustian morale purely dynamic, p. 341. Every Culture has a form of
morale proper to itself, p. 345. Posture-morale and will-morale, p. 347.
Buddha, Socrates, Rousseau as protagonists of the dawning Civilizations,
p. 351. Tragic and plebeian morale, p. 354. Return to Nature, Irreligion,
Nihilism, p. 356. Ethical Socialism, p. 361. Similarity of structure in the
philosophical history of every Culture, p. 364. The Civilized philosophy of
the West, p. 365.
Chapter XI. Faustian and Apollinian Nature-

knowledge 375
Theory as Myth, p. 377. Every Natural Science depends upon a preceding
Religion, p. 391. Statics, Alchemy, Dynamics as the theories of three
Cultures, p. 382. The Atomic theory, p. 384. The problem of motion
insoluble, p. 388. The style of causal process and experience, p. 391. The
feeling of God and the knowing of Nature, p. 392. The great Myth, p. 394.
Classical, Magian and Faustian numina, p. 397. Atheism, p. 408. Faustian
physics as a dogma of force, p. 411. Limits of its theoretical (as distinct
from its technical) development, p. 417. Self-destruction of Dynamics, and
invasion of historical ideas; theory dissolves into a system of morphological
relationships, p. 420.
Index Following page 428
Tables Illustrating the Comparative At end of volume

Morphology of History
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of
predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the
destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time
and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment—the
West-European-American.
Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has
evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the
means of dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at
best, inadequately used.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and
incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we
may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something
that is essentially independent of the outward forms—social, spiritual
and political—which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities
indeed secondary or derived from that something? Does world-
history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and
again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if
so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may
be pushed?
Is it possible to find in life itself—for human history is the sum of
mighty life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego
and personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating
entities of a higher order like “the Classical” or “the Chinese Culture,”
“Modern Civilization”—a series of stages which must be traversed,
and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence? For
everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are
fundamentals—may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a
rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all
history founded upon general biographic archetypes?
The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the
corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon
limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical
problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within
itself every great question of Being.
If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the
Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to
what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul,
to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how
far these forms—peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas,
states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic
types and world-ideas, great men and great events—may be
accepted and pointed to as symbols.
II
The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law.
The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these
means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the
world.
It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the
expression-forms of world-history are limited in number, and that
eras, epochs, situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true
to type. Napoleon has hardly ever been discussed without a side-
glance at Cæsar and Alexander—analogies of which, as we shall
see, the first is morphologically quite inacceptable and the second is
correct—while Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to
Charlemagne’s. The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of
Carthage when it meant England, and the Jacobins styled
themselves Romans. Other such comparisons, of all degrees of
soundness and unsoundness, are those of Florence with Athens,
Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with modern Socialism, the
Roman financial magnate of Cæsar’s time with the Yankee.
Petrarch, the first passionate archæologist (and is not archæology
itself an expression of the sense that history is repetition?) related
himself mentally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil Rhodes, the
organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library specially
prepared translations of the classical lives of the Cæsars, felt himself
akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of Sweden used
to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket, and to copy
that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.
Frederick the Great, in his political writings—such as his
Considérations, 1738—moves among analogies with perfect
assurance. Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under
Philip and the Germans to the Greeks. “Even now,” he says, “the
Thermopylæ of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of
Philip,” therein exactly characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury.
We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the
Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony
and of Octavius.
Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually
implied rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious
expressions than a really deep sense of historical forms.
Thus in the case of Ranke, a master of artistic analogy, we find
that his parallels of Cyaxares and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of
the Cimmerians and those of the Hungarians, possess
morphologically no significance, and his oft-quoted analogy between
the Hellenic city-states and the Renaissance republics very little,
while the deeper truth in his comparison of Alcibiades and Napoleon
is accidental. Unlike the strict mathematician, who finds inner
relationships between two groups of differential equations where the
layman sees nothing but dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and
others draw their historical analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-
romantic, touch, and aim merely at presenting comparable scenes
on the world-stage.
It is easy to see that, at bottom, it is neither a principle nor a sense
of historic necessity, but simple inclination, that governs the choice of
the tableaux. From any technique of analogies we are far distant.
They throng up (to-day more than ever) without scheme or unities,
and if they do hit upon something which is true—in the essential
sense of the word that remains to be determined—it is thanks to
luck, more rarely to instinct, never to a principle. In this region no one
hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the
slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from
which can come a broad solution of the problems of History.
Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of
history, might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique,
developing under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would
surely eventuate in inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But
as hitherto understood and practised they have been a curse, for
they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes, instead of
soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with
the symbolism of history and its analogies, and, in consequence, the
problem has till now not even been comprehended, let alone solved.
Superficial in many cases (as for instance in designating Cæsar as
the creator of the official newspaper), these analogies are worse
than superficial in others (as when phenomena of the Classical Age
that are not only extremely complex but utterly alien to us are
labelled with modern catchwords like Socialism, Impressionism,
Capitalism, Clericalism), while occasionally they are bizarre to the
point of perversity—witness the Jacobin clubs with their cult of
Brutus, that millionaire-extortioner Brutus who, in the name of
oligarchical doctrine and with the approval of the patrician senate,
murdered the Man of the Democracy.
III
Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited
problem of present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new
philosophy—the philosophy of the future, so far as the
metaphysically-exhausted soil of the West can bear such, and in any
case the only philosophy which is within the possibilities of the West-
European mind in its next stages. It expands into the conception of a
morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the
morphology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the
only theme of philosophy. And it reviews once again the forms and
movements of the world in their depths and final significance, but this
time according to an entirely different ordering which groups them,
not in an ensemble picture inclusive of everything known, but in a
picture of life, and presents them not as things-become, but as
things-becoming.
The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out
of its opposite the world-as-nature—here is a new aspect of human
existence on this earth. As yet, in spite of its immense significance,
both practical and theoretical, this aspect has not been realized, still
less presented. Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a
distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has
deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We have
before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess
and experience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as
to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-
impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and
symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from
the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination
ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of
experience dissecting according to scheme; and—to mention even
thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its
significance—the domain of chronological from that of mathematical
number.[1]
Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there
can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they
become visible day by day on the surface, at their face value, and
arranging them on a scheme of “causes” or “effects” and following
them up in the obvious and intellectually easy directions. Such a
“pragmatic” handling of history would be nothing but a piece of
“natural science” in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the
materialistic idea of history make no secret about it—it is their
adversaries who largely fail to see the similarity of the two methods.
What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this
or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by
appearing. Present-day historians think they are doing a work of
supererogation in bringing in religious and social, or still more art-
history, details to “illustrate” the political sense of an epoch. But the
decisive factor—decisive, that is, in so far as visible history is the
expression, sign and embodiment of soul—they forget. I have not
hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological
relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all
branches of a Culture, who has gone beyond politics to grasp the
ultimate and fundamental ideas of Greeks, Arabians, Indians and
Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their early
ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture, philosophies,
dramas and lyrics, their choice and development of great arts, the
detail of their craftsmanship and choice of materials—let alone
appreciated the decisive importance of these matters for the form-
problems of history. Who amongst them realizes that between the
Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age
of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean
geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting
and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range
weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there
are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed from this morphological
standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic
and even a metaphysical character, and—what has perhaps been
impossible hitherto—things such as the Egyptian administrative
system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the
Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army,
and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made
uniformly understandable and appreciable.
But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no
theory-enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such
draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that
science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of
cognition, viz., physics, and thus we imagine ourselves to be
carrying on historical research when we are really following out
objective connexions of cause and effect. It is a remarkable fact that
the old-fashioned philosophy never imagined even the possibility of
there being any other relation than this between the conscious
human understanding and the world outside. Kant, who in his main
work established the formal rules of cognition, took nature only as
the object of reason’s activity, and neither he himself, nor anyone
after him, noted the reservation. Knowledge, for Kant, is
mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and
categories of the reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different
mechanism by which historical impressions are apprehended. And
Schopenhauer, who, significantly enough, retains but one of the
Kantian categories, viz., causality, speaks contemptuously of history.
[2]
That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect—which I
may call the logic of space—another necessity, an organic necessity
in life, that of Destiny—the logic of time—is a fact of the deepest
inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological
religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel
of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable
through the cognition-forms which the “Critique of Pure Reason”
investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical formulation. As
Galileo says in a famous passage of his Saggiatore, philosophy, as
Nature’s great book, is written “in mathematical language.” We await,
to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is
written and how it is to be read.
Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic,
Chronology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the
phenomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover
the whole world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and
through which this world is realized.
IV
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures
synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses.
History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of
the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he
thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of
creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking
consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.
Man, thus, has before him two possibilities of world-formation. But
it must be noted, at the very outset, that these possibilities are not
necessarily actualities, and if we are to enquire into the sense of all
history we must begin by solving a question which has never yet
been put, viz., for whom is there History? The question is seemingly
paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that
every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is a part of
history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under
the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-
course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or
conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained.
For the latter type of consciousness there is certainly no world-
history, no world-as-history. But how if the self-consciousness of a
whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit?
How must actuality appear to it? The world? Life? Consider the
Classical Culture. In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all
experience, not merely the personal but the common past, was
immediately transmuted into a timeless, immobile, mythically-
fashioned background for the particular momentary present; thus the
history of Alexander the Great began even before his death to be
merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend, and to
Cæsar there seemed at the least nothing preposterous in claiming
descent from Venus.
Such a spiritual condition it is practically impossible for us men of
the West, with a sense of time-distances so strong that we habitually
and unquestioningly speak of so many years before or after Christ,
to reproduce in ourselves. But we are not on that account entitled, in
dealing with the problems of History, simply to ignore the fact.
What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual,
that historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense—that
is, every kind of psychological comparison and analysis of alien
peoples, times and customs—yields as to the soul of a Culture as a
whole. But the Classical culture possessed no memory, no organ of
history in this special sense. The memory of the Classical man—so
to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a
notion derived from our own—is something different, since past and
future, as arraying perspectives in the working consciousness, are
absent and the “pure Present,” which so often roused Goethe’s
admiration in every product of the Classical life and in sculpture
particularly, fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly
unknown.
This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in
itself predicates the negation of time (of direction). For Herodotus
and Sophocles, as for Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is
subtilized instantly into an impression that is timeless and
changeless, polar and not periodic in structure—in the last analysis,
of such stuff as myths are made of—whereas for our world-sense
and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful
organism of centuries or millennia.
But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the
Classical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek
called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but
complete. Inevitably, then, the Greek man himself was not a series
but a term.[3]
For this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with
the strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and
especially the Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and
disregard of the present-as-such which revealed itself in their
broadly-conceived operations of astronomy and their exact
measurements of big time-intervals, none of this ever became
intimately a part of him. What his philosophers occasionally told him
on the subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few
brilliant minds in the Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and
Aristarchus) discovered was rejected alike by the Stoic and by the
Aristotelian, and outside a small professional circle not even noticed.
Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory. In the last years of
Pericles, the Athenian people passed a decree by which all who
propagated astronomical theories were made liable to impeachment
(εἰσαγγελία). This last was an act of the deepest symbolic
significance, expressive of the determination of the Classical soul to
banish distance, in every aspect, from its world-consciousness.
As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery
of this man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-
explanatory the events of the present, and also in his possession of
the magnificently practical outlook of the born statesman who has
himself been both general and administrator. In virtue of this quality
of experience (which we unfortunately confuse with the historical
sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and
professional historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so.
But what is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the
power of surveying the history of centuries, that which for us is
implicit in the very conception of a historian. The fine pieces of
Classical history-writing are invariably those which set forth matters
within the political present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct
opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being those
which deal with a distant past. Thucydides would have broken down
in handling even the Persian Wars, let alone the general history of
Greece, while that of Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach.
He, as well as Polybius and Tacitus (who like him were practical
politicians), loses his sureness of eye from the moment when, in
looking backwards, he encounters motive forces in any form that is
unknown in his practical experience. For Polybius even the First
Punic War, for Tacitus even the reign of Augustus, are inexplicable.
As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling—in our sense of the
phrase—is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his
book by the astounding statement that before his time (about 400
B.C.) no events of importance had occurred (oὐ μεγάλα γενέσθαι) in
the world![4]
Consequently, Classical history down to the Persian Wars and for
that matter the structure built up on traditions at much later periods,
are the product of an essentially mythological thinking. The
constitutional history of Sparta is a poem of the Hellenistic period,
and Lycurgus, on whom it centres and whose “biography” we are
given in full detail, was probably in the beginning an unimportant
local god of Mount Taygetus. The invention of pre-Hannibalian
Roman history was still going on even in Cæsar’s time. The story of
the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus is built round some
contemporary of the Censor Appius Claudius (310 B.C.). The names
of the Roman kings were at that period made up from the names of
certain plebeian families which had become wealthy (K. J.
Neumann). In the sphere of constitutional history, setting aside
altogether the “constitution” of Servius Tullius, we find that even the
famous land law of Licinius (367 B.C.) was not in existence at the time
of the Second Punic War (B. Niese). When Epaminondas gave
freedom and statehood to the Messenians and the Arcadians, these
peoples promptly provided themselves with an early history. But the
astounding thing is not that history of this sort was produced, but that
there was practically none of any other sort; and the opposition
between the Classical and the modern outlook is sufficiently
illustrated by saying that Roman history before 250 B.C., as known in
Cæsar’s time, was substantially a forgery, and that the little that we
know has been established by ourselves and was entirely unknown
to the later Romans. In what sense the Classical world understood
the word “history” we can see from the fact that the Alexandrine
romance-literature exercised the strongest influence upon serious
political and religious history, even as regards its matter. It never
entered the Classical head to draw any distinction of principle
between history as a story and history as documents. When, towards
the end of the Roman republic, Varro set out to stabilize the religion
that was fast vanishing from the people’s consciousness, he
classified the deities whose cult was exactly and minutely observed
by the State, into “certain” and “uncertain” gods, i.e., into gods of
whom something was still known and gods that, in spite of the
unbroken continuity of official worship, had survived in name only. In
actual fact, the religion of Roman society in Varro’s time, the poet’s
religion which Goethe and even Nietzsche reproduced in all
innocence, was mainly a product of Hellenistic literature and had
almost no relation to the ancient practices, which no one any longer
understood.
Mommsen clearly defined the West-European attitude towards this
history when he said that “the Roman historians,” meaning especially
Tacitus, “were men who said what it would have been meritorious to
omit, and omitted what it was essential to say.”
In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its
decisive expression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian
astronomy, no calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is
the track of a conscious spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of
their Culture, which as regards its organic phase came to an end
with the rise of Buddhism, we know even less than we do of
Classical history, rich though it must have been in great events
between the 12th and 8th centuries. And this is not surprising, since
it was in dream-shapes and mythological figures that both came to
be fixed. It is a full millennium after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when
Ceylon first produces something remotely resembling historical work,
the “Mahavansa.”
The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built
that it could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a
single author as an event determinate in time. Instead of an organic
series of writings by specific persons, there came into being
gradually a vague mass of texts into which everyone inserted what
he pleased, and notions such as those of intellectual individualism,
intellectual evolution, intellectual epochs, played no part in the
matter. It is in this anonymous form that we possess the Indian
philosophy—which is at the same time all the Indian history that we
have—and it is instructive to compare with it the philosophy-history
of the West, which is a perfectly definite structure made up of
individual books and personalities.
Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot nothing.
Hence, while the art of portraiture—which is biography in the kernel
—was unknown in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist’s only
theme.
The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and
impelled with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past
and future as its whole world, and the present (which is identical with
waking consciousness) appeared to him simply as the narrow
common frontier of two immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian
Culture is an embodiment of care—which is the spiritual
counterpoise of distance—care for the future expressed in the choice
of granite or basalt as the craftsman’s materials,[5] in the chiselled
archives, in the elaborate administrative system, in the net of
irrigation works,[6] and, necessarily bound up therewith, care for the
past. The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the first importance. The
body of the dead man was made everlasting, just as his personality,
his “Ka,” was immortalized through the portrait-statuettes, which
were often made in many copies and to which it was conceived to be
attached by a transcendental likeness.
There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards
the historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this
relation is expressed in the disposal of the dead. The Egyptian
denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole
symbolism of his Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their
history in chronological dates and figures. From pre-Solonian Greece
nothing has been handed down, not a year-date, not a true name,
not a tangible event—with the consequence that the later history,
(which alone we know) assumes undue importance—but for Egypt
we possess, from the 3rd millennium and even earlier, the names
and even the exact reign-dates of many of the kings, and the New
Empire must have had a complete knowledge of them. To-day,
pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the bodies of the great
Pharaohs lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable. On the
shining, polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we
can read to-day the words “Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the
Sun” and, on the other side, “Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than
the height of Orion, and it is united with the underworld.” Here indeed
is victory over Mortality and the mere present; it is to the last degree
un-Classical.
V
In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we
meet at the threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying
the ease with which it could forget every piece of its inward and
outward past, of burning the dead. To the Mycenæan age the
elevation into a ritual of this particular funerary method amongst all
those practised in turn by stone-age peoples, was essentially alien;
indeed its Royal tombs suggest that earth-burial was regarded as
peculiarly honourable. But in Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we
find a change, so sudden that its origins must necessarily be
psychological, from burial to that burning which (the Iliad gives us the
full pathos of the symbolic act) was the ceremonial completion of
death and the denial of all historical duration.
From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution
was at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just
as little as it allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known
how decisively the Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in the
arts. Right into the imperial period Classical art handled only the
matter that was, so to say, natural to it, the myth.[7] Even the “ideal”
portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are mythical, of the same kind as the
typical biographies of Plutarch’s sort. No great Greek ever wrote
down any recollections that would serve to fix a phase of experience
for his inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his inward
life, anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable
indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to
the motive forces that are presupposed in the production of a
Parzeval, a Hamlet, or a Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any
conscious evolution of doctrine; his separate works are merely
treatises written from very different standpoints which he took up
from time to time, and it gave him no concern whether and how they
hung together. On the contrary, a work of deep self-examination, the
Vita Nuova of Dante, is found at the very outset of the spiritual
history of the West. How little therefore of the Classical pure-present
there really was in Goethe, the man who forgot nothing, the man
whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single
great confession!
After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-
works were thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting
them), and we do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled
himself about the ruins of Mycenæ or Phaistos for the purpose of
ascertaining historical facts. Men read Homer but never thought of
excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they wanted
was myth, not history. The works of Æschylus and those of the pre-
Socratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic
period. In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and
peculiar to the Culture manifested itself, five centuries before
Schliemann, in Petrarch—the fine collector of antiquities, coins and
manuscripts, the very type of historically-sensitive man, viewing the
distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was he not the first to
attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially not of it.
The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his
conception of Time. Even more passionate perhaps, though of a
different colouring, is the collecting-bent of the Chinese. In China,
whoever travels assiduously pursues “old traces” (Ku-tsi) and the
untranslatable “Tao,” the basic principle of Chinese existence,
derives all its meaning from a deep historical feeling. In the
Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and displayed
everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal (as
described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose
simply did not arise—and this too in the very presence of Egypt,
which even by the time of the great Thuthmosis had been
transformed into one vast museum of strict tradition.
Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who
discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of
time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that echo day and
night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression
of which a historical world-feeling is capable.[8] In the timeless
countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the
sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely
by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the

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Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study

Audiences Authors and Digital

Eight tragedies of Shakespeare a Marxist study New

Rethinking reprogenetics enhancing ethical analyses of

Minorities and Media: Producers, Industries, Audiences

Building Benjamin Naomi s Journey 1st Edition Britton

HCNA Networking Study Guide 1st Edition Huawei

The Culture Industry and Participatory Audiences 1st

Mary Wroth and Shakespeare Routledge Studies in

Shakespeare and Consciousness 1st Edition Paul Budra

Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor in the Department of E

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the

24 Shakespeare’s Lost Playhouse

25 Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion

27 The Fictional Lives of Shakespeare

28 Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

29 Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference

32 Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

ISBN: 978-1-138-12307-6 (hbk)

Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study 1

1 Toward a Sustainable Source Study 19

2 Contaminatio, Race, and Pity in Othello 46

3 Translating Plautus to Bohemia: Ruzante, Ludovico

4 Veiled Revenants and the Risks of Hospitality:

5 Traces of Knowledge: Microsource Study in Cymbeline

6 Reconstructing Holinshed: History and Romance

8 Diachronic and Synchronic: Two Problems of Textual

9 Greek Sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Rome: Titus Andronicus

10 Multiple Materials and Motives in Two Gentlemen

11 The Curious Case of Mr. William Shakespeare and the

12 Shakespeare Source Study in the Age of Google:

13 “Tangled in a Net”: Shakespeare the Adaptor/

14 Lost Plays and Source Study 297

Putting together a collection like this, based as it is on studying Shake-

Meredith Beales is completing a monograph on Early Modern ­medievalism

Shakespeare criticism of the past thirty years has often suggested—

Returning to the Sources: Authorship,

are derivative in one significant way or another. How could it be oth-

Uncontroversial as any of this seems, scholars interested in sources

Rather than something that distilled and transcended its sources,

Loomba importantly notes that the methodology of source study was

Chapter IX. Soul-image and Life-feeling. (1) On the

Chapter X. Soul-image and Life-feeling. (2) Buddhism,

Chapter XI. Faustian and Apollinian Nature-

Index Following page 428

Tables Illustrating the Comparative At end of volume

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Meredith Beales is completing a monograph on Early Modern medievalism