Shakespeare's resources

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