By John Drakakis
Shakespeare’s Resources challenges orthodox thinking about ‘sources’ that was initiated by Geoffrey Bullough between 1955 and 1975. Critics and commentators have wrestled with the image of Shakespeare as a creative genius whose work was not ‘original’ in a number of ways. The assumption has always been that the plots and motifs of Shakespeare’s plays can be traced back to published narratives, and also to a range of classical authors. But what was the driving force behind the desire of scholars to trace Shakespeare’s texts to originating source and ultimately to a quasi theological origin. Shakespeare’s Resources re-investigates the theoretical framework that has remained in place for much of the last century, and that has proved resilient in resisting (or, even worse, domesticating) any challenges to its hegemony. But things are beginning to change. A rethinking of the concept of ‘intertextuality’ enables us to restore its political force, and various formulae (for comedy, tragedy, history and tragi-comedy) suggest that all these materials were available to a practising dramatist of Shakespeare’s calibre as “resources”, elements that could be re-used, re-furbished and transformed.
Shakespeare’s Resources questions the relationship between ‘text’ and ‘con-text’, and seeks to suggest various ways in which clusters of plays taken together offer insights into the ways in which Shakespeare deployed material and re-used it for different theatrical genres. In the concluding chapter the argument turns to examine the attempts to resurrect Shakespeare from the ‘elephant’s graveyard’ and to rescue his plays from this unfortunate image that has for too long shaped the discourse of ‘source’ study.
Along the way, the issue of what books Shakespeare is thought to have had at his disposal and, if he ever had access to them, how he might have read them. Recent work on ‘the history of the book’ indicates that the act of reading was very different from how it has been imagined, and we need to be cautious about trying to identify ‘sources’ from the texts of the plays themselves. Shakespeare’s Resources builds on existing scholarship but it also interrogates some of its basic assumptions and proposes new ways of thinking about a range of issues that have been consigned to an ‘elephant’s graveyard’.
Shakespeare’s resources
By John Drakakis
ISBN: 978-1-5261-7452-9 | Paperback: £25.00
‘deeply engaged with the history of Shakespeare scholarship.’
Times Literary Supplement