Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study

Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies

Dennis Austin Britton, Melissa Walter, Dennis Austin Britton, Melissa Walter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317302889
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book asks new questions about how and why Shakespeare engages with source material, and about what should be counted as sources in Shakespeare studies. The essays demonstrate that source study remains an indispensable 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 Shakespearean 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 affiliation, and race, seeking to enhance the opportunity to register diverse ideas and frameworks imported from foreign material and distant sources. The volume not only examines print culture, but also material culture, theatrical paradigms, generic assumptions, and oral narratives. It considers how digital 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 continues to shape the image of Shakespeare and his authorship. The collection will be valuable to those interested in the relationships between Shakespeare's work and other texts, those seeking to understand how the legacy of source study has shaped Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon, and those studying source study, early modern authorship, implications of digital tools in early modern studies, and early modern literary culture.

Part I

Source Study, Sustainability, and Cultural Diversity

These chapters do source study through acknowledging the literary and philosophical sophistication of the sources that inspired Shakespeare, looking out for places where Shakespeare’s plays incorporate or host “foreign” materials and ideologies, and highlighting the heterogeneity of early modern cultures. If earlier examples of source study sought to establish the peculiar genius of Shakespeare and the cultural superiority of Englishness, the chapters in Part 1 rethink source study so that it is more attuned to ideologies of power and issues of cultural difference.

Beginning with an examination of the history of Shakespeare source study itself, Lori Humphrey Newcomb uncovers the colonialist logic underpinning source study as it originated in nineteenth-century Germany. She argues that conceptualizing source study as intertextuality, however, provides an alternative to this colonialist logic; instead of viewing sources as primitive materials that Shakespeare transforms into modern masterpieces, source study should recognize the “recycling of cultural materials” in a way that fosters the sustainability of early modern literary and cultural diversity. Newcomb then turns to The Winter’s Tale to show how source study as it has traditionally been conceived has not allowed critics or editors to make sense of the play’s various references to Africa. She demonstrates that to make sense of them, we need to look beyond Pandosto to one of Greene’s sources, Heliodorus’s Aethopica.

Dennis Austin Britton’s chapter demonstrates the usefulness of reviving the concept of contaminatio, the adaptation of one text that incorporates passages from others, for considering sources in Shakespeare. Examining Othello, which incorporates materials from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Robert Greene’s play of the same name into an adaptation of Cinthio’s 3.7 of the Hecatommithi, he argues that the play is Italian in a number of ways: it employs contaminatio, a mode of dramatic composition popular in Renaissance Italy, it draws from numerous Italian sources, and it translates to its English audience Italian concepts of race. Britton also argues that Shakespeare “contaminates” Cinthio’s novella with two versions of Orlando Furioso in order to help an early modern English audience feel tragic pity for a black Moor.

In her reading of The Winter’s Tale, Jane Tylus, like Newcomb, demonstrates the fruitfulness of looking beyond Pandosto to one of Greene’s sources, in this case Plautus’s Rudens. Yet her chapter considers the complexity through which sources may make their way into Shakespeare’s play. Although Plautus’s Rudens is a source for both Greene and Shakespeare, she suggests that that source might have been interpolated through Ruzante’s La Piovana, written and published in the Padovan dialect, by way of Ludovico Dolce’s Italian translation, Il Ruffiano. Both Ruzante and Dolce provide prologues that self-consciously consider the relationship of their plays to Plautus’s, prologues in which the authors defend themselves against accusations of stealing materials from their sources. Shakespeare, then, might have been influenced—perhaps indirectly—by Il Ruffiano, a play that features various types of stealing (sources, other people’s children, bags of money), and that links the dramatic adaptation of other sources to supposedly lower class, rogue activity. As Tylus considers the ownership of language, text, and land, she also traces transformations in the representations of rural life from Plautus to Shakespeare via Ruzante; her consideration of Shakespeare’s pastoral scenes in relation to Plautus, Ruzante, and Dolce reveals The Winter’s Tale’s interest in social difference and national incohesion.

Susanne L. Wofford examines how alternative knowledges enter into specific cultural spheres. Exploring scenes of veiled wives returning from the dead and issues of genre in Euripides’s Alcestis and Shakespeare’s Much Ado, Wofford suggests that the radical hospitality of hosting the unknown revenant, whether wife or text, is life-giving (within the terms of the comic plots analyzed) and culturally valuable (in terms of scholarly analysis and understanding of how texts interact with one another): the cultural knowledge produced through the intertextual and intercultural relations among texts—whether or not it is explicitly or consciously known by the author—creates a space not entirely contained within the particular political and cultural ideologies of a given text. Her chapter demonstrates that the intercultural and intertextual relations among texts create alternative, indeed foreign, possibilities to generically and cultural prescribed outcomes that would result from the tensions created between classical and early modern cultural obsessions with virginity, fidelity, hospitality, and the incorporation of foreignness.

1 Toward a Sustainable Source Study

Lori Humphrey Newcomb

In this self-reflective era of Shakespeare studies, source study is anomalous: a critical practice that remains unexamined yet ubiquitous, unfashionable yet not quite obsolete. Old as it is, source study lacks the elaborate narratives of birth, entrenchment, and reinvention that support most traditions of Shakespeare scholarship. Recently, however, the “undertheorized” state of source study has been noted prominently by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith (16). Their article, “What Is a Source? Or, how Shakespeare read his Marlowe,” leads off the 2015 Shakespeare Survey volume on “Shakespeare, Origins and Originality” (16). The convergence of that volume and the present collection suggests that Shakespeare scholars finally are ready to examine source study’s history, consider its hidden costs, and imagine better options. Future source-study projects need not comprise a uniform practice, but they should reach beyond the status quo to imagine and articulate clear aims. This essay reviews the anomalous place of source study in the history of Shakespeare studies, considers why the method persists despite such devaluation, and explores the model’s most problematic assumptions and then turns to my practice of source study, stating my aims and demonstrating them in action. My purpose is not to condemn source study as retrograde yet again or to forbid the term. Rather, I propose that a new frankness about the stakes of textual interchange—whatever we call it—can ensure a more sustainable scholarly future not just for Shakespeare, but for early modern cultural studies. I borrow the term “sustainable” from environmental thinkers to remind us that our scholarly practices do have systemic impact. Source study, conceived as the study of dead relics, contributes to the sense that early modern studies are moribund; source study, conceived as the study of living cultural ecosystems, points to a sustainable future for the study of the past. My own practice of source study hopes to sustain responsibility to the material record, cultural inclusiveness, and public access to the fruits of research.

Re-theorizing often starts with nomenclature, although it cannot end there. While some have proposed new names for source study, we have yet to examine the term “the source” itself, to unpack the metaphor’s ecological and political baggage, or to confront the issues of access and fair use it should raise. It can be no coincidence that “source-hunting,” as the uneasy scholarly joke puts it, emerged and faded with the great European colonial empires. Source study was tied to Western territorial expansion structurally, for it guaranteed the cultural supremacy of the national bard by devaluing or marginalizing related texts of less impeccable genesis. It justified treating literary history as raw material for Northern European genius to exploit. To perpetuate that logic in our scholarship is neither ethical nor, in the present endangered state of humanities education, strategic. Therefore, this essay offers a preliminary genealogy of Shakespearean source study and some of its damaging effects and then proposes one more sustainable alternative. I close by demonstrating briefly how that practice might re-situate The Winter’s Tale, a play inevitably placed alongside its immediate English source, in a longer intertextual and intercultural chain of imperial tales.

Genealogies of “the source”

The imminent demise of source study was proclaimed in 1985, when Stephen Greenblatt tarred it as “the elephants’ graveyard of literary history.”¹ The reference itself enacts the infinite regress of source studies: Wikipedia (today’s universal source) suggests that myths of lost ivory fields arose because “elephant skeletons are frequently found in groups near permanent sources of water” (emphasis added). Greenblatt’s clever putdown implied that scholars looking for treasure among Shakespeare’s sources were chasing a mirage, or at least that the only ivory, Shakespeare, had already been extracted. Perhaps also hinted was that source scholars were a herd approaching extinction. The jibe became infamous, even as Greenblatt distanced himself from it. As Douglas Bruster has shown, when the 1985 essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” was incorporated in the 1988 volume Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt excised the reference to the elephants’ graveyard.² Bruster argues that this change suppressed even a critical mention of the source scholarship on which New Historicism relied for its thick descriptions. I would add that as Greenblatt backed away from this image of bounty-hunting, he also covered the tracks connecting New Historicism and source study alike to the global imperial project.

The “elephant’s graveyard” phrase, having condemned source study as unsophisticated, furnished a handy excuse for continuing to marginalize the subfield. Thirty years after this remark, source study remains Shakespeareans’ least charted territory. It is still included in, say, companion volumes on critical approaches, but its premises remain unexamined. For instance, the article on “Source Study” in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide refers readers to Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare for “a history of source scholarship.”³ Bullough indeed launched his project in 1957 with the promise of that history as capstone, but eighteen years and eight volumes later, his “General Conclusion” allotted just a few brisk, albeit lucid, pages to the task.⁴ A history of source study must begin, then, with what Bullough reports, and does not report, in those pages.

Bullough’s mini-history identified several distinct periods in the identification and study of Shakespeare’s acknowledged sources. He credited Gerard Langbaine in the 1680s and Charlotte Lennox in the 1750s as pioneering compilers of sources. By the turn into the nineteenth century, scholars had read the plays so painstakingly alongside English “black-letter literature” that “most of the main sources (as we known them today) had been noted.”⁵ Although Bullough does not spell this out, these lovers of the plays were scrambling to defend Shakespeare from charges of plagiarism on one hand and on the other lack of learning, the neoclassicists’ charge resting on Ben Jonson’s “small Latine and lesse Greeke.” While their project can now be recognized as source studies, that term was not especially prominent. If any concept was dominant, it was that of “dependence”—was Shakespeare dependent on foreigners for his plots, and clumsy translators for his classical references? Elevating his “black-letter” sources as artifacts of Englishness, however crude, relieved that pressure. Thus Richard Farmer, in his famous and much-reprinted essay on “The Learning of Shakspeare” (sic), wrote that Shakespeare “wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him above all other men” (5). Farmer does use the “source” metaphor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study
• PART I Source Study, Sustainability, and Cultural Diversity
• PART II Sources and Audiences
• PART III Authorship and Transmission
• PART IV Source Study in the Digital Age
• Afterword
• Index