Dennis Austin Britton and Melissa Walter's edited collection is impressive in its coverage and its engagement with the questions that arise from a reappraisal of Shakespeare source study. The book is organized into four parts: “Source Study, Sustainability, and Cultural Diversity”; “Sources and Audiences”; “Authorship and Transmission”; and “Source Study in the Digital Age.”
Essays by Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Dennis Austin Britton, Jane Tylus, and Susanne L. Wofford in part 1 each address questions of power, ideology, and cultural difference, and how sensitivity to these inform source study. Newcomb situates the origins of source study in a teleological, nationalist, and colonial mode of cultural history, aiming for an inclusive and intercultural source study that “protects and sustains cultural resources for public use” while also attending to materiality and intermediality (29). Her reading of The Winter's Tale is sensitive to reception histories, the “microsources” (the allusions and impressions that are fleeting in a play) that feed into a text and its transmission, and how stories are shared and spread interculturally. Following on from Newcomb, and taking the concept of contamination—where a writer incorporates materials from another text into the adapted or translated text—as a starting point, Britton argues that Shakespeare “contaminates” Cinthio with Ariosto to introduce a type of pity more commonly associated with Italian romances into Othello. In being attentive to genre, focusing upon how pity inspires Desdemona's love of Othello and the affective responses of spectators and the intermodal, intercultural, and intertextual quality of contaminatio, Britton uncovers the ways in which Shakespeare's play translates Italian feelings about race and how the romance genre expands notions of sameness. In her chapter, Tylus finds a source for the character Autolycus from The Winter's Tale in Ruzante and in so doing makes Greene's unforgiving settings sites of repentance. Finally, in this section, Wofford explores how the classical past is integrated into the early modern present and how the ending of Much Ado About Nothing can be understood through genre, Euripides, and the revenant guest.
In part 2, Dimitry Senyshyn, Meredith Beales, and David Kay connect source study to audience expectation and the knowledge that the spectator may bring to viewing the play. For Senyshyn, romance “memes” signal the fictional trait of Holinshead's chronicles and Tudor historiography to the Jacobean audience of Henry VIII. Beales then focuses upon microsources and how knowledge of early British history in early modern England influenced the reception of Cymbeline and King Lear. Finally, Kay marries source study with repertory studies and considers how the early modern playhouse functioned as an economic and creative space. Examining Macbeth and All's Well That Ends Well, Kay argues that Shakespeare's playwriting was influenced by audience demand for popular subgenres.
Following this examination of genre and audience reception, in part 3, Kent Cartwright draws from his experiences of identifying sources while editing The Comedy of Errors. What emerges here, and in Penelope Meyers Usher's essay, is that Shakespeare is an author who is engrossed in a transnational theatrical culture. Whether or not Shakespeare read Iphigenia at Aulis, Usher contends that, because the story was well known in the Renaissance, it could be a source for child sacrifice in Titus Andronicus. In addressing how Shakespeare departs from his primary sources in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Meredith Skura uncovers the microsources that inform our interpretation of the play and its intertextual connections with other plays; this enables us to reassess Shakespeare's compositional process. As with Cartwright, Mark Houlahan ends this section by drawing from his experiences of editing a Shakespeare play: in this instance, Twelfth Night. Through marrying print-based scholarship with data mining, Houlahan embeds Shakespeare into the theatrical culture of his time, teasing out various points of connection with other early modern plays, with “red-herring” sources, and with the comedy actor, Robert Armin. Houlahan's essay also gestures to the final section, which addresses how digital humanities has transformed source study.
Brett Greatley-Hirsch and Laurie Johnson open part 4 by using Hamlet as a case study for examining how newer analytical practices expand source studies. Greatley-Hirsch and Johnson demonstrate how the human element, cultural memory, and networks of association problematize source identification. Janelle Jensted then turns to the editorial decisions made on digital platforms and the opportunities for opening up source study and diversity through presenting source and text equally. In the final chapter, David McInnis addresses sources that are lost, fragmented, or incomplete. The Lost Plays Database, edited by McInnis, Rosalyn Knutson, and Matthew Steggle, goes some way to forensically trace the residues of plays that are now lost, underscoring how lost plays offer invaluable information about intertheatricality and authorship.
In his afterword, John Drakakis points to the timeliness and provocative nature of this collection. What emerges is a more nuanced mode of source study that is sensitive to diversity, microsources, and the collaborative quality of Shakespeare production.
