Inside the Elephant’s Graveyard: Revising Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare

Abstract

Discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘sources’ continues to be ubiquitous, despite the fact that the terms in which it takes place are acknowledged to be unsatisfactory. This chapter considers how questions of ‘source text’ and ‘authority’, in addition to practical questions concerning how Shakespeare read and what materials he had ready access to, are aligned with a more radical questioning of the nature of the ‘text’ itself, and this leads towards a radical revision of Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, that takes account of the palimpsestic nature of Shakespeare’s dramatic texts.