Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakepeare Sources (review)

We all know how to deal with Shakespeare's sources: go directly to Geoffrey Bullough's eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75), find the play(s) with which you are concerned, look up the sources, and—zip, zip—the job is done. If not, then turn to T. W. Baldwin's William Shakspere's Small Latine and Less Greeke (1944), Kenneth Muir's The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (1957-77), Joseph Satin's Shakespeare and his Sources (1966),or Emrys Jones's The Origins of Shakespeare (1977). Well, not exactly. While Bullough's work remains the standard for source study, and while Baldwin, Muir, Satin, and Jones provide further grist for the mill, even as John W. Velz's Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition (1968) and Selma Guttmann's The Foreign Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (1947) increase the range and scope,Stuart Gillespie looks elsewhere and continues what those scholars began.

Gillespie organizes his work by author: "However unfashionable the notion of the author may be today, Chaucer or Seneca or Marlowe were as Shakespeare conceived them real individuals responsible for a range of different works, and it follows that one way of understanding the nature of his conceptions is to consider each of these ranges of textual entities as a group, instead of pondering Shakespeare's use of them one instance at a time" (1). Gillespie wants us to consider "creative and imaginative" sources as well as narrative and dramatic ones. Our understanding of sources has broadened to include texts that are obliquely related to the work in question, and "evidence about a source can be derived from 'scenic form, thematic figuration, rhetorical strategy, structural parallelism, ideational or imagistic concatenation' as well as more straightforward kinds of 'verbal iteration'" (3). Gillespie ponders the terms allusion and imitation, affinity and echo. Then, too, the "likelihood of Shakespeare's having knowledge of a work available only in a Polish-language edition is more remote than in the case of a French-language one" (4).

Each entry has four sections: Section A offers "a brief factual, biographical/historical description of the writer and/or work(s)" (5). Section B "supplies information on the reputation, presentation, availability and use of the writer or work in Shakespeare's time," with the aim of indicating "how the writer or work would have appeared to Shakespeare's eyes, and the dominant ways in which it was being represented" (5). Section C provides "a detailed, though not exhaustive, discussion of the relationship to Shakespeare's plays and poems" (5). Finally, Section D supplies a bibliography for the item. When the source texts are quoted, there is minimal modernization.

That said, let me turn to the sources themselves. Aping Sidney Lipman, Fred Wise, and Buddy Kaye's 1948 song "A—You're Adorable," I'd like "to wander through / The alphabet with you" in order to suggest, howsoever slightly, the breadth and depth of Gillespie's impressive collection:

A is for Aeschylus, Aesop, and Lucius Apuleius;
B is for Matteo Bandello, François de Belleforest, the Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer;
C is for William Caxton, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Giovanni Baptista Giraldi Cinthio;
D is for Samuel Daniel, Dante Alighieri, and Diogenes the Cynic;
E is for Sir Thomas Elyot, emblems, and Desiderius Erasmus;
F is for Robert Fabyan, John Foxe, and Jean Froissart;
G is for Robert Garnier, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Giovanni Battista Guarini;
H is for Edward Hall, Samuel Harsnett, and Raphael Holinshed;
I is for impresa and interludes;
J is for James I and VI, Ben Jonson, and Decimus Junius Juvenalis;
K is for Albertius Kranzius and Thomas Kyd;
L is for Sir Lewis Lewkenor, Titus Livius, Lucian, and John Lydgate;
M is for Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, and Sir Thomas More;
N is for Thomas...