ABSTRACT
The dynamics in and between innovation-producing institutions is considerable. There are two main types of dynamics: changes in and of the systems. Single innovations may percolate between institutions, and such movements may go both ways. Gesunkenes Kulturgut was for a long time a key term in European ethnography. A striking and well-known example of percolation in the other direction, as it were, is Shakespeare, who - now the dramatist par excellence - originally worked in a heterocultural medium, the popular theatres of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century London. At the beginning of his career he was looked down upon by the 'University Wits'. Regarding themselves as serving another system, semi-independent at the very least, and yet anxious not to be overshadowed by Shakespeare, they called him an 'upstart crowe beautified with our feathers ... that supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you' (quoted from Legouis and Cazamian 1930/1957: 411).
