ABSTRACT
Everybody makes allusions, it’s just that we often fail to notice them as such. It’s worth introducing as a topic in its own right: Why do we quote and refer? Why don’t we have to explain our allusions? What about private allusions which other people won’t ‘get’? This could lead to an exercise in historical imagination: what might have to be explained in four hundred year’s time (Jade Goody, hip-hop, ‘wicked’). With older students this could be developed in some detail: they could be given an early twenty-first-century text and some examples of scholarly editions of old texts which use different conventions for the explanatory apparatus. Their task would be to produce an edition of the text with scholarly annotations for readers in – say – two hundred years’ time. However briefly we raise the issue, we can go on to refer to the allusions in Shakespeare as something quite straightforward in principle; while they present us with immediate difficulties, most of them can be cleared up by brief explanations (usually a marginal note). We do, however, need to consider what weight to give to particular allusions at particular times in our teaching.
