Intertexts

Scott’s great library at Abbotsford includes a full range of literary texts, from the Classical period through to his own time. The twenty-seven novels have more than 10,000 literary references, allusions, or echoes, nearly half of them accounted for by the Bible (over 3000) and Shakespeare (nearly 2000). There are also not far short of 2000 uses of proverbs and over 3000 allusions to works by authors other than Shakespeare and anonymous pieces. These numbers might be considerably expanded were every fleeting reminiscence to be identified. ¹ If the allusions were evenly spread out there would be one on nine out of ten eewn pages. ² Obviously they are not so distributed. The introductory chapters in several of the novels, when Scott is writing in one of his ‘smart’ styles, ³ are particularly rich in allusions, whereas some chapters consisting entirely of narration have little such material, if any. Most often, even in novels without conspicuously ‘smart’ openings, there is a tendency for allusions to become rather less dense from the second volume on: this is noticeably the case with the first three works, where it is aligned with the increasingly dramatic style noted in the third chapter. The late novels (from The Betrothed on, but anticipated by Quentin Durward) tend to be noticeably less allusive than the earlier ones, perhaps because of a decline in zestfulness, certainly resulting in a more spartan texture. An exception is Woodstock with its plentiful biblical and Shakespearean allusions associated with the Puritans and Sir Henry Lee respectively, giving it an intertextual density that puts it alongside The Antiquary, The Tale of Old Mortality, and The Heart of Mid-Lothian.