ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the casual intertextuality surrounding William Shakespeare’s works with a different focus and draws on digital and traditional research in different ways to complement the narratives of intentional, complex allusion that studies in Shakespeare reception have favoured. It discusses Shakespeare’s own borrowings and those of his early quoters with a special focus on John Marston. Shakespeare’s works are quoted far more than they are read or watched; Shakespeare himself borrowed countless phrases and most of his plots from his wide and varied reading. Casual Shakespeare quotations are not ‘references’ in the sense of Latin ‘re-ferre’, ‘to carry back’; they do not take the reader back to a Shakespearean context that would give them meaning. The book explains the history of Shakespeare quotation into the 1830s with a more obviously quantitative approach.
