ABSTRACT
Quotations that are obviously based on acoustic memory, the sound and rhythm of remembered phrases, are a particularly telling symptom of distance from original content, and another indicator of casual intertextuality is the use of favourite lines. The mass of casual quotations is just as integral to William Shakespeare’s status of most-quoted-author-of-all-time as are sophisticated literary allusions. Casual quotation is rife in Shakespeare’s own use of older texts and of classical and Biblical motifs and quotations from Shakespeare throughout the two first centuries after his death is casual in many ways that are individually and historically inflected. Shakespeare quotations in hypertext, databases, electronic archives, search engines and social media are giving new leases of life to old texts, and ‘casual quotation’ may be acquiring new meanings and modes of existence which are to be explored. The casual use of Shakespeare’s words has mostly been considered as a modern practice, a symptom of cultural decline that originated in the twentieth century.
