ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that reading with sources must also involve the uncovering of contest and potential conflicts between subtexts, invoked cultures, and revenant voices, and articulates the difficulty of estimating the cultural knowledges and theatrical experiences that multiple intertexts bring to a play. It focuses on what might be called the theatergram of the veiled wife returned from the dead in final scenes of Euripides's Alcestis and William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing as a way of understanding how the classical past is integrated and interrogated in this early modern play. The chapter focuses on the study of how Shakespeare draws from and integrates classical and contemporary non-English materials to suggest that audiences, authors should be more modest. It presents source study as exemplifying a different kind of transnationalism, translation, and cultural exchange–to consider in particular what interpretive paradigms the rediscovery of Euripides's influence in the sixteenth century can bring to understanding Shakespeare.
