ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a preliminary genealogy of Shakespearean source study and some of its damaging effects and then proposes one more sustainable alternative. It demonstrates briefly how that practice might re-situate The Winter's Tale, a play inevitably placed alongside its immediate English source, in a longer intertextual and intercultural chain of imperial tales. Stanley Wells demonstrates how Shakespearean source study is burdened by a history of contempt for its objects of study: sources are sought only to confirm their worthlessness in comparison to Shakespeare's reinventions. Attention to materiality is crucial for source study because it allows comparative histories of publishing and reading across media. Jeanette Winterson reflects on bidirectional time as well, in an essay about her 2015 novel The Gap of Time, her "prose version of The Winter's Tale." Robert Greene's romance may be a direct, primary, and visible precursor of The Winter's Tale, but it is not its source in the etymological sense, not its point of origin.
