ABSTRACT
Much of contemporary Shakespeare criticism’s ambivalence about traditional “source study” arises from the discrepancy between how easily available the vast array of putative sources is and how weak their explanatory force has become. If scholars want to know the sources of any play or poem of Shakespeare’s, they are ready to hand in most scholarly editions, from the detailed critical history in Harold Jenkins’s Arden2 Hamlet (1982) to J. J. M. Tobin’s summatory table in the Riverside Shakespeare (1997).1
Reprints of this material cluster in the back of teaching editions, and compilations like those of Bullough (1957) or Muir (1957) are easily found. But discovering that All’s Well derives from the thirty-eighth story in William Painter’s popular three-volume collection of stories, The Palace of Pleasure (1566-67), does not satisfy our desire to understand the play. Even knowing that Painter in turn adapted his material from Boccaccio’s Decameron, or that the story has affinities with medieval tales about witty women and classical romances like the story of Cupid and Psyche does not resolve the question of why identifying a source should be a valuable activity for Shakespeare critics. The compelling reason to return to source study today must be its ability to produce new ways of understanding the narrative and rhetorical patterns whose histories have been so densely traced.
