ABSTRACT
In his short story "Shakespeare's Memory," Jorge Luis Borges's narrator, the self-confessed Shakespeare expert Hermann Sörgel, is offered by his friend, Daniel Thorpe, the gift of "Shakespeare's memory." In many respects, the promise of familiarity, has, from the outset, been what has driven the study of what for the moment we will continue to call Shakespeare's "sources." The refusal to "explain" what curious minds have always wished to know about the essence of Shakespeare's "art" is at the same time a respectful gesture to Eliot's emphasis on the flexibility and suppleness of "interpretation," and a residual gesture in the direction of the romantic concept of "genius." From time to time new "sources" have been suggested for particular plays, and new speculations about how Shakespeare engaged with them, although these discoveries have done little to disturb seriously the conceptual framework that underpins the discourse.
