ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that a rethought source study might seek to complicate the situation further by considering certain literary or cultural traditions as constituting repositories of shared memories upon which William Shakespeare could draw as conceptual sources. It also proposes that certain literary modes or cultural traditions might be seen to have provided Shakespeare and his audiences with a common dramaturgical vocabulary, a set of recognizable tropes that could then be transformed and put to any number of uses. The chapter suggests that Shakespeare and William Fletcher could rely upon their audience's familiarity with the mode's tropes and use the memes as a source to inform their adaptation of Raphael Holinshed's account of key events surrounding Henry's divorce and the birth of Elizabeth. A remarkable feature of Holinshed's text is just how much of the Chronicles' account of Henry's reign may be seen to resonate with romance tropes.
