ABSTRACT
Deconstruction, appealing to the insights of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michael Riffaterre, has sought to show that all boundaries are, at best, provisional, at worst, false and deluding. The act of reading ‘plunges us into a network of textual relations’, Graham Allen expounds; ‘Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations’ (2000: 1). The study of an author’s ‘sources’ may be rejuvenated by ideas of ‘intertextuality’. Stephen J. Lynch avers: ‘The old notion of particular and distinct sources has given way to new notions of boundless and heterogeneous intertextuality.’ Indeed, ‘the sources themselves can be examined as products of intertextualityendlessly complex, multilayered fields of interpretation that Shakespeare refashioned and reconfigured into alternative fields of interpretation’ (Lynch 1998: 1).
