Book review: Shakespeare’s Originality, by John Kerrigan

It is one of the first things that schoolchildren learn about Shakespeare. He didn’t make much up. Even the examples I was given – Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Prospero, Caliban and Ariel in The Tempest – have been chiselled away by scholarship. At university, this shifted towards an appreciation of what Shakespeare had read and how he had adapted his sources. I have fond memories of Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative And Dramatic Sources Of Shakespeare. We learned about his use of Holinshed’s Chronicles and North’s translation of Plutarch, Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye Of Romeus And Juliet and that before King Lear there was a play called King Leir, with a much happier ending. More recently, critical concentration has looked into Shakespeare’s collaborative work, how he worked with George Wilkins on Pericles, Prince Of Tyre or maybe with Thomas Middleton on Macbeth. The most recent new edition of Shakespeare, the New Oxford Shakespeare, makes various attributions – to Christopher Marlowe, contentiously – and even adds in plays like Arden Of Faversham. Even last month, a study using plagiarism software found similarities between several parts of different plays to an unpublished manuscript, George North’s A Brief Discourse Of Rebellion and Rebels. Whenever we think Shakespeare studies are exhausted, they prove inexhaustible.