Colin Burrow

Shakespeare’s Authorities

From Charlotte Lennox to Geoffrey Bullough Shakespeare’s ‘narrative’ sources have been explored at the expense of discursive texts. This chapter argues critics should talk not of ‘Shakespeare’s sources’ but of his ‘authorities’, a wide range of texts including narrative works, rhetorical treatise, and works of philosophy, which could provide the contentious seeds of thought within Shakespearean drama. This chapter explores examples from 1 H IV, which shows how Shakespeare used Cicero’s De Oratore to enhance Prince Harry’s political and rhetorical authority. It ends by arguing that in Hamlet and King Lear a hybrid mingling of ‘authorities’, ranging from Cicero to Melanchthon, and from Seneca the dramatist and Seneca the philosopher, come to the fore in speeches by characters within the drama who are themselves suffering crises of authority.

The sixteenth century

What makes a century? It is clearly something more than the simple passage of a hundred years, but equally clearly is something less than a perfectly connected sequence of events with an interconnected beginning, middle, and end. History rarely shapes itself to the motions of the planets or to the arbitrary divisions of the calendar: as Hayden White has shown us, it is more usually shaped by the demands imposed on it by different kinds of narrative structure. Monarchs do not obligingly succumb to fin de siecle gloom in order to die with the century, nor do social or literary movements terminate with a bang the moment a century draws to an end. The sixteenth century is particularly unobliging in its relation to the calendar. Nothing of great note happened in 1500, and nothing of great note happened in 1600 either, as the timeline appended to this volume shows.