Link it "to the source from whence it came". Shakespeare Source Study after the Digital Turn

This paper discusses the digitally inflected changes occurring in Shakespeare source study – a long-standing research field that burst back into prominence over the last few years. The recent publication of volumes such as Shakespeare, Origins, and Originality (Holland 2015), Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Britton, Walter 2018) or Shakespeare’s Resources (Drakakis 2021) vouches indeed for a steady resurgence of interest in “the circulation, transformation and function of Shakespeare’s sources” (Bigliazzi 2018, p. 13) – a rising tide heightened, no doubt, by the proliferation of electronic archives, digital critical editions, wiki databases, and corpus-based searching tools designed to bring early modern (inter)textuality into sharper focus. This “flood of digital possibilities” (Lavagnino 2014, p. 21) has greatly impacted on Shakespeare source criticism, modelling new ways to explore and identify the intertextual, subtextual, and contextual forms of influence that shaped the playwright’s production. In this essay, such an ongoing shift of perspectives is examined by sorting through a series of digital methodologies and resources that show promise in improving how we visualise, analyse, and identify Shakespeare’s diverse sources. Laying emphasis on the dovetailing of “‘old source study’ and more contemporary approaches to textual and cultural analysis” (Britton, Walter 2018, p. 1) fostered by the digital medium, the paper illustrates the benefits, limits, and prospects of digital editing and archiving, quantitative analyses, wiki databases, and digital thick mapping for the study of Shakespeare’s creative process and early modern European theatricality tout court.