the context familiar alike to dramatist and audience; they read it in
those collections (original or translated) in which it was available
to the Elizabethan reader. ¹ And, by a minor irony of circumstance,
their discoveries opened the way to such scholarly labours as have
done scholarship a sort of disservice: to reprints of single tales from
those collections, and even of passages from those tales, and ex-
tracts from those passages -- all designed to smooth the reader's
way to understanding. Perhaps it would be too much to say that,
the more our convenience is consulted, the more helpless we be-
come -- but hardly too much to guess that, when what we im-
mediately need has been made available, we may not look beyond
or beside it. Will not the candid reader admit that he has had, at
some instant or other, to shrug himself awake and dispel the illu-
sion that Shakespeare found the stories for his plays in a row of
compact volumes labelled 'Shakespearian sources'? And the un-
happy consequence of our situation is wasteful division among
Shakespearian scholars. The eager young researcher seeks more and
more widely -- and, to the unsympathetic eye, distractedly -- for
analogues, versions of his originals with which Shakespeare may or
may not have been acquainted; while the established critic deve-
lops a princely indifference to all such inquiries, all attempts to dig
in the soil whence the plays grew -- careless of former cultivation,
or disappointed with the crop. I therefore beg the reader to lay
aside both his remembrance of acknowledged sources in conve-
nient reprints, and impatience with this digging -- at least until the
sod has been turned afresh and the tissue of roots laid bare.

If, in what I have to say, I should seem to attend too little to
those who have tilled this soil before me, it will not be for want of
attention to what they have reported. I have listened, followed
their directions, and even found small objects hitherto unnoticed
-- only to doubt their significance, and wish that the nature of this
sort of evidence might be considered afresh. Names of characters,
for example, are surely a very dubious way of tracing the foot-
steps of a writer of fiction 'in other men's snow'. ² And there is not

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