Of many books which influenced Shakespeare, the Bible and Ovid's Metamorphosis are the most important. This section of the classroom is devoted to the exploring the influence of the Bible on the bard. Special attention will be devoted to the recent discovery of Edward de Vere's Geneva Bible-- the subject of a 2001 Phd Dissertation at the University of Massachusetts by Roger Stritmatter -- and its possible significance as a critical artifact in the authorship question.

More generally, we hope to make available a range of resources on the relevance of the Bible to Shakespeare studies and tackle the intriguing and much-neglected question of the relevance of source studies to literary criticism.

Many persons assume that source studies are boring and irrelevant. Isn't a text merely a text, regardless of the sources which influenced its composition? We don't think so: in fact, we think that all texts are, in actuality, hypertexts. Meaning almost never inheres in a text itself, but in a relationship between texts. And the more sophisticated the literary artist, the more that close study of sources -- reading intertextually -- repays the reader.