My goal in this chapter, as in the previous chapter on the appropriation of a specifically medieval tradition, is to examine generic innovation in the later Shakespeare (post-1600) as responses, reconsiderations, or revisions of earlier generic experiments. If Winter's Tale looks back to Greene's Pandosto as a source of narrative material, might Shakespeare not also look back to Spenser's Faerie Queene as a source for narrative form? Spenser's shifting and non-unified narrative in Book III of the Faerie Queene bears a suggestive resemblance to Shakespeare's narrative technique in the tragedies and the romances. In this chapter, the innovation I am interested in operates across kinds, altering the way that Hamlet presents revenge tragedy and producing the unsettled and unsettling treatment of Troy in the roughly contemporaneous Troilus and Cressida. Both plays approach their central stories from deliberately complicated and multiple perspectives, and this proliferation represents their intervention in the generic system. While both Spenser and Shakespeare respond to and revise tradition, neither writer can or desires to break completely with the past. Their interventions in the field are better and more easily understood as position-takings in the field of cultural production. The shape of the field enables and constrains the breaks from tradition. As demonstrated by the history of the two plays this chapter focuses on, some innovations find audiences more readily than others. In the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare's innovation was successful and popular, while Troilus and Cressida's reception appears to have been rather less enthusiastic.

This chapter and its companion on medieval legacies are Shakespeare-centric in a way that other chapters in this book are not. There are several reasons for this focus, the first being rooted in the history of criticism.