I am interested in the relation of Chaucerian narrative to what appear to be innovations in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy after the turn of the century. My interest is thus less in verbal influences or direct debts of theme or matter than in structural and narratological elements that Shakespeare may have adapted in producing plays like Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Following Bakhtin’s suggestion that utterances (as works) are responsive to each other, I intend to investigate the ways Shakespeare’s post-1600 plays react to medieval antecedents as they experiment with alternative principles of construction. My intention is not to focus so much on specific connections as on structural ones. Bakhtin argues that works interact in ways that go beyond more or less readily recognizable matters of verbal influence. He writes:

Works, in this account, engage in a conversation spanning histories of reception and production, and each work actively works to condition the kinds of responses it will receive as much as it influences the works to which it responds. Bakhtin imagines a dynamic and flexible version of literary history that attempts to account for the ways work-utterances, to use his term, intervene prospectively and retrospectively in the “chain of speech communion” that is the literary field.