Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories

Abstract

The documentary Joanna Lumley’s Nile (2009) describes a journey south up the river Nile from Alexandria to Cairo; thence via Aswan to Khartoum and Lake Victoria; and ending finally in a muddy trickle above the Kagera river in the mountains of Rwanda. Here Lumley proclaims, abetted, somewhat bizarrely, by a New Zealand tour guide, is the ‘true’ source of the Nile, at ‘02°16.931S, 029°19, 875E’ (Macintyre et al., 255). This will not be a chapter on Nilotic storytelling, from the Victorian to the postmodern era, and will, as promised in my title, take up the subject of Shakespeare and his use of ‘sources’ to tell stories. Rather let Lumley’s quest stand as a riverine trope for the problem of traditional source study. Doubtless GPS led Lumley and her guides (as Macintyre et al. recount) to a small stream which flows east into Lake Victoria and thence, after several thousand kilometres, to the many mouthed delta of the Nile. But is this stream the ‘true’ source of the Nile? This is surely to repeat the false certainty of Victorian explorers, that the quest for the Nile was a riddle with one solution and therefore one triumphant discoverer. To assert as much is to underestimate the combined synergies which make the Nile, merging the waters from Lakes Albert and Victoria, with the force of the Blue Nile descending from the highlands of Ethiopia joining the White Nile at Khartoum.