My first debt is to my editors at the University of Chicago Press. Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos welcomed the initial proposal for this book and oversaw its scrupulous refereeing and ultimate acceptance. With this, as with my previous books with the Press, I remain delighted and honored by their support and counsel.
The University of California, San Diego, has provided me with research support and sabbatical leave, as well as with the pleasure of teaching Shakespeare in its unique Department of Literature. A 2015 Keeley Fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, offered an unparalleled place to research and write and to share portions of the book with faculty and students. Thanks are due to Jane Griffiths, Rhodri Lewis, and Daniel Wakelin, and to the Bodleian Library, the English Faculty Library, and the Wadham College Library. A term as the 2016 M. H. Abrams Visiting Professor at Cornell University presented the opportunity to teach and lecture on some of the material here, along with a wonderful library and an engaged group of colleagues to enhance the completion of the book.
Versions of this material were presented as lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, Princeton University, the University of Rochester, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Montana, the University of San Diego, Syracuse University, York University, and at the meetings of the Modern Language Association of America and the Shakespeare Association of America. Thanks are due to all who heard and questioned. A remarkable gathering of University of California scholars for the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (held at the San Diego Public Library) gave me the chance to share ideas with a general as well as specialist audience. I thank my UC colleagues who contributed memorably to that event: Heidi Brayman, Frances Dolan, Patricia Fumerton, Jeffrey Knapp, Julia Reinhard Lupton, and Robert Watson.
My work with the Musicians in Ordinary in Toronto (the lutenist John Edwards and the soprano Hallie Fishel) taught me more than any books could about performance practice in early modern England, about the subtleties of Dowland’s lyric voices, and about the modern challenges of living with an earlier aesthetic. I thank them for inviting me to perform with them in Toronto and for their unforgettable concerts and lectures at my classes and conferences at UCSD.
Bradin Cormack, William Germano, Kenneth Gross, Timothy Hampton, James Shapiro, and Deanne Williams read versions of this book in progress. They challenged its arguments and honed its scholarship. Working through their responses has made this a better book than I could have imagined it to be.