Acknowledgments

Shakespeare is quoted from the individual volumes of The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, edited by Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), except for King Lear, which is quoted from the Arden edition, 3rd series, ed. R.A. Foakes (London:Thomson Learning, 1997). I have made good use of the notes and introductions in the Arden editions and in the Signet. I have footnoted only special issues in an effort to avoid excessive footnoting, but I have profited greatly from conversation with my colleagues at Rutgers and with members of the Shakespeare Seminar at Columbia University.

I presented a paper on Tybalt at the Shakespeare Seminar. Since just about everyone disagreed that Tybalt was a villain, I took this as a strong sign of the intellectual vitality of that seminar. I also want to thank Angelika Zirker of the University of Tübingen for providing me with a preliminary bibliography on Shakespeare’s villains. Maik Goth of Ruhr University at Bochum kindly lent me a copy of his original bok connecting Iago and Vice tradition

I have made abundant use of The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). I also refer frequently to the Oxford English Dictionary, abbreviated as the OED. The dates of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are from Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964). For proverbs, I refer to the numbering system in Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966).