The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments A book on satisfaction opens itself up to many puns and allusions, often starting with the Rolling Stones. I try to avoid them here. Instead, I enjoy the opportunity to turn from a vocabulary of repentance, compensation, and atonement to the related, but distinct, language of gratitude and thanks. This project would not have been possible without the financial and administrative support of scholarly institutions. I am grateful to have held a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library and to have received from the National Endowment for the Humanities a summer stipend as well as a year-long fellowship. All three were essential to the completion of this book. I have also been the beneficiary of various sources of support at the University of Tennessee: the Department of English, the Office of Research , the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Center, and the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Friends and colleagues have listened to me opine about satisfaction more than I had a right to expect. At UT, this includes Donna Bodenheimer, Katy Chiles, Dawn Coleman, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Mary Dzon, Rachel Golden, x Acknowledgments Laura Howes, Rob Stillman, Judith Welch, and especially Urmila Seshagiri, a model of intellectual as well as material kindness and care. A number of colleagues and members of the Renaissance Humanisms reading group also screened parts of the manuscript at various stages, including Bob Bast, Jane Bellamy, Palmira Brummett, Stan Garner, Katherine Kong, Jeri McIntosh, Samantha Murphy, Brad Pardue, and Anthony Welch. John Zomchick read the introduction more times than he should have. Amy Elias embraced the idea behind this project from its inception and discussed all aspects of it on our weekly walks with compassion as well as theoretical acumen. Graduate students Ashley Combest and Lewis Moyse offered important contributions along the way. Vera Pantanizopoulos-Broux has offered much support and guidance. I am grateful for the interest and encouragement of friends and colleagues beyond UT, including Barbara Baines, Sarah Beckwith, Lara Bovilsky, Al Braunmuller, Kent Cartwright, Carrie Euler, Raphael Falco, Natalie Houston, Nora Johnson, Erika Lin, Kate Narveson, Gail Paste, Garrett Sullivan, Susan Zimmerman, and members of the monthly reading group of the Appalachian Psychoanalytic Society. Graham Hammill was especially generous in sharing his time and insights with me. I hope he enjoys the epigraph. Leigh DeNeef was a demanding as well as kind reader of this material in all of its many incarnations. Frances and Emery Lee continue to be a source of great insight and understanding. Ken Jackson and Kevin Curran invited me to participate in seminars and panels at the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) and the Renaissance Society of America, respectively , and I profited from these opportunities. I thank the members of my own 2008 SAA seminar, “Would I were satisfied,” who challenged and broadened my own notions of “enough.” I was honored to have been asked to present parts of this work in various venues and grateful for the feedback I received. Thanks go to Thomas Fulton and Ann Baynes Coiro, for having me speak at the “Rethinking Historicism” symposium; to Molly Murray, for asking me to the Columbia University Early Modern Colloquium; to Erika Lin and Matthew Biberman, for asking me to the University of Louisville; and to Garrett Sullivan, for inviting me to speak at Pennsylvania State University. I owe particular debts to the readers for the press. The anonymous reader captured and recast the argument for me in ways which are reflected in the final product and for which I am deeply grateful. And John Parker’s engagement with the project was extraordinary. He read the manuscript Acknowledgments xi sympathetically and rigorously, and I have learned much from his intellectual generosity. This is a different and better book because of his responses. I thank Peter Potter at the press for having faith in the project and for his scrupulous attention to details of the manuscript. I am singularly lucky to have the continued support of my parents, Pam and Henry Hirschfeld. Anthony Welch was not a part of my life at the start of this project. But he was the first to ask what it meant that I was working on satisfaction, a question that expresses in little his characteristic curiosity, charm, intuition, patience , and sensitivity to things that matter. All of these qualities, as well as the more general erudition and delight he brings to our...