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I am grateful to Princeton University for several grants and fellowships that allowed me to pursue research in England; the kind and helpful librarians and staff at the British Library, the Print Room of the British Museum, the Society of Antiquaries, and the John Rylands University Library of Manchester helped me make the most of my time. The Johns Hopkins University Press has been a generous and supportive partner in this project: Stephen Nichols, Michael Lonegro, Courtney Bond, and Juliana McCarthy have been unfailingly encouraging and patient; the anonymous readers offered productive criticism; and Peter Dreyer’s careful attention and wise judgment purged the manuscript of many errors, opaque sentences, and other infelicities. This book has been a long time in the making; its publication is a happy event in no small measure because I now have the opportunity to acknowledge debts of such long standing. It is rare that I read a Renaissance play without thinking of Janet Adelman, Stephen Booth, and Jonas Barish. Before the project had really taken form, Harry Berger and I had several conversations that have stayed with me for years and helped to lay the foundations of this book. Had I not dedicated this book to my parents, I would have dedicated it to the late Julian Boyd; the three of them taught me how to read. Princeton’s early modernists—past and present—have been wonderful colleagues : Lawrence Danson, Michael Goldman, Tom Roche, and the late Earl Miner all read substantial portions of the manuscript and made many excellent and challenging suggestions. I am especially grateful to Victoria Kahn—it was wildly lucky for me that she was at Princeton when I arrived—and Joanna Picciotto, whose exceptionally keen reading of the penultimate draft of the manuscript led to dozens of improvements, large and small. I am very grateful to J. K. Barret and Abigail Heald for their invaluable help and good humor. My sisters Caroline and Jane, my parents, Thomas Garrity, Dorothy Hale, Jeff Nunokawa, Michael Wood, Claudia Johnson, Uli Knopflmacher, Eduardo Cadava, Esther Schor, Deborah Nord, Larry Danson, and Martin Harries have Acknowledgments ix given me the kind of intellectual and emotional support that can be repaid only with love. This book would never have been finished without the encouragement and support of three people. At several moments when the project was foundering, Jeffrey Knapp rescued it and me. Jeff has an uncanny knack for seeing the misalignments , gaps, and disorders in the deep structure of an argument; showing someone how to fix those problems requires both a high gift and an awful lot of hard work. If I have made a contribution to the scholarship on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Parliament, it is only because I fell in love with Susan Maslan, who just happened to be a brilliant historian. In countless conversations, she supplied the gear I was missing—and badly needed—to understand what I most wanted to say about everything from Habermas to new historicism to the Third Citizen’s account of power. More than that, she stuck with the book through thick and thin and never let me give up on it. Stephen Greenblatt’s intellectual generosity has meant everything to me: every rough idea that I ever bounced off him always bounced back higher—transfigured into something more ambitious and exciting, something that I had to stretch for. His friendship has meant everything and more: among many kind, expansive, and loyal acts and gestures I will recall just one—one night, at a bar in Princeton, he willed me to write the chapter on Julius Caesar and finish the book. Acknowledgments x ...

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