From the Editor

JEMCS 3.1 (Spring/Summer 2003) From the Editor Bruce Boehrer In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Bill Buford revisited classic George Orwell territory by taking a job in a restau rant kitchen. In Buford's case, the restaurant was Mario Batali's Babbo, and from his experience there Buford extracted the following bit ofwisdom: One of the mysteries of a restaurant is that there is almost always one thing or another that everyone seems to order, and you never know what it's going to be. One night, everyone wanted duck or branzino. . . . One evening itwas rabbit. Then: no rabbit. Tonight, itwas lamb chops. (140) As it happens?and who would have known??the same rule holds true for scholarly editing. Currently we're experi encing a mild run of submissions in eighteenth- and nine teenth-century French literature. Just before that came a series of essays on food studies, which will comprise the bulk of JEMCS 3.2 when it appears. And before that came the contents of the present issue: a whole string of submis sions dealing with the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. As a result of such vagaries, JEMCS will be producing not one but two unsolicited theme issues this year. As to the present issue: the two essays by Deneen Senasi and Adam Cohen are united not only by their focus upon Shakespeare, but also by their overriding concern with the function ofmemory. For Senasi, this function is particularly ii The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies manifest in Shakespeare's soliloquies, which participate in an Augustinian dynamic of confessional recollection that constitutes the speaking subject through temporal vacilla tion, in the spaces between past, present, and future. Cohen, likewise, focuses upon what we might call the early modern culture of memory, although for him this culture finds its roots not in Augustine but in Cicero and Quintilian, and it achieves its principal Shakespearian expression inHamlet. While not so immediately devoted to questions ofmemo ry and its management, the additional two essays by Brian Lockey and Jeanne H. McCarthy arguably address the same subject-matter inmore diffuse form, as it invests questions of national identity and tradition. Lockey considers the rela tion between civil and common law in the formation of early modern Englishness, suggesting that Cymbeline embodies a tension between competing discourses of nationhood, one founded in native custom and the other in classical influ ence. Rather than confronting the broader question of national identity, McCarthy on the other hand deals with the identity and continuity of English theatrical culture. Revisiting the subject of Ben Jonson's relations with the boy players of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, she argues that Jonson's peculiarly proprietary view of the theater emerges not from his own innovation but rather from the typical operating dynamics of the children's companies. Between them, these four essays confront one of the cen tral dilemmas ofwhat we might call time-management: how to construct a sense of self?whether itbe theatrical, nation al, or personal?from the experience of diachronic progres sion and loss. In the process, they offer a unity of focus ren dered all the more remarkable by its serendipity. Poised as I am between the present and the future of JEMCS, I can only wonder what similar constellations of interest will appear in the submissions to come. Works Cited Buford, Bill. aThe Secret of Excess." The New Yorker. August 19 and 26, 2002. 122-141. ...