The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

Acknowledgments

xi You can’t detach what you seek to know from your emotions as you seek to know it. —Lyn Hejinian, “The Fatalist”1 The first assemblage encountered in this book is distinctly sanguine in temperament—a modular network of students, colleagues, mentors, allies, editors, family members, band mates, and friends. Many institutions have hosted me while I assembled this work: the University of California at Berkeley; the Huntington Library; the Folger Library; St. John’s College, Oxford; and Johns Hopkins University. There I have had the distinct pleasure of learning from feisty undergraduates and being regularly challenged by the participants in a monthly early modern reading group whose cohort includes Rebecca Buckham, Marisa O’Connor, Jacob Chilton , David Hershinow, Will Miller, Benjamin Parris, Andrew Sisson, and Maggie Vinter. My present and former colleagues in the Department of English have been extraordinary allies and famously demanding interlocutors : The book would not have taken the shape it did had I not had the scholarly examples of Amanda Anderson, Sharon Cameron, Simon During , Frances Ferguson, Jared Hickman, Douglas Mao, Christopher Nealon, Jesse Rosenthal, Eric Sundquist, and Mark Thompson before me. I am also deeply grateful to three colleagues at Hopkins from outside my department who have responded to early versions of this work with expertise , encouragement, and timely advice: Jane Bennett, Stephen Campbell, and Katrin Pahl. Outside of my own institution, there stands a constellation of people who have encouraged,hosted,helped,or inspired in manifold ways:Richard Acknowledgments xii Acknowledgments McCabe,Gerard Passannante,Steven Shaviro,Molly Murray,Jeffrey Cohen, Nigel Smith, Stephen Greenblatt, Eileen Joy, Fred and Katherine Maus, Scott Wilson, Tavia Nyong’o, Heather Love, Jose Muñoz, Lauren Berlant , Jonathan Flatley, Bryan Lowrance, Madhavi Menon, Jonathan Gil Harris, Gustavus Stadler, Homay King, Jonathan Dollimore, Monica Youn, Erika Clowes, Will Stockton, Christopher Pye, Steve Burt, Ken Wissoker, Mark Wunderlich, and Francois-Xavier Gleyzon have nothing in common with each other but my gratitude, dispensed in variably sized portions. Versions of this project have been given as talks at Columbia, Princeton, UCLA, UC Irvine, George Washington University, and the University of Virginia, and I am also grateful to my hosts and respondents at those institutions . Graham Hammill and Jacques Lezra wrote responses to the version of my chapter on “The Merchant of Venice,” which was published in Shakespeare Quarterly, and I am doubly indebted for their critical and constructive engagement. Whether reading chapters, hosting talks, curating conferences, or throwing dinner parties, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard have been particularly staunch allies, collaborators, and friends: This project has been shaped by their example and their tough questions. I also wish to thank my manuscript’s two readers for their encouragement, advice, and critiques, and to preemptively absolve them of any errors and lacunae that remain. I want to thank the editors of Shakespeare Quarterly for permission to reprint my chapter on “The Merchant of Venice.” I also wish to thank Margaret Gray of Powis Castle, Shannon Haskett at Patrick Painter Editions , and the helpful staff of Art Resource and the Bridgeman Art Library . An extra special thanks to the Tirkanits/Daniel Foundation for the Arts for making the color insert possible. My greatest intellectual and emotional debts are to the two advisors to this project who stewarded me through the writing process and out the other side: Richard Halpern and Janet Adelman offered me paternal/maternal advice, ferocious criticism, and crucial support. From separate corners and opposite coasts, they each personified scholarship as a lifelong practice of creative commitment to the pleasure of difficulty. Janet’s death leaves a wound twice over, within Shakespearean scholarship and psychoanalytic criticism, but the monument of her work holds fast. Acknowledgments xiii Arriving at the other end of a seemingly endless process, I wish to thank my editors at Fordham University Press—Helen Tartar, Thomas Lay, Nicole Pfeifer, and Eric Newman—for believing in the project and steering it toward publication with flexibility, honesty, and good sense. The enduring support of my family has been both inspiring and humbling . Over the past decade, Rollin Daniel, Beatrix Tirkanits, Kathleen Daniel, Marty Sussman, and Matthew Sussman have patiently endured more than the legal limit of melancholizing. I want to thank them for reminding me of joy. It is not possible to thank Martin Schmidt for twenty years of unrelenting honesty and love. Instead, I will repeat what Jorge Luis Borges said of De Quincey—“my...