The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book has taken me a long time to finish. During the course of its writing and the many turns that have accompanied it, I have accumulated an enormous amount of debt—but some kinds of debt are good. It is a pleasure to be able to recognize and thank the extraordinary teachers, scholars, colleagues, students, friends, and family, without whom this book would never have been possible. The Tears of Sovereignty began when I was at New York University and worked with Leonard Barkan, Georgina Dopico Black, and Anselm Haverkamp. Leonard has been a sustaining force throughout these years. His intelligence, humor, refinement, and warmth are a continuing inspiration. I thank him for being a wonderful teacher, advisor, and friend. The project was sparked by ideas generated in his graduate seminar on “Word and Image” and began to take shape after a conference on “Political Theologies” in Amsterdam co-sponsored by the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Divinity School of Harvard University, which I was able to attend thanks to the generosity of Anselm Haverkamp. I am especially grateful to Anselm, Michèle Lowrie, and Eva Geulen of the NYU Poetics and Theory Program for supporting the 2002 “Zone 2” Sovereignty conference whose participants, including Georgio Agamben , Gil Anidjar, Judith Butler, Rüdiger Campe, and Richard Falk, articulated the historical and theoretical problems of sovereignty in such compelling and important ways. At NYU, I was privileged to be able to study Golden Age drama with Georgina Dopico Black, who is not only an exemplary scholar and advisor but also a witty, brilliant, and generous friend. At NYU, I was also very fortunate to study with Mikhail Iampolski, whose seminars on sovereignty and symbolic space changed the critical horizon and whose influence is notable in these pages. viii Acknowledgments I would especially like to thank Anselm Haverkamp for his teaching and his continued and extraordinary generosity, support, and encouragement . Thanks to the trans-Atlantic affiliations he established between NYU, the European University Viadrina, and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, I benefited from interactions with scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. I am grateful to Anselm and to the members of the Graduiertenkolleg at the Europa Universität Viadrina, including especially Dirk Mende, Mariele Nientied, and Björn Quiring for reading and responding to drafts of this project at various stages and for their invaluable commentary, criticism, and suggestions. I would also like to thank Christoph Menke, Katrin Trüstedt, and the organizers of the “Wrong Again—Tragedy’s Comedy” conference for the invitation to present portions of this material at Potsdam University, and, again, to Björn Quiring for the opportunity to test ideas about Suárez, mystery, and theater at the workshop on “The Uses of the Theatrum Mundi: Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England” at the LudwigMaximilians -Universität in Munich. This is a comparative project. I have learned what that can mean from a marvelous group of scholars I am privileged to be a part of who comprise the international research collective on Comparative Renaissance Drama, “Theatre Without Borders.” My thanks to Dick Andrews, Michael Armstrong-Roche, Pam Brown, Christian Billing, Pavel Drábek, Rob Henke, Peg Katritzky, Natasha Korda, Paul Kottman, Jacques Lezra, Clare McManus, Bella Mirabella, Eric Nicholson, Shormishtha Panja, David Schalkwyk, Jyotsna Singh, Maria Galli Stampino, Melissa Walter, and Susanne Wofford—whose work reminds us that Renaissance drama travels, transgresses, and is nothing if not international from the start. My research on Francisco Suárez has carried me across disciplinary boundaries and into territories beyond my professional training, including theology and especially international law. I would like to thank Anne Orford and Martti Koskenniemi for invitations to present portions of this material at a series of conferences and workshops on “International Law and Wars of Religion” at the Faculty of Law at the University of Lund, in Sweden, in 2007; on “Reasons of State: Security , Civility, Immunity, Life” at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School in 2009; and on “International Law and Empire” at the Erik Castrén Institute for International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki, in 2011. Acknowledgments ix At Cornell University, I have benefited from the best colleagues and students one could hope to have. Rayna Kalas read and commented...