Acknowledgments

The teachers most responsible for helping me become capable of writing this book are Jenny C. Mann and Rayna Kalas. My primary advisers in graduate school and in the years after, Jenny and Rayna have always taken my work so seriously that, despite being daunted by their brilliance, I am never anything but excited to share it with them.

One of the central claims of this book is that modern critical writing, like early modern poetic writing, must be understood as a collaborative effort. At the forefront of my collaborators on this project has been Wendy Beth Hyman, whose marginal comments on every page of early drafts still linger in my memory when I look at the finished product. Wendy’s seemingly boundless generosity, coupled with her incisive critical eye, helped me overcome the doubts that plagued this book in its later stages. Debapriya Sarkar organized a working group that gave me an intellectual community in New York City, and I am grateful to her and to Caralyn Bialo, David Hershinow, Laura Kolb, and Lauren Robertson for their feedback and support on an early chapter. Other chapter drafts were read by Jenny Mann, Phil Pardi, and Dianne Mitchell, and portions of early aspects of the book were read, generously and generatively, by Adin Lears, Christian Crouch, Lianne Habinek, Collin Jennings, Jessica Rosenberg, Kate Bonnici, and Jessica Beckman. Maria Sachiko Cecire reviewed early drafts of the book proposal and has been a reliably keen interlocutor throughout the life of this project. The Five College Renaissance Seminar at UMass Amherst, the Columbia University Early Modern Colloquium, and the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar invited me to present my work in progress, and I am so appreciative of the feedback shared by their members.

Patricia Parker, Blair Hoxby, Walter Cohen, Phil Lorenz, Masha Raskolnikov, Andy Galloway, and William J. Kennedy invited me into this discipline. I first felt like a part of a scholarly community thanks to the Early Modern Reading Group at Cornell; thanks, especially, to Shilo McGiff, who took me under her wing, and to Matthew Bucemi, Molly Katz, Matthew Kibbee, Jonathan Reinhardt, and Sara Schlemm for convincing me that I had found my place and my people. During the final year of writing, I was privileged to join the “Renaissance Project” and to develop my ideas by sharing them with Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld and the rest of the organizing committee: Stephanie Elsky, Wendy Hyman, Kimberly Johnson, Tessie Prakas, and Emily Vasiliauskas. Since becoming an early modernist, I have benefited tremendously from conversations with scholars from across the academy: Faith Acker, Patricia Akhimie, Liza Blake, Claire M. L. Bourne, Emily Coyle, Katherine Cox, Heidi Craig, Hannah Crawforth, Alice Dailey, Callan Davies, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Allison Deutermann, Jeff Dolven, Ross Duffin, Hillary Eklund, Marissa Greenberg, Roland Greene, Musa Gurnis, Matthew Harrison, John Kuhn, Alexander Lash, Victor Lenthe, Ross Lerner, Erika T. Lin, Michael Lutz, Nedda Mehdizadeh, T. J. Moretti, Lucy Munro, Vin Nardizzi, Harry Newman, Vimala Pasupathi, Tripthi Pillai, Richard Preiss, Christopher Pye, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Jonathan Shelley, Emily Shortslef, Joel Slotkin, John Staines, Alan Stewart, Jacob Tootalian, Evelyn Tribble, Scott Trudell, Henry Turner, Christine Varnado, Sarah Werner, William West, Katherine Schaap Williams, Seth Williams, Michael Witmore, Matthew Zarnowiecki, and Adam Zucker.

Fellowship grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library made the research informing this book possible. A grant to participate in Heather Wolfe’s paleography seminar at the Folger helped me both conceive and complete the fourth chapter.

My colleagues at Bard have welcomed me into a warm, thriving community where I have learned much about teaching. Thank you for your collegiality and your conversation: Franco Baldasso, Alex Benson, Krista Caballero, Rob Cioffi, Ben Coonley, Lauren Curtis, Jay Elliott, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Liz Frank, Simon Gilhooley, Beth Holt, Laura Kunreuther, Marisa Libbon, Pete L’Official, Patricia Lopez-Gay, Joe Luzzi, Allison McKim, Dinaw Mengestu, Susan Merriam, Alys Moody, Keith O’Hara, Gabriel Perron, Karen Raizen, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Nate Shockey, Katherine Tabb, Dominique Townsend, Marina van Zuylen, Thomas Wild, and Daniel Williams. Lory Gray gets a special shout-out for helping me through countless administrative hurdles. I also want to vociferously thank Dierdre D’Albertis, Éric Trudel, Nicole Caso, Cole Heinowitz, and Matthew Mutter for their advocacy on behalf of junior faculty members.

Over the years, hundreds of students at Bard have challenged me to see the work of writing through eyes other than my own. They have been subject to my own pedagogical maturation. I want to single out Enzo Cnop, Jonathan Repetti, Oona Cullen, Sam Kiley, and Zoe Stone for trusting me with their work and for their candor.

This book obviously would not have been published without Cornell University Press taking a chance on it, and I will be forever grateful to Mahinder Kingra for his receptivity, editorial advice, and care. Karen Hwa helped keep everything organized as my production editor, and Eric Levy was an exceptionally scrupulous and thoughtful copyeditor. Many thanks, moreover, to the two anonymous reviewers, whose commentary improved the book immeasurably in both form and substance. Any errors or failings that remain are mine alone, but if there are any triumphs, they have been nurtured by several waves of readers, editors, and advisers.

There are many people who have gamely kept up with my progress on this book even while I struggled to articulate what it was about. Thanks to the (regrettably named) “Bidet Talk” chat group— Lex, Matt, Jono, Tamar, Peter, Cody, Rob, Keith, Dan, Brian, and Raffi—for two decades of friendship. Nicholas Friedman still puts up with my questions about poetry, and Dee Bowers, Dan Shanks, and Bern Funk periodically helped me stop thinking about poetry when the need arose.

No one has struggled with me through the process of writing a book during a global pandemic more than Nicole Ida Fossi. Thank you for taking care of me, for reading and listening to my ramblings, for goofy bits and silly songs, and for preparing innumerable cups of tea. I could not have finished this without you. Thanks, as well, to the whole Fossi family for their enthusiasm and support, and to Loki and Sicily, who were adamantly uninterested in helping me focus on my work but did wag their tails every time I came out of my office.

I would not have become the person who wrote this book without the support of my family. I am so grateful to the Desais, the Karwals, the Soods, and the Dodejas of all generations for everything that I am and have. My parents, Ninad and Mala Desai, taught me two important lessons that inform the chapters that follow: that the most meaningful work comes from doing service for others, and that being serious about what you’re doing does not mean taking yourself too seriously. This book is dedicated to them.