With this collection of essays, a distinguished group of scholars pays homage to Leeds Barroll, in particular, to the metacritical and historiographic concerns in his scholarship. They engage with Barroll’s ideas articulated in papers, lectures, and publications that span his career, including Artificial Persons (1974), “The Human Figure on the Stage” (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1984), “Researching the Renaissance” (Graduate Seminars, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1991–99), and “England at the Margins” (2000). For each of these entries in Barroll’s oeuvre, the essayists respond to or expand on his explorations of Shakespeare’s works, gender issues, and the social, cultural, and spatial margins of Renaissance England.

In part 1, “England at the Margins,” essayists refer to plays by Shakespeare as they explore the instability of England’s power in the early modern global economy and Christian-Muslim relations. Taking cues from Othello and Macbeth, Peter Stallybrass emphasizes England’s marginal status in the world in comparison to that of the Ottoman Empire in “Marginal England: The View from Aleppo.” In “Incising Venice: The Violence of Cultural Incorporation in The Merchant of Venice,” Philippa Berry suggests that Shakespeare’s Venice may be read as a “geographical and cultural site, which, in its marking by significant rifts and fissures, can offer us new insights into the fragmented and fragmenting character of the Renaissance” (40). And, in “Barbers, Infidels, and Renegades: Antony and Cleopatra,” Patricia Parker pursues the meanings inherent in references to barbering and the barbarous.

In part 2, “Researching the Renaissance,” essayists address issues of gender, culture, and space. Phyllis Rackin, in “Our Canon, Ourselves,” compares the histories of the receptions of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor, noting that Shrew has enjoyed more popularity in the modern period than in the early modern period, and posits that comparisons “between Shakespeare’s representations of women and those of his fellow playwrights suggest that a too-exclusive focus on Shakespeare may produce a misleading picture of the assumptions about women’s roles that early modern English playgoers were prepared to accept” (92). Comparing examples from art history and dramatic representation, Harry Berger, Jr., examines gender and performance anxiety in “Artificial Couples: The Apprehensive Household in Dutch Pendants and Othello.” Then, in “Spaces of Treason in Tudor England,” Lena Cowen Orlin explores the “spatial history of treason” as it relates to the architectural innovation, the Tudor long gallery (158).

In part 3, “The Human Figure on the Stage,” authors turn their attention to representations of masculinity and charisma, along with the deconstruction of iconic figures. In “Stage Masculinities, National History, and the Making of London Theatrical Culture,” Jean E. Howard refers to the Henry VI plays and Richard III as she discusses Shakespeare’s allusions to statecraft and stagecraft via his use of theatrical male bodies, as well as particular popular actors. In “Charisma and Institution-Building in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy,” Raphael Falco engages Max Weber’s theories of authority as he examines the ways in which charismatic and traditional authorities function regarding leaders and group relations in Richard II, the Henry IV plays, and Henry V. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s notions of deconstruction in “Mona Lisa Takes a Mountain Hike, Hamlet Goes for an Ocean Dip,” Bruce R. Smith concludes this chapter with his examination of the “dead-centeredness” of Hamlet and Mona Lisa in their respective art works, as well as the “logomarginality” of Hamlet’s place in Shakespeare’s play (238, 251).

In part 4, “Artificial Persons,” essayists take up psychoanalysis, Milton’s angels, and optical technologies. In “Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne,” Catherine Belsey encourages a revival of psychoanalytic criticism, arguing that “a postmodern and psychoanalytic acknowledgment of the incompleteness of every text … is a necessary ally, the material of a deeper historicism and a sharper awareness of historical difference” (275). In “Abdiel Centers Freedom,” Susanne Woods examines the ways in which Abdiel acts as a “rebel-prophet” for Milton, positioning individual freedom at the center of Paradise Lost (283). Finally, in “Artificial Intensity: The Optical Technologies of Personal Reality Enhancement,” Barbara Maria Stafford considers the exhibition, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, at the Getty Museum of Art (2001), discussing the progression of mediated reality from the early modern cabinet of wonders to complex, computer-generated imagery.

The unifying goal of these essays is to “offer challenges to received wisdoms about the Renaissance” (11), and the broad range of scholarly approaches in them is meant to reflect that in Barroll’s work. The authors succeed on both counts as they assimilate key theoretical concerns of the past two or more decades and demonstrate their ongoing critical viability. Far from staging a retrospective, the essayists instead present studies that illustrate how the concerns of Barroll’s scholarship continue to reward investigation.