This project has evolved over many years, a process greatly abetted by a Fall 1990 fellowship at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Spring 1991 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Along that tortuous path a treatment of keys in The Merchant of Venice that became a part of chapter 8 appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin (1985); some material now in chapters 1 and 2 appeared in Word and Image (1988); a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, 5.3 that now frames chapter 9 was published in Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Marvin and Ruth Thompson (1988); and an early version of chapter 4 appeared in Renaissance Papers 1991. I wish to thank the editors of those journals and the University of Delaware Press for their permission to incorporate such materials here. In addition, parts of this argument have been presented to various groups, so for helpful comments my thanks are due to my graduate students in a 1992 seminar and to colleagues at several seminars of the Shakespeare Association of America, a 1991 seminar of the New York Shakespeare Society, the 1991 Southeastern Renaissance Conference, and the 1992 Ohio Shakespeare Conference. Of the many people who have been generous in sharing insights and offering criticisms, I would like to single out Homer Swander, Andrew Gurr, Robert Hapgood, George Walton Williams, G. B. Shand, Steven Urkowitz, John Astington, Cary Mazer, D. F. Rowan, William Long, Lena Orlin, Catherine Belsey, E. Pearlman, Peter Blayney, Leslie Thomson, and June Schlueter.