Shakespeare's Neighbors focuses on what lay next door to Shakespeare- the theoretical context that, while partially lost on us, was quite likely to inform the perception that Shakespeare's contemporaries (his "neighbors") had of his works. In this series of alternative readings, the primacy of the literary text is set against the backdrop of unexpected or largely ignored theories whose enormous diffusion renders them inescapable terms of comparison. Rocco Coronato advocates the likely as a viable backdrop to literary analysis. The inference has it that the presence of such widely disseminated theories may allow for the study of the literary works through their own codes and imagery, without implying a rigidly ideological transmission between social and literary domains. While written with literary criticism in mind, Coronato manages to avoid convoluted jargon, striving in the process to translate the terms of otherwise esoteric discourses into a generally accessible language form, for the benefit of a non-specialist audience as well. “I read ['Shakespeare's Neighbors'] with admiration for the erudition in fields as different as Pocahontas and Perdita, pop culture and bardolatry?>” ―L.R.N. Ashley, BHR “ I read ['Shakespeare's Neighbors'] with admiration for the erudition in fields as different as Pocahontas and Perdita, pop culture and bardolatry… ” ―L.R.N. Ashley, BHR Rocco Coronato is Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Siena, Italy. Excerpt from Arthur F. Kinney s Foreword: The writing of Rocco Coronato is sui generis, yet it is difficult to imagine who will not be drawn to its remarkable combination of learning, investigation, and wit. Coronato s exploration of Renaissance culture is what that culture itself most prized: a probing mind, an extensive learning, a rich array of resources in juxtaposition, a passion for learning, the play of intellect. Both the matter and the manner are instructive, and continually attractive, too. Coronato s own juxtapositionings always light fires to our reason and our imagination. No matter what Renaissance text has attracted Coronato s attention and ours and will not let any of us free, the mind at play here I can think only of Harry Levin as comparable always illuminates. The cultural filiations that Coronato develops out of a text always widen our horizons, and yet always keep the text shadowing the investigation and reappearing at its close. As readers, we can be divided between total submersion into the culture he defines so tellingly and kept distanced, aware that all we read interplays with literary texts in ways that give them original, authentic life. The thesis of Shakespeare s Neighbors, Rocco Coronato says at one point, is his interest in suspension: that notion, growing out of philosophical stoicism, when all things are in balance and there is a moment of respite before decisions are made and future actions ascertained. Surely those moments are central to each chapter and each investigation. But we arrive at them with so much sense of cultural activity and belief that they become not moments of inaction but moments of startling accumulation. Here is a book to be read with every kind of joy. Used Book in Good Condition