Jackson Kenneth S. - Shakespeare and Abraham

This study began around 1996, when Suzanne Gossett told mein her inimitable tone and mannerWell, if you are going to write about Timon of Athens you will need to deal with Copplia Kahn! I did, reading and rereading a single article in Shakespeare Quarterly with this admonition ringing in my minds ear. I am grateful to have the clear guidance of such serious scholars who, through their own work and willingness to teach, cut paths to further inquiry. As I progressed, struggling with my own thoughts, I had the great luxury of almost always being able to turn to the work of Julia Reinhard Lupton to understand my own abstract musings. In academia, having someone else always arrive there first really isnt that bad as long as it is someone like Julia.

Timon of Athens eventually took me home, to Detroit, where we never stop talking about the Renaissance, and where Arthur F. Marotti has kept the very idea of the university alive for me at a time when the very term seems threatened. To paraphrase a dean at Professor Marottis retirement, many thought that without his gravitas the whole place might levitate off the ground and disappear. It hasnt, perhaps because he has been able to maintain his faculty office. Wayne State University has been generous in its support even though I could never work STEM in to the title of this book. Richard Grusin, Ellen Barton, and Michael Scrivener provided much needed direction and modelling, all of a different sort. Robert Aguirre reminded me I am never quite alone. And Jaime Goodrich and Simone Chess always prompted me to keep moving, lest I recede in to the past. My former graduate studentsLaura Estill, Renuka Gusain, and Michael Martinprovided more sheer joy, I am sure, than I ever provided my teachers. Having pushed like mad to get them out the door in a timely fashion, I now miss their company so much I got a Facebook page. Dean Ambika Mathur, late in the process, gave much needed support and confirmation that university sciences werent quite ready to jettison the humanities. Kay Stone and Cindy Sokol make my regular work day manageable and, at times, fun.

Outside WSU, I hope to see Jim Knapp, Gary Kuchar, and Ewan Fernie soon to tell them I owe them.

Some material here appeared in article form, and I want to acknowledge the following journals and publishers and thank them for their permission to reprint here. Parts of my final chapter appeared as One Wish or the Possibility of the Impossible: God, the Gift, and Derrida in Timon of Athens, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52.1 (Spring 2001): 3466; my discussion of King John emerges from Is It God or the Sovereign Exception? Giorgio Agamben and Shakespeares King John, Religion and Literature 38.3 (Autumn 2006): 8599; I first discussed Aaron the Moor in Here Aaron Is: Abraham and the Abrahamic in Titus Andronicus, 14531699, in Cultural Encounters Between East and West, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Matthew Birchwood (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 14567; my chapter on The Merchant of Venice draws on Shylock, the Knight of Faith? The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 8.3, (Fall 2007), 6782; theoretical formulations were worked out in The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies, co-authored with Arthur F. Marotti, Criticism 46.1 (Winter 2004): 16790, and The Great Temptation of Religion: Why Badiou Has Been So Important to iek, The International Journal of iek Studies 1.2 (2007): 128.

At home, well, I have come to learn that there is nothing I wont sacrifice for my family, and for me that brings heaven and earth closer together.