A number of colleagues and friends have been kind beyond duty or friendship, and have provided me with both support and advice: to David McKitterick, Laurie Maguire, John Pitcher, Tiffany Stern, Andrew McNeillie, Paul Eggert, Steven May, Peter Lindenbaum, Marta Werner, Randall McLeod, Stephen Orgel, and Gary Day, I am indebted for the support and kindness they have shown. On a more personal level, I would like to thank Marcus Quiren, Karl Davies, Tim Myatt, Jeff and Jessica Staniland, Tim Brown and Gael Webster, Felicity Gifford, Tim O’Brien, Olika Kortiyeva, Neil Sewell-Rutter and Emilia Markot: at one stage or another of this journey, they have all made things possible. To Peter Shillingsburg, the debt is both more serious and specific: to him I owe the wisdom of his company, his engagement with everything that I have done in recent years, his sometimes acerbic but always astute comments on what I have written, his patience with my foibles, his discussions of textual scholarship and bibliographical history beyond the call of professional kindness, his generosity and companionship, and his profound sense of decency. I could not have asked for a better colleague, or friend, in my first four years at De Montfort. Bright lights cast deep shadows. It was on my return from London to New Zealand in 1979 that I found myself, aged 17, at Victoria University sitting alongside Mary McCallum in the second row on the left-hand side of Easterfield 006. In the course of the next hour, my life changed, although it took longer perhaps to realize the full significance of what that class had meant. Over the next few years, I was privileged to be taught by Don McKenzie on several occasions and, in 1983, he not only supervised my ‘dissertation’ on the late plays of Jonson; Alexandra Lutyens, Jan Moore, and I were the last students to take his literary scholarship class before he left for Oxford. A few years later, he was my supervisor in Oxford, and I last saw him in the Bodleian a day or two before I went out to New Zealand in 1999, three weeks before his death. This book would have been immensely better for his oversight and advice: I hope it does some justice to the debt I owe him. Julia Briggs had been at Oxford with Don, and when I moved to De Montfort we shared an office together for several years: at idle hours, our conversation would often turn to the debt we both felt towards his inspiration and kindness. Julia had a knack of reminding me of my better instincts: whatever Don had left brick, she made marble. The debt to my parents ought not to require any further explanation: I have been graced by their support, generosity, and love.