This issue marks the 10th anniversary of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. On this occasion, the special section celebrates the achievement of senior Shakespearean scholar Robert Weimann, whose work on the Elizabethan theatre and early modern performance culture has so influenced contemporary scholarship. Ten essays in this issue of Yearbook, including one by the honoree himself, focus on those aspects of Shakespearean studies which Weimann has impacted most profoundly: the idea and practice of a "popular tradition," the materialist critique of early modern theater, the practices of...

Peter Laslett's comment, in The World We Have Lost, that in the early modern period 'every relationship could be seen as a love-relationship' presents the governing idea of this book. In an analysis that includes Shakespeare's sonnets and a wide range of his plays from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale, David Schalkwyk looks at the ways in which the personal, affective relations of love are informed by the social, structural interactions of service. Showing that service is not a 'class' concept, but rather determined the fundamental conditions of identity across the whole society, the...