Renaissance Reflections

Arthur Kinney has made so many contributions to the study of English literature, in so many different roles, that it can be difficult to reckon with the true sum of his achievement. . . . His curiosity encompasses an entire world and all the things in it, the very world that English Renaissance thinkers inhabited and approached with the same comprehensive spirit of inquiry. . . . Every topic to which he turns in these pages is pursued with impeccable scholarly rigor. . . . To pursue new approaches as Kinney has done year after year and decade after decade requires the nerve to risk failure, even repeated failure. It demands that the scholar constantly explore unfamiliar ground where the feet are still unsure and use analytical tools before they have grown familiar in the hand. It asks the thinker to move outside the security of expertise, the writer to advance arguments that may not succeed. . . . [Kinney] has provided us a wholly different model of a distinguished scholarly career, spending decades in pursuit of intellectual risk and adventure.”—James J. Marino, author of Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property