William N. West is Associate Professor of English, Classics, and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe(2002), co-editor (with Helen Higbee) of Robert Weimann’s Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2000) and (with Bryan Reynolds)Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005), and editor of the journal Renaissance Drama. Most recently he has published articles on Renaissance humanism and the resistance to theology, the physics of early modern acting, the authority of the actor’s voice, and replaying as the modality of early modern drama. He last worked in the Beinecke Library as an undergraduate reading diaries about the Oregon Trail. This September at the Beinecke he will be working on a book to be called Understanding and Confusion in the Elizabethan Theaters, on cognition and experience in early playing and playgoing.