Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare

When was the last time you couldn't put down a book of literary criticism or didn't want it to end? Ever? In Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, Angus Fletcher, a magically gifted teacher in whose presence we hear what thinking feels like, has given us not only a brilliant study of the early modern period but a handbook for our time as well...Quietly astounding observations punctuate his volume...Here is the critic as wizard, making us see what we have always seen but never seen before. -- Joan Richardson Bookforum 20070901 Reading [Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare] is a bit like sharing a late-night conversation with a particularly brilliant, eloquent, digressive, athletically persuasive, and universally read colleague...Fletcher covers an astonishing amount of territory in this demanding, and rewarding, book. -- William N. West Comparative Drama 20071201 Fletcher convincingly demonstrates what he calls "the predominant conceptual, scientific, metaphysical and hence philosophic power of the idea of motion for the poets of the early modern age"...As a former student of Professor Fletcher at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, I have the advantage of imagining his voice and gestures, of remembering the kind of dumbfounding observations he would toss off seemingly out of nowhere as we students struggled to keep up with his incredible ability to think polysemantically. -- Anthony DiMatteo College Literature 20080322 Of all the studies on the history of witchcraft that have appeared in recent years, this must surely be one of the most compelling. To a field and an episode that have often been melodramatized, if not sensationalized, Malcolm Gaskill brings an enviable sense of balance. He also writes with a novelist's instincts for place and mood and for details of character, emotion, landscape, and weather, creating a wonderful evocation of East Anglia during the first Civil War...Gaskill takes us through case after case...writing with great sensitivity and compassion about the human and social dynamics involved, the conditions of imprisonment and trial, and the harrowing ends of those convicted...Indeed, Gaskill writes with such evenness and calm authority about the personal and collective turmoil that his book never fails to convince. It succeeds in two contrasting directions simultaneously: it accounts for an episode previously treated as singular and odd as the almost-to-be-expected outcome of prevailing historical conditions, and yet it never loses sight of the unique human tragedies from which it was made. -- Stuart Clark Journal of Modern History