JONATHAN BATE is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford, UK. Well known as a critic, biographer and broadcaster, he has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA, and was previously King Alfred Professor at the University of Liverpool and Professor of Shakespeare at the University of Warwick. Among his many books are a biography of Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, and a history of his fame, The Genius of Shakespeare. His biography of the poet John Clare won Britain's two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. His one-man play for Simon Callow, Being Shakespeare, was performed in Edinburgh, London, New York and Chicago, and he was consultant curator for the British Museum's major exhibition for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Shakespeare Staging the World. He is a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Vice-President (Humanities) of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Eric Rasmussen is Foundation Professor of English and Chair at the University of Nevada. His recent publications include the award-winning catalogue raisonne The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue, co-edited with Anthony James West, and its companion volume The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios (Palgrave Macmillan). He is co-author, with Lars Engle, of Studying Shakespeare's Contemporaries (Wiley Blackwell) and is an editor of The Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama, and of plays in the Arden Shakespeare series, the New Variorum Shakespeare, the Oxford World's Classics series, the Revels Plays series, and the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson. He has served on the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America, on the General Council of the Malone Society, and as General Textual Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project - one of the most visited Shakespearean websites in the world.
