Acknowledgements; Contents; Author's Note on Cover Portraits; Chapter 1 Introduction: "The Rivals of My Watch"; Chapter 2 Locating the Earliest "Critics"; 2.1 Locating the Audience: The Space of the Stage; 2.2 Locating the Discourse: Rhetorical Devices; 2.3 Locating the First Critical Comparisons in Print: Robert Greene and Henry Chettle; 2.4 Locating the English Canon: Meres, Stow, and the Mapping of Literary London; 2.5 Conclusion: "Dislocation, then and Now"; Chapter 3 The Seventeenth Century: "Collaboration, Co-Authorship, and the Death of the Author(s)"

3.1 Performing Collaborative Criticism in the Parnassus Plays: Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Rest3.2 Collaboration and the Authorial Persona; 3.3 Michael Drayton: Creative Collaboration and Poetic Criticism; 3.4 Ben Jonson: Singular Author and the Specters of the Past; 3.5 Conclusion; Chapter 4 The Long Eighteenth Century: "Limbs Torn Asunder, Borrowing the Bones, and Identifying the Corpus"; 4.1 "Torn Asunder"; 4.2 The Borrowing of Bones to Raise the Dead; 4.3 Identifying the Bodies: Science and Canonization; 4.4 Conclusion: "Indecent Liberties" and "Frightful Spectacles"

Chapter 5 The Nineteenth Century: "The Space(s) of the Critical Rivalry in London"5.1 Lamb, Marlowe, and Shakespeare; 5.2 Kean and Hazlitt: The Jew of Malta and the Merchant of Venice; 5.3 Marlowe and Shakespeare in the Reign of Victoria; 5.4 Conclusion; Chapter 6 The Twentieth Century: "Formalization, Polarization, and Fictionalization"; 6.1 The Early Twentieth Century: Ornate to Abstract; 6.2 The Imagery Is All; 6.3 From Text to Context; 6.4 Cold War Rhetoric, the New Critics, and Irving Ribner; 6.5 Fact, Fiction, and Film; 6.6 Conclusion

Chapter 7 The Twenty-First Century: "Trauma, Drama, Conspiracy"7.1 911 and Art; 7.2 Literary Aftershocks; 7.3 Biography: Speculation and Conspiracy; 7.4 Conclusion; 7.5 Coda: The Critical Rivalry, Past, Present, and Future; Works Cited; Index