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Additionally, lively, web-exclusive content will be featured-short, informal essays from eminent Shakespeareans; invited discussions about essays published in our pages; interviews with authors and performers; performance reviews; and Letters to the Editor.To submit Letters to the Editor, please go to sq.folger.edu or email sq@folger.edu with \"To the Editor\" in the subject line.Other than Letters to the Editor, our new site will not feature unsolicited material, and-as with newspapers or magazines-we do not promise to publish each letter that we receive (though we do hope to receive many).

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

We now recognize that renaissance manuals of conduct, in which thinkers such as castiglione and erasmus sought to encode canons of polite behavior, are a major source of evidence about early modern emotions. But scholarly understanding of the relation between conduct literature and Renaissance society's management of emotions had to wait for the publication of the sociologist Norbert Elias's two-volume work Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process [1939]), which only began to reach anglophone critics in 1978.

[...]of these and other factors, we increasingly found ourselves with an unacceptable lag between the date a book might be published and the date it was reviewed in SQ. Such a time lag is a disservice to authors, reviewers, and readers-and for it, we offer both an apology and a promise to do better in the future.

[...]fittingly in an issue devoted to Shakespeare biographies in historical perspective, we are thrilled to include Michael Bristol's magisterial essay looking comprehensively at the Great Shakespeareans series, taking what he (as a contributor to the series) considers an insider-outsider stance on this massive enterprise. -

Remaining on the editorial staffare Ted Leinwand and Barbara Mowat, who will serve the journal invaluably as Consulting Editors, and Sarah Werner, who continues as Associate Editor with special responsibilities for performance and digital communication.