Patricia Parker, Margery Bailey Professor in English and Dramatic Literature at Stanford University, is the author of Inescapable Romance (1979), Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (1987), and Shakespeare from the Margins (1996) and co-editor of Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (1985), Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985), Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994), and other critical volumes. She is currently preparing a new Arden 3 edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.