Michael O’Connell is a Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1970. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1971, and his central interests include Renaissance literature (Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton); and medieval and Renaissance Drama. He is the author of Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1977), Robert Burton (1986), The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (2000), as well as articles on Spenser, Catullus, Petrach, Milton, and Handel. Professor O’Connell is currently at work on a project about the relations between the late medieval theater and the Elizabethan stage.