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copies to all attendees (“Rivals” passim). This conference was established almost solely to examine the conjoined questions of whether Shakespeare had lived at the Tower as a youth and whether he was a Catholic during part or all of his life. Because of its announced topics, the conference became something of a cause célèbre and was widely covered in the media—even being featured on live television reports. My paper, besides being premature, fitted the conference theme only marginally (in that the Tower Hoghtons were clients of the fourth and fifth earls of Derby in Lancashire, upon whom my paper focused), but I had been kindly invited to attend and present my work, and so I did. I remain grateful to Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson for the chance to present it there. The paper arrived at some of the same conclusions as the book does today, although it was made up of less than half the present evidence and lacked the strong supporting work of Paul Hammond in his Refiguring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester, which is now included and will be discussed in detail.
As for the final two chapters, chapter 13 demonstrates from the evidence that the total absence of back-and-forth dialogue in the Dark Lady sonnets of Shakespeare reinforces the conclusions reached by the book as a whole that such a dialogue existed between Shakespeare and Barnfield in the other sonnets, primarily in the Rival Poet series, given that those other sonnets are filled with dialogic examples, as discovered by both Hammond and myself. Chapter 14 argues that all or most of the Rival Poet series was originally composed between 1593 and 1595.
Appendix A, “Shake-speares Sonnets and Historical Representation,” is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Vancouver, British Columbia, in April of 2003. It supports the book's conclusions by making a detailed argument that the book