ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to comprise ten essays that can be considered as exercises in Baconian placement and displacement. Each essay starts with seeming "calmness" in the place of one or more of Michael Neill's critical writings: it then moves—if not with violence, then in ways that both settle and unsettle his writings, using these as points of departure for rethinking place in relation to early modern cultural production, and to a variety of ends. The book outlines six different versions of place at play, each of which derives from a persistent preoccupation in Neill's work: the place of words; resting places; the place of service; colonial dis/placements; the places of appropriation; and finally—a term familiar less to literary critics, perhaps, than to theatre practitioners—"Places!".
