William M. Hamlin is a professor of English at Washington State University (See profile). Author of The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser and Shakespeare (St. Martin's Press, 1995) and Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), he has also published more than fifty essays and reviews in a wide range of journals devoted to early modern literature. He has been the recipient of research fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Academy. Currently he is at work on a book entitled Montaigne's English Journey; this study will trace the genesis, reception and literary appropriation of John Florio's famous translation of Montaigne in seventeenth-century England.