In 1646, when the London theatres were closed, James Shirley published a collection titled Poems &c. Shirley’s et cetera included “Prologues and Epilogues Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and else-where.” While the paratexts in this volume are for plays that had already been performed, Shirley’s Poems offers the first or only known publication for some prologues, for instance, for Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir (first published in 1652; also included in Six New Plays, 1653). This chapter explores how the dramatic epitexts in Shirley’s Poems make meaning without the full text of their play. Shirley reveals himself to be Ben Jonson’s heir and a poet-playwright in the classical tradition. These paratexts no longer frame plays; rather, they act as a threshold that opens into Shirley’s dramatic oeuvre and makes it the centerpiece of, to use Richard Helgerson’s term, Shirley’s “self-crowned laureateship.”

The so-called dispersed Nerudiana, composed of interviews, speeches, prologues, notes, and letters, provides a necessary horizon to rescue, organize, and disseminate. Nerudian letters, in particular, are a privileged source that has not been cataloged or collected in a single corpus. This surprising daily life of a famous writer, a sort of parallel itinerary, lies vast and dispersed in libraries, private archives, and documentary repositories awaiting a systematic effort that allows the long-awaited “deployment of the self-portrait” (à la Boersner), the ultimate goal of historical-literary research. Without his correspondence, in short, his self-portrait is impoverished, leaving room for criticism, speculation, and political dithyramb.

Chapter three starts from the surprise I felt when I first read a Security Council resolution. What does it mean to begin a resolution by recalling, reiterating, reconfirming or recognizing previous resolutions? In order to make sense of such beginnings, I compare preambles of Security Council resolutions to prologues in theatre plays as well as to preambles in Babylonian codes. Acts of recalling, I argue, are radically different from the decision that follows. The decision constitutes a cutoff in time, a break with the past and a pointer to the future. Decisions, in other words, present a new beginning, a lack of continuity. To recall, reiterate, recognize or reaffirm is to do the opposite: to indicate that resolutions have begun well before they were adopted. In that sense, acts of recalling seek to fill the gap that is created by a beginning, not unlike prologues do. However, preambles to Security Council resolutions cannot escape the dialectics of repetition. They do not innocently present the past as it is, but rather retake it in light of what is to follow. This means they come with their own breaks and gaps, which are filled by yet further acts of repetition.