Written between 1947 and 1960 and first published in 1963, the prose work in the first of these two volumes reflects Louis Zukofsky"s ongoing obsession with Shakespeare--whose plays he had first seen performed in Yiddish--and is central to understanding Zukofsky"s work. Tracing the themes of knowledge, love and physical vision ("the eyes have it") through both Shakespeare"s plays and the poetry, Bottom: On Shakespeare is more than a compendious act of homage by one poet to another. In effect, it lays out Zukofsky"s poetics and theory of knowledge on a grand scale, tracing his themes through the whole of Western culture, from the Classical Greeks through William Carlos Williams. The second volume of Bottom: On Shakespeare consists of Celia Thaew Zukofsky"s spare operatic setting of Shakespeare"s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play in which Zukofsky saw Shakespeare rewriting the classic plots and tropes of the Odyssey. The Wesleyan edition features a new foreword by Bob Perelman.