The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.

Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.

Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

The Epilogue offers some concluding remarks while explaining why later Jacobean and Caroline plays are excluded from this study. In the process, it offers a brief consideration of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge.

The opening lines of Ajax are spoken by the goddess Athena, who addresses her favourite, Odysseus, as an adherent of Harm Enemies: he is tracking down an enemy as usual, in a manner worthy of his traditionally tricky persona. She is the dearest of gods to him, and they enjoy a solidarity inherited from the Odyssey. He places himself in her hands, as he has always done in the past. But despite the bond between them, a conflict of values emerges. When Odysseus is reluctant to view the mad Ajax Athena scolds him as a coward. She implies that any kind of fear or ’reluctance’ constitutes cowardice.

This chapter describes three major violent events in the Amendolas’ lives. The first was a squadrist attack on Giovanni in central Rome on 26 December 1923. By the following summer, after the Fascist kidnapping and murder of the socialist Giacomo Matteotti, Amendola had become the leader of the Aventine Secession and thus head of the respectable opposition to the Fascist regime. What resulted was a still more vicious beating he was given in Tuscany on the night of 20–21 July 1925. Giovanni died of his injuries in Cannes in April 1926. His tomb carried the message ‘Here lies Giovanni Amendola, waiting’. Even Mussolini was willing to state that Giovanni was the noblest of his enemies (as well as the most menacing). Giovanni’s teenage son, Giorgio, watched his father’s persecution and decided, after 1926, that only communism offered a genuinely strong opposition to Fascism. He therefore joined the party in 1929. By 1943–4, he was a reasonably senior figure in the PCI, and he became responsible for its fighting resistance around Rome. Action culminated on 23 March 1944, with the attack on German soldiers in the Via Rasella.

The American public is assumed to have overwhelmingly supported the use of atomic bombs on Japan, but this impression comes in part from a Gallup poll conducted just days after the bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The poll found that eighty-five percent of Americans were in favor of the bombs. Only ten percent disapproved, and five percent were unsure. Those figures might suggest a deep current of hatred toward Japan, the depths of which can only be hinted at by polling data. But it must be considered along with another Gallup poll taken in June 1945, barely two months prior to the nuclear strikes. In this survey Americans were asked if they supported the use of poison gas against the Japanese, if doing so would reduce American casualties. Forty percent said yes, but almost fifty percent said no. As horrible as poison gas undeniably is, a nuclear bomb is vastly worse. This suggests that most Americans simply had no concept of what an atom bomb meant. This chapter examines what Americans actually thought about the bomb.

America emerged from World War II as the undisputed superpower. But during the war, the United States committed numerous inhumane acts against the innocent. It imprisoned thousands of American citizens in concentration camps because of their race. It used nuclear weapons on entire cities, indiscriminately killing some 200,000 civilians. And it imposed a punishing peace on Germany, which for two painful years caused countless children and adults to starve. As I explored the process that produced these decisions, I fully expected that racial animus and wartime hatreds alone would explain them. But it couldn’t. To my surprise, the majority of key decision makers, along with much of the American public, opposed these harsh measures. The most remarkable aspect of these policies was precisely how little support and how much ambivalence they actually produced. But if most of the government’s top leaders supported mercy, how and why were these vengeful policies adopted? That is the crucial question that drives Part I. Part II tackles the flip side of the puzzle. It asks how American leaders sought to, in essence, atone for some of its own wartime cruelties.

Chapter 4 discusses autonomy (or its lack) as a key element in characters’ fictional ontology. It divides the topic into three themes - freedom, revenge, and suicide - each of which plays a vital role in Seneca’s dual concept of personal and fictional independence. The first section addresses Stoic isolationism as an assertion of individual sovereignty and demonstrates that this trait is shared by Seneca’s sapiens and tragic characters alike. The second section examines revenge as, simultaneously, an amplification and limitation of characters’ autonomy. Finally, the chapter considers Senecan suicide as an expression of free agency in the midst of misfortune, charting its importance across both the prose and the dramatic works.

While Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is often described as a private poet and there is no firm evidence that she shared either her fascicle booklets or the great majority of her poems with anyone, there is good evidence that Dickinson drew public attention to herself as a poet from her early years. In this sense, Dickinson was not at all private about her poetry. As a young woman she shared her poems and thoughts about poetry with readers whose response mattered to her, and doing so may have given her the confidence she needed to become the “Emily Dickinson” we know. She also wrote occasional passages of metered prose in her letters of this period – from a few beats to multiple implied lines and rhyme. In the final years of her life, her use of metered prose became more prominent. This essay will focus primarily on the decade during which Dickinson shaped herself as a poet, roughly from the late 1840s to 1858. After a brief review of the years of her greatest productivity, I will pick up my story of Dickinson’s transitions with the 1880s, when she increasingly wrote at this border of poetry and prose. While some aspects of Dickinson’s themes and style changed over her lifetime, as early as 1853 she had settled into the rhythms of highly compressed, short-lined metrical verse she would maintain – with rare exceptions – for the rest of her life, including in her passages of metered prose.

Paul Loeb discusses the intensely debated topic of Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism and thinks that the crucial text is Nietzsche’s JS 109. For Loeb the argument has to do with removing anthropomorphic projective errors from our concept of nature. Loeb thinks that Nietzsche’s naturalism in TSZ leads him to endorse the truth of cosmological eternal recurrence and that this truth entails for Nietzsche a solution to the problem of radical flux and a means of curing the human feeling of impotence and spirit of revenge that is provoked by this radical flux. Loeb claims that Zarathustra gains a stronger sense of agency because his new understanding of the reality of circular time enables him to have a causal influence on the past – an influence which is embodied and displayed in the chronological narrative of TSZ.

Revenge probably features in most, if not all, lust killing. This chapter exemplifies where revenge for perceived transgression comes into the clearest focus and seems to occupy center stage. Of course, the revenge was disproportionate to the ‘offence’, a feature of displaced aggression and ‘revenge collecting’. Part of the trigger to revenge is a blow to self-esteem. The antagonism that Peter Sutcliffe felt towards women appeared to derive from suspicions over his partner’s infidelity and being cheated by a sex worker. Sutcliffe seemed to have a kind of love-hate relationship with sex workers. He was fascinated by them and engaged them in sex but was alsodisgusted by them and killed them. It can be speculated that Levi Bellfield’s toxic trajectory started when as a boy he was jilted by a blond girl. Most of his victims were blond girls, yet he sought this type as his girlfriends. Sergey Golovkin targeted boys.

This chapter considers ethical prototypes, which give needed specificity to the very general ethical orientations defined by principles and parameters. In ethical decision and behavior, we are concerned with sequences of actions and the motivations guiding these actions. In other words, we are concerned with stories. In this chapter, I argue that the prototypes at issue in specifying our ethical orientations are, most importantly, the universal story structures that I have sought to isolate in earlier works – heroic, romantic, sacrificial, family separation, seduction, revenge, and criminal investigation. These narrative structures are inseparable from human emotion systems. Indeed, story universals are shaped by emotion–motivation systems (along with some general patterns in emotion intensification); those systems (and patterns) account for their universality. In addition, these story genres are of crucial importance for the way we think about and respond to various worldly concerns, such as politics. The third chapter extends these arguments to ethics.

In his history plays, Shakespeare shows how the hierarchical shame- and honor-based political system called monarchy leads to an endless cycle of violence. But he also shows us through the character of Falstaff and his famous speech about honor how debunking or satirizing honor has no effect on honor- and shame-driven personalities. In the context of current US politics, this can explain the inability of the two sides to hear one another. Henry V, often celebrated as a national hero, becomes a killing machine when he ascends to power, pursuing wars that are as futile as they are bloody. In contrast, Henry VI, the exception that proves the rule, adheres to the guilt ethic of Christianity, which renders him powerless to protect himself from the violence generated by the shame culture in which he lived. Richard III shows the power of shame and humiliation to stimulate violence on a scale that ultimately consumes him as well.

Timon of Athens shows how basing one’s behavior on a shame ethic ultimately motivates killing everyone, even at the cost of one’s own life. Timon, whose self-esteem and pride were dependent on giving lavish dinner parties and gifts to his friends, feels overwhelmingly shamed and unloved when those same friends refuse to offer him the slightest help when he is unable to pay his bills – in response to which he declares war on all of Athens, enlisting Alcibiades to carry out this mass slaughter. This is a pattern demonstrated by the most violent prison inmates, who say they have “declared war on the whole world,” as well as by the “suicide bombers” of modern-day terrorism, mass murderers who commit “suicide by cop,” and so on.

Shakespeare shows how violence can be prevented by replacing retribution, or revenge, with “restorative justice”: renouncing punishment toward others and the self, thus transcending both shame and guilt ethics, and giving violent offenders the opportunity and means to restore to the community what they had taken from it, thus reconciling with their community. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio conducts a psychological experiment showing how the “retributive” apparatus of the state produced an attempted (judicial) murder and rape, whereas the Duke’s approach prevented all violence, by individuals and the state. The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale illustrate the same principles and outcome. The Merchant of Venice, however, shows how severely restorative justice is compromised when the primary cause and constituent of violence is ignored, and attention is paid only to its symptom or consequence (Shylock’s anger at Antonio’s anti-Semitism).