STEPHEN Greenblatt asserts that “the topical significance of a play depends in large measure on the particular moment in which it is performed, and on certain features of the performance— for example, a striking resemblance between one of the characters and a well-known public figure.” If he is correct, then we should not be surprised that when someone paid the Lord Chamberlain's men to “revive their old play about the deposition and murder of Richard II,” on the very “day before the Earl of Essex's attempted coup against Queen Elizabeth in 1601,” the astute and furious monarch would declare, “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” James Stuart, of course, the most famous auditor at the December 26, 1604, performance of Measure for Measure, did not publicly claim identity with any of the characters in the play, though its subsequent performance history suggests that he had a decided private reaction to what he saw and heard that day. If, as several critics suggest, Shakespeare purposefully comments on the newly crowned king of England in the play, James may well have had good reason to be at least bemused. Opinions differ, though, as to what exactly these comments are, and what their intended purpose is. Carolyn Brown observes that, while some scholars “interpret the play and its main character as a tribute to James and his conception of government,” others “suggest that [Shakespeare] may be counseling or educating his king on proper governing procedures.” But these two opinions need not be mutually exclusive, for, as Brown herself notes, “several critics have attempted to decode the play and to detect the covert criticism of James and monarchy hidden under a surface meaning that Shakespeare meant to please the king and his supporters.” Although Shakespeare's criticism of the king in the play may be covert, his counsel to the king is not, coming through the often overlooked figure of Lord Escalus, the sagacious counselor to both Duke Vincentio and Angelo.

Escalus, though arguably wise in this play, is a stock character, the type of character that Paul Cantor suggests is “found standing in the background of a play, futilely counseling the other characters to rein in their foolish but dramatically exciting passions.”

Three years after the Merrison Committee submitted its final report, Parliament passed the 1978 Medical Act. In reference to the registration of overseas doctors, the provisions of the act reflected more continuity than change. The GMC's oversight of the register remained intact. The Medical Act's scheduled termination of reciprocity on December 1, 1980, came as no real surprise. The retraction of reciprocity from Pakistan in 1972 and the subsequent withdrawal of recognition of Indian medical qualifications a year later anticipated this provision of the legislation while underscoring the politically conditional relationship of overseas doctors to British medicine. The terms of access to the medical market were no more surprising. Overseas doctors were now required to pass the Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board (PLAB) examination, which replaced the TRAB examination. For those who passed the PLAB, the right to practice medicine was still subject to restrictions regarding length and place even after the category of temporary registration was replaced by the category of limited registration.

The act enhanced the authority of the GMC over registration even as the relationship of overseas doctors to British medicine became more contingent. After years of lobbying, the council now enjoyed discretionary power to specify the duration and clinical assignment for doctors who were admitted under limited registration. It was also empowered to grant full registration to those overseas doctors who satisfied the necessary medical qualifications and clinical experience. In sum, the act formalized what postwar British medicine had become: a globalized medical profession that was stratified between domestic and overseas graduates, one largely white and permanent and the other largely nonwhite and transient.

As I have argued in this book, the inequitable treatment of overseas doctors of color was not so much a historical accident of the postwar period but rather a result of the careful political management of the national and imperial boundaries that historically circumscribed British medicine. Since 1858, the medical register had fortified these boundaries, creating a space for the growth and consolidation of British medicine as a social institution. Admission to the register—a crucial step toward success in the British medical occupation—was tied to the possession of a medical qualification from designated university and nonuniversity licensing bodies in the United Kingdom.

MITTEILUNG AN DEN ADEL by Elisabeth Plessen clearly spoke to the emotional needs of a generation, selling over one hundred thousand copies within four years of its publication. The semiautobiographical novel is an early example of the West German literary mode that critics dubbed Väterliteratur (father literature), a label that captures the androcentrism of contemporary antifascist discourse. Fathers are central to this strand of autobiographical or autofictional literature, written by members of the first postwar generation who attempt to understand how their fathers could have come to support National Socialism, how the war shaped them, and how these experiences combined were transferred to the next generation through an impersonal and disciplinarian upbringing. As in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, the family is depicted as the locus of authoritarian mentalities.

It is unsurprising that authors of Väterliteratur drew connections between the punitive family milieu and the Nazi past, given their political backgrounds: many were sympathetic to the 1968 protest movement. In fact, Plessen was a member of the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS, Socialist German Student Union), the dominant branch of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extraparliamentary Opposition), when she was a student in West Berlin. The specific tenor of the student protests in Germany owed to the students’ anger about perceived continuities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. In Germany, the issues that united global reform movements (capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and war) appeared to signal a restoration of the defining elements of National Socialism. The Third Reich was frequently brandished as a symbolic weapon in the confrontation between the conservative establishment and the student reformers. As the protests grew increasingly explosive, and segued into the terrorism of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF, Red Army Faction), critics drew parallels between the tactics of the students and the violent methods used by the National Socialists. In the eyes of the students, by contrast, the older generation was the Nazi generation. It needed to answer for its moral and political failings during the Third Reich.

The student movement directed its political energies toward overcoming authoritarian character structures and hierarchies across the social spectrum, from state institutions and the media to the bourgeois family. A conception of authoritarianism that bridged the private and the political was popularized, in particular, by Rudi Dutschke, the ringleader of the antiauthoritarian strand of the SDS.

In the wake of her 1964 solo exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Violeta Parra was interviewed in Europe on several occasions. In these instances, she was often asked about the origin, subjects, and techniques used in the creation of her visual art. The first excerpt, reproduced above, is from a review of the exhibition published in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. In this interview, Parra supplies a narrative of haphazard ‘discovery’ that excavates the roots of her artistic experimentation while she was ill for eight months in 1960.

“WIR KENNEN DIE FLEISSIGE TRÜMMERFRAU und die von Rotarmisten vergewaltigte Frau. Wir kennen die Opferfrau. Die Täterfrau kennen wir kaum” (We know all about the woman of the rubble and the woman raped by a Red Army soldier. We know the woman as victim. We barely know the woman as perpetrator). This sentiment was repeated frequently in newspaper reviews of Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013; Hitlers Helferinnen: Deutsche Frauen im Holocaust, 2014), a historical study seeking to challenge the stereotypes about women's moral innocence and political passivity that I examine in this book. Using material that has become accessible to Western scholars since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lower unfolds the biographies of thirteen German women who became witnesses, accomplices, or perpetrators of genocide in the Nazi East. Lower's gripping narrative style succeeded in opening up this history to a nonacademic audience. Hitler's Furies was a bestseller in the United States in 2013, a finalist for the National Book Foundation Award for Nonfiction, and extensively reviewed in Anglo-American and German newspapers.

These feats are remarkable for a study of women and National Socialism. Claudia Koonz's study Mothers in the Fatherland (1986) was admittedly nominated for a Book Award in 1987 and reviewed in English- Language publications such as The Guardian and the New York Times. In Germany, however, it garnered little attention in the media. Even the so-called Historikerinnenstreit (female historians’ dispute) between Koonz and Gisela Bock in 1992 caused “barely a ripple” on the surface of mainstream cultural memory. While the male historian's dispute between scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Ernst Nolte, and Andreas Hillgruber unfolded in major newspapers, the debate between Bock and Koonz played out in an academic journal. Until Lower's book, no academic study of women and National Socialism received more than sporadic media coverage in Germany, unlike widely discussed studies of male perpetrators such as Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992), Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), or the Verbrechen der Wehrmacht (Crimes of the Wehrmacht) exhibition that originally ran from 1995 until 2001. As Christine Richard speculated in her review of Lower's book, “mag sein, dass die massgeblichen Medienmänner nur ungern am edlen Frauenbild kratzen” (it may well be that the leading men of the media are reluctant to chip away at the noble image of woman).

The Chilean artist Violeta Parra (1917–67) is renowned for her contribution to Latin American letters; her protest songs are championed and her poetry is a fixture of the Spanish American canon. All artists are united by their creativity, yet each artist works from a unique philosophical perspective. In the quotation above, taken from a letter that she wrote to her partner, Gilbert Favre, Parra conveys the spirit and intention of her creative endeavour. Violeta Parra describes her creativity as a form of generosity, a way of uplifting her spectators and touching their souls. The letter, one of the few records in which Parra reflects upon her own artistic practice, communicates her vision with great clarity. What she makes clear is the impact that she hopes it will have on the individual. Alongside this desire to provide a positive experience for the audience, there is an activism and a simple yet deep philosophical heart at the centre of all of Parra's work. Multiple meanings converge in her unique poetic, a fusion of Chile's strong heritage of popular poetry, and of artistic currents that were extremely modern.

Parra carried out research into Chilean traditions and developed her own creative practice in a variety of media. As a creator, the range of artistic genres she explored make her work particularly interesting. Many people know her as the singer of the song ‘Casamiento de negros’ (Negro wedding), or as the progenitor of the Chilean New Song movement. In the decades following her death, her music was to be championed by people all over the world, who linked Parra's broad, left-wing ethos to their own ideological and political struggles. Others recognise her poetry as the most perfect example of the décima form in Chilean literature.

GIVEN THAT EMOTIONS IN TEXT are discursive constructions and only activated through the reader's engagement with the narrative content, this fictive emotional interiority must be conveyed through language. In fact, the anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz consider emotions to be fundamentally a ‘discursive practice’, which should therefore be approached through language:

Lutz in fact considers the concept of ‘emotion’ itself to be a cultural construct. She assumes that the concept of emotion is intimately related to the notion of a self, particularly to the Western preoccupation with and conception of the self. She therefore rejects the idea that we can determine or fully understand the emotional life of distant cultures given that the social circumstances that shaped the perception and experience of emotional life are always fundamentally different and hence inaccessible.

Yet we would be unable to relate to emotional depiction in texts if there were not a certain degree of commonality in emotional behaviour that allows the reader to decipher emotional reactions and behaviour in texts. The stance taken in this volume assumes that emotions are to a great extent culturally and historically contingent, but that there is nevertheless a modicum of biological predetermination that dictates basic emotional responses. While the articulation of emotions, and their representations and function, will thus differ – and in fact those differences are decisive in formulating and shaping emotive scripts and literary identities – the emotive potential of a text can only be realised if these scripts remain meaningful. This emotive signifying potential is admittedly always actualised through a particular reader (or audience) within a particular cultural and historical context with a particular knowledge of the context of the text with which he or she is engaging.

Violeta Parra began her creative work, an integral part of both the legacy and the destiny of folk culture, during the first half of the 1950s, particularly following her first trip to Europe in 1954. Her output then quickly deepened and matured, reaching its conclusion by around 1965. It thus covered a brief period of a little over ten years. A surprisingly short time, considering the assurance and intensity of her artistic expression and the complexity of her work as a whole. Parra's output is a universe formed of distinct spheres of creation, in some of which, such as the areas of poetry and song, her yield is prolific. This is less surprising, upon discovering a telling detail: in Violeta, the creative drive did not progress linearly, through successive transformations of knowledge, as occurred in other cases, where suddenly knowledge met its own limitations and, facing the ghost of rhetoric, opened up to a new scenario. In this sense, Parra's creative drive lacked ‘history’. The learning process might have taken years, but when Parra began her authentic creation, she already knew what she needed to know and, instead of transforming it, she realised its potential. This knowledge, and the urgent need to artistically communicate it, act as an energetic nucleus from which the different spheres of her creation emanate, in a movement that is similar to the growth and expansion of concentric circles. Instead of linearity, there is superposition. Around 1965 the energetic nucleus seems to have been exhausted, and the cycle came to an end. Could Violeta's suicide at the beginning of 1967 have been a way to render visible this exhaustion and closure?

Violeta's art includes poetry, music, painting, pottery, embroidery (arpilleras) and wire sculptures. These are, of course, diverse spheres of creation. The primary material employed in each is different: word, sound, colour, wool and metal. And diverse are the figures and images built with those materials. However, the diversity of these spheres of creation is simply a plurality of faces in which the same themes return again and again; Parra's creativity reiterates itself, reproducing the same pattern of correlated elements in each of the genres in which she works.

1965: The Wayward Way Divorce Me, Darling! Four Thousand Brass Halfpennies Passion Flower Hotel Twang!

The West End was never the right milieu for The Wayward Way (Vaudeville Theatre, 27 January 1965; 36), an American musicalisation of the nineteenth-century temperance melodrama The Drunkard. Shaftesbury Avenue was no place for theatrical trinkets. The Wayward Way had already played Los Angeles for six years, but never chanced Broadway; its non-musical predecessor had played LA for twenty years, making it a sort of US compatriot of The Mousetrap. Lightly dotted with songs by composer Lorne Huycke and lyricist Bill Howe that had no hope of lasting beyond the exit doors, the British production of The Wayward Way, presented by Tommy Duggan, had a season at the Lyric, Hammersmith before its London opening. It was artfully cast, with Jim Dale and David Holliday, late of Sail Away and No Strings, as leading men, playing opposite innocent heroine Roberta D'Esti. Deranged Mad Agnes was played by Cheryl Kennedy, with one of the best lyrics of the evening: ‘Why do they call me dotty when Agnes is my name?’ In the shadow of the greatest British stage villain of all time – who else but the inimitable Tod Slaughter?1 – John Gower's Squire Cribbs had little to offer but a deep voice, but elsewhere the trifling felicities of the piece worked well enough, if overplaying was wanted. With the evening's tract against the consequent social evils of drink packed away, the second half was given over to an ‘Olio’, a series of vaudevillian turns reminiscent of a revue night at the Players’ Theatre in Charing Cross.

There remained the question of style. Should the primped-up Victorian drama be played straight or served up as warmed-up cod, blatantly mocked or gently parodied or done straight-faced? Answer came there none, so much nonsense already having been written about how other shows dealt with a similar problem of period style (The Boy Friend aping the 1920s or Little Mary Sunshine aping American operetta).

1961: The Three Caskets Belle Wildest Dreams

With its eye on a West End transfer, the Players’ Theatre mounted a revival of Gordon Snell and Peter Greenwell's operetta The Three Caskets (Players’ Theatre, 1 March 1961; season), originally produced in a shorter version at that theatre in 1956. Now extended to provide a full evening, with new songs, and orchestrations by Gordon Langford played by the Eugene Pini Orchestra, the updating of scenes from The Merchant of Venice moved the action to Miss Portia Browne's residence in Belmont Square, Mayfair. It was a pretty conceit for the educated sensibilities of the typical Players’ audience, but whether it would have rung a bell with the average London theatregoer is doubtful. Portia, played by Margaret Burton, was wooed in turn by Denis Martin as an Irish tenor, Robin Hunter as a black-face Morocco Joe arriving complete with ‘nigger minstrel’ songs, and heroic Laurie Payne (formerly a romantic presence in A. P. Herbert and Vivian Ellis's The Water Gipsies and the Louisa M. Alcott musical A Girl Called Jo) as the soldierly Honourable Percy Bassanio. It seemed an odd project in a climate already suffused with the rhythms and street-wisdom of West Side Story, and more so because Greenwell was one of the few British composers who had seemed to be pushing the boundaries towards modernity with The Crooked Mile. Coming so soon in the wake of the catastrophic Johnny the Priest, with its curious cocktail of teddy boys and semi-operatic religioso, it showed the Players’ management as out of kilter with the world beyond Villiers Street. Greenwell's next collaboration with Peter Wildeblood, House of Cards, suffered from an identity crisis, too, unsure of what idiom it assumed. It was generally agreed that this economy-sized edition of The Three Caskets, despite its bright lightness, was not as diverting as it had more briefly been in 1956, when the joke had worked better because it wasn't so stretched.

Celestina's prologues reveal an author who was profoundly aware of the comparative, interconnected, and dialogic nature of textual creation. Rojas situates the Comedia within an initial textual dialogue between an author and his ‘friend’, a perspective that later broadens with the Tragicomedia to include a wider audience of readers, editors, and printers, who apply their own ‘punturas’ to his creation, each interacting with and understanding it differently. It is as much a work about interpretation and the creation of meaning as it is about a love affair between two youths. Rojas may call attention to the dangerous effects of love in his letter to a friend, but by the time he had returned to and reworked the sixteen acts of the Comedia into the Tragicomedia, the work had acquired a decidedly more nuanced and ambiguous character, seen most vividly in Pleberio's lament and Melibea's death. The process of re-writing that Celestina underwent at Rojas's hands was only the first in a series of many. The many translations, adaptations and continuations it spawned testify to an ongoing dialogue across languages and geo-political and chronological boundaries that mirrors the work's own creation. Celestina exists in an ongoing conversation with readers and commentators who in turn became translators and adaptors, printers and editors. As with Rojas's own experience, each new re-reading, each new iteration, brings different nuances to the fore.

A broader perspective on Celestina's reception opens up new ways of understanding Rojas's work and its relationship to contemporary debates. This study has posited that one of the reasons for its success is its evident interest in the nature and condition of mankind. ‘Libro divino, si encubriera más lo humano’: Celestina has ever been represented as a book on the edge of the two poles of human existence, excellent yet fallen. Within its pages is a depiction of the worst of human behaviour – greed, lechery, deceit, theft, adultery, blasphemy, suicide, despair. Equally, however, elements in the work are suggestive of more positive views of man's potential: the focus on the need for self-knowledge, the striving for self-determination and agency, the acknowleged power of language and its importance in the fashioning of selfhood.