Chapter 6 turns to later revisions of Kydian revenge drama on the early Jacobean stage in the hands of idealistic playwrights who sought to reform the ambiguous theatrical experience of the original play by restoring its tragic dignity within a reconstituted Christian morality of patient suffering or rational Stoic forbearance. Looking to Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and its kindred play, Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, this chapter explores the resulting tension when playwrights reintroduce Stoic-Christian idealism into the theatrical experience of revenge which the play’s performance ethics utterly confound morally and causally. If Chettle and Middleton explore the violence underpinning any attempt to yoke Christian moral idealism onto living and suffering human subjects, in these later plays, this process is re-examined from the idealist point of view and its sustainability.

This chapter collects the tips on what we as individuals can do to better manage toxic stress and to reduce the contributions of stress to acute and chronic illnesses. Because toxic stress is such a common problem and a potent contributor to our most costly conditions all around the world, but still poorly understood, we should elevate toxic stress to a top public health priority to guide our efforts to find the most effective ways to prevent and treat stress-related conditions.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

Classical and medieval rhetorical theorists had many names for the figure of thought that we call ‘personification’ or prosopopoeia. This fundamentally hybrid figure occurs at the confluence of different kinds of discourse; definitions range across a spectrum from the ‘animate abstraction’ to the ‘person introduced to speak’. The essay explores the diverse rhetorical theory behind this figure. It then discusses the hybridity of this figure, and in particular its striking capacity for multivalency, change and even disintegration (paradiastole), in medieval vernacular narrative allegory. It focuses on Langland’s Piers Plowman, with reference to the figures Clergie, Patience, Conscience, Wil, Haukyn and Piers Plowman. Finally, the essay investigates another aspect of this hybridity that might seem counter-intuitive to readers who assume that prosopopoiae/personifications should have surface or even naturalistic narrative coherence: the way that this figure of thought allows Langland repeatedly to cultivate an ambiguity about whether his prosopopoiae/personifications are lay or ordained. This telling ambiguity reflects the poet’s disengaged attitude to the institution of the church and even the priesthood.

King Lear is structured by a surprisingly comprehensive and sustained engagement with Senecan tragedy. The play is about the collapse of society, and the antisocial nature of Senecan tragedy is its major intertextual resource for thinking about the tragic self in relation to community. The play’s first two acts draw heavily on Senecan language to imagine Lear’s furious response to his daughter’s independence. The middle portion of the play, especially the part with Lear in the storm, interrogates a style of high-flown Senecan rhetoric as the voice of a tragic brand of solipsism. The final movement of the play draws heavily on scenes of fraught and partial reconciliation in Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Phoenissae. Since the 1960s, King Lear has been celebrated as the preeminent dramatic representation of deracinated modern subjectivity, at once uplifting and corrosively skeptical. The play has come to be seen as a representative example of the type of modernist allegory Benjamin finds in Trauerspiel – as a representation of what it means to be human after having lost the ability to feel like part of any larger whole. But since Shakespeare achieves this via Seneca, it may be worth revisiting how modern the perspective actually is.

In the revenge tragedies of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, the negotiation between the prodigal urge to act and, conversely, the necessity of patiently resisting action, is central to the presentation of the gendered identities of revenging characters and to the theatrical experience itself. In this chapter, I develop and complicate the ideas and arguments about patience and prodigality explored in Chapters 1 and 2 by analysing a number of revenge tragedies. The Spanish Tragedy (1585-89), Titus Andronicus (1590-92), Antonio’s Revenge (1600-1), The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Othello (1603-4), The Atheist’s Tragedy (1607-11), The Duchess of Malfi (1612-14) and The Changeling (1622) in different ways draw attention to both the patience and prodigality of the revenger. This chapter argues that male revengers are authorised whether they achieve vengeance (thus asserting their masculine authority and carrying out the filial duty which upholds patriarchal norms) or whether they delay revenge (and in doing so express a degree of Christian piety). Female revengers, on the other hand, seem to be denigrated whether they act to revenge (exposing themselves to accusations of sexual impropriety) or delay vengeance (therefore establishing their ineffectiveness and cruelty).

Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of patience and the figure of the patient wife, looking in detail at this identity of female delay in early modern conduct and religious literature, and in a group of plays from the turn of the century. I begin by thinking about the nature of performative endings in All’s Well that Ends Well (1603-4), going on to examine the figure of Patient Griselda as an exemplar of female virtuous inaction in medieval narratives and in Dekker, Chettle and Haughton’s The pleasant comodie of Patient Grissill (1600). I argue that patience is figured as a temporal framework of patriarchally authorised virtuous inaction (chastity, silence and obedience), and yet also that patience can be denigrated in order to define women as obstructing socially authorised male action on the early modern stage. This chapter also examines the temporality of characters defined as prostitutes and shrews, both in Patient Grissill and in Parts One and Two of The honest whore (1604, 1604-5) as well as the anomalous figure of the patient husband. It explores the ways in which a specific kind of active patience can complicate the binaries that set duration against the instant and passivity against agency.

Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda - quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning subjectivity, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty - are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a common humanity, much less Christianity. This chapter argues that Griselda is not an inhuman monster; rather, through The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer imagines a different view of humanity, one engendered according to modes of virtue typically associated with women, including patience, pity, humility, steadfastness, and submission.