Beckett’s works are built around the paradoxical notion of the still life. Suspended between motion and standstill, destruction and creation, a still life conveys the state of a being that is simultaneously lifeless and alive. Still lifes are located at the intersection of life and death, of presence and absence, of the material and the immaterial dimension of a work of art. Beckett, above all in his later prose and drama, uses the still life as a reflection on the creation of a work of art while simultaneously performing this creative process as it were in vivo. This chapter discusses the relation between visual, textual, musical and dramatic still lifes. It analyses the tableaux vivants and nature mortes in works such as A Piece of Monologue, Stirrings Still and What Where in relation to Hamlet, and investigates the notion of ghostly doppelgangers by way of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise that informed Beckett’s late plays. Journeys of dispossession and shrinking, moments frozen in time that approach the condition of a still life will be analysed in Timon of Athens, The End, King Lear, Texts for Nothing, Sonnets 55, 18 and 81, and finally in Breath.

Chapter 9 discusses the use of Plutarch in drama understood as a mode of political reflection. I provide a brief analysis of the political implications of Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) famous use of Plutarch in a series of plays devoted to key figures of the classical era. I explore how Shakespeare’s depiction of public life shifted between his first Roman play Titus Andronicus, deemed to have been written before his close study of North’s translations of Plutarch, and his latter plays focused on key Greek and Roman historical figures (Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) for which his use of North is heavily documented and discussed. I then explore political themes and argument stemming from Plutarch and as relayed through Pierre Corneille’s (1606–1684) Pompée and Jean Racine’s (1639–1699) Mithridate.

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.

In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens the title characters express intense anger and desire for revenge, but nonetheless retain their masculinity and do not degenerate into weakness or effeminacy. This essay identifies ways that these plays use gender to influence how audiences distinguish between extreme and excessive anger. In Titus Tamora’s failure as an effective avenger keeps revenge a masculine pursuit. Moreover, the play maps an emotional register onto the Goth-Roman-Moor racial and moral spectrum. Whereas Aaron’s and Tamora’s anger appears excessive, Titus’ appears moderately and appropriately Roman – despite the violence it entails. In Timon, female characters are virtually absent, and the play clears a place for considering men’s anger and revenge that brackets off effeminacy. The grounds for Timon’s misanthropic, vengeful tirades, rather than gender, determine whether his emotions are excessive. The questions raised in both plays about the line between extreme and excessive anger, and the revenge that ensues, thus have political implications. What reasons and circumstances make anger and revenge a legitimate response to being wronged? Who decides, and what role does gender play in that determination?

The author presents a necessarily brief summary of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) regarding immigration, featuring especially Pius XII's much neglected apostolic constitution Exsul familia. He also sets out some of the philosophical presuppositions of CST as it pertains to immigration. These presuppositions are to be found, he maintains, especially in the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. He then examines in some detail Francisco de Vitoria's ideas regarding immigration, based as they are upon Aristotelian and Thomistic principles. Finally, he offers answers to questions that have arisen over the course of the essay.

The common good (bonum commune) has, since antiquity, referred to the aim of social and political association, and was particularly prominent in medieval Christian political theology. Since St. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical letter, Mater et magistra, ecclesiastical statements about social teaching have employed a formulation of the common good, usually in the version that appeared in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, as “the sum of those conditions of social life that allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This chapter discusses the origins and development of this formulation as well as the ways that it has been used in subsequent Catholic Social Teaching. While it has sometimes been interpreted as an “instrumental” account of the common good, the sources and uses of the notion suggest that it is the particularly modern political component of a fuller notion of the common good continuous with the tradition. In particular, the recent formulation is concerned to limit the power of the modern state and protect the dignity of the human person in the challenging conditions of political modernity.