This chapter contextualises the rise of the stage Machiavel in the suppression of the Elizabethan Puritan movement in the late 1580s and early 1590s and the period’s distrust in the hidden, inward self of religious dissenters. The stage Machiavel of the early 1590s, most prominently embodied by Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, bears traces of anti-Puritan polemics that have been mostly overlooked so far. Hence, the stage Machiavel can be read as a predecessor of the stage Puritan and as a theatrical convention, most notably in his typical revelation of his plans to the audience, which showcases the theatre as an institution that grants access, or rather a fantasy of access, to the inward secrets of religious dissenters. Marlowe’s Jew of Malta can be read as an expression of such a desire to make windows into men’s hearts and as a poetological statement that flaunts the complicity of the theatre in this enterprise.

In this chapter, we take a close look at a predominant feature of UK democracy – Prime Minister’s Questions – the weekly parliamentary event, most notable for the showdown between the Prime Minister and his/her main political opponent, the Leader of the Opposition. We begin with an overview of PMQs, including claims it has descended into an event characterised by antagonistic political point-scoring. We then consider its history, including apparent changes – procedural and behavioural – revealed by systematic research. Subsequent sections focus on two forms of behaviour: adversarialism and equivocation. In the first, we see evidence in support of those views expressing concern that impoliteness, incivility and personal attacks are salient features of PMQs; however, certain circumstances or topics of debate can prompt relative politeness. The section on equivocation reveals that, compared with other forms of political discourse (e.g., broadcast interviews), PMQs has some of the highest levels of question evasion. Those findings have generated not only national news headlines, but were also cited in a question at PMQs. Finally, we consider public opinion; the weekly showdown is the prime psychodrama of British democracy, and because people either love it or hate it, PMQs has aptly earned the soubriquet of ‘political Marmite’.

Degree-theoretical approaches to vagueness attempt to flesh out the idea that properties referred to by vague predicates come in degrees, and that sentences containing such predicates can be true to a degree in between absolute truth and absolute falsity. This many-valued semantics is wedded either to some fuzzy logic, or to a non-truth-functional logic, or even to classical logic. The first part of the chapter is devoted to surveying these different alternatives. Subsequently, we discuss the standard fuzzy approach (SFA) to the Sorites, based on infinite-valued Łukasiewicz logic. The mainstream objections to the SFA are then dispelled from a perspective that views classical logic as an ambiguous logic. Next, we address the status of the Tolerance principle in the SFA. We provide a semantics for vague predicates within Rational Pavelka Logic (RPL), contending that the conditional premisses in a Sorites are ambiguous between a reading as Łukasiewicz conditionals and a reading as 'tolerance conditionals'. In conclusion, we formalise in RPL a purely structural version of the paradox, where no logical constant is involved. We ascribe this paradox to an equivocation over consequence.