Focusing on Romans 11, this chapter argues that Paul here concludes his larger argument by making the case that gentile incorporation does not suggest that God has abandoned his people Israel but rather is the very means by which God is saving not only one subset of Israel (that is, the Jews) but all Israel (Judah and Israel), with transformed gentiles effectively becoming resurrected Israelites. In the process, the chapter addresses Paul’s arguments about the remnant and the olive tree and observes that Paul concludes his argument by highlighting God’s removal of “impiety” from “Jacob,” tying this passage to the very beginning of the argument in Romans 1.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between individual, communal, and political contentment in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare presents contentment as most successful when shared between selves, whereas an overly possessive attitude toward one’s contentment jeopardizes its existence. As You Like It depicts a commonwealth built upon the bonds between subjects and preserved through mutual contentment. By contrast, the malcontent Iago identifies vulnerabilities in Othello’s understanding of contentedness to destroy his relationships with Desdemona and Venetian society writ large. In As You Like It, communal contentment counteracts the social threat of envy, but in Othello jealousy distorts content beyond the point of recognition or redemption. Shakespeare does not shy away from the challenges to contentment, but he attempts to provide audiences with collective experiences of positive emotion and to unite them in the face of tragedy. Though recent critics have described the Renaissance theatre as an arena for emotional extremes, this chapter broadens our perspective of Shakespearean emotion to include a contentment that shares the stage with other affects.

In species with internal female fertilization, males face the problem of paternity uncertainty, which refers to the risk of investing in unrelated offspring. As such, a partner’s sexual infidelity may be particularly damaging for males given that it may result in allocating resources to genetically unrelated offspring, reducing a male’s inclusive fitness. As such, males invest considerable time and effort to retain their mates. Mate retention tactics involve cost-inflicting strategies that operate by reducing the partner’s self-perceived value to prevent the partner from leaving the partnership, and benefit-provisioning strategies that operate by boosting a partner’s self-esteem and improving relationship satisfaction. In this chapter, first, we discuss the benefits that men gain from long-term relationships, which include increased probability of paternity, prolonged proximity and sexual access to a partner, and increased probability of attracting a high-quality partner. Second, we discuss the main costs of infidelity for males, including the risk of investing in an unrelated child as well as costs to his reputation and future mating opportunities. Third, we define and discuss a taxonomy of mate retention tactics and explain that a male’s mate retention tactics are expected to respond to his female’s partner preferences, at least partly. Indeed, males have been found to engage in tactics such as resource display given that females value mates that are able and willing to provision them and their offspring with resources. Empirical evidence has also, surprisingly, found that men, more than women, engage in strategies such as submission and debasement. Empirical evidence also suggests that men also use threats and violence directed to rivals more than women do. Our review also demonstrates that males engage in both benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting mate-retention strategies, and that the type of strategy chosen as well as its intensity is partly dependent on a man’s mate value and his ability to acquire resources. Finally, we discuss some of the main environmental factors that may influence the mate retention tactics displayed by males, including partner mate value and perceived infidelity threat.

In The Winter’s Tale, power, eros, death, the utopian, and the aesthetic are the main themes in play. It begins in a world of amoral and dehumanizing power politics and ends in affirmations of the utopian spirit – while acknowledging the realities of death and suffering. It draws on festival traditions, fairy tales, and ancient issues of resurrection and rebirth in its end and political and psychological issues, as King Leontes becomes a mad tyrant. His madness paradoxically takes an aesthetic form in its (perverse) creativity and reliance on intuitive mental decisions as defined by Kant – thus relating to the aesthetic issues later in the play. The play’s utopian space is a mixed, complicated locus that includes both the utopian and the nonutopian. What makes it a consummate example of Shakespearean metatheater is its investigation of the relations of two concepts of ancient provenance, “art” and “nature,” introduced off-handedly, played with extensively in the second half of the play, and climaxed and thematically resolved in the complex, dissonant unity of the two terms figured when an apparent stone statue of the supposedly dead Queen Hermione is revealed as living flesh.

In King Lear and Coriolanus Shakespeare shows how parents who shame their children motivate them to commit violence that ultimately consumes the parent and child. To call this a perversion of parental love is virtually an understatement. Lear shames Goneril and Regan by loving Cordelia more than he loves them – so they bring about the deaths of both Lear and Cordelia. And Gloucester shames Edmund, who has his father’s eyes gouged out – an atrocity committed by American murderers we have seen – since people feel shamed in the eyes of others. Coriolanus shows how a mother’s teaching her son to achieve honor through violence ultimately rebounds on her and the very community she meant him to protect.

Both Othello and Macbeth show how men can be shamed by other people into committing murder, and how guilt can motivate self-murder. Othello felt humiliated when Iago deceived him into believing Desdemona had made him into a “cuckold.” When he discovers she has actually been faithful, he feels so guilty he punishes himself by suicide – as many such murderers still do. Iago shames Othello into ruining himself because he felt Othello had shamed him. Lady Macbeth shames Macbeth into murdering Duncan, which finally leads to so many murders that she feels guilty enough to kill herself; and he feels so exhausted he longs for death as the only face-saving way to rest in peace – again, like many murderers we have seen.

Envy is a ubiquitous emotion which plays an important role in human life. This Introduction provides a brief overview of the taxonomy of envy and a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.

Envy is often confused with jealousy, because they are both rivalrous painful emotions, which are directed at a competitor and are concerned with a good. But envy is about the potential or actual lack of the good, while jealousy is about the potential or actual loss of the good. This distinction is not always clear cut, as a section devoted to ambiguous, hybrid, and transitional cases shows. In the end, envy is defined as an aversive response to a perceived inferiority or disadvantage vis-à-vis a similar other, with regard to a good that is relevant to the sense of identity of the envier.

Iago serves as an experimenter, setting up a powerful context in which Othello is positioned to behave as a “jealous husband.” Othello has certain characteristics that made him especially susceptible to Iago’s manipulations, including his chosen lieutenant’s flirtatiousness and weakness for alcohol. However, the more important factor shaping behavior is the context set up by Iago, within the militaristic context of an island (Cyprus) facing an invasion. Iago first schemes to get Othello to dismiss Cassio as his lieutenant. Next, he persuades Cassio to get Othello’s wife, Desdemona, to plead for his reinstatement. At the same time, her persuades Othello that Desdemona is sexually pursuing Cassio. The more Desdemona pleads for Cassio to be reinstated, the more she damns herself in Othello’s eyes. The power of this trap is too much for Othello, who falls victim to it – as would most other individuals in this context, as demonstrated by psychological research.

This chapter argues that while Shakespeare has no single or overarching theory or view of love, specific patterns or tendencies are evident in both the plays and the poems. It focuses on three characteristics of such a disposition: the singularity of the beloved (‘you are you’) that admits of no substitute; the essentially projective rather than reactive vision of love (‘love sees not with the eyes but with the mind’); and the perhaps counterintuitive fact that love is not an emotion as such, but rather a disposition or form of behaviour that involves different, sometimes contradictory, emotions. This puts Shakespeare at odds with contemporary, Galenic theories of love as one of the most volatile of the passions. The Sonnets, for example, are virtually devoid of references to contemporary psychology, and the chapter focusses on these poems to explore the rich varieties of emotion they express in their complex and fraught negotiations of love and desire. Classifying and arranging the sonnets in accordance with the emotions expressed in them furthermore does not accord with the usual narrative attributed to them.

In the extant plays we find examples of wives who react intensely and/or with violence to the introduction of a sexual rival into the household or to their abandonment by their partner for that rival. This chapter fills in the gaps in our understanding of this pattern by taking into account the fragmentary plays in which women enact violence upon other women and girls. This most often occurs in the case of married women who perceive the introduction of a (younger) rival into their household as a threat to their own position and status, and it frequently takes the form of an attack upon this rival’s physical beauty. The chapter shows that we should place less recognised figures such as Sidero, Dirce, and the wife of Creon alongside the widely cited examples of Clytemnestra and Medea as tragic wives whose desire to maintain or restore their status leads them to violently target other women.