The Introduction sets out the study’s main claims and methodological approach and explains the wide use in this study of the term ’mimetic ethical exercises’. In the process, it explains the distinction drawn in this study between ethics and religious morality. Finally, the Introduction addresses the question of genre and theatricality when studying early modern examples of English revenge plays and explains what is unique about the plays selected for analysis.

Chapter 1 begins with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by analysing the mimetic ethical exercise inherent to Kyd’s design. In particular, this chapter analyses the onstage uses in The Spanish Tragedy of disrupted missives, purloined letters and misquoted texts as offering the necessary space for the emergence of a new ‘counterfeiting’ theatrical ethic which eschews moral meaning beyond the immediate effects of what the staged performance can display. As this chapter shows, such mimetic ethical entanglement is often enacted through the theatrical translation of humanist ethical values of Christian Erasmian virtue into an epistolary emblem of writing, sending and intercepting letters. These letters and emblems of writing, in failing to arrive at their destination, frame a moral void in which the excesses of revenge unfold onstage in surprising and unpredictable ways.

In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.

Aristotle’s theology is best understood in relation to Plato’s. Like Plato, Aristotle offers no science of god, but he does offer philosophers a way to immortalize themselves through the study and contemplation of the cosmos. First, Aristotle arrays all classes of substances, from the elements to the gods, in a single progressive hierarchy. Every substance in the cosmos, he says, strives to become as much like god as its own nature permits: each class of substance perfects itself by imitating the class above it. A person’s life, says Aristotle, develops through the classes of plants, animals, and humans—before striving to imitate the divine by contemplating the stars. We become like the god by climbing the ladder of classes of substances. Second, Aristotle’s god governs the cosmos not by managing it but purely by being an example of perfection—an example that magnetically draws all things toward him. The perfect happiness enjoyed by god inspires all other classes of substances to love and to imitate him. Similarly, a philosopher governs his household and his city not by managing them, but merely by the attractive power of the example he sets of godlike happiness.

Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

To support experiential learning, HLVC data are available for research (by permission, and with protections for the participants). This chapter illustrates the integration of research and community-engaged learning, which is critical to the success of the project. It presents activities that support critical and creative thinking, enable theoretical knowledge to be empirically tested, and facilitate and enhance quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and the communication of research. It includes a section on how to best conduct and teach research methods to support the vitality of the languages being examined and one on ethical practices. Sociolinguistics trails other subfields in analyzing data outside the majority language (English). With these supports, students can change this situation. The exercises exemplify tasks that students have undertaken and can help others get started. Exercises provide prompts and show how to gain access to instruments and data. In addition, the course Exploring Heritage Languages, which has modules that can be (adapted and) used, is introduced. The HLVC corpus and these modules provide instructional infrastructure to scaffold undergraduate and graduate class assignments teaching relevant theory and research skills.

DOHaD and epigenetic research that investigates causal mechanisms and predictive biomarkers has often occurred in the absence of discussion of ethical, legal, and social implications or engagement with disability communities. These implications include maternal blaming, labelling, stigmatisation, and ableism. Considering the debate on different models of disability by disability activists and social scientists, this is a timely opportunity to optimise the design of epigenetic research into conditions labelled as disabilities. Research aims should address the needs of disability communities, acknowledge diversity, and move away from medical to social models of disability. Here we focus on the autistic community as an example. We argue that there is a need to work with autistic people and their supporters to co-design studies that facilitate a better understanding of autism’s challenges and assets and to use this knowledge to assist these individuals and communities. We also stress the importance of autonomy and information provision in relation to autistic individuals’ engagement with epigenetics tests. We conclude by urging researchers planning DOHaD and epigenetics research to listen to and engage with disability communities when they say, ‘nothing about us without us’.

Chapter 4 turns to the watershed moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the great anti-revenge play of its day, which by commenting on Kyd’s design and its diminished capacity for novelty, profoundly changed it. In the process, Shakespeare’s play became itself an ethically vacant theatrical space in the dramatic continuum of the period, which subsequent playwrights responded to viscerally. This chapter argues that Shakespeare introduces into the intra-theatrical ethics of the standard revenge plot a theatrical ethics of ‘marking’ which seeks to translate through spectacle and performance what is merely shown into that which is, in the world, finally marked and bearing the trace of a wound or a scar. In the process, the chapter reflects on Shakespeare’s wider intervention in the dramatic fortunes of Kyd’s dramatic legacy in raising the stakes for audience participation in the action to new levels of guilt and vexed ethical complicity.

According to Aristotle, character or ethos in tragedy is ’that which reveals what the moral choice is like’. This kind of ethos is what this book explores in Sophocles, by examining five tragedies in which moral choice is central to the course of the drama. These choices are made within the context of traditional Greek morality, which, amongst other things, expected one to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Closely allied to these principles is the conception of justice as retaliation. This nexus of principles provides a pervasive ethical background to most of Greek literature and is of special significance for tragedy.

Greek popular thought is pervaded by the assumption that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. These fundamental principles surface continually from Homer onwards and survive well into the Roman period, and indeed to the present day, especially in international relations. They are firmly based on observation of human nature, which yields the conclusion that most human beings do in fact desire to help their friends and harm their enemies, and derive satisfaction from such behaviour. Thus Xenophon’s Socrates can count benefiting friends and defeating enemies as one of the things which bring the ’greatest pleasures’.

Many scholars agree that one of Darwin’s main accomplishments was the introduction of blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. The history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led many to the conclusion that the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. As a result, many accept the idea that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by Darwin’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. However, this claim is false. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. Moreover, Hitler’s own conception of biological processes was antithetical to Darwin’s theory; and the leading Nazi theorists rejected Darwinian evolution because of its materialistic character. The chapter shows that Darwin is wrongfully blamed for Hitler’s atrocities.

Chapter 12 concludes the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law by drawing out a set of fundamental comparisons, both differences and similarities, from the volume’s previous chapters, in addition to offering further reflections on the field of ‘ancient law’ itself. The chapter opens by comparing and contrasting the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law to earlier historiography, underscoring its unique contribution to existing scholarship: developed through collaborative work and drawing upon numerous specialist traditions and technical expertise, across a pan-Eurasian research field. The chapter then moves on to a broader discussion of ‘Mapping the Ancient Legal Cosmos’ and ‘Ordering Ancient Associations’, pinpointing the specific connections between ethics, law and statecraft that can be observed across the ancient source material. The chapter concludes by suggesting several answers to a provocative, but fundamental, question: What is ‘Ancient’ about ‘Ancient Law’?.

This chapter theorizes how interventions employed by police and community safety advocates might promote cooperation. The evaluation focuses on two interventions that plausibly reverse cycles of silence: facilitating cooperator anonymity to reduce the risk involved in information sharing and creating awareness of support for cooperation to strengthen the perceived norms favoring information sharing. Given that these interventions do not address distrust in the police, which places a ceiling on cooperation support, the evaluation also includes the trust-based intervention of exposing citizens to police officers of the same race or ethnicity. The chapter concludes with enumerating principles that should be considered when evaluating the appropriateness of implementing interventions to promote cooperation.