Martyrdom is the running thread in this study. Chapter 6 turns its focus to the definitive martyr, Jesus Christ, whose stoic behavior at the Passion established a way forward for those who stood mute. When Herod summoned Jesus before him, the divine prisoner also stood mute. His silence functioned as a means of protest, an interpretation familiar to English communities, who watched the drama unfold annually in the mystery plays. Similarly, depictions of the ancient martyrs also presented silence and passivity as models for resistance. These narratives reinforced the notion that only a heroic martyr stood mute in a court of common law. The world of literature also had much to say on the subject of peine forte et dure. Analysis of works such as Chasteau d’Amour, the Seven Sages of Rome, and Bevis of Hampton all clarify that hard prison was a sentence inflicted by an unmerciful, and often distinctly unchristian, authority. Nonetheless, these stories place peine forte et dure in a positive light: the intense suffering supplies the falsely accused with the ideal surroundings to perform imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), thus assuring his salvation.

This chapter examines the role played by various sources – Shakespeare’s ‘inheritances’ – in shaping the dramatist’s treatments of grief, sorrow and a longing for emotional recognition. I argue that warring characters’ competitive displays of feeling, which are central to the drama of affect in Richard III and 3 Henry VI, derive from but intensify comparable scenes in Senecan drama. However, whilst such competitive emoting is affirmed in these early Shakespearean plays, in Richard II, The Merchant of Venice and elsewhere the same phenomenon – now linked to implicit imitations of Christ’s Passion inspired by the medieval mystery plays – instead provokes scepticism. Having explored this, the chapter then turns to a more contemporary source. I consider, specifically, how early modern ways of conceiving credit relations guided Shakespeare and his co-author, Thomas Middleton, in imagining the emotions in Timon of Athens. Timon too, I contend, affirms himself by parading what he conceives as a kind of love – his credit-funded gestures of charity – in a tacitly competitive fashion. Like earlier Shakespearean characters, though, he is led by this into transmuted reworkings of Christ’s Passion and the latter again expose the compromised, inauthentic nature of emotional display.