This chapter explores Leoš Janáček’s innovative and individualistic approach to opera, with a particular focus on his most frequently performed work, Jenůfa. Composed between 1894 and 1903, Jenůfa reflects Janáček’s interest in the concept of realism, influencing his choice of subject matter, the use of a prose text, and a compositional style rooted in spoken language. The chapter also discusses Janáček’s fascination with Gustave Charpentier’s 1900 opera Louise and its impact on Janáček’s musical language. Similar approaches can also be identified in Janáček’s other operas. The composer’s innovations encountered resistance within Czech musical circles, and it took more than a decade for them to receive even partial appreciation.

The double-distortion argument holds that income taxation is more efficient than redistribution through changes in legal rules because a change in a legal rule distorts both the market to which the rule applies and, by altering incomes of market participants, the labor market as well. The argument succeeds only if it is possible to achieve the same distributive outcomes with the income tax as with changes to legal rules. This is not the case, however, because tax authorities cannot obtain information regarding the extent of the surplus available for redistribution without altering legal rules in individual markets and observing whether the effect is inframarginal (in which case there is surplus available for redistribution) or marginal (in which case there is not). This point is illustrated using the Ayres and Talley model of Coasean bargaining with divided entitlements.

Despite the amount of innovation and creativity in evidence, reviewing Shakespeare productions outside London in 2024 was a somewhat gloomy experience. The first performance under consideration, Tim Crouch’s Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel, was performed as part of the Mayfest festival, originally founded in 2011 by Kate Yedigaroff and Matthew Austin. This biennial festival is one of the best places to find new work in the country, bringing world-class, international live performance to Bristol, and has long been a force for good in the city. This year, for example, it operated a ‘pay-what-you-can’ ticketing structure to encourage those without economic means to access performances and build new audiences. Sadly, in November 2024 Mayfest announced that they would have to take an organizational hiatus until 2026 for financial reasons, evidence of a cultural sector in crisis that could be witnessed up and down the country. In Sheffield, for example, I was fortunate to see Northern Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum where Prokofiev’s outstanding score was played by the Northern Ballet Sinfonia.

After a brief drought, 2024 saw the release of seven new single-play editions: As You like It; Henry IV, Part I; Macbeth; Measure for Measure; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Romeo and Juliet; and The Tempest – all published as part of the Oxford World’s Classics New Oxford Shakespeare series. The texts, which are taken from The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, overseen by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan in 2016, have now been furnished with compelling new introductions by Todd Andrew Borlik, Indira Ghose, Emma Smith, Emma Whipday, Callan Davies, Hannah August and Lauren Working, respectively, with more of the editions (twenty-eight in total) set to be released at the start of 2025.

1.1 [11] Those wise and sagacious experts in the sacred doctrines marvel at the beauty of the truth and highly regard the ability to understand “a parable and an obscure word, both the sayings of the wise and their obscure utterances.”1 For by thus focusing their exact and discerning mind on the God-breathed writings, they fill up their souls with the divine light, and by setting their ambition upon achieving an upright and most lawful way of life, [12] they may also become providers to others of the highest assistance.2 For it is written, “Son, if you should become wise for yourself, you will be wise also for your neighbor.”3

Leonard Becket’s various publications insistently quote passages from Lucrece as illustrations for the subjects they explore. In developing this sustained afterlife for Lucrece, Becket’s works exhibit a striking redactive agency, whilst the poem itself serves to illuminate a meditation on the fragility of life.

This chapter explains the idea of ‘beer law’ and discusses its place in law as a discipline. It also addresses matters such as the history of beer, beer styles, and the beer ingredients, including both conventional and less conventional ingredients. Further, it explains the brewing process, and discusses the difference between craft beer and mass market beer. It also deals with the important legal question of what we class as beer.

Nearly a thousand years before the life and times of Rammohan Roy, another writer and polymath of Bengali origin wrote a play about the various disputes between members of different religions in the kingdom of Kashmir, under the sovereign of King Shankar Varman (r. 883–902 CE). Little is known about the author, Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, besides his Brahmin lineage as well as surviving commentaries on grammar and scriptures. Of his many writings about religion, his play Much Ado about Religion, likely written in the late ninth century CE, serves as a reminder of the deeply embedded nature of political thought on questions of religious pluralism and the various ways of assessing truths, potentials, and values inherent in different positions on religion.

The play features the leading man in the name of Sankarshana, a young graduate (snatak) of the orthodox Mimamsa school of philosophy and an ardent believer in the Vedas. He seeks out constant battles against those who oppose his viewpoints. In the first act, he debates a Buddhist monk, arguing against “universal momentariness” and “consciousness as the only reality.” He declares that Buddhists must stop deceiving themselves in the belief of a better afterlife, as the actions of Buddhists threaten the social order in India at the time. In the second act, he faces and argues against the positions of a Jain mendicant, though he does not consider them a threat to the social order.

Adopting a broad understanding of editing, this chapter views medieval and early modern text producers as precursors of present-day scholarly textual editors. The chapter surveys how editors from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century discuss their choices concerning the selection and reproduction of texts when making them available to contemporary audiences. Editors’ awareness of the historical nature of their project makes their work philological. The comments examined in the chapter are obtained from editors’ prefatory materials from three time periods: 1. the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of scholarly editing and the disciplinisation of English studies; 2. the mid nineteenth century – characterised by a more systematised activity in vernacular text editing and societies promoting it; 3. the twenty-first century, dominated by the rise of digital editing. The survey shows that editors of all three periods address textual selection and reproduction in their comments. Although editors in all periods sometimes arrive at similar editorial solutions, for example in favour of the faithful linguistic reproduction of the source, their decisions do not necessarily spring from similar motives. Throughout the three periods, editors convey their ideas of the target audience; readability is identified as a major editorial concern from early on.

Origen makes sense of the Gospel traditions by receiving them as if the Evangelists were themselves figurative readers of the life of Jesus. Advancing this thesis one stage further, this final chapter discovers Origen locating the inspiration for the Gospels’ literary form in the figure of Jesus himself. That is, Origen believes that the canonical records of Jesus’s life indicate that he also was a “spiritual reader” of this particular epoch in the history of Israel and, ultimately, the role of his own life therein. For an archetypal expression of Jesus’s figurative mode of discourse, no series of passages more clearly establishes Origen’s view – that Jesus himself “intended to teach what he perceived in his own understanding by way of figures” – than his interpretation of Jesus’s prophetic Son of Man sayings. Here, I show that one can take up the whole matrix of first principles developed in the preceding chapters on the nature of the Gospel narratives and may, with startling immediacy, transpose them into a distillate of the nature of Jesus’s own discourses.

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from listings, company publicity and published reviews. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

Among Richard III’s child characters there are multiple moments of community building and disruption. In particular, Richard’s pageboy undermines these communities by being culpable in his master’s murderous plot. Rather than the pageboy being an ‘anti-child’, he exhibits self-preserving behaviours mirroring students in early modern grammar schools policing each other.

Belgium has a strong beer culture and enormously diverse beer production with many unique styles. This chapter discusses Belgian beer, beer culture, and beer law. This includes topics such as the Abbey and Trappist beers, and the strong tradition of pairing beers with specific beer glasses – both of them topics characterized by litigation.

Kierkegaard and Ørsted were not just contemporaries but personally knew each other. In this chapter, I argue that Kierkegaard probably learned the term Tankeexperiment from Ørsted. This chapter contextualizes Kierkegaard’s use of “imaginary construction” (Experiment) in his work as a whole, including his well-known uses of paradoxes. I will show how the core elements of Ørsted’s account – thought experiment as a method of variation, the need for free and active constitution, and the use of thought experiments for facilitating genuine thought – are echoed in Kierkegaard’s discussions. Along the way, I will describe some decisions on how to translate Experiment and Tankeexperiment that are unfortunate in some ways and fortuitous in others, as I will explain. In these ways, Kierkegaard indirectly takes up Kant’s proposal that “construction” (i.e., Experiment in Danish) is a means of achieving cognition.

Chapter 6 focuses on the political structure of a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right, by handing the bulk of the state’s political power to unelected agents, Hegel is in effect compromising the reconciliation of particular and collective interests he regards as essential to a rational political order. However, his wariness of democracy is more than a mere relapse into some pre-modern, reactionary standpoint. This chapter argues that Hegel is right to denounce the atomism favoured by mass electoral systems, which tend to reduce the citizens’ political identity to that of individual voters, but that he is wrong to dismiss mass democracy altogether. His critique is overly severe because his conception of democracy presupposes the liberal logic of civil society, which he attempts to sublate in a strictly political manner. As this chapter seeks to show, the atomism he argues against is best avoided not by limiting democracy, but by extending it to the economic sphere. In a democracy that is both political and economic, individuals are no longer mere atoms, but part of collective social units organized around commonly held goals.