The Tempest throws us into the midst of a world of tragic repetition, in which usurpation, oppression, and the drive for mastery repeat themselves again and again. The chapter argues that it also offers a precious, if tenuous, escape from tragic history, by calling for a politics of humble disappointment. This tentative path runs through abjuration or negation. The play consistently stages violent and intrusive spectacles that break the characters (and the audience) out of their initial subject positions and into a more outward-looking mode. Such interruptions connect to the tradition of negative theology, in which poorness or nothingness “is the ultimate state of receptivity” (Meister Eckhart). They offer a breath of air from outside the masterful self, a sliver of distance from the tragic past. In particular, the play institutes a theatrical form of collectivity through the isle’s inclusive dramatic “air”. It draws us, as well as the sovereign figure of Prospero, into a broader dramatic life-force or “intersubjective phenomenology” (Schalkwyk). Indeed, in the Epilogue, the sovereign power is subject to the many; subject to audience’s judgment, pleasure, and approval. It is this recognition of mutual need (Plato) that opens the vision of a renewed political community.

The book looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse, or dream in Shakespeare. The focus is not just on what the plays represent but on what they do and how they inspire and unsettle the political imaginations of their audiences. The Introduction sets out the intellectual heritage underpinning this approach, including the tradition of negative theology and subsequent philosophies of the negative (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou). It thereby establishes a negative political theology that challenges the official (or positive) political theology that sacralises power. By outlining “the disruptive spirit of negativity”, it shifts critical focus from the mimetic to the affective and opens new and more nuanced readings. The approach builds on the work of critics such as Annabel Patterson, Andrew Hadfield, and Chris Fitter, who have highlighted the anti-monarchical or popular political forces at play during the period. In the via negativia, however, it explores a very different origin and mode of egalitarianism. It focuses on the way negativity and unsettlement imaginatively transform political thought and relations. Shakespeare’s drama opens up visions of something other, including radical experiences of the “perhaps” or “what if”, that deepen the audience’s political thought.

Chapter 2 explains how belligerent reprisals have come to be interpreted as tools to induce compliance with the laws of armed conflict. It does so by highlighting three cumulative processes. First, it looks at the role that post–World War II tribunals, the ICTY and the ICRC have played in stressing the procedural elements of belligerent reprisals, emphasizing the highly formalized set of steps to be taken before the adoption of the measure while downplaying the retaliatory act itself. Then, it claims that the main thrust of this proceduralization lies in the creation of a regulatory framework that attributes a specific legal meaning to the retaliatory conduct and, by so doing, allows for an assimilation of belligerent reprisals with the notion of countermeasures. In turn, this analogy leads to the attribution to belligerent reprisals of a sanctioning character that protects the primary norm from the risk of persistent non-compliance. The outcome of these three processes is the attribution to belligerent reprisals of a chiefly coercive purpose, interested in inducing compliance with the laws of armed conflict and markedly influenced by the enforcement paradigm.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.

Chapter 6 inquires into the legality and purposes of belligerent reprisals in non-international armed conflict. At the outset, it delves into the travaux préparatoires of Additional Protocol II to the 1949 Geneva Conventions to overcome the paucity of black-letter provisions on belligerent reprisals in this type of conflicts and identify relevant practice indicating which reprisals are prohibited (and which are permissible). Then, it looks into the work of several fact-finding commissions, mandated investigations and expert bodies addressing situations of non-international armed conflict (including those in Myanmar, South Sudan, Yemen and Syria) to gauge their formalization of the mechanism. The re-instatement of reciprocity in the functioning of belligerent reprisals emerges clearly from the purpose of evening out the legal and substantive imbalance brought about by enemy breaches. This analysis results in a novel understanding of belligerent reprisals as a tool concerned with the overall equilibrium in the legal relationship between parties to the conflict and aimed at remedying their inequality of status.

The Introduction explains the relevance of a theoretical inquiry into the purpose and function of belligerent reprisals. It highlights several examples in recent practice where the vocabulary of belligerent reprisals has been harnessed by parties to an armed conflict, pointing to the continued relevance of the institution in contemporary warfare. At the same time, it outlines persisting difficulties in the terminology, regulation and governance of reprisals, and shows that they all derive from the failure by international legal theory to give a proper legal vest to the purpose and function of the mechanism. It points to fundamental fallacies both in how the question has been approached, and in how it has been answered. It proposes an alternative to existing accounts and outlines how it will be investigated in the book.

The Conclusion draws on the findings of the book to analyse the main implications of a reciprocity-based understanding of belligerent reprisals. First, it distinguishes this formalization of belligerent reprisals from earlier theories stressing the law-making function of the measure. Then, it accounts for the continued relevance of belligerent reprisals even at a time when mechanisms monitoring and enforcing compliance with the laws of armed conflict gain momentum. Finally, it explains how a reciprocity-based interpretation of belligerent reprisals would affect follow-up reform of the mechanism – be it in the sense of fine-tuning its regulation, or in the sense of disposing of it altogether.

Imperial gardens in ancient Rome and China were as much a physical arrangement of place as they were discursive realms, evoking imagination and invective alike. Starting from semantic observations on ancient Latin and Chinese terminologies, Wentian Fu explores the divergent contexts and concepts of imperial gardens in each culture. The first section traces the respective origins: while inextricably intertwined with ideas of visibility, citizenship, and republican traditions in Rome, the chapter argues for a conspicuous absence of those vectors in China prior to Western Han traditions. The analysis of odes from the Book of Songs reveals, on the contrary, close connections with the power-invested charge of palatial structures. In the second section, the author showcases how Roman aristocratic gardens evolved over time from aristocratic domains into imperial properties, dynamically growing in size and scope. The gardens in Nero’s Golden House, which are given exemplary consideration, both resembled and reversed the order of human spheres and nature. In doing so, they paralleled Shanglin Park and the Jianzhang Palace outside of Chang’an: the chapter explains how those sites were critical to the emperor’s pursuit of immortality. In the concluding section, Fu fully capitalizes on his findings, immersing the argument in the ambiguities of imperial gardens both as seductive spaces of transgression, indulgence, and debauchery, and as role model instantiations of good governance.