This approach to Shakespeare's treatment of revenge emphasizes the psychology of revenge and, in particular, the relationship of revenge to the experience of victimization. Instead of assuming that dramatic avengers reflect mental imbalance to be condemned for moral and civil offenses, Keyishian treats revenge as a strategy by which victims strive to restore personal integrity and recover from feelings of powerlessness, violation, and injustice. Keyishian bases his discussion on Renaissance theories about the proper and beneficial role of the passions, from Aristotle and Aquinas to Francis Bacon, Niccolo Machiavelli, and others. His study ranges from authentic and redemptive avengers like Macduff to purely vindictive ones like Iago.

It also identifies Renaissance ideas about vindictiveness, a condition of chronic revengefulness grounded in envy, excessive pride, resentment, and self-hate.

We call it justice—the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice. What, if anything, distinguishes punishment at the hands of the government from a victim’s individual desire for retribution? Are vengeance and justice really so very different? No, answers legal scholar and novelist Thane Rosenbaum in Payback: The Case for Revenge—revenge is, in fact, indistinguishable from justice. Revenge, Rosenbaum argues, is not the problem. It is, in fact, a perfectly healthy emotion. Instead, the problem is the inadequacy of lawful outlets through which to express it. He mounts a case for legal systems to punish the guilty commensurate with their crimes as part of a societal moral duty to satisfy the needs of victims to feel avenged. Indeed, the legal system would better serve the public if it gave victims the sense that vengeance was being done on their behalf. Drawing on a wide range of support, from recent studies in behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics, to stories of vengeance and justice denied, to revenge practices from around the world, to the way in which revenge tales have permeated popular culture—including Hamlet, The Godfather, and Braveheart—Rosenbaum demonstrates that vengeance needs to be more openly and honestly discussed and lawfully practiced. Fiercely argued and highly engaging, Payback is a provocative and eye-opening cultural tour of revenge and its rewards—from Shakespeare to The Sopranos. It liberates revenge from its social stigma and proves that vengeance is indeed ours, a perfectly human and acceptable response to moral injury. Rosenbaum deftly persuades us to reconsider a misunderstood subject and, along the way, reinvigorates the debate on the shape of justice in the modern world.

In Kargil, Maine, Frank Dreavor, a town groundskeeper dies mysteriously, leaving no surviving family or heir. Tanner Cook is called in to clean up the Dreavor estate and while doing so discovers a path to the hidden first drafts of William Shakespeare's priceless manuscripts. Guided by secret clues he uncovers within Shakespeare's writings, Tanner follows a dangerous trail up the rocky coast of Maine, trying to outrun others hunting the treasure, some from around the globe some deadly violent. As he digs deeper into the truth behind the clues Shakespeare injected into his works, Tanner realizes that he has unwittingly immersed himself in an ongoing mystery that began in the Elizabethan Era. Within forty-eight harrowing hours, Tanner is betrayed, attacked, and left for dead while miles away his only brother suddenly disappears. Decoding the playwright's secrets and finding Shakespeare's original drafts become a matter of life or death. Not sure who to trust, Tanner races to save his life and the lives of those closest to him.

"It's not just Murakami but also the shadow of Borges that hovers over this mesmerizing book... [and] one may detect a slight bow to the American macabre of E.A. Poe. Ogawa stands on the shoulders of giants, as another saying goes. But this collection may linger in your mind -- it does in mine -- as a delicious, perplexing, absorbing and somehow singular experience." -- Alan Cheuse, NPR Sinister forces collide---and unite a host of desperate characters---in this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor---who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders---their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web. Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the last page. An NPR Best Book of 2013

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.

First, complete, integrated corpus of this major Elizabethan writer and first critical edition of his collected works in over one hundred years, with major new discoveries of authorship and attribution.Thomas Kyd (1558-94) is best known as author of The Spanish Tragedy, the first revenge play, hugely influential on Shakespeare and other dramatists. He also wrote another love tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia, a classical tragedy translated from the French. This is a small canon for a dramatist described as "industrious". Kyd worked between 1585 and 1594, when the instability in the London theatre caused by the plague led to companies breaking up and plays being published anonymously. For over a century scholars have been searching for Kyd plays, the most frequently attributed being Arden of Faversham. Uniting accepted methods with modern electronic data processing, Brian Vickers has endorsed Kyd''s authorship of Arden and added two other plays: King Leir, Shakespeare''s main source, and Fair Em, a comedy - justifying Jonson''s reference to "sporting Kyd". His research has also identified Kyd as co-author with Nashe of ''harey the vi'', which became 1 Henry VI after Shakespeare adapted it to his "Wars of the Roses" sequence. The evidence suggests that Kyd and Shakespeare co-authored Edward III. The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd brings together for the first time his dramas, poetry, translations, and letters in accurate modernized editions, each text edited by one of a team of internationally renowned scholars, accompanied by commentaries, collation notes, and introductions. Kyd emerges as a pioneering playwright of much greater generic range than has been hitherto recognized. His newly defined canon will stimulate a fresh evaluation of English drama in this crucial period.medy - justifying Jonson''s reference to "sporting Kyd". His research has also identified Kyd as co-author with Nashe of ''harey the vi'', which became 1 Henry VI after Shakespeare adapted it to his "Wars of the Roses" sequence. The evidence suggests that Kyd and Shakespeare co-authored Edward III. The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd brings together for the first time his dramas, poetry, translations, and letters in accurate modernized editions, each text edited by one of a team of internationally renowned scholars, accompanied by commentaries, collation notes, and introductions. Kyd emerges as a pioneering playwright of much greater generic range than has been hitherto recognized. His newly defined canon will stimulate a fresh evaluation of English drama in this crucial period.medy - justifying Jonson''s reference to "sporting Kyd". His research has also identified Kyd as co-author with Nashe of ''harey the vi'', which became 1 Henry VI after Shakespeare adapted it to his "Wars of the Roses" sequence. The evidence suggests that Kyd and Shakespeare co-authored Edward III. The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd brings together for the first time his dramas, poetry, translations, and letters in accurate modernized editions, each text edited by one of a team of internationally renowned scholars, accompanied by commentaries, collation notes, and introductions. Kyd emerges as a pioneering playwright of much greater generic range than has been hitherto recognized. His newly defined canon will stimulate a fresh evaluation of English drama in this crucial period.medy - justifying Jonson''s reference to "sporting Kyd". His research has also identified Kyd as co-author with Nashe of ''harey the vi'', which became 1 Henry VI after Shakespeare adapted it to his "Wars of the Roses" sequence. The evidence suggests that Kyd and Shakespeare co-authored Edward III. The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd brings together for the first time his dramas, poetry, translations, and letters in accurate modernized editions, each text edited by one of a team of internationally renowned scholars, accompanied by commentaries, collation notes, and introductions. Kyd emerges as a pioneering playwright of much greater generic range than has been hitherto recognized. His newly defined canon will stimulate a fresh evaluation of English drama in this crucial period.suggests that Kyd and Shakespeare co-authored Edward III. The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd brings together for the first time his dramas, poetry, translations, and letters in accurate modernized editions, each text edited by one of a team of internationally renowned scholars, accompanied by commentaries, collation notes, and introductions. Kyd emerges as a pioneering playwright of much greater generic range than has been hitherto recognized. His newly defined canon will stimulate a fresh evaluation of English drama in this crucial period.

The archaic context of vengeance -- Vengeance in the Odyssey: tisis as narrative -- Three narratives of divine vengeance -- Odysseus' terrifying revenge -- The multiple meanings of Odysseus' triumphs -- The end of the Odyssey.

An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth's England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth's reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.

This volume brings together research on revenge across childhood and adolescence to explore how revenge is a part of normative development, but also arises from maladaptive social environments. The chapters demonstrate the ways in which revenge is intertwined with social, emotional, cognitive, and moral development as well as being informed by interpersonal experiences within familial, educational, community, and cultural social settings. The book summarizes international scholarship on revenge across early childhood to late adolescence from a wide variety of interdisciplinary perspectives to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. The authors address how individual differences in revenge emerge as an adaptation to the challenges faced when growing up in adverse social and societal conditions. They then suggest a range of avenues for effective intervention that take account of the complexity of revenge as a psychological and social phenomenon.