Chapter 4 considers dramatic plotting, exploring competing tastes and approaches, and focusing on Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas Jordan’s The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon. It considers early modern debates about narrative and plot, including the decorum and necessity of adhering to classical precedents and theories; the respective merits of simplicity and conscious craft; and the need to incorporate individual narrative ‘moments’ popular with an audience. It puts various approaches emphasising structure and conscious artifice in conversation with the alternative view that a good plot is simply one that serves the set-piece moments that a playgoer desires. It argues that both Volpone and The Walks combine complex and visible structural craft with the careful provision of set-pieces designed to appeal to playgoers who judged their plots on moments rather than movements. These case studies reveal dramatists writing subtly and effectively in conscious anticipation of multiple approaches to playhouse censure.

Chapter 1 lays out the foundational claims of Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres, tracing how entangled understandings of pleasure and judgement framed theatrical response and exploring evidence of widespread, varied, and continuous playhouse censure. It argues that theatrical performances were often judged ‘in parts’, with features including narrative structure, verbal construction, and actorly technique engaged with individually by playgoers. This supplies the conceptual framework for the following chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of playhouse performance that was demonstrably subject to censure by and evocative of pleasure from playgoers: spectacle; words; plot; action.

Chapter 5 considers the technical craft of theatrical performers, focusing on Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. This final chapter tracks habitual censure of performers’ skill that took place even whilst playgoers engaged imaginatively and emotively with fictional worlds. It traces frameworks drawn from grammar school or university education such as actio and pronuntio and even demonstrates widespread familiarity with these concepts, also brought to bear by those lacking privileged educational backgrounds. Just as importantly, close engagement with the demands of play-texts reveals many other modalities of actorly skill offered for censure alongside gesture and delivery. The Jew of Malta and The Roman Actor indicate a mixed culture of censure that encompassed action and accent but was not limited to this framework. Skills as varied as interrupting, falling over, and playing the lute all contribute to the conspicuous playhouse display of technical skill, alongside actio and pronuntio.

The Coda draws together the preceding chapters by taking a single example from Twelfth Night that encompasses all of the ‘parts’ of a play examined separately in individual chapters: spectacle, words, plot, and action. Focusing on 4.2, when Malvolio is imprisoned in a ‘dark house’, it considers the many invitations to judge all four aspects in this single scene, as well as its potential to please playgoers with all of these elements. The Coda emphasises that the separate treatment of each ‘part’ in individual chapters is a means of making visible otherwise overlooked aspects of dramatic production and theatrical censure, rather than a suggestion that for example some plays sought engagement with their spectacle alone and others with their language. It indicates the potential for future studies to draw collectively on the topics and approaches of each chapter, rather than treating them as alternative options.

The Introduction sets out the critical context and core arguments of Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres. It explains that the book offers a new account of how playwrights like Shakespeare crafted their plays for demanding and varied commercial audiences. Rediscovering the many forms of judgement practised in the early modern playhouse, it investigates influences from the classical tradition and grammar school classroom to ballad and jest culture. Where prior studies have often treated ‘the judicious’ as a self-contained subset of playgoers, it reveals the variety of careful judgements made in the theatre by a wide range of playgoers. It shows that judgement and pleasure were not mutually exclusive but could be simultaneous elements of the same response. It offers an overview of the following chapters, including one tracing the wider context of pleasure and judgement, and specific chapters devoted to parts of a play that were especially subject to judgement and generative of pleasure: spectacle, words, plot, and actorly technique.

Chapter 3 considers engagements with words in performance, focusing on John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, or The City Gallant, and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women. Tracing the plurality of linguistic tastes associated with playgoers, it tracks key forms such as jests, conceits, and ‘fresh’ language and explores key debates between heightened and plain style, and about novelty and aptness. These tastes persisted despite shifts in linguistic fashion, resulting in plays that, despite paratextual complaints about the impossibility of pleasing all tastes, encompass a striking degree of linguistic variety into their practice. Greene’s Tu Quoque and Women, Beware Women reveal playwrights catering to a variety of linguistic tastes simultaneously, even whilst asking playgoers to reflect upon the judiciousness of their tastes, and even the trustworthiness of language itself.

Chapter 2 explores early modern playhouse engagements with stage sights, focusing on Hamlet and Dekker and Ford’s The Sun’s Darling. It argues that whilst some early modern commentators distinguished the discerning ear from the passive gaze, it was more commonly held that commercial drama is best encountered with judicious ear and censorious eye. Building upon important work by Gillian Woods, Lauren Robertson, Amy J. Rodgers, and others who have recently dismantled long-standing assumptions about passive, uncritical engagements with playhouse spectacle, the chapter recovers a culture of playhouse engagement through sight that was as censorious as it was pleasurable, reflecting dramatic craft and theatrical convention concomitantly committed to the habitual and sophisticated use of visual dramaturgy. Hamlet exemplifies the ubiquity of visual censoriousness even in the reception of plays that may not seem ripe for such engagement, whilst The Sun’s Darling’s concerted visual stagecraft demonstrates just how high playwrights’ expectations of commercial theatregoers’ visual judiciousness could be.

This chapter examines how fashion points to alternative forms of pleasure that exceed conventional narratives about choices between a life of political struggle and one of security and luxury. It focuses on British Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson’s novel Clash (1929), which is set during the 1926 General Strike and features a feminist heroine whose male suitors offer two distinctly different futures: one committed to the workers’ cause, and the other an escape into bohemian indulgence. Appropriating the genre of the romance, Wilkinson configures her protagonist’s conflict through two key fashion and design networks of the 1920s, Bloomsbury bohemianism and the European avant-garde, against which a third realm, the world of class struggle, is positioned as a counter-text. Engaging recent theories of affect and aesthetics, this chapter reveals how fashion attunes characters and readers to otherwise foreclosed ways of sensing and being, including unrealized forms of women’s expression and cross-class solidarity.

This chapter explores the challenge of teaching Homer and Vergil in the Roman Empire, focusing on the pleasures of fiction in epic poetry. Using the Phaeacian books of the Odyssey (6–13) and Carthaginian books of the Aeneid (1–4) as case studies, it shows how educators reckoned with the poetic seduction that threatened to derail heroic virtue and integrity. Drawing on philosophical critiques of these canonical poets, the chapter traces evolving responses to the nexus of “Phaeacian pleasures” in their episodes. In the second half, it analyzes how four educators – Plutarch, the anonymous author of the Essay on Homer, Tiberius Claudius Donatus, and Augustine – developed distinctive approaches to epic pleasure. While Plutarch disciplines poetic deception into a propaedeutic for philosophy, the Essay embraces Homeric fiction as a new pedagogy of pleasure. Donatus treats the Aeneid as rhetorical panegyric, while Augustine transforms the affective power of Aeneas and Dido into a new Christian grammar. Together, these authors reveal the centrality of epic pleasure to Imperial education and the divergent strategies by which students learned to navigate literary enchantment

The Introduction summarises my book’s contents and highlights its key themes. I will argue that there is a human nature, from which flow a raft of ‘pre-moral’ (or ‘ultimate intrinsic’) goods. My Aristotelian (teleological and essentialist) theory of ‘natural perfectionism’ is, I will argue, compatible with Darwinism and subsequent evolutionary biology. It is not an account of normativity across the board, however. Specifically, it does not tackle the manifold quandaries that arise in the domain of practical reason; it does not treat supernatural goods (supposing these to exist); and it does not examine natural perfections in plants or the lower (non-human) animals. Two cautionary notes: first, my book treats perfectionism in the philosophical, not the colloquial, psychological, sense; more specifically, it elaborates a perfectionism of powers or faculties. Second, by focusing on powers or faculties, it avoids the pseudo-essentialisms of class, race, nation, sex etc. Last, I tackle three values that are absent from my book: namely, autonomy, pleasure and wellbeing. These cannot be natural perfections, I argue, because they fall short of being ultimate intrinsic goods.

Chapter 7 is the first of seven chapters on store atmospherics. The term indicates that the atmosphere is under the retailer’s control, and it is an idea that has been researched for over 50 years. Most research studies on store atmospherics rely on the Mehrabian−Russell model (the M-R-model). The M-R model is a stimulus-organism-response model. That is, it looks at the effect of a stimulus (e.g., the store environment) on the shoppers; emotions that in turn influence shopper behaviour. The effect on the shopper behaviour is indirect since behaviour is altered only as a consequence of the shoppers' shifted emotions. A common way to measure emotions is to use the pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) scale. In a next step, a common way to measure the behavioural outcome is to estimate shoppers' approach/avoidance in terms of how much time and money they spend as well as whether they try to approach or avoid others in the store. Pleasure is typically found to correlate with higher spending. Arousal is often found to amplify positive/negative emotions. Some studies have found support for an optimal level of stimulation where too little arousal leads to shoppers spending less because they are not sufficiently aroused, while too much stimulation also has a negative effect on the shopper’s behaviour.

The USA has among the highest levels of mental illness of all countries, together with the most treatment. We seek happiness through mechanisms that produce pleasure, most of which are not effective. Those lower down in the hierarchy use more destructive means to gain gratification, thereby becoming worse off. Americans may suffer more pain than people in other rich nations, especially social pain in response to chronic stressors present here. We consume 80% of the world’s opioids Smartphone use, especially among youth, may be harmful for mental health. Evolutionary pressures make us live to reproduce and nurture the progeny until they can have children. Various mental illnesses that don’t impact propagation can manifest, especially in later life, such as anxiety to cope with danger. Mental health is political, like other aspects of health

Bentham gave utilitarianism its name and put it on the map, both as a philosophical theory and as a reforming social and political doctrine. In all of his philosophizing, Bentham was most fundamentally concerned with its relevance for law and, ultimately, for a distinctive kind of legal, social, and political reform. Bentham was unalterably opposed to legal and political doctrines whose only grounding was in tradition and any common sense tradition informs. This extended also to his views about morality. His defense of the principle of is not grounded, as Sidgwick will argue any moral principle must be, in intuition. But neither does Bentham ground his utilitarianism in an empiricist-naturalist metaethics, as do Cumberland and Mill, though his metaphysics certainly has that character. Bentham holds that the ultimate grounding of utilitarianism must be political. According to Bentham, the utility principle is the only one that can play the role that a moral principle must be able to play in informed noncoercive public debate. In this way, Bentham anticipates Rawls’s “political liberalism.” This chapter argues that Bentham could accept Rawls’s an emended version of Rawls’s slogan: “the principle of utility: political, not metaphysical.”

Unlike the utilitarians, the British Idealists – T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley – were steeped in ancient Greek philosophy and post-Kantian German idealism. Both thinkers had a eudaimonist outlook along with a profound interest in Hegel and Fichte, which had been mostly missing from anglophone philosophy. During his lifetime, Green was known more for his political ideas and activity than for his moral philosophy, which was published only posthumously. Green’s moral and political philosophy hang together, however. The justification for political order, and indeed, for any claim of right, Green thinks, is its role in enabling citizens to realize themselves in ethical action through active membership in a community with a common good. Green was a perfectionist eudaimonist, like Aristotle, but he was also a modern who, like Kant and Hegel, advanced an ethics of freedom. For Green, the self-realization that is our final end actualizes a positive form of freedom. For the most part, Bradley’s philosophical fame was due to his metaphysical and logical works, most especially, his Principles of Logic and Appearance and Reality. His Ethical Studies is an important work, however, which contains trenchant criticisms of Mill’s Utilitarianism along with a sketch of Bradley’s own idealist ethics.

Although Mill learned Bentham’s utilitarianism literally at his father James Mill’s knee, Mill’s own version of utilitarianism departed from Bentham’s at key points. When Mill tried to live Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine as a youth, he was sent into a deep depression from which he was saved by reading the Romantic poetry and a romantic relationship with Harriet Taylor. This led him to reject Bentham’s “quantitative hedonism” in favor of a “qualitative hedonism” that emphasized intrinsic differences between different kinds of pleasures and held that some pleasures are “higher,” and therefore more valuable, than others. Here Mill’s view recalls Aristotle’s that pleasures resulting from exercising higher, distinctively human faculties and sensibilities are intrinsically better. Unlike Aristotle, however, Mill persisted in holding that his view is a version of hedonism, defended on nonteleological, empirical naturalist grounds. A second important departure from Bentham, was Mill’s holding that the deontic ideas of moral right and wrong are conceptually connected to accountability. This made him a “modern moral philosopher” by Anscombe’s definition and led him to defend, on these grounds, a utilitarian theory of rights and justice as well as a version of utilitarianism that was more like rule utilitarianism than act utilitarianism.