This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

This chapter argues that the wellspring of theatre can be found in childhood pretend play – a universal human phenomenon that leaves us all capable of theatrical behavior, whether as performers who enact make-believe “realities” or as audience members who imaginatively engage in others’ make-believe. Such play is likely associated with an evolutionary adaptation for advanced symbolic thinking. Theatre might be a by-product of pretend play, carried over into adult life, but it might be an exaptation in which childhood pretend play has been co-opted for the new evolutionary purpose of allowing performers and audiences to explore “what-if” situations in ways that compel attention through the performers’ presence and artistry, and the empathy given to their enacted characters by the audience. The universality of pretend play suggests this behavioral trait evolved more than 50,000 years ago, at which point humans had begun their globalizing expansion from Africa.

In the genre of images known as the Mass of Saint Gregory the central drama is the living body of Christ on the altar. To one side of that drama, if one looks closely, can be found a single book, opened but not legible (Plate 6). By the fifteenth century, depending on the church, one might find a range of different kinds of books for the liturgy in its library, its choir stalls, or sacristy: antiphonaries, graduals, psalters, hymnals, or breviaries. Only one liturgical book, the missal, the book for the celebrant of the Eucharist, would have been found on the altar. That object is the focus of this chapter.

Patrick Prétot comments on the individual parts of which the celebration of the Eucharist consists. For that, he takes as his point of departure the script of the Order of Mass, which is used in the Roman Catholic Church but which shows many commonalities with other liturgical and ecclesial traditions.

Acts of worship typically involve expressions of fealty: One takes off one’s shoes, bows low, or falls on one’s face. Experiences that naturally prompt such expressions – the sense that one is in the presence of God in an unusual and profound way – raise interesting metaphysical questions about divine presence and absence. Talk of special divine presence poses serious puzzles. In the Jewish scriptures – and in the writings and words of those who treat these scriptures with reverence, whatever their religion – there is much talk of God’s presence and of God’s absence. And yet, God is also affirmed to be everywhere. How can God be everywhere, but also absent from some places, and especially present in others? Metaphysics is a likely place to look for a range of possible answers to this simple but puzzling question.

The eight dimensions of being with, outlined in detail in my A Nazareth Manifesto and elsewhere in their missiological, ethical and public policy implications, are here explored in their full scriptural dimensions. Presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment and glory each have profound resonances in Old and New Testaments, and each provides a continuous thread through incarnation, the reason for creation, the nature of Jesus’ ministry and death, the work of the Holy Spirit, the church and heavenly destiny – in relation to God, to one another and to the whole creation. They affirm how the incarnation is not a means to an end (such as saving us from our sins) but an end in itself, and they expand the notion of being with into a multidimensional concept with rich resonances.

After discussing different phenomenological modes of presence, I argue that the full force of the icon’s visual language is meant to bring us into an encounter with the listening presence of a person. This begins to emerge through the painting’s natural aesthetic presence as a portrait, but can only come to full fruition for the one who prays. After a phenomenological account of the act of prayer, I show how the experience of the icon takes on a critical structural difference for those who come before the icon in the conviction that the words that they say and actions that they perform are truly communicated to the person who is visibly present.

Given China’s position in Pacific Asia, defining its regional centrality might seem a simple task. But centralities grander than merely geographical have been alleged and contested. Currently some maintain that China is the central kingdom because of its power. But it was conquered by the Mongols and the Manchus, and its present centrality is due more to its economic mass and connectivity than to its military. Others claim that hierarchy is natural to Asian culture, and China is the apex. But neighbors were often cynical about China’s moral stature, and China’s soft power is now at a low ebb. I argue that China was the center of regional attention in the premodern era, and that it has returned to center stage since 2008. The three basic reasons for China’s original centrality and its return were situational: presence, population, and production. The salience of all three disappeared with Western imperialism’s global presence, the devaluation of mere demography, and industrial production. Traditional and current centrality created asymmetric relationships between China and its neighbors, but the regional situations differ fundamentally.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.