In the sixth and final chapter, I consider the late poems and the curious prose work On the Boiler (1939), which includes the play Purgatory. I emphasize Yeats’s bardic sensibility, which is defined by relations of testament and bestowal and the double burden of witnessing the past and handing down bequests. Generational temporalities characterize the poetry in this period, inaugurated by the historical sequences in The Tower (1928). Yeats’s revivalist attitude toward time, future-oriented by way of a rectifying gaze cast on prior attitudes and achievements, continues to mature in the testamentary poems of this period, in which the modernist bard recreates, because he cannot sustain, a doomed Anglo-Protestant social order. These poems submit the heroes of the literary revival to new conditions of recognition, in which their greatness becomes an inheritance that Yeats, as their bardic representative, both announces and embodies in the world of his work. The antithesis of this inheritance can be found in On the Boiler, specifically in the play that concludes it, Purgatory. The play, Yeats’s last, is a Gothic distortion of the covenant at the heart of the testament. It subjects time and history, personal and cultural inheritance, to a withering critique that highlights both the intellectual pleasures and the potential dangers of the logic of misrecognition.

In 1929, J. M. Barrie made a bequest to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children of his most popular creation, ‘Peter Pan’. Chapter 5 explores the dynamic of gift-giving for the benefit of vulnerable children and how this translated into licensing practices. A Peter Pan movie, to be directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn, was never made because of the bitter relationship that developed between the licensor, the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and its licensee, the Disney Corporation, which resulted in litigation in the 1960s. By looking at the misfortune of a film that was never made, the chapter shows how licensing intangible properties involved not only a question of contract and property, but also a more complicated question of trust, sociality and the etiquette of managing commercial opportunities. The chapter engages in a deeper consideration of the impact of the Disney Corporation, not just in creating a highly effective managerial infrastructure to exploit the child as a consumer, but also in developing intellectual property strategies to gain a privileged position with consumers, who were now conceived of as being included within the Disney family.

analyzes events immediately following the death of the eleventh Imam with no apparent offspring. In spite of his strong claim as son of the tenth Imam, Jaʿfar “the Liar” ultimately failed to succeed to his father. Opposing camps generated anti-Jaʿfar propaganda which survives in our sources and can be used to reconstruct key events and early discourses. It is argued that within twenty-four hours of the eleventh Imam’s death, several events of central symbolism for future understandings of the Occultation had occurred, including funerary rituals for the dead Imam; the claim that one of his concubines was posthumously pregnant with his child; and the dispute over the inheritance of the Imam’s property. These events were related to claims for Imamic mediation including claims made for the mother of the dead Imam, Ḥudayth; servants within the household of the Imam; and the concubine pregnant with the Imam’s child.