It is striking how many of Shakespeare’s erotic plays have war either as their setting or are born out of a recent state of violent conflict. Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra fall most clearly into the former camp, but think also of comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where eros emerges from a newly forged peace only to constitute a new battleground of its own. This chapter probes the conjunction of war and eros that appears in almost half of Shakespeare’s plays, first through a broad survey of his corpus and then through studies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. It argues that, far from merely contingent, theatrical conjunctions, Shakespeare provides us a deep conceptual study of the connection between eros and violence, both the potential violence of sexuality and the unsettling underlying sexuality of war.

Chapter Two focuses on imagination, the cognitive faculty allegedly residing in the front of the brain. Early moderns worried about this faculty especially, as it introduced harmful forms into girls’ minds and enabled them to produce illicit visions. But it also appears as a generative faculty in girls. The adolescents under consideration here use their imaginations to see beyond what is tangible and take on uniquely ameliorative roles in relation to dominant restrictive ideologies and damaging norms. The chapter begins with fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton and her performance as the Lady in John Milton’s Comus. Her imaginative brainwork emerges as a powerful, righteous phenomenon against her sorcerer-captor. Next, a reading of Othello’s Desdemona demonstrates how her extended imagination challenges the gender and race codes that inform the play’s basest mentalities. Desdemona also serves as a case study in how marriage binds the female mind to her husband’s fantasies, eventually limiting its cognitive reach. Finally, the chapter analyzes the teenagers of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen. The “coining” brain of the Jailer’s Daughter is shown to complement and compound the brainwork of particular girls within and beyond the play — including Desdemona — and gives their previously contracted, suffocated body-minds a second life.