This book studies how the tirades and unrestrained villainy of Shakespeare?s art explode the decorum and safety of our sanitized lives and challenge the limits of selfhood. The literary criticism of anger and hate provides a vision of the experience of Shakespeare?s theater as an intensification of human experience that goes beyond traditional contexts of character, culture, and ethics. The book, alive to the judgmental character of emotions, transforms the way we see the rancorous passions and the disorderly and disobedient demands of anger and hatred.