In her last testament, Paradiso, the philosopher Gillian Rose asserts ‘a refusal to adopt or affirm the opposition between law and love which has so marred the development of Christian theology’, and, by implication, Western thought about justice. It is in this courageous, revisionist tradition that Regina Schwartz’s impassioned book Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare positions itself, and in turn locates Shakespeare’s works, as it issues a clarion call for the integration of ethics and affect in creative as well as critical practice. But it is also an invitation to live a larger life, to operate in an economy of plenitude, not of scarcity, and to rethink the particulars of love in an age of suspicion and hardening insularity. Its agenda is unabashedly one of healing: healing a rupture between loving and judging, the personal and the political, textual and social practice, and between being critical and being human. And its central claim is that Shakespeare shows us how to do this: not through any resounding moral abstraction or impersonal doctrine of moral good, but through dramatising specific human encounters and relations that invite us to recalibrate the ‘justice imaginary’ we inhabit (p. 6). For it is in our negotiation of the need and worthiness of the other – Rose calls it ‘loveability’, and Schwartz ‘intrinsic value’ (p. 7), to be contrasted with desert or merit – that we exercise justice, or fail to be just; it is in laying ourselves open to the risk of encounter that we practice equity, and bring truth into dialogue with love. When, in securing protective walls around our own selves and interests at times of crisis, we refuse to engage with the reality of the other or to respond to their questioning, we miscarry quotidian justice and degrade the original gift of love by robbing another’s dignity. Implicit in Schwartz’s narrative - which begins with a deeply personal experience of care and ends with a daringly comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s Juliet and Bizet’s Carmen – is the inextricability of capacious living, loving and reading.