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Placing two innovative, high-profile stagings of Shakespeare in dialogue, this essay emphasises the power of re-citations, both as aural echoes and as tableaux, across dramatic genres. Building on Martin Luther King’s self-quotation within his anti-Vietnam address, it reveals how the Compagnia de’ Colombari’s site-specific The Merchant of Venice, performed in the originary Jewish Ghetto, and the New York Public Theater’s Julius Caesar, which created a national furore, each employed non-traditional casting and Shakespeare’s Act 4 emphasis on threatened yet suspended male-on-male violence to create complex political theatre, addressing historical ethnic and racial inequalities within ‘the fierce urgency of now’.

The attenuation paradox refers to the increase in test validity that accompanies increasing test reliability up to a point beyond which validity decreases with further increases in reliability. It is shown that, for perfectly discriminating items, this phenomenon can occur regardless of the distribution of underlying ability. A numerical example is also given for a class of non‐perfectly discriminating items and a rectangular distribution of ability.

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