The Reformation Of Emotions In The Age Of Shakespeare

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith. As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.

This interdisciplinary study argues that the intersection of pedagogical and affective language in Renaissance literature shows that emotion was conceived as a conventional practice.

This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. While such scholarship has been important in foregrounding questions related to historical phenomenology and embodiment, it has obscured the extent to which other intellectual and creative frameworks - including religion, philosophy, rhetoric and drama - also shaped cultural beliefs about emotion in the period. The Renaissance of Emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries explored emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, the volume demonstrates how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of early modern emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in the early modern period. The Renaissance of Emotion will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, the history of emotion, theatre and cultural history, and the history of ideas.

Exploring a wide range of material including dramatic works, medieval morality drama, and lyric poetry this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the history of emotions. Early modern English writing about pity evidences a social culture built specifically around emotion, one (at least partially) defined by worries about who deserves compassion and what it might cost an individual to offer it. Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare positions early modern England as a place that sustains messy and contradictory views about pity all at once, bringing together attraction, fear, anxiety, positivity, and condemnation to paint a picture of an emotion that is simultaneously unstable and essential, dangerous and vital, deceptive and seductive. The impact of this emotional burden on individual subjects played a major role in early modern English identity formation, centrally shaping the ways in which people thought about themselves and their communities. Taking in a wide range of material - including dramatic works by William Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley; medieval morality drama; and lyric poetry by Philip Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Barnabe Barnes, George Rodney and Frances Howard - this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the broader history of emotions, a field which has thus far remained largely the concern of social and cultural historians. Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare shows that both literary materials and literary criticism can offer new insights into the experience and expression of emotional humanity.

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained. A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world, bringing together some of the best-known writers in the field with a strong selection of younger Shakespeareans. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The collection is organised in five sections. The substantial opening section introduces the plays by placing them in a variety of illuminating contexts: as well looking at ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, it addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past, by considering tragedy's relationship to other genres (including history plays, tragicomedy, and satiric drama), and by showing how Shakespeare's tragedies respond to the pressures of early modern politics, religion, and ideas about humanity and the natural world. The second section is devoted to current textual issues; while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies, from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with the extraordinary diversity of twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The thirteen essays of the book's final section seek to expand readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia. Offering the richest and most diverse collection of approaches to Shakespearean tragedy currently available, the Handbook will be an indispensable resource for students both undergraduate and graduate levels, while the lively and provocative character of its essays make will it required reading for teachers of Shakespeare everywhere.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual volume featuring the work of scholars, critics, and cultural historians from across the globe. This issue includes a Forum on the drama of the 1580s, from eleven contributors; a Next Gen Plenary, from four contributors, three articles, and reviews of sixteen books.

What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions—bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life—animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Thinking with Shakespeare encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.