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. The Renaissance of emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which early modern texts explore emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine.
The chapters in the book seek to demonstrate how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of 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.
Erin Sullivan is Lecturer and Fellow in the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham
Introduction
Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan
Part I The theology and philosophy of emotion
1: The passions of Thomas Wright: Renaissance emotion across body and soul Erin Sullivan
2: The scripture moveth us in sundry places: framing biblical emotions in the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies David Bagchi
3: This was a way to thrive: Christian and Jewish eudaimonism in The Merchant of Venice Sara Coodin
4: Robert Burton, perfect happiness and the visio dei Mary Ann Lund
Part II Shakespeare and the language of emotion
5: Spleen in Shakespeares comedies Nigel Wood
6: Rue even for ruth: Richard II and the imitation of sympathy Richard Meek
7: Whats happiness in Hamlet? Richard Chamberlain
Part 3 The performance of emotion
8: They that tread in a maze: movement as emotion in John Lyly Andy Kesson
9: (S)wept from power: two versions of tyrannicide in Richard III Ann Kaegi
10: The affective scripts of early modern execution and murder Frederika Bain
11: Discrepant emotional awareness in Shakespeare R. S. White and Ciara Rawnsley
Afterword Peter Holbrook
Index
