Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England

Cambridge University Press, 2/7/2013
EAN 9781107028005, ISBN10: 1107028000

Hardcover, 256 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English

This strong and timely collection provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare's plays and poems were understood to affect bodies, minds and emotions. Contemporary criticism has had surprisingly little to say about the early modern period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling. Shakespearean Sensations brings together scholarship from a range of well-known and new voices to address this fundamental gap. The book includes a comprehensive introduction by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard and comprises three sections focusing on sensations aroused in the plays; sensations evoked in the playhouse; and sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems. With dedicated essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Twelfth Night, the collection explores how seriously early modern writers took their relationship with their audiences and reveals new connections between early modern literary texts and the emotional and physiological experiences of theatregoers.

Introduction
imagining audiences Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard
Part I. Plays
1. Feeling fear in Macbeth Allison P. Hobgood
2. Hearing Iago's withheld confession Allison Deutermann
3. Self-love, spirituality, and the senses in Twelfth Night Douglas Trevor
Part II. Playhouses
4. Conceiving tragedy Tanya Pollard
5. Playing with appetite in early modern comedy Hillary Nunn
6. Notes towards an analysis of early modern applause Matthew Steggle
7. Catharsis as 'purgation' in Shakespearean drama Thomas Rist
Part III. Poems
8. Epigrammatic commotions William Kerwin
9. Poetic 'making' and moving the soul Margaret Healy
10. Shakespearean pain Michael Schoenfeldt
Afterword
senses of an ending Bruce R. Smith.