Afterword: Thinking About Affect and Emotion in Julius Caesar

Abstract

Examining Shakespeare’s exploration of cognitive ecology in Julius Caesar, Paster argues that early modern theorizations of affect adduce the impossibility of separating reason from emotion, cognition from affect, and action from passion. Intimacy is the central feature of the play’s political landscape, in which characters decode the emotional states of individual persons and measure the affective intensities of entire groups. When Brutus compares Caesar to a snake, his metaphor performs an affective work that commits Brutus emotionally to the assassination and withdraws sympathy from Caesar by representing him as an object of instinctual fear.