Abstract
Whatever it is in the zeitgeist that causes such shifts must remain a larger mystery, but since the millennium we seem to be living through what has been dubbed ‘an affective turn’, an unprecedented era of the academic study of emotions, particularly in the unashamedly emotive vehicles of literature and drama, history and musicology. Following in the wake of pioneering work by Norbert Elias, recent contributions by Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy have developed historical methodologies for the history of emotions, though the application of these to literature is arguably limited.1 In the former case, to consider as ‘emotional communities’ examples of, let us say, The Comedy of Errors and Henry V, not to speak of the Globe’s London in the 1590s, we find each so complex and various that it barely makes sense to speak of them at all in these terms. At the same time, Reddy’s proposition that emotions are ‘performatives’ (‘emotives’) and cause change is so axiomatic in relation to fictional works that it does not take us far along the path towards deeper understanding of emotions in literature and drama. There is little doubt that Shakespeare’s works ‘move’ audiences and readers in more senses than one, and there needs neither ghost come from the grave, nor modern theorists, to tell us this. The real questions (how? why? what?) begin rather than end at this point. (Reddy has, however, published a book which is significant to the study of romantic love in literature.2)
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Notes
Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)
and William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Amongst recent contributions emanating from the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions are Stephanie Trigg’s ‘Emotional Histories — Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory’, Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, 26 (2014), 3–15; and Stephanie Downes and Rebecca McNamara’s ‘The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature’, Literature Compass (forthcoming).
See, for example, Russell A. Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1970), in which the conflict is traced.
See Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011), ch. 1.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 73.
See Frans de Bruyn, ‘William Shakespeare and Edmund Burke: Literary Allusion in Eighteenth-Century British Political Rhetoric’ in Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin, eds, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 85–102.
Quotations from A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), Lecture I.
Quotations from G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1930), ch. 1.
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), 281–295.
Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1931), 31.
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Affective Fallacy’, Sewanee Review, vol. 57, no. 1, (1949): 31–55;
and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
See, for example, Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Cornell University Press, 2004);
Jennifer C. Vaught, ed., Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008).
Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan-State University Press, 1951).
Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
J. B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), 146.
Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
See also Paster’s The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1993).
David Houston Wood, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England. (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2013), passim.
See also Matthew Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2000) 52; The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford University Press, 1995).
See, for example, Erin Sullivan, ‘A Disease unto Death: Sadness in the Time of Shakespeare’, in Emotions and Health 1200–1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 159–183;
Allison P. Hobgood, ‘Feeling Fear in Macbeth’, in Katherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard, eds, Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19–46.
Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Katherine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2007); Craik and Pollard, eds, Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (above).
Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, eds, The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2014).
Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2014);
Bridget Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
For example, Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History (Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
Andy Mousley, Literature and the Human: Criticism, Theory, Practice (London: Routledge, 2013), 39.
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White, R.S. (2015). Reclaiming Heartlands: Shakespeare and the History of Emotions in Literature. In: White, R.S., Houlahan, M., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Shakespeare and Emotions. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464750_1
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