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Speak What We Feel: Sympathy and Statecraft

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Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism ((PSATLC))

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the ways the early modern belief in dispersed sympathetic forces informs the representation of political obedience in King Lear. Reading the migration of the word “nothing” throughout the play as an index of what Sianne Ngai calls a “minor affect” allows us to bypass moments of highly charged emotion in order to focus on political affiliations constituted by natural, mimetic, sympathetic bonds driven by impersonal and unconscious processes. This exploration of competing models of political affect in the period thus prompts a reconsideration of the role played by non-empathetic and non-epiphanic experiences that lie below the threshold of consciousness in analyses of early modern structures of social and political power.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. English, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Amanda Bailey

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  1. Amanda Bailey
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Correspondence to Amanda Bailey .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Amanda Bailey

  2. The Graduate Center, CUNY, City University of New York, New York, New York, USA

    Mario DiGangi

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Bailey, A. (2017). Speak What We Feel: Sympathy and Statecraft. In: Bailey, A., DiGangi, M. (eds) Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56126-8_2

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