Circuits of disease correspond to previously unconsidered practices of caregiving in early modern English drama in this new volume by Darryl Chalk and Rebecca Totaro. They explore how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to and intersected with local and international ideas of communal care, health management, quarantine, embodiment, and theatricality.The role of the spectators who found themselves represented in such themes of caregiving in times of crisis fin...

This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to ...

Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions...

This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare’s world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ‘body-mind’ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare’s theatre or on ...

This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-ful...

Allison P. Hobgood tells a new story about the emotional experiences of theatregoers in Renaissance England. Through detailed case studies of canonical plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Kyd and Heywood, the reader will discover what it felt like to be part of performances in English theatre and appreciate the key role theatregoers played in the life of early modern drama. How were spectators moved - by delight, fear or shame, for example - and how did their own reactions in turn make an impact...

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team o...

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney.Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern p...

Shakespeare and Emotion devotes sustained attention to the emotions as a novel way of exploring Shakespeare's works in their original contexts. A variety of disciplinary approaches drawn from literary, theatrical, historical, cultural and film studies brings the recent upsurge of interest in affect into conversation with some of the most urgent debates in Shakespeare studies. The volume provides both a comprehensive account of the current state of scholarship and a speculative forum for ne...

This ground breaking and accessible study explores the connections between the English Reformation's impact on the belief in eternal salvation and how it affected ways of believing in the plays of Shakespeare. Claire McEachern examines the new and better faith that Protestantism imagined for itself, a faith in which scepticism did not erode belief, but worked to substantiate it in ways that were both affectively positive and empirically positivist. Concluding with in-depth readings of Rich...

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture.In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops listening as a critical practice, attending to the ways in which Shakespeare's plays express their author's awareness of early modern associations between sound and particular forms of ethical and aesthetic experience. Through reading...

The life expectancy in Shakespearean times averaged only about twenty-five to thirty-five years, but those who survived the illnesses of infancy and childhood could look forward to a long life with nearly the same level of confidence as someone living now. But even so long ago, some faced conflicts in their middle and later years that remain familiar today. In Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity, Karl F. Zender explores William Shakespeare's depictions of middle age by examining the rel...