From the Editor

Abstract

It is my great pleasure to introduce this special issue in honor of Gail Kern Paster, who provided field-shaping leadership of Shakespeare Quarterly and its home institution the Folger Shakespeare Library, and whose scholarly work has given us a powerful language and methodology for thinking about the relation between mind, body, and environment in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am grateful to Bruce R. Smith, Evelyn Tribble, Paul Yachnin, and Julian Yates for accepting my invitation to contribute to this issue and for producing a set of vivid, imaginative essays that demonstrate the range and depth of Gail’s influence. Most broadly, the aim of Gail’s work is (as she puts it near the beginning of Humoring the Body) “to look for traces of a historical phenomenology in the language of affect in early modern drama in order that readers of that drama and other texts of the period may begin to recover some of the historical particularity of early modern emotional self-experience.”1 It is a testament to the success of this project that, in reading a sentence like the one I have just quoted, we now barely register its staggering ambition. Gail’s scholarship has made the excavation of affect in a distant historical moment—the recovery of “lived practices of early modern cosmology” (20) and the assessment of Shakespeare’s “idiosyncratic understanding of contemporary psychophysiology” in relation to the “intellectual framework of his cultural moment” (23)—not only a locally productive form of cultural archaeology, but a pervasive, vital methodology for the interpretation of early modern literature in relation to our own historical moment and our own sense of ourselves. As Gail would be the first to point out, her scholarship has not accomplished this feat on its own; rather, it has flourished in sustained dialogue with a vast array of historians and theorists of the emotions, the body, and the theater who have inspired her and been inspired by her. At once skeptical and receptive in its approach to the texts it encounters, Gail’s work is consistently generative to those who encounter it. The dialogic quality of her scholarship, and its continuing ability to push early modern studies in new directions, is everywhere on display in this issue’s four essays: from Bruce Smith’s listening for the sound of early modern “complexion,” to Lyn Tribble’s description of the atmospherics of magic circles, to Paul Yachnin’s anatomy of bodily shame in the Sonnets, to Julian Yates’s discussion of the intersection between affect and apocalypse in King Lear and some of its distant descendants.