Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England

Abstract

Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England Edited by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 Shakespearean Sensations joins an ongoing conversation in the field of early modern studies about the logic of the senses, the affects, and conditions of embodied subjectivity in and around the plays and poems of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume offers ten new essays by distinguished and innovative scholars that consider, collectively, the "sensations aroused by imaginative literature" (3) or more concretely, how Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have understood the impact of drama and poetry on audiences and readers. The editors, who have each produced sustained studies of literature and forms of sensory response, Katherine A. Craik (Reading Sensations in Early Modern England) and Tanya Pollard [Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England), seem an ideal team to open up new directions in this field. Indeed, in the company of several thoughtful edited collections in recent years, including Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition, edited by Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (2010), Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, edited by Laurie Johnson, John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble (2014), and the earlier Reading the Early Modern Passions, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2004), Craik and Pollard's volume offers a timely contribution to scholarship on intersecting histories of literature, affect, and embodiment. Shakespearean Sensations, however, sets itself apart from this developing body of scholarship by calling for an intensive focus on "literature's effects," or imagined effects, on early modern audiences and readers. "How did early modern writers," ask Craik and Pollard at the outset of the Introduction, "imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies, and souls?" (1). They further refine the scope of the volume by asking their contributors to consider, or reconsider, "the period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling" (1). While re-familiarizing readers with early discourses concerned with both literary impact and "the physiology of affect," including classical and renaissance rhetoric, philosophy and medicine, debates about religion, and treatises on the powers and dangers of theater and poetry, Craik and Pollard ask their contributors to consider early modern discourses of literary impact in new ways. For in light of both the "affective turn" in a number of disciplines within and beyond the humanities and the need for scholars to articulate the value of literary study, the editors stress the importance of historicizing "literature's shaping impact on audiences" in order to deepen our understanding of "the period's beliefs about how and why literature mattered" (25). By emphasizing the urgency of excavating "the historical specificities of the period's vocabulary for describing consumer's experience of literature, and the ways in which these descriptions challenge our own assumptions of what literature is and does" (5), they further raise the stakes of the collection. The ten essays that follow in many ways cohere around concerns with fundamental issues of "affect" and "effect" while differing substantially in topic and argument. Essays range from Allison P. Hobgood's analysis of the effects of fear (or "fear-sickness") in and around Macbeth to Matthew Steggle's study of the rhetoric and dramatization of clapping in and around Shakespeare's theater. Both essays examine the interrelationship of actors and audience, but open up completely different pictures of "sensation" at work in the early modern theater. Hobgood's lead essay, "Feeling fear in Macbeth," examines fear as a form of affective contagion linked with physical illness in and around Macbeth (including the notoriously precarious production history of the play). …