Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications
Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies: Ill Communications
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Abstract
ulysses … No man is the lord of any thing,Though in and of him there be much consisting,Till he communicate his parts to others.Troilus and Cressida Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare’s Ulysses explains, by its communications with others—by its open involvement with interlocutors, its participation in interaction—this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that ‘no man is … any thing’ till he has ‘communicate[d] his parts to others’, can these formative communications still be risked in a world preoccupied by communicable sickness, where every contact risks contraction, where every touch could be the touch of plague, where kind interaction could facilitate cruel infection, and where to commiserate is to risk ‘miserable dependence’ (Tro.)? Counting the cost of compassion, this study offers analysis of how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of individuals who find themselves precariously implicated within a world of ill communications. It examines the influence of scientific thought upon the history of the subject, and explores how Shakespeare—alive to both the importance and dangers of sympathetic communication—articulates an increasing sense of both the pragmatic benefits of monadic thought, emotional isolation, and subjective quarantine, while offering his account of the considerable loss involved when we lose faith in vulnerable and tender, extensive existence.
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Front Matter
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Part I Sympathy
Eric Langley -
Part II The Bittersweet
Eric Langley -
Part III Tenderness
Eric Langley -
End Matter
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