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The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare

Online ISBN:
9780226117096
Print ISBN:
9780226547633
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare

Published online:
21 January 2016
Published in print:
27 July 2015
Online ISBN:
9780226117096
Print ISBN:
9780226547633
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; there was a reformation of social emotions—a necessary recalibration of community—as well as a Reformation of faith. It is an informing belief of this study that our most lasting and moving works of culture are what they are—lasting and moving—because they are so deeply rooted in the soil of their times, complexly engaged with what is at risk in the historical moment and unsettled in the collective identity. This is especially true of theater, one of the most social of the arts. As a public and performative art, theater provides public and performative cultures with a means of thinking about themselves, especially when other methods and media fail. This book argues that Elizabethan popular drama served as a form of embodied social and affective thought, challenging the first generation born into the Elizabethan Protestant Settlement—Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe’s generation—to confront its fault lines and differences in social thinking, feeling, and belief. A lasting example of art at its most engaged, early modern Reformation drama was also a critical phenomenon in the way that theory, an etymologically related term for seeing, is critical: a far from harmonious and not always therapeutic way of thinking and feeling, by means of actual bodies on stage and in the audience, about the larger, traumatized social body.

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