Professor Katharine Craik

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 new research. Its chapters outline some important contexts for understanding Shakespeare's creativity through an emotional lens – from religion, rhetoric, and medicine, to language, acting and Bollywood – and offer a range of case studies which reveal particular emotions at work. Considering emotional and passionate experience as an animating and sometimes alienating force within the plays and poems, the volume highlights the continuing importance of Shakespeare today: for our sense of who we are and who we might become.

This strong and timely collection provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare's plays and poems were understood to affect bodies, minds and emotions. Contemporary criticism has had surprisingly little to say about the early modern period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling. Shakespearean Sensations brings together scholarship from a range of well-known and new voices to address this fundamental gap. The book includes a comprehensive introduction by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard and comprises three sections focusing on sensations aroused in the plays; sensations evoked in the playhouse; and sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems. With dedicated essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Twelfth Night, the collection explores how seriously early modern writers took their relationship with their audiences and reveals new connections between early modern literary texts and the emotional and physiological experiences of theatregoers.

If chastity has for generations served the needs and desires of men, can it still be taken seriously as a virtue? Dismissed in the west as a medieval superstition, or, at best, as a means of escape from an intolerable situation, chastity seems a worn-out version of goodness which belongs in the past. Putting forward a new reading of Pericles (1609), this chapter opens up chastity as forgotten version of agency which, in the most surprising ways, enables new kinds of assertion and affirmation. It offers an account of the Marina Project, an ongoing creative-critical collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has resulted in the creation of a new play entitled Marina. Both the project and the play prioritize the perspective of the protagonist’s daughter, Marina, who powerfully and triumphantly refuses to play the game where women are sold to men. Chastity emerges as a specifically female and remarkably direct kind of action which overturns the withdrawal implied by obedience to a patriarchal frame. Marina’s "radical chastity" disrupts our sense of the way things have to be, opening up a constellation of important issues today.

This essay explores the therapeutic possibilities opened up by literature for breathless patients today. Focusing on King Lear, it considers Shakespeare’s suggestion that we do not breathe as isolated agents but are instead ‘breathed’ by those who know and observe us. Breath emerges as fundamental to early modern personhood. Many breathless patients today still experience the inseparability of breath and aliveness, and breathlessness becomes ‘a way of life’ as they adapt their sense of what is possible in order to accommodate their condition. This life belongs not only to sufferers, however, but also to those who care for them. Considering recent clinical research on vicarious dyspnoea alongside King Lear reveals the existential and therapeutic potential of breath’s intimate, under-recognised relationality.

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-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard III or the "corpulent" Falstaff, the conflicts between different health-care belief-systems in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, the power of figurative language to delineate or even instigate puberty in the Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet, and the ways in which the powerful or moneyed mediate the access of the poor and injured to cure or even to care. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops both a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.