This essay considers questions of control and consent in A Lover’s Complaint through an exploration of the Renaissance ‘figure of similitude’. Shakespeare’s poem works through patterns of likeness and unlikeness, exploring the chilling risks involved for women when they – or their lovers – are taken to resemble something they are not.

This chapter offers a new reading of Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), focusing on the role played by emotion in urban memory-making. Yarington’s play has sometimes been described as a conventional, homiletic domestic tragedy designed to castigate London’s unruly citizens with a frightening account of the murder of a chandler, Robert Beech, and his servant, Thomas Winchester. I argue instead that Yarington regards the urban soma as detached, or indifferent, and that this aspect of city life affects the ways real-life, traumatic events can be reexperienced in the theater. Yarington explores the Thames as a powerful but perverse channel for local memory-making, finding new and unpredictable forms of emotionalism in the dark, insalubrious places where the river meets the city. Exploring the play’s fascination with disordered personhood and prosthetic feeling, the chapter also rethinks connections between memory, affect, and theatrical culture more generally at the turn of the seventeenth century.

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.

Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems just as the word ‘emotion’ was emerging into common currency. In its first usages, traceable back to the 1590s, the term referred to the general disturbance suggested by the Latin term emovere (to move out), and Shakespeare and his contemporaries indeed often described as motions the impulses that aroused the mind, body and soul. The introduction to Shakespeare and Emotion explains the rationale for giving serious and sustained attention to the emotions as a way of approaching Shakespeare’s works as art from the past, as well as the place of these works in the present. It offers a brief survey of Shakespeare’s classical and early modern sources for his understanding of affect, and an account of how the present-day surge of interest in emotional experience builds on earlier strands of Shakespearean scholarship from the early to mid-twentieth century. The Introduction concludes with a survey of the volume’s chapters, organised around the assumption that emotion offers a deeply promising (and often challenging) prospect for imagining and enacting change.