This chapter explores how early modern dramatists were often preoccupied with ideas of pity and compassion, and sought out new words and metaphors for articulating such feelings. It begins by considering Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1585-6) and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), arguing that these plays centralize ideas of emotional comparability, receptivity, and resistance that fed into the subsequent emergence of the term sympathy. It goes on to examine Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), which contains an important early example of the word sympathy being used to describe a harmony of woe. The chapter then explores the emergence of the verbal form sympathize in several plays from the late 1590s, including The Comedy of Errors and Troilus and Cressida. It concludes with a discussion of Samuel Brandon’s 1598 closet drama The Vertuous Octavia, in which the protagonist invokes the possibility that she might ‘simpathize’ with her husband, while simultaneously suggesting that she is capable of resisting such emotional forces. This new word reflected and enabled a more active conception of sympathy as a practice of individual choice and agency.

This chapter explores how the term sympathy was co-opted into political discourse in the first part of the seventeenth century, and how Jacobean literary and dramatic texts debated the political aspects of pity and compassion. Focusing on responses to the crises of succession and the plague, the chapter discusses the representation of sympathy in William Muggins’s Londons Mourning garment (1603), William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Croesus (1604), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). It argues that King Lear exposes the ethical and philosophical problems involved in emotional perspective-taking, and points to the ways in which concepts of sympathy in this period were complicated by an individual’s class and status. The chapter then turns to royal elegies from the 1610s and 1620s, including poetic responses to the deaths of Prince Henry and Queen Anne. The chapter also explores several religious works that express concerns about a decline of sympathy during this period, and proposes that the increased bleakness of the 1623 Folio text of Lear may reflect wider social anxieties about what Thomas Medeley calls ‘this iron and flinty age’.

This chapter considers the first appearances in print of the word sympathize (1594) and argues that complaint poetry was an especially fertile genre in which ideas of emotional imitation and transmission were themselves imitated and transmitted. The chapter examines the poetics of feeling in Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592). It goes on to discuss Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and focuses on Lucrece’s emotional encounter with her maid, who, ‘enforced by sympathy’, begins to weep herself. The chapter then examines how this sympathetic encounter was appropriated and reworked by several writers in the years that followed, including John Trussell’s The First Rape of Faire Hellen (1595) and Samuel Nicholson’s Acolastus (1600). This process of textual transmission and dissemination is also at work in the various poetic miscellanies that appeared at the turn of the seventeenth century, including Bel-vedére; or, The Garden of the muses (1600) and Englands Parnassus (1600), both of which include extracts from several of the poems discussed in this chapter.

This chapter uses David Garrick’s career-long engagement with Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681) to demonstrate two points about Restoration Shakespeare. First, it shows how Garrick’s production of Tate’s alteration continued the work undertaken by the late seventeenth-century playwright to fit the Jacobean tragedy to new theatrical contexts. Promptbook evidence and review accounts indicate that Garrick, like Tate and his contemporaries, added music and other special effects to the King Lear story, thus augmenting the already strong multimedia dimensions of the Restoration versions of Shakespeare’s plays. These same sources, however, also indicate how Garrick modified Tate’s own alteration to provide an even greater focus on the monarch, one of this actor-manager’s most famous and most often performed parts. Second, this chapter takes Garrick’s reworking of Tate’s King Lear as an example of how generations of theatre practitioners – including our own – might use the writings of Tate and his contemporaries as a useful intermediary between themselves and Shakespeare’s works.

Once the misattribution to Matthew Locke of some music for Macbeth published in 1770 was finally resolved in the 1960s, it was concluded that just one song and one dance by him could be connected with some certainty to Restoration stagings of the play. In this chapter, I discuss the ‘The Rare Theatrical’ compositions by Locke, which survive in the manuscript US-NYp Drexel 3976 and show how many of them can be identified as dating from the time of the Macbeth productions of 1663/4 and 1667. An understanding of the nature of the instrumental scoring of the English violin band, which at that date reflected French practice with two viola parts, is combined with other evidence to enable a reconstruction of Locke’s instrumental music for Macbeth, which takes the form of pre-performance music, a Curtain tune and Act tunes. While the particular grouping of movements used in the reconstruction remains largely speculative, the methodology devised to create it enables the identification of a significant body of theatre music from the 1660s, shedding light on the role of music in theatre productions of the time while also providing a context for the better-known music of the following decade.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between individual, communal, and political contentment in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare presents contentment as most successful when shared between selves, whereas an overly possessive attitude toward one’s contentment jeopardizes its existence. As You Like It depicts a commonwealth built upon the bonds between subjects and preserved through mutual contentment. By contrast, the malcontent Iago identifies vulnerabilities in Othello’s understanding of contentedness to destroy his relationships with Desdemona and Venetian society writ large. In As You Like It, communal contentment counteracts the social threat of envy, but in Othello jealousy distorts content beyond the point of recognition or redemption. Shakespeare does not shy away from the challenges to contentment, but he attempts to provide audiences with collective experiences of positive emotion and to unite them in the face of tragedy. Though recent critics have described the Renaissance theatre as an arena for emotional extremes, this chapter broadens our perspective of Shakespearean emotion to include a contentment that shares the stage with other affects.

This chapter considers how the moving, working bodies of boy actors were depicted on stage throughout the early modern period, drawing together a number of metatheatrical instances which explicitly stage the acquisition and performance of theatrical skill. Focusing particularly on moments in plays by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare, it argues for a theatre directly influenced by and representative of early modern culture's fascination with boys' physical capacities. Having established the early modern stage as a site of heightened physical display, the chapter moves to consider what bearing this culture of physical training and skill demonstration had on the careers and reputations of individual boy actors. It traces the careers of leading boy actors Nathan Field and Richard Robinson, attending to the highly physical nature of the roles these boys played, as well as how playwrights and audiences celebrated and commemorated the corporeal nature of their performances. Boy actors' physical performances, it ultimately argues, had a demonstrable impact on individual careers and reputations as well as company repertories.

In “Natural Philosophy,” Mary Thomas Crane charts the early modern movement away from Aristotelian natural philosophy, rooted in a version of nature based on everyday experience, and toward a counterintuitive nature, understood only through mathematics and artificially produced experiments. Examining the works of London-based practitioners of technical and mathematical sciences such as Robert Record, John Dee, Leonard Digges, and William Bourne, as well as natural philosophy’s most strident promoter, Francis Bacon, Crane demonstrates how the new version of nature that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came at the cost of an older, more intuitive understanding. The chapter ends with an analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a cautionary tale about using natural science to control people and nature.

In “Nature in the Anthropocene,” Hiltner contends that we must reject nostalgic attempts to reconstruct a lost harmony with nature that never really existed, such as narratives of Eden and the Golden Age, in favor of a sustainable future-oriented version of nature. Nature in the Anthropocene, Hiltner argues, must be a nature we consciously craft using the tools of modern science and technology. Exploring the classical works of Hesiod and Ovid, as well as the Judeo/Christian/Muslim story of Eden, Hiltner foregrounds how nostalgic visions of harmony with nature still structure much of the environmentalist thinking of the present. Using early modern examples, Hiltner shows how humanity has long grappled with environmental problems of its own creation. The chapter ultimately turns to the example of Rachel Carson to illustrate a scientifically informed approach to forging a more livable and sustainable concept of nature.

In “Pastoral,” Terry Gifford traces the development of pastoral literature from the classical genre established by Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues to its broader use as a literary mode by writers like Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth. He also examines modern iterations of the “post-pastoral” by writers like Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich. Attentive to its ideological valences, Gifford examines the persistence of the pastoral mode in literary representations of the relationship between nature and culture, even as authors resist pastoral idealization. The chapter concludes with an overview of what Gifford calls the “prefix-pastoral” (e.g., postmodern pastoral, Black pastoral, feminist pastoral, etc.) in order to capture the diversity of contemporary pastoral literature and theory.

The Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s central argument: that in post-Reformation England, when girls were expected to marry and turn their minds toward husbands, early moderns viewed the stage of girlhood between puberty and marriage as one of cognitive liberty and productivity. The Introduction explains how the brain’s anatomy and mental faculties were commonly perceived, and when and to what extent the brain came to be sexed. It traces the transmission of ancient and medieval depictions of pubertal change, and demonstrates how early modern English adaptations of these sources reveal a gendered shift in the cognitive vocabulary used to describe what happens to male and female body-minds when they experienced “the change of fourteen years.” It articulates the interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks that inform the study: theories of embodied cognition, studies of adolescence, work by historians of science on the early modern humoral body, and recent scholarship in Girls’ studies. Also included are discussions about constructing a feminist literary practice that analyzes depictions of embodied female experiences, and how early modern scholars largely have overlooked girls and failied to recognize the dynamic brainwork that Shakespeare and his contemporaries attributed to adolescent females, fictional and real.

Eric Langley examines how early modern writers revisit the classically derived emblematic scenario of the shipwreck as they assess the nature of compassionate contact. In this chapter, he shows how the recurring image of the shipwreck provides insight into the extent to which vulnerability, affectivity, embeddedness or interdependence are integrated into the substructure of the subject at various historical moments. He argues that the emblem of the shipwreck is used in early modern texts, and particularly in the works of Shakespeare, to account for both the importance and cost of emotional interaction.

The question of the treatment of the Steward Malvolio is one of the crucial interpretive issues in Twelfth Night, and the placement of audience compassion is central to the history of that debate. Recent readings focusing on the social function of laughter have reached diverging conclusions. Is Malvolio the legitimate victim of a ‘community of laughers’, or does laughter fail to achieve social correction and cohesion in the play? Elisabetta Tarantino argues that the play’s audience is expected to achieve a higher understanding of the motives why compassion may be granted or withheld by different groups of characters within the play. Reading the play in its international political context, she argues that the ambivalent representation of Malvolio is a central part of the play’s semantic strategy. On the basis of new intertextual evidence, she suggests that Twelfth Night addresses issues of community and compassion in a direct historical and political sense, with reference to the contemporary relationship between England and Europe.

Chapter 10 lays out the primary methodological motivations behind the book. Because both postcolonialism and tragedy are highly complex, constellation concepts, I argue that they instigate the necessity for thinking closely about the dynamics of comparison, critical theory, interdisciplinarity, and the ethics of reading. I then track the complex relations between historical context and literary texts in postcolonial studies and go on to show some of the ways in which the contrast and comparison of Western notions of tragedy with postcolonial examples forces us to rethink both sides of the coin. I conclude with remarks on the characterological types we have seen in the course of the book – namely the bold (Othello, Okonkwo, Sethe) and the quiet (the Magistrate and Murphy) – and show how they correlate to two different ideas of freedom. There are implications to be derived from postcolonial tragedy for how we think of freedom in today’s world.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

In the early modern English period, the distinction between the two pronominal terms of address for a single addressee, ye and thou, still existed but it was showing the first signs of decline. William Shakespeare did not use the case forms consistently, and the pragmatics of his system differs considerably from the situation in Middle English. The chapter shows how the pronominal and the nominal terms of address interact in the works by Shakespeare and in particular in Romeo and Juliet. In contrast to the situation in Middle English, the choice of ye or thou cannot always be accounted for on a turn-by-turn basis. Shakespeare’s use has to be described on a more global level for different dyads of speakers. The use of thou increasingly shows a high level of emotionality, which may ultimately have led to its demise and the present-day English system with only you as a pronominal term of address.

Baldesar Castiglione’s courtesy book Il Cortegiano introduced the notion of sprezzatura (a kind of ‘effortless mastery’) to early modern England. The notion of courtesy, which characterised the Middle English period, was replaced by the notion of civility. A review of the relevant research shows how the theoretical framework proposed by Brown and Levinson with the key notions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ politeness has been applied to the plays by William Shakespeare. The chapter continues with a third-wave discursive politeness approach that is exemplified with case studies of two plays by Ben Jonson, Volpone, Or the Fox and Bartholomew Fair. They demonstrate how default politeness or impoliteness values of specific linguistic forms interact with the discursive contexts in which they occur.