Overview
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.