This is the first collection to systematically combine the study of memory and affect in early modern culture. Essays by leading and emergent scholars in the field of Shakespeare studies offer an innovative research agenda, inviting new, exploratory approaches to Shakespeare's work that embrace interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Drawing on the contexts of Renaissance literature across genres and on various discourses including rhetoric, medicine, religion, morality, historiography, colonialism, and politics, the chapters bring together a broad range of texts, concerns, and methodologies central to the study of early modern culture. Stimulating for postgraduate students, lecturers, and researchers with an interest in the broader fields of memory studies and the history of the emotions – two vibrant and growing areas of research – it will also prove invaluable to teachers of Shakespeare, dramaturges, and directors of stage productions, provoking discussions of how convergences of memory and affect influence stagecraft, dramaturgy, rhetoric, and poetic language.

This is the first book to view Shakespeare’s plays from the prospect of the premodern death arts, not only the ars moriendi tradition but also the plurality of cultural expressions of memento mori, funeral rituals, commemorative activities, and rhetorical techniques and strategies fundamental to the performance of the work of dying, death, and the dead. The volume is divided into two sections: first, critically nuanced examinations of Shakespeare’s corpus and then, second, of Hamlet exclusively as the ultimate proving ground of the death arts in practice. This book revitalizes discussion around key and enduring themes of mortality by reframing Shakespeare’s plays within a newly conceptualized historical category that posits a cultural divide—at once epistemological and phenomenological—between premodernity and the Enlightenment.

Shakespeare / Space explores new approaches to the enactment of 'space' in and through Shakespeare's plays, as well as to the material, cognitive and virtual spaces in which they are enacted. With contributions from 14 leading and emergent experts in their fields, the collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies and cultural geography, cognitive studies, memory studies, phenomenology and the history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and language, translation studies, theatre history and performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections on intersections such as space/mobility, space/emotion, space/supernatural, space/language, space/race and space/digital, whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close readings of plays like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Othello and Shakespeare's history plays. They testify to the importance of space for our understanding of Shakespeare's creative and theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding of space as a critical concept in the humanities. It will prove useful to students, scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners of Shakespeare and early modern studies.

The first book to systematically combine the two vibrant yet hitherto unconnected fields of memory and affect in Shakespeare's England.

Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.

The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets uses Shakespeare's poetry as a case study for the mutually formative relationship between desire and recollection. Through a series of close readings that are both historically situated and informed by recent theory, it traces how the speaker of the poems strives for a more agential relationship to his own memory by treating recollection as a form of narrative. Drawing together insights from cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, John S. Garrison connects the Sonnets to the larger Renaissance project of conceiving memory as a faculty to be developed and managed through self-discipline and rhetoric. In doing so, he reveals how early modern thought presaged many theories that have emerged in contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic understandings of the self and its longing for pleasure. The Sonnets emerge as a collection that contemplates the affective dimensions and conceptual overlaps that bind anticipation to retrospection in the fraught pursuit of erotic pleasure. Indispensable for students and scholars working on Shakespeare's poetry, this study appeals also to a broader audience of readers interested in affect, memory, and sexuality studies. Shakespeare's most beloved sonnets are discussed, as well as less familiar ones, alongside contemporary adaptations of the poems. Garrison brings the Sonnets further into the present by comparing them with treatments of pleasure and memory by modern authors such as C.P. Cavafy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Michael Ondaatje.

This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.