Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann; Part I. Ars Memoriae, Ars aAmatoria: 1. Allegories of Love: Affect and the Art of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets Rebeca Helfer; 2. Twelfth Night and the Rites of Memory Brian Cummings; 3 The Lustful Oblivion of Widowhood in The Insatiate Countess Grant Williams; Part II. The Politics of Memory and Affect: 4. 'Gathered Again from the Ash': Traumatropism, Memorialization, and Foxe's Acts and Monuments Devori Kimbro; 5. 'To Take on Me the Payn / Ther Fall to Remember': Metrical Visions and the Dangerous Memory Networks of Complaint William Kerwin; 6. Jesting, Nostalgia, and Agonistic Play Indira Ghose; Part III. Affective Memory: Temporal and Spatial Modalities: 7. 'My Despised Time': Memory, Temporality, and Disgust in Shakespearean Tragedy Johannes Schlegel; 8. Remembering Water in Robert Yarington's Two Lamentable Tragedies Katharine A. Craik; 9. Mourning Memory in Cymbeline Daniel Normandin; Part IV. Memory, Affect and Stagecraft: 10. The Tug of Memory: Affect and Invention in Shakespeare's Drama William E. Engel; 11. Memory, Text, Affect: The Deaths of Gloucester Rory Loughnane; 12. Memory, Affect, and the Multiverse: From the History Plays to The Merry Wives of Windsor Evelyn Tribble; 13. Cut Short All Intermission: Sound, Space, Memory, and Macduff's Grief Lina Perkins Wilder; Coda; 14. Remembering Shakespeare Peter Holland.

About the Author :
Jonathan Baldo is Professor of English at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester and the author of Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stage of Forgetting in Early Modern England (2012). His essays on Shakespeare and the interplay of remembering and forgetting have appeared in numerous journals and essay collections. Isabel Karremann is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Zurich and the author of The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare's History Plays (2015). She has published widely on Shakespeare, early modern drama and memory culture, and is the editor of the Shakespeare-Jahrbuch.

Review :
'An expansive and consistently illuminating collection, Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England argues so convincingly for integrating the areas of memory and affect studies that early modernists will wonder that we ever considered them separately. In essays on a broad range of literary subjects-from complaint poetry and sonnets to grisly domestic tragedy, jestbooks, and the Shakespearean history play-Baldo and Karreman's important volume demonstrates how affect and memory co-structure one another in and through a provocatively diverse array of abstract and material forms, such as geography, temporality, verse rhythm, texts, and props.' Alice Dailey, Villanova University 'From memory arts to stagecraft via politics and the modalities of space and time, this book's organization demonstrates the varied possibilities of approaching memory and affect together. The essays included here offer smart, persuasive readings of Shakespearean drama and poetry as well as of non-canonical texts. A sustained exploration of memory and affect in early modern England is long overdue, and this collection thus provides an important and welcome intervention in early modern literary studies.' Kristine Johanson, University of Amsterdam