Shakespeare’s Compassion: Emotion and the Classics on the Early Modern Stage

This book shows that Shakespeare’s dramatization of compassion, far from expressing a sense of universal empathy, stages a conflicted emotion available to be solicited, manipulated and at times even monopolized as a discursive vehicle for the exclusion of others. Drawing on the history of emotions and on Shakespearean classical studies, Anne Sophie Refskou argues both that Shakespeare’s compassion expresses his own historical and cultural moment and is at the same time the product of his close engagement with literature from the classical past. In so doing, she traces a set of recurrent strands in Shakespeare’s engagement with discourses of compassion throughout his playwriting career, situating them in relation to plays written for the early modern stage by contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Individual chapters offer readings of Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear by way of comparative analysis of key classical texts – including Euripides’ Hecuba and The Trojan Women, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – from which Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights drew sustained inspiration. Together, the chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare’s engagement with the classical literature, from which he inherited a spacious understanding of the social efficacy of emotion, enables his dramatization of issues that are central to the current critical field, including questions of race, gender, sexuality and the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals.

Table of Contents:
Note on Texts and Translations Acknowledgements Introduction: Shakespeare’s Compassion 1. Compassion’s Exclusions: Titus Andronicus and the Power of Pity 2. Feeling Human: Compassion, Cruelty and Beastliness in Richard III 3. ‘Pity me not’: Hamlet’s Queer Compassion 4. Compassion at a Distance: King Lear and Euripides Conclusion: Compassion after Shakespeare Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Anne Sophie Refskou teaches comparative literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has taught theatre and performance studies at the University of Surrey, UK, and comparative literature at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has published widely on Shakespeare, performance and emotion.

Review :
A brilliant new contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare and emotion, one of the most exciting areas of early modern studies today. Moving beyond the field’s traditional emphasis on negative feelings, Refskou expertly shows that tending to compassion — especially via its classical heritage — can illuminate our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays — yet, at the same time, she also vitally reveals how this ostensibly positive sentiment can be leveraged for exclusion and oppression. By demonstrating how Shakespeare’s engagement with compassion intersects with matters like race, gender, sexuality, and animality, Refskou has written a book that will be of interest not only to scholars of Shakespeare and emotion: Shakespeare’s Compassion deserves the attention of all Shakespeareans. Anne Sophie Refskou has written a remarkable book. Shakespeare’s Compassion is learned, sophisticated, and rigorously argued, as well as being unusually accessible, engaging, and often moving. Avoiding the twin dangers of the topic, sentimentality and cynicism, she not only shows how central compassion is as a concern both of Shakespeare’s plays and the response to them, but also how unsettled and unsettling the idea is in Shakespeare’s recurring dramatizations of it. In its alert and agile readings, it gets at the heart, one might say, of the often misunderstood quality that has been largely responsible for Shakespeare’s enduring reputation.