Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday; together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women's political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"--Financial, emotional, and socio-political - that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive