The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare
by Steven Mullaney
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-54763-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-54764-0 | Electronic: 978-0-226-11709-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith.

As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Steven Mullaney is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is also the author of The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England.

REVIEWS

“A powerful and provocative meditation on the innovative cultural forms and emotional processes that emerged from the violent affective dislocations of memory, identity, and community of the English Reformation. Mullaney addresses issues of wide interest among scholars of early modern literature and culture through evocative readings of both familiar and unfamiliar plays that are consistently surprising, insightful, and original.”
— William N. West, Northwestern University

The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare is an important book by an important critic. Mullaney gives historical depth to the affective turn in early modern studies, linking Reformation texts to the emotions they generated. What he has to say is always subtle, revelatory, and rhetorically brilliant.”
— Jean E. Howard, Columbia University

“This is a radiantly intelligent study. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare will enlighten those interested in Shakespeare and will also reward the efforts of anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the social dimensions of the theatrical art in any age.”
— Paul Yachnin, McGill University

“Armed with an impassioned insight into the importance and meanings of our shared experience, and an inspired vision of the unique role of theatre as an art form, Mullaney has once more made a groundbreaking contribution to the field of English Renaissance studies. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare demonstrates how much the dramatic and cultural performances of the period mattered, and illustrates how much they can, in the right hands, advance our understanding of the impact of the Reformation on English life.”
— Sir Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2002–2012

“The breadth and range of Mullaney’s canvas often produces nuanced, surprising, and compelling juxtapositions. . . . His study is important as yet another reminder of how deeply affective and thoughtful the space of Renaissance English theaters was. . . . His book is a must read for students of early modern theater.”
— Sixteenth Century Journal

“Mullaney’s book is useful as a theoretical text linking affect theory with studies on theatrical space, performance studies, and the development of early modern subjectivity.”
— Shakespeare Bulletin

“Lithe and energetic. . . . A constantly stimulating and engaging read. . . . One of the great pleasures of this book is its unpredictability, its shifting points of reference, and its frequently wonderful turns of phrase.”
— Shakespeare

“Highly original and eloquently argued. . . . The great value of Mullaney’s . . . intelligent and thought-provoking contribution is that . . . it directs our attention to how drama functioned in post-Reformation England where the theater of state was constantly re-scripted and its roles redefined.”
— Spenser Review

“An innovative and compelling contribution to Elizabethan dramatic interpretation, theatre theory, and cultural critique. . . . Mullaney’s book offers a powerful account of an Elizabethan amphitheatre technology that institutionalized the production of private perspectives in public.”
— Renaissance and Reformation

“This is a beautifully written book. Mullaney’s prose is deft and detailed, and his careful scholarship leaves his study peppered with insights into the crumbling certainties of early modern life.”
— Times Literary Supplement

"A slim but powerful volume. . .bringing a provocatively original approach to a seemingly well-worn topic, The Reformation of Emotions is a remarkable attempt to engage sensibly. . . .Mullaney's creatively emblematic approach should serve to jostle critics out of their own well-worn argumentative positions, with the hope of inspiring new and methodologically original work on the theatre."
— Theatre Journal

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

- Steven Mullaney
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.003.0011
[dead, social memory, social imaginary, emblem, Raymond Williams, Kenneth Burke, social landscape, emotional landscape]
The Prologue opens with an emblematic moment in 1549, when Lord Protector Somerset ordered the Ossuary at St. Paul’s emptied and the bones of four hundred years of loved ones, ancestors, and neighbors dumped in a marsh. Radical protestants sought to dissociate the present from the past in extreme, traumatic, and not-always theologically driven ways. Such “rage[s] against the dead” sought to erase a deep and affective form of historical memory. Post-Reformation England used a wide range of affective media and technologies in its efforts to understand the gaps that had opened up in the social and affective landscape. Early modern amphitheater drama, a melding of available media, was one of the more telling responses. It was a key component in the period’s “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase—providing a public place where audiences could experience, investigate, dig into, or salve the cognitive and affective conditions of their own possibility. (pages 1 - 6)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Steven Mullaney
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.003.0001
[reformation of emotions, collective identity, imagined community, structures of feeling, embodied thought, phenomenology of emotions, counter memory, idioms of expression, cultural performance]
The introduction clarifies the use of “social emotions” and discusses the concept in relation to debates over the nature and historicity of emotions in the social sciences and the humanities. It argues that a phenomenology of historical emotions—social emotions felt, expressed, and understood by others as well as oneself—cannot be derived from humoral medicine or other etiological and physiological theories of the period. Social emotions participate in “structures of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s phrase. They are a form of embodied social “thought,” in Michelle Rosaldo’s sense, an affective and cognitive apprehension that “I am involved.” With the help of Williams, Rosaldo, Peter Marshall, Sara Ahmed, Patrick Collinson, and a number of other historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars, I argue that the Reformation in England did not succeed in severing affective ties to the past but did manage to loosen and unravel them, with significant consequences for individual and collective senses of identity. Like the emptiness at the foundations of St. Paul’s after 1549, gaps had opened up in the affective landscape of the period. The introduction closes with brief readings of plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare and an overview of the chapters to come (pages 7 - 50)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Steven Mullaney
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.003.0002
[Galen, affective irony, Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare, anti-mimesis, affective faultlines, Thomas Wright, point of view, Shylock, revenge play]
This chapter introduces a new way of thinking about the anti-mimetic role that affective point-of-view played in early modern English theatrical performance. Works of drama written in this period cannot be fully understood outside of the context of their performance (I return to this claim in chapter three). The affective embodiments of characters that were enacted on stage were both transactional and intersubjective in their relation to the audience; this kind of theater was able, as a result, to serve as a kind of laboratory where the faultlines of affect that ran through the audience could be tested, explored, and felt. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy employed the affective architectonics of the new amphitheater playhouses to cast a shadow of dramatic irony over that audience. Marlowe and Shakespeare built upon Kyd’s theatrical practices in their own plays, specifically in Edward II, Titus Andronicus, and The Merchant of Venice. Such plays develop a transactional relation to their audiences that relies on a kind of “affective irony,” in which the audience’s emotional reactions and ideological points-of-view are catalyzed only insofar as they are alienated from—rather than represented by—the emotions expressed onstage. (pages 51 - 93)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Steven Mullaney
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.003.0003
[historical trauma, eucharistic, structural amnesia, collective memory, Henry VI, Richard III, constructed archaism, medieval drama]
This chapter focuses on Shakespeare’s early history tetralogy (1, 2, 3 Henry VI and Richard III) to examine the complex relation between collective memory and forgetting in the formation of a collective or contestatory historical consciousness. Drawing on work by Edward Casey, Cathy Caruth, and a wide body of sociological scholarship on collective and social memory, we see that forgetting can sometimes be a necessary component of memory, especially in times of collective social trauma. Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, oscillating between fifteenth-century Catholic and sixteenth-century Protestant England, is structured by the devaluation of eucharistic thought in Reformation England, and in some surprising ways. Affective history in these plays grounds historical consciousness in a form of longing or mourning that is not nostalgic but critical, and an engagement with present and dominant ideologies of Tudor England that is keenly aware of their role in the reformation of social emotions as well as the Reformations of faith. Early in the evolution of Shakespeare’s own work, these plays are especially important examples of what can be called the “affective technologies” of the period. (pages 94 - 143)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Steven Mullaney
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.003.0004
[public sphere, Habermas, theatrical publication, modes of production, phenomenology of theater, audience-oriented subjectivity]
This chapter examines the relationship between theatrical performance and the early modern public sphere. Habermas claimed that early modern theater impeded the emergence of the public sphere (i.e., an “audience-oriented subjectivity,” crucial to that emergence, developed only in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the novel). Habremas’s account of the phenomenology of reading fiction is compelling and worth rescuing from an otherwise problematic description of the public sphere, due, largely to his heavy reliance on the intersubjective dynamics of theatrical performance (which he explicitly rejects). Postmodernists similarly demoted theatrical performance and other prominent early media to a secondary role in the production, deconstruction, analysis, or maintenance of publics and counter-publics. Early modern print, however, had not yet fully captured the concept of “publication.” Oral proclamation, scribal production and dissemination, and performance remained significant forms of publication; making ideas, feelings, and perspectives available for the formation of new publics and counter-publics was still a multi-modal phenomenon. Earlier we saw the exposure of gaps and faultlines that scarred social and affective landscapes; theatrical performance onstage constituted a play’s “first publication”, a complex hybrid between oral, performative, and inscriptive spheres of publication, offering a highly social, necessarily collective—not always harmonious—affective technology for creating early modern publics and counter-publics. (pages 144 - 174)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

- Steven Mullaney
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.003.0005
[cognitive ecology, Hamlet, Andy Clark, John Sutton, thinking through things]
The epilogue returns to the matter of the dead, the embodied memories of the affective past in its physical remains, with a brief consideration of what it meant to think and feel with and through historical things, including the bones and skulls of loved ones. Earlier chapters regularly invoked the language of cognitive ecology to make sense of the social and inter-subjective dynamics of early modern performance. Bringing the dead of St. Paul’s together with the bones of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, the epilogue makes explicit these earlier references to the concepts of distributed cognition and extended mind. Elizabethans regularly relied on affective tools and technologies like popular theater as they sought to understand, in and of themselves, what it felt like to be an Elizabethan. (pages 175 - 180)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Notes

Index