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.

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.