Reviewed by: Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater eds. by Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker, and: Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form eds. by Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi Erin Sullivan Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater. Edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker. Routledge, 2015. Pp. 260. $148.00 (hardcover). Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form. Edited by Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi. Palgrave, 2017. Pp. xiii + 234. $99.99 (hardcover). Interest in the history of emotions and embodied experience has played an important role in the study of Shakespeare for at least the last two decades: as several monographs and edited collections have shown, an understanding of feeling as deeply influenced by the interplay of humors, spirits, and passions shaped the emotional world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While a good deal of this work on the history of emotions in the early modern period has been informed by the parallel rise of affect theory from the 1990s until today, the links between the two fields, and indeed the relevance of affect theory to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinking, have typically been implicit rather than overt. The two collections considered in this review mark a shift in this trajectory. Both privilege the language of 'affect' in their titles and chapters, at times invoking it alongside a more historicized discussion of 'passion' or 'emotion' and in some cases displacing the older terminology entirely. This is all the more remarkable, and exciting, for the fact that studies in affect theory have typically remained fixated on contemporary literature and culture. As Katherine Ibbett has recently reflected, "Readers in affect have tended to focus on contemporary or at least resolutely modern culture: it is no accident that affect theory has burgeoned in the United States since 2001, when the familiar Aristotelian terror that makes its audience stronger got a political shot in the arm" ("'When I do, I call it affect'," Paragraph 40:2 [2017], 251–2). The results of such a modern and politicized theoretical movement have been a series of studies of contemporary cultural phenomena, ideologies, and literatures that often focus on affective experiences as deeply embodied, non- (or pre-) conscious, and non-verbal. At the same time, [End Page 189] it's essential to note that 'affect theory' itself is highly diverse and that its many practitioners differ greatly in their understanding of what exactly 'affect' is—particularly whether or not it is autonomous and thus separate from language—and consequently how it should be studied and applied (Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth offer a very useful introduction to the plurality of affect theory in "An Inventory of Shimmers," The Affect Theory Reader [Durham: Duke University Press, 2010], 1–28). This originating diversity is alive and well in both Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker's Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater and Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi's Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts. The former came out in 2015 and serves as an impressive Festschrift for Jean Howard, who has worked with each of the book's eighteen contributors as either a doctoral advisor or research collaborator (or, indeed, both). The affective bond and intellectual debt that these authors feel is clear in every chapter as well as in the book's structure, which includes four thematic sections that tip their hats to several of Howard's influential publications: "Struggling with the Stage," "Engendering …," "… A Nation," and "Theater of a City." As we might hope and expect from such a collection, issues of political subjecthood and the ethical force of theater loom large in many of its chapters, which address the work not just of Shakespeare but of dramatists as diverse as Chapman, Dekker, Fletcher, Ford, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Shirley, and Tomkis. The choice of affect as a unifying subject for the collection is helpfully elucidated in Arab, Dowd, and Zucker's introduction: "What might it mean for early modern theater scholars to consider the felt experience of emotion or the physiological inducement of affect as a 'historically specific social formation?'," they ask, "Or, to carry the...
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Aug 4, 2020
Wing Ki Lee 
Open Access