Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage.(Book review)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses

Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage, by Gail Kern Paster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 274. Cloth: $35.00.

The emotions--those seemingly most transhistorical of objects--undergo a thoroughgoing defamiliarization in Gail Kern Paster's recent work. In contrast to the contemporary tendency to read early modern literary representations of the emotions through a post-Cartesian lens of dematerialized affectivity, Paster argues for their rematerialization by recognizing that "what is now emotional figuration for us was bodily reality for the early moderns" (26). According to Paster, the tendency to read the emotions represented in early modern literature through a residual post-Enlightenment framework of mind-body dualism bedevils our efforts to read them "with historical care" (26). She thus embarks on an ambitious project to reconstruct a "historical phenomenology of the early modern emotions" (10), carefully treating a range of early modern texts on the emotions and demonstrating how this project might extend our understanding of early modern dramatic literature. Particularly notable are her readings of less familiar texts such as Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604)...

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