Shakespeare's Compassion Emotion and the Classics on the Early Modern Stage

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Refskou, Anne Sophie

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Literary criticism.

Shakespeare, William.

Classical literature--Influence.

Classical literature.

Compassion in literature.

Emotions in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

London Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2025

Summary:

This book shows that Shakespeare's dramatization of compassion, far from expressing a sense of universal empathy, stages a conflicted emotion available to be solicited, manipulated and at times even monopolized as a discursive vehicle for the exclusion of others. Drawing on the history of emotions and on Shakespearean classical studies, Anne Sophie Refskou argues both that Shakespeare's compassion expresses his own historical and cultural moment and is at the same time the product of his close engagement with literature from the classical past. In so doing, she traces a set of recurrent strands in Shakespeare's engagement with discourses of compassion throughout his playwriting career, situating them in relation to plays written for the early modern stage by contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. Individual chapters offer readings of Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear by way of comparative analysis of key classical texts - including Euripides' Hecuba and The Trojan Women, Vergil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses - from which Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights drew sustained inspiration. Together, the chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare's engagement with the classical literature, from which he inherited a spacious understanding of the social efficacy of emotion, enables his dramatization of issues that are central to the current critical field, including questions of race, gender, sexuality and the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series

Title

Copyright

Contents

Note on Texts and Translations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Shakespeare's Compassion

1 Compassion's exclusions: Titus Andronicus and the power of pity

2 Feeling human: Compassion, cruelty and beastliness in Richard III

3 'Pity me not': Hamlet's queer compassion

4 Compassion at a distance: King Lear and Euripides

Conclusion: Compassion after Shakespeare

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record

Other Format:

Print version Refskou, Anne Sophie Shakespeare's Compassion

ISBN:

9781350497597

1350497592

9781350497610

1350497614

9781350497603

1350497606

OCLC:

1492963376

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license