Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009) and co-editor of Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (2008), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2015), and Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (2019).

'A wonderfully perceptive book, written with great empathy. Meek is an astute reader of early modern literature, but his book also attends carefully to the ethical and spiritual possibilities of compassion in the wider world. A brilliant addition to scholarship on the history of emotion.' Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes University

• Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'; 1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction; 2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon; 3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy; 4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama; 5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England; 6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.

Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009) and co-editor of Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (2008), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2015), and Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (2019).

'A wonderfully perceptive book, written with great empathy. Meek is an astute reader of early modern literature, but his book also attends carefully to the ethical and spiritual possibilities of compassion in the wider world. A brilliant addition to scholarship on the history of emotion.' Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes University

• Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'; 1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction; 2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon; 3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy; 4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama; 5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England; 6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.

Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009) and co-editor of Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (2008), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2015), and Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (2019).

'A wonderfully perceptive book, written with great empathy. Meek is an astute reader of early modern literature, but his book also attends carefully to the ethical and spiritual possibilities of compassion in the wider world. A brilliant addition to scholarship on the history of emotion.' Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes University

• Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'; 1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction; 2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon; 3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy; 4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama; 5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England; 6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.