Shakespearean Sensations

Katharine A. Craik is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (2007) and an edition of Jane Collier's An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (2006). She has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, The Seventeenth Century and The Huntington Library Quarterly. She has been working for ten years as a librettist and her first opera was commissioned in 2004 by English National Opera. Her most recent project, an opera entitled The Quicken Tree based on Spenser's The Faerie Queene, premièred in Edinburgh in March 2011. Tanya Pollard is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her publications include Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (2004), essays in journals including Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama and chapters in numerous volumes including, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (2010). She is currently writing a book about the sixteenth-century reception of Greek plays and their impact on English conceptions of dramatic genres.

'The volume's contributors engage in meaningful dialogues with drama, poetry, and primary sources; with a growing body of secondary materials; and above all with one another. Both uninitiated readers and long-time students of embodiment in literature will find much to deepen their understanding of the physiological impacts of reading and playgoing … Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.' P. D. Collington, Choice

• Introduction: imagining audiences Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard; Part I. Plays: 1. Feeling fear in Macbeth Allison P. Hobgood; 2. Hearing Iago's withheld confession Allison Deutermann; 3. Self-love, spirituality, and the senses in Twelfth Night Douglas Trevor; Part II. Playhouses: 4. Conceiving tragedy Tanya Pollard; 5. Playing with appetite in early modern comedy Hillary Nunn; 6. Notes towards an analysis of early modern applause Matthew Steggle; 7. Catharsis as 'purgation' in Shakespearean drama Thomas Rist; Part III. Poems: 8. Epigrammatic commotions William Kerwin; 9. Poetic 'making' and moving the soul Margaret Healy; 10. Shakespearean pain Michael Schoenfeldt; Afterword: senses of an ending Bruce R. Smith.