The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney (review)

In his provocative The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Steven Mullaney tackles a difficult question: "What did it feel like, to be an Elizabethan?" (17). This lively book begins with the premise that the Protestant Reformation provoked a traumatic break with the past and initiated a tumultuous period in English history during which reformations of belief were simultaneous reformations of feeling in a deeply unsettled nation. Mullaney depicts an England with little sense of a collective self and suggests that theater thus becomes "a public place where audiences could experience, investigate, exacerbate, or salve the cognitive and affective conditions of their own possibility" (4). Mullaney probes dramatic performance for "the affective dimensions of reform" that helped "the Elizabethan present to understand its own shifting or ruptured relationship with the distant and immediate past and to address the affective consequences of even partial severance from the past with all its embodied and tangible memories" (4). The book traverses early modern and modern cultural theorists from Thomas Wright to Raymond Williams to Jürgen Habermas in order to articulate how art functions as a primary form of social thought in the Renaissance. Mullaney argues that "theatrical performance and reception enable and constitute a significant form of analysis and inquiry in and of themselves" (45), something of particular necessity in moments of social and cultural upheaval.

Methodologically, Mullaney encourages readers to treat early modern narratives of all kinds as primary sources. He postulates that imagined accounts should carry equal weight with nonfiction ones in "the recovery and understanding of historical structures of feeling" (24). After all, he reminds us, stories matter for felt histories—feeling comes from the telling of it. The book critiques conventional reflection theories and understandings of Renaissance theater as mimetic, illustrating instead the power of dramatic misrecognitions, audience alienation, and affective irony. Media and practices are "social productions, dialectal rather than reflexive or didactic. . . . [They] are processes as well as products of thought and feeling" (47). Intersubjective and highly relational, Renaissance theater is imagined in this book as a crucial method of apprehending the disjunctions and abjections of a climacteric early modern moment. Further, theater's unique power as a mode of affective and cultural working through comes from audiences who were nothing short of dramaturgical collaborators.

Following an introduction that takes up Williams's structures of feeling as the book's underpinning logic, chapter 1 examines Elizabethan revenge plays as evidence of theater as an "affective laboratory . . . designed to test and explore the affective faultlines that ran deep in its large and diverse audience" (49). Revenge plays offered an "antimimetic semiotics" in which the "affective embodiment of characters on stage was both transactional and intersubjective in its relation to the audience"; further, spectators were moved most when "alienated from the emotions expressed or represented on stage" (48, 49). This chapter reads Lavinia in Titus Andronicus as an example of "affective irony" in which "what the speaker [Marcus] feels is precisely not what we feel" (74). It also points to an architectonics of performance that played to an audience's auditory and visual literacies, and it argues for the importance of "critical distractions," absences, and moments of metatheatrical "distraction-in-reception" (90, 92) that prompt discomfort, affective irony, and emotional sympathy.

Chapter 2 focuses on Shakespeare's first tetralogy in order to examine historical consciousness, especially the relation of historical trauma to memory and forgetting. Mullaney argues that the trauma of the Protestant Reformation was "marked less by an undesired return of the repressed than by active, often quite remarkable efforts to erase a previously acknowledged past" (99), and he uses Shakespeare's history plays to tease out "the paradox involved when a culture has a 'record' of something it never possessed, a 'memory' of what it has also, to all appearances, entirely forgotten" (101). In staging history as dialogic, incongruous, and configured by "a relativity...