Feeling Shakespearian

In The Anatomy of Melancholy the seventeenth-century scholar Robert Burton explained how fear functioned as a vehicle for bodily contagion, through which anxious bystanders could fall victim to infection: ‘if they see but another man tremble, giddy, or sick of some fearful disease, their apprehension and feare is so strong in this kind, that they will have the same disease’. For Burton – a thoroughly Galenic head-shrinker – emotions were intricately connected to health. The body’s balance of the four humours (distinct elemental fluids) determined one’s physical well-being and mental equilibrium. And our passions were not simply our own: the outside world and – crucially – other people influenced our humoral make-up and hence our inward feelings. ‘Passion, I see, is catching’, observes Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Allison P. Hobgood takes this fact of early modern psychology seriously, and it is the basis for her excellent study of playgoing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hobgood’s book is one of several in the past few years that has sought to explore the experience of seeing a play in Shakespeare’s London (Charles Whitney’s Early Responses to Renaissance Drama and Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama by Jennifer Low and Nova Myhill are both important precursors), a growth area despite the dearth of evidence testifying to the subjective experience of Renaissance audience members (theatre historians can count on the fingers of very few hands the number of extant printed or manuscript accounts of a visit to an English playhouse).

Hobgood’s solution is to conduct an analysis that borrows productively from a range of disciplines, broadening her field of study and digging along the ‘faultlines between early modern humoral theory, philosophical and medical treatises, pro and anti-theatrical literature and drama’ to offer a new and startling argument about spectatorship: that in the Renaissance playhouse, the passions of the playgoers had an impact on the show. The audience participated in ‘affective interplay’ with the actors on stage, an exchange of passions that was simultaneously thrilling, unsettling, invigorating and debilitating. As Hobgood concedes, on their own terms those anti-theatrical tub-thumpers who inveighed against the devilish playhouse were probably on to something: going to the theatre really was bad for your health.

The core of the book is a set of literary case-studies, but the introduction, ‘Pondering Playgoers’, is an elegant theoretical preamble in which Hobgood negotiates her way around the sometimes competing principles of affect theory and historicism. Drawing on the notion of ‘in-between-ness’ articulated by Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, Hobgood sets out to examine the processes of emotional exchange as they occurred between early modern performer and spectator. But while modern theories about affectivity ‘lurk palimpsestically’ beneath the surface of the book, Hobgood’s concern is with the way early modern people thought about their feelings. In this pre-Cartesian, pre-Enlightenment world, passions were catching, and ‘affective contagion’ was a real and present danger. Playgoers were thus not passive recipients of emotional stimulation, but engaged participants in an act of passionate creation.

Hobgood offers enticingly novel readings of some well-known early modern plays: Macbeth is a work that seeks to induce stimulating dread – fearsickness – in its audience through a process of ‘titillating collaboration’; Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy relies on ‘affective resonance’ to ensure the audience feels Hieronimo’s encompassing grief as excruciatingly as he does; Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness performs ‘a narrative about unsuccessful humoral governance and the dangers of unruly affection’ (among the better defences I have read of this extremely nasty play); Twelfth Night, in the gulling of Malvolio, entices the audience to partake in an act of public humiliation of which they will come to be thoroughly ashamed; and Ben Jonson, long characterized as a champion of cool satiric intellectualism, is rehabilitated as a playwright deeply concerned with how his plays make his audience feel (although it is of course imperative for Jonson that they feel...