Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

Передня обкладинка
University of Chicago Press, 15 лист. 2010 р. - 288 стор.
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.

Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

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Зміст

Introduction
1
The Ecology of the Passions in Hamlet and Othello
25
Shakespeares Maidens and the Caloric Economy
77
Reading Shakespeares Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier
135
Male Passions and the Problem of Individuation
189
Epilogue
243
Bibliography
247
Index
261
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Сторінка 107 - Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels...
Сторінка 70 - Yet could I bear that too ; well, very well : — But there, where I have garner'd up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up...
Сторінка 56 - Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world : now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on.
Сторінка 141 - No, faith, not a jot ; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: As thus; Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust ; the dust is earth ; of earth we make loam : And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel...
Сторінка 114 - Ay, there's the point. — As, — to be bold with you,— Not to affect many proposed matches, Of her own clime, complexion, and degree ; Whereto, we see, in all things nature tends : Foh ! one may smell, in such, a will ' most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.
Сторінка 65 - Twere now to be most happy ; for, I fear, My soul hath her content so absolute, That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.
Сторінка 49 - I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be the devil : and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, — As he is very potent with such spirits, — Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds More relative than this: — the play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
Сторінка 54 - ... play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
Сторінка 107 - A maiden never bold ; Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion Blush'd at herself : and she, — in spite of nature.

Про автора (2010)

Gail Kern Paster is the former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare and The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England.

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