Chapter 11 - Feeling Feelings in Early Modern England

Summary

Affect theory and early modern texts face each other across a substantial divide. The period had a discourse on “the passions”; but passion was defined in cognitive terms, where affect is usually said to be like a vibration, an unconscious feeling, an intensity. This essay argues that there is an aspect of the discourse on passion that is hospitable to affect, and may even constitute the earliest trace of a theory of affect. It turns to rhetoric and poetics for an account of the communication of non-conceptual feeling. And it uses Gloucester’s line “I see it feelingly” in Lear to suggest that Shakespeare’s interest in the multiple resonances of “touch” or “feeling” represents an effort to think affectivity in ways not licensed by extant discourses on passion. Early modern drama is legible as an inventory of instances of affective transmission, conceptualized in ways that go beyond anything sayable in explicit theories of the passions.