The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.

Providing an overview of health, medicine and medical practitioners in France at the time of Molière, this chapter shows that, unsurprisingly, medical treatment and access to trained practitioners depended on social status and geographical location, although life expectancy for adults was not as uneven as we might expect. While humoral medicine continued to dominate, key advances were accepted over time, and the publication of medical works in the vernacular disseminated knowledge among literate lay persons. The challenge is to recognise what Molière’s audiences would have found credible or risible. His depiction of illness and medicine belongs to the traditions of farce, comedy-ballet and extravagant entertainments, and should not be read as a reflection on his own health or treatment by doctors. Two farces (Le Médecin volant, Le Médecin malgré lui) and a farcical scene in Dom Juan derive broad humour from a character grotesquely impersonating a physician. In contrast, three comedy-ballets (L’Amour médecin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Le Malade imaginaire) feature genuine physicians treating patients whom they seek to exploit for financial gain if they are delusional and gullible. Yet music, dance and entertainment are also artfully contrived to restore health, at least in the world of the theatre.

In this essay I consider how an early modern understanding of the passions might inform the practice and analysis of acting in the theatre today. Taking the idea of being ‘moved’ quite literally, I argue that early modern subjects were ‘moved’ when the humours moved through the body, and the body moved passionately about the world. ‘A woman moved is like a fountain troubled’, says Kate in her final, notorious speech of gendered conformity in The Taming of the Shrew, in which she describes men moving about in the world while women must stay, unmoved, at home. I argue that recent, inward, and static conceptions of the emotions tend to occlude the relationship between the emotional and the political in the theatre now. I suggest instead that rehearsal room consideration of early modern ideas about dynamic emotion/motion might recuperate the political agency and import of emotional life in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In making this argument, I move between analysis of a Shakespearean comedy and a tragedy (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus), considering both plays in performance and making suggestions for rehearsal practices.