This ambitious collection of essays takes as its starting point that “for classical and early modern writers, literature's potent shaping impact on its audiences through their minds, emotions, souls, and bodies was its most striking and most discussed characteristic” (25). In their introduction, Katherine Craik and Tanya Pollard argue that despite the considerable amount of recent criticism focusing on early modern ideas of the body, the serious interdisciplinary work on emotion and affect, and the interest in the impact of both text and performance on its audiences, “our longstanding habit of separating bodily responses from intellectual reasoning has deterred critics from exploring their interdependence” (4–5). Focusing on early modern notions of the effect of passions on the humoral body, with its closely interrelated mental and physiological qualities; Hellenistic medical and literary theory; and sacred rhetoric, the introduction attempts to recover the “shared conceptual and discursive vocabulary” (8) of early modern writers who discuss the affective experience of reading and seeing plays and poetry. The collection includes essays from scholars with a variety of specializations in the literature of early modern England and is divided into three sections: “Plays,” “Playhouses,” and “Poems”; as these titles imply, the collection includes essays that employ an unusually broad range of genres and methodologies in an effort to explore the early modern understanding of the affective shaping power of literature.

The first section, “Plays,” consists of three readings of single plays, focusing on the representations of the ways characters are affected by what they see, hear, and read, and considering the possible effect on the theater audiences. Allison P. Hobgood argues that fear, the dominant emotion in Macbeth, was understood as a contagious sickness, and she suggests that the play exacerbates fear for the audience rather than mitigating it and offers both the potential for self-discipline and the pleasure of its absence. Allison K. Deutermann suggests that in Othello, Iago's refusal to confess overturns the audience's generic expectations and denies them the possibility of purgation that both religious confession and revenge tragedy depend upon. In the last essay in the section, on Twelfth Night, Douglas Trevor presents an intriguing re-reading of Malvolio, suggesting that his determined assertion of the evidence of his senses in the Sir Topas scene marks his suffering as that of a Christian martyr.

The second section, “Playhouses,” explores how playwrights worked to affect their audiences. Pollard reads Hamlet's language of pregnancy in relation to her claim that early modern medical and literary theories suggest that tragic emotion can most effectively be embodied on stage and transferred to the audience by female characters who have “experienced the physical and emotional purgation of childbirth” (93). Moving to a very different type of sensation, Hilary M. Nunn explores the presentation of food in early modern comedy, with particular attention to The Taming of the Shrew and Old Fortunatus, and argues that it functions as both spiritual and physical temptation that might have provoked hunger and increased profits from the concessions sold during performances. In the next essay Matthew Steggle analyzes early modern applause, drawing attention to its volume and its frequency and making the compelling claim that “through applause, audience members participate, with their bodies, in constructing the performance event” (130). Finally, Thomas Rist analyzes the idea of catharsis in terms of purgation, in both its medical and religious senses, and suggests both the importance and the limits of Arisotle's Poetics as a way of making sense of early modern drama.

The final section, “Poems,” considers how poetry affects its readers. William Kerwin discusses the aggressive, stinging characteristics of the epigram and the way that early modern epigrams combine “mental movement and public movement” (168), allowing the readers to experience and be shaped by oppositional voices in a particularly urban manner. Margaret Healy considers the complex notion of fancy in early modern literary criticism, and she suggests the extent to which fancy is presented as both more affectively efficacious than reason and alarmingly difficult to distinguish from madness. In the last essay of the section, Michael Shoenfelt analyzes Shakespeare's presentation of pain in Lucrece and King Lear, emphasizing the early modern understanding of pain as necessary and inevitable and tracing Shakespeare's exploration of the palliative possibilities and limitations of art.

The collection ends with a useful afterword by Bruce R. Smith that reminds us that “sensations and affects demand that we deal with them on their own terms, and those terms do not fall easily into the linear logic of syntax” (217). This conclusion suggests both the enormous potential and the considerable challenges of the approach taken by this volume. The collection's attempt to reintroduce the production of feeling, which has a number of differing meanings, as a central category of literary analysis, leads to some truly illuminating new readings; Trevor and Healy's essays are particularly valuable in reading against dominant critical assumptions. It also creates a context for exploring how early modern experiences of particular sensations—applause and pain in particular—might have differed from modern experience in startling and fascinating ways. Some of these ideas appear in multiple essays and contexts, leading to some rich insights into early modern ideas of contagion, purgation, and religious affect.

The topic of this collection is by its nature imaginative and speculative; while all of these essays are carefully researched and contextualized, some raise questions about how, or whether, certain types of claims can be supported and what sort of evidence convinces. As literary criticism becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, the methodological questions raised here become increasingly complex and important. This thoughtful and timely collection offers a valuable starting point for a promising approach to the literature of the early modern period.