Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage

Front matter

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE

Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage

Passion’s Slaves

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS INTRODUCTION

Chapter One ‘A brain that leads my use of anger’: Choler and the Politics of Spatial Production

Chapter Tivo ‘Do you mock old age, you rogues?’ Excessive Laughter, Cruelty and Compassion

Chapter Five Conclusion: Emotional Agendas NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

229 275 295

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the help, encouragement and ideas of many people and organizations. I am extremely grateful to colleagues in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London, particularly to Jen Harvie, Maria Delgado and Nicholas Ridout, who have given invaluable advice and stimulating conversation in their capacities as Directors of Research, and as friends. Nick Ridout played a particularly important role in helping me to know and understand what this book needed to be. I would also like to thank Michele Barrett, Head of English and Drama at Queen Mary, who supported me in my application for a period of research leave to complete the project, all of the School administrative team, particularly Jenny Gault and Beverly Stewart, without whose help with other aspects of my job this book would never have been completed, and Sally Mitchell and the Thinking Writing team for the wonderful Queen Mary Writing Retreats. Many thanks too to Paul Heritage and People’s Palace Projects.

Many thanks also to all at Arden Shakespeare, particularly Margaret Bartley, Emily Hockley and Claire Cooper.

The work of a great many theatre practitioners — actors, directors and designers — is at the heart of this book; I would like to thank and acknowledge the work of all referenced in what follows and to mention here those who have given up their valuable time to talk or write to me in recent years — Jane Collins, Dominic Dromgoole, Peter Farley, Sunil Shanbag, Roxana Silbert. The help and stimulation of conversations with countless friends and colleagues must also be acknowledged; some of those I mention here will already understand the help and stimulation they have given; others may not realize the influence they have had. They include Frances Babbage, Bobby Baker, Roberta Barker, Christian x Acknowledgments

Billing, Warren Boutcher, Christie Carson, Ralph Cohen, Rob Conkie, Pavel Drabek, Sarah Dustagheer, Indira Ghose, Bret Jones, Farah Karim-Cooper, Eric Langley, Clare McManus, Lucy Munro, Marcus Nevitt, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Peter Holland, Paul Prescott, Carol Rutter, Richard Schoch, Catherine Silverstone, Kim Solga, Tiffany Stern, Christine Twite, Tiffany Watt-Smith, Penelope Woods, Jan Wozniak, Zoe Svendsen, and Queen Mary undergraduate students who have taken the class ‘Madness and Theatricality’ during the past five years.

Material in the book has been stimulated and developed through presentation at a range of conferences, including the International Shakespeare Congress; the Shakespeare Association of America (particularly the panel session ‘Academic Pressure and Theatrical Forms’ organized by Jeremy Lopez and Paul Menzer at the 2012 meeting); the AHRC Network Isolated Acts and its 2012 conference ‘Confined Spaces: Considering Madness, Psychiatry, and Performance’, organized by Anna Harpin. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists at the National Theatre Archive, the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust and Shakespeare’s Globe for their help and patience.

Thanks should also go to my mother Hilary Escolme, and my brother John Escolme and his partner Jussi Kalkkinen, for listening and questioning. And lastly my love and thanks to my partner Gary Willis, to whom this book is dedicated and who has not only proof-read it in its entirety but has provided unstinting support and encouragement at the most difficult points in its creation. He had always wondered why writers’ partners got such profuse thanks in the Acknowledgements, and now he knows.

Bridget Escolme, London 2013.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 Caius Martius Coriolanus (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) in Coriolanus (The Roman Tragedies) by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, dir. Ivo van Hove (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2012 © Jan Versweyveld/BAM). Page 4

Figure2 Caius Martius Coriolanus (Jonathan Cake) in Coriolanus, dir. Dominic Dromgoole, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2006 (© Alastair Muir, 4854). Page 22

Figure 3 Caius Martius Coriolanus (Richard Lynch), First Citizen (John Rowley), Second Citizen (Gerald Tyler) in Coriolan/ Us dir. Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes for National Theatre Wales, performed at RAF St Athan, 2012 (© Mark Douet/ National Theatre Wales). Page 48

Figure 4 The Duchess of Malfi (Miranda Henderson) in Ten Thousand Several Doors dir. Jane Collins, Prodigal Theatre at the Nightingale Theatre, Brighton, 2006 (© Matthew Andrews). Page 78

Figure 5 Malvolio (Ted van Griethuysen) in Tivelfih Night (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2008), used to accompany a review of Malvolio’s Revenge (Shakespeare Theatre Company Mock Trial, Sidney Harman Hall, Washington, DC, 2009) (by kind permission of Shakespeare Theatre Company © Carol Rosegg). Page 98

Figure6 Malvolio (Tim Crouch) in J Malvolio, Unicorn Theatre, 2011 (© Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino). Page 103

Figure7 Richard III (Jonjo O’Neill) in Richard ITT dir. Roxana Silbert, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2012 (© Geraint Lewis). Page 191

Figure 8 Hamlet (Rory Kinnear) in Hamlet dir. Nicholas Hytner, National Theatre, 2010 (© Geraint Lewis). Page 207

Introduction

[...] For thou hast been As one in suff’ring all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards Hast ta’en with equal thanks. And blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.

Shakespeare, Hamlet (3.2.66—75)*

Prior to this eulogy on Horatio’s blessed balance of ‘blood and judgement’, Hamlet gives his advice to the players, in which he conjures the embarrassing image of a bad actor in a wig, to warn the actors against ‘tear[ing]a passion to tatters’ (3.2.10) with overemphatic gestures and too much shouting. In both art and life, then, Hamlet seems to privilege cool judgement over hot passion. The description of Horatio as ‘one in suffering all that suffers nothing’ suggests a complete detachment from the emotions produced by ‘fortune’s buffets and rewards’, a stoical paradigm of self-control in the face of the slings and arrows Hamlet has already contemplated in the play (3.1.58). A similar privileging of reason over passion emerges in a range of early modern treatises on the passions. While the apatheia with which Hamlet credits Horatio is regularly dismissed as unnaturally blockish and un-Christian! much of the advice available to the early modern reader on the subject of emotion concerns its restraint and control. The reader is either advised against indulging the passions at all, or told that their expression should be moderated.’ It is brutish to feel nothing — but to feel too much is to reduce oneself to the the level xiv Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage of the unreasoning animal. Whereas today, emotion in Western culture is regarded as an individuating force — when exhorted to ‘express yourself’ it is often emotion one is being asked to ‘express’ — the early modern passions are frequently described as that which makes one less of an individual. The passions are material forces barely under the control of what really makes man human: his sovereign reason. Indeed, the four examples of emotion or emotional affect/effect that head up the chapters of this book — anger, laughter, love and grief — often appear to the early modern philosophical mindset to sit along a continuum at the far end of which is madness. Anger is a potentially murderous mania; the mad laugh unpredictably and inappropriately; love leads to the sickness of ‘love melancholy’; grief is the prime producer of melancholic insanity.

Hamlet’s ideal of the perfect actor and his paradigm for the perfect, dispassionate friend are not the same. True, in advising the Players against ‘anything so o’erdone’ (3.2.21) as gestural air-sawing and vocal passion-tearing, he uses the imagery of weather in a similar vein to early modern sermons on the restraint of the passions in everyday life. For Thomas Playfere in his sermon on The Mean in Mourning (1595), crying is compared to the weather: too much weeping is like an economically unproductive, physically destructive storm:

The water when it is quiet, and calm, bringeth in all manner of merchandise, but when the sea storms, and roars too much, then the very ships do howl and cry. The air looking clearly, and cheerfully refresheth all things, but weeping too much, that is, raining too much, as in Noah’s flood, it drowns the whole world.

‘In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness’, insists Hamlet (3.2.58) as he holds forth on the actor’s craft. However, Hamlet does suggest that this temperance of theatrical expression is somehow to be found tn ‘the whirlwind of your passion’ rather than that there should be no such whirlwind in the theatre, whereas his praise of his friend implies that Horatio has

Introduction XV found the state of perfect stoical apatheia, in which misfortune and luck are regarded with equally dispassionate equanimity.

Hamlet’s first encounter with the Players after their arrival at Elsinore (2.2) seems to sit even less easily with his praise of the man who is not a slave to his passions. While Polonius finds the First Player’s tears for Hecuba just too much (2.2.499, 520-1), Hamlet is delighted with the actor’s theatrical production of emotion and takes the tearful delivery of the Trojan battle narrative as a rebuke to his own lack of passionate action in avenging his father. So it is not that Hamlet thinks that passionate expression is only for actors: he takes the actor’s example as one he should follow in his own life. Were he able to permit passion to overwhelm him as this actor can, birds of prey would be at his uncle’s corpse already (2.2.581—2). And should the Player have had similar passionate ‘motive and [...] cue’ (561) for his speech as Hamlet has to support his revenge, far from turning the Player into an embarrassing, overacting Herod of a performer,

[...] He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears.

(562-6)

Here, over-passionate acting would be ‘overdone’ not in the sense of bombastic and implausible; it would rather be beyond effective, too much to bear, storm-like in a way that seems impossibly impressive in its excess. If the court were filled with men like Horatio, there would be no crimes like Claudius’s, governed by lust for sex and power. But there would also be no theatre, no performance like the player’s to impress Hamlet — and no one driven to passionate action in a cause either wrong or right in social life. The man who is not passion’s slave does not make a very successful dramatic hero; Horatio’s ability to suppress rather than to act upon his emotions, to govern himself entirely by his reason, would mean no star-cross’d lovers, enraged fathers, jealous husbands, furious warriors, jovial and self-indulgent xvi Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage drunks or murdering uncles. In praising the actor’s art, Hamlet seems to be suggesting that there are times when people need to be as passionate in their expression and action as actors.

This is a book about ‘excessive’ emotion in the theatre in which Shakespeare worked, in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and in the productions of those plays in performance today. It inevitably poses questions about what emotional excess actually is: how much or what kind of emotional expression is too much? What kinds or expressions of emotion are considered legitimate in theatrical culture and social life, what kinds or expressions of emotion are considered worthy of shame, repression and punishment? How does our own expression and reception of emotion — in the theatre and, more broadly, in our everyday lives — lead us to interpret the work of the early modern dramatists? In this book I will be exploring the cultural politics of emotion in Shakespeare’s plays — and historicizing the ways in which we reproduce and receive them in the theatre. Writers and thinkers of the early modern period had all kinds of things to say about what we might call the emotions; a significant amount of it was negative, as Hamlet suggests in his positive evaluation of the reasonable Horatio. Yet people regularly came to the theatre to watch people laugh inappropriately, get murderously angry, fall madly in love and grieve inconsolably. This book contends that the early modern theatre is a place where audiences went to watch extremes of emotion and to consider when those extremes became excesses. It suggests that because of the social and political significance of the passions in early modern drama, and because of the ways in which emotion is structured politically in the plays, they are a particularly rich site for discussions of how our own society conceives of, celebrates and regulates emotion.

EMOTION THEN AND NOW

The early modern period may have valued the expression or display of emotion in very different ways from twenty-firstcentury Western culture but the differences are not simple to

Introduction xvii define. A visitor to, say, one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s theatres in the UK today might regard it as just one site of legitimate and desired emotional expression. That audience member is likely to have been interpellated,* by films and television dramas, by advertising, by the therapeutic community, and in certain educational contexts, into what one might call an emotionally expressive being, one whose modes of emotional expression define the self. He or she may have been told by his or her schoolteachers that while expressing one’s own emotions is valuable, the dramatic poetry in which Shakespeare expressed emotion is all the more so for its profundity and universality. If the kinds of anxieties around influence and mimesis expressed by the Puritan anti-theatrical tracts? have lasted at all over 400 years, they have shifted on to other media — films and computer games. Early modern drama, particularly that of Shakespeare, is overwhelmingly regarded by today’s English-speaking cultural authorities as good for you, partly because it is supposedly so good at depicting characters’ emotional expression. A recent scientific and educational agenda around ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘emotional literacy’ has privileged emotion as part of a rationally regulated, functioning society, complicating once again a binary of reason and emotion that appears never to have been conceived of as simple in the first place. Shakespeare has played a part in this agenda, in the classroom and in training for the workplace.°

The theatre of Shakespeare’s London was clearly valued by the state’s highest authorities, yet it also held something of a precarious legal position.’ If Hamlet’s awe at the First Player’s tears for Hecuba are anything to go by, the passions it portrayed were an essential part of its draw, despite the anxiety around the passions demonstrated by some of the treatises I will examine here. Are sermons such as Thomas Playfere’s (see p. xiv), which describes too much weeping as destructive nature out of control, pointlessly attempting to legislate against the emotional outpourings of an essentially passionate culture which best expressed itself through its theatre? Were attempts to police the emotions through tracts and sermons no more successful xviii Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage than the repeatedly reimposed sumptuary laws of Elizabeth’s reign, which uncover a society determined to indulge in sartorial excesses as much as an authority eager to rein them in? A number of recent film and television productions in the UK have concerned themselves with the supposedly unbridled passions of this period. Popular characterizations of the “Tudors and Stuarts’ in television drama and documentary have suggested that if our own culture is exhorted to greater and greater outpourings of emotion, Shakespeare’s contemporaries were even more ready to demonstrate the passions (particularly lust and anger, if Michael Hurst’s The Tudors is anything to go by).? A documentary still on air at the time of writing, Jan Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip," has characterized early modern England as a culture of wildly demonstrative shows of both anger and affection, in comparison to the repressed rigours of Victorian Stoicism that developed through the age of empire and in the English Public School (see p. 27). In the academy, 2011 has seen the publication of Richard Strier’s monograph, The Unrepentant Renaissance; this rigorously historicist work demonstrates ways in which affect and emotion were highly valued in the dramatic, literary and religious works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and points to a thriving anti-Stoical position in the art and society of the period.'' Here, I too am going to assume that the expression of extreme emotion was something that people came to the theatre to see and hear — to take pleasure in, in fact. But rather than suggesting that it is completely mistaken to read anxiety around emotional expression in the cultural products of the early modern period, I want to argue that the theatre was a place for pushing at the boundaries of what society regarded as the legitimate expression of emotion, for interrogating and debating those boundaries.

Having begun to make claims for what this book will do in terms of early modern scholarship, I should state that one of its central purposes is to consider how actors and audiences deal with ideas about emotional excess in early modern drama today. Whether visitors to the theatre recognized a broadly similar spectrum of emotions in what they saw and heard on the early modern stage

Introduction xix as they do now, or whether the different historical conditions in which the plays were produced and received make it impossible for us even to conceive of how early modern audiences may have felt in response to the emotions they saw and heard depicted on stage, my aim has been to draw the reader into a debate around what the theatre can do today with these historical/cultural differences and similarities. I am particularly interested in questions of how early modern audiences judged or valued the emotions they heard and saw performed and whether we judge or value differently. The language of the plays, the dramatic and literary traditions and conventions upon which they drew, the dramaturgy of the plays and the ways in which they were rhetorically structured to engage audiences, the architectural structures in which audiences were invited to engage with emotion expressed in theatrical fictions, the ideas circulating in early modern writings on the passions — all these cultural phenomena may be read in terms of what it might have been possible to feel in the early modern theatre. But if it is possible to make informed speculations about what kind of emotional expression was considered laudable or shameful, pitiable or risible, enjoyably or horribly excessive, how do we put those speculations to work in the theatre today? I hope that this book can be part of a dialogue between the theatre and the academy about the ways in which we receive and remake the cultural artefacts of the past.

EMOTIONAL. EXCESS. SHAKESPEAREAN

Emotional

All of the terms in the main title of this book are politically and historically contentious. The first Oxford English Dictionary (OED) citation of the adjective ‘emotional’ (as I have used it in the title here, to mean ‘Of or relating to the emotions’) is not until 1831.” The OED’s first citation of the word ‘emotion’ to mean ‘an agitation of mind, an excited mental state’ is from 1602, though the common equivalent term to ‘emotion’ as it is currently conceived was ‘passion’ and even to name this as an ‘equivalent’

Xx Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage is to open oneself to the accusation of anachronism. As we will see, historians of the emotions have suggested that the shift from passion to emotion in common usage over 200 years reflects a shift in underlying concept, indeed a shift in somatic, psychological and cultural experience. The OED’s 1602 citation does place ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ in interesting proximity:

1602 T. LODGE tr. Josephus Wks. XV. iv. 388 The king entred into a strange passion...and in this emotion or rage of jealousie [Fr. en ceste fureur de ialousie] hardly contained he himselfe from killing his wife.

This might suggest that a shift is beginning to occur from the use of emotion to mean ‘political agitation or unrest’ (first OED citation 1562), or ‘movement, disturbance or perturbation’ (first OED citation 1594), to its current definition as of ‘any strong mental or instinctive feeling, as pleasure, grief, hope, fear, etc., deriving esp from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationship with others’. In 1602, passions are movements, disturbances, perturbations of the mind. However, Lodge’s use of the word ‘emotion’ in this context suggests that the word ‘passion’ has not yet accrued the positive and subjectivity-defining connotations that the word ‘emotion’ has in many English speaking cultures today. Thomas Dixon has pointed to anachronistic pitfalls of assuming that terms such as emotion and emotional, passion and passionate, feeling, affection and expression mean the same across history.'* Neither can we assume that each of these terms has an equivalent in every historical period — that we are all feeling and expressing the same things across 400 years and simply naming them differently.

Here it is worth noting that the field of the history of the emotions contains an epistemological tension: broadly, between a discipline such as my own, namely Theatre and Performance Studies, which is interested in the ways in which language and history (arguably) constitute meaning, and the Sciences, whose overriding research imperative is to discover things about the material world which (arguably) pertain throughout history.

Introduction xxi

These two broad modes of inquiry need not entirely contradict one another. It is mainly only in the comic novel now that poststructuralist Humanities scholars are still be found berating scientists for their essentialism.!* However, if a scientist were to demonstrate to me, as I have no doubt she could, that no matter what a seventeenth-century man’s social class or religious belief was, he would still be flooded with adrenalin when fearful, I would reply that this material reality is not necessarily material to my interest in the cultural phenomena that produce fear, and legitimize or punish its expression. I am not so much interested in what is physically produced in moments when human beings are in the grip of strong passions. Perhaps it is humoral imbalance; unsurprisingly, writing in 2013, I do not believe this, though, like Michael Schoenfeldt, I often find that the language of Galenic medicine ‘yields an [intuitively plausible] account of what it feels like to experience certain corporeal phenomena’. Or it could be or hormonal and neurological activity, the science of which seems to me to be convincing. But I am more interested in which expressions or demonstrations of emotion are considered to be reasonable and legitimate in different historical and theatrical cultures, and which excessive, disapproved, shameful. I am interested in the binaries of reason and excess as they existed in the early modern period and as we read them today, and in the resultant sets of expressions and repressions, displays and hidings of emotion that are staged in the theatre and in everyday life. Why use Emotional Excess in this book’s title, then, when the early moderns would not have understood the phrase? Why not ‘Passionate Excess’, for example, to match early modern treatises on the ‘passions’, and to fit Hamlet’s line from my subtitle? Aside from the issue of what ‘Passionate’ might mean to the reader today,” I want to retain, throughout this book, the sense of ‘motion’ in ‘emotion’ with which the early moderns would have been familiar and to take quite literally and theatrically the early idea that when in a heightened emotional state, we are ‘moved’. Early modern figurations of the passions, as Thomas Dixon has pointed out, were founded upon Aristotelian concepts of rest and xxii Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage motion, taken up by Aquinas in his explication of the ‘irascible’ and ‘concupiscible’ passions! and drawn upon by the authors of the early modern treatises, such as Wright in his Passions of the Mind in General (see pp. 13—14, 113-14). I am interested here in the interrelationship of movement and emotion in the production of early modern drama today, and how attention to what those things meant in the theatre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries might give us interesting things to do and feel in the theatre today.

The first cited uses of the word emotion, then, before it came to be explicitly associated with human feeling, suggest political as well as somatic turbulence and movement. Underpinning all the examples of theatrical passions explored in this book is a sense in which all the passions are propulsive and political. Many of the early modern treatises on the passions figure them as turbulent movements it is impossible to control. Patience in the face of adversity is stasis, passion is movement (although melancholy, as we will see, produces a stasis of its own; see pp. 197-8). As such, the passions are a potential threat to social stability. Today, as the early moderns did, we speak of being ‘moved’ — but imagine someone being ‘moved’ by a news story or a fiction and I doubt the image conjured contains much actual movement. While ‘moved’ and ‘moving’ have become metaphors for a compassionate, often sorrowful, feeling ‘towards’ a person or incident, that ‘towards’ has lost its sense of direction, whereas ‘moved’ as it is used in the early modern drama is much more active: it can contain the same sense of compassionate feeling but usually results in someone being moved to do something. Burgundy’s letter explaining his re-defection to the French in / Henry VI reads:

I have, upon especial cause,

Mov’d with compassion of my country’s wrack.

Together with the pitiful complaints

Of such as your oppression feeds upon,

And join’d with Charles, the rightful King of France. (4.1.55-60)

Introduction xxiii

Speaking of his father’s past support of Bolingbroke, Hotspur relates that ‘My father, in kind heart and pity moved,/Swore him assistance and perform’d it too’ (7 Henry IV, 4.3.64—-5). One can be moved to compassionate deeds and moved to angry ones, and even where there is no obvious move to action as a result of inner motion/emotion, being moved is associated with action and movement. ‘A woman moved is like a fountain troubled’ (5.2.143) says Katherine in her final speech of capitulation to her role as perfect wife. While your husband is obliged to move about the world for you, she argues, committing ‘his body/To painful labour both by sea and land,/To watch the night in storms, the day in cold’, the woman is fortunate enough to lie ‘warm at home, secure and safe’ (5.2.149-52). Women, at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, should stay ‘unmoved’ both mentally and physically —and it is difficult to extricate the two in early modern English. When Tullus Aufidius sees Caius Martius Coriolanus’ tears in the face of his family’s pleas and hears Martius give up the attack on Rome, Aufidius responds by telling Martius very simply, ‘I was mov’d withal’ (5.3.197). But in performance, Aufidius is rarely portrayed as ‘moved’ in the modern sense of empathetic tearfulness. His response is ambiguous — and in fact he is moved to have Coriolanus killed. Passion is motion/emotion in the early modern drama and often leads to passionate action. Emotion is thus a political issue for this period, in a way that has been masked by Western culture’s current tendency to think of emotion as private and ‘personal’. In what follows I consider ways in which the production of early modern drama today can re-politicize emotion for a modern audience.

My other reason for the use of the term ‘emotional’ in this title is connected to the equally contestable term ‘the Shakespearean stage’, by which I mean not only the stage of Shakespeare’s historical period but the stages which continue to produce Shakespeare’s work. This book is an exercise in linking theatre and cultural history to the ways in which we perform plays from the early modern period today. To make historical comparison, one inevitably start with the discourse through xxiv Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage which one understands one’s own moment, even as one acknowledges its partial inadequacy to the period studied. Using the words ‘emotion’ and ‘emotional’ acknowledges that I am writing about what audiences today would think of as having to do with ‘emotion’. Having argued thus, I do not deny that the term ‘emotional has a problematic — because possibly misleading — history in the theatre. It is at the centre of a misunderstanding about acting — particularly about acting 400-year-old plays — which suggests that acting is all about how characters feel about things. But to re-politicize the emotional, to re-inflect it with its early modern sense of movement, I am going to start with this term, to which audiences in the West today feel they have a close relationship and which many assume speaks of something universal, transhistorical. I too read something transhistorical in this term — its sense of motion, even though that sense is lost to everyday usage. As we will see (pp. 193, 270n. 41), for a significant group of directors of Shakespeare today, powerful, engaging acting is underpinned not by ‘emotion’ in its current common sense of what we ‘feel’ about people and circumstances, or in the Stanislavskian sense of emotion memory (the generation of emotion for a character through remembering one’s own emotions) but achieved through action, as Stanislavski also argued.” Stanislavski’s technique of finding objectives for units of dramatic text — verbs that suggest what a character is trying to do with words — was intended to produce authentic emotion in the actor, readable by an audience. Read Stanislavski and his proponents and one finds a spiritual rhetoric which valorizes emotion and the inner life in ways that suggest a very different understanding of human subjectivity from an early modern one.” But his method of physical action propels performers towards and away from one another, like the concupisciple and irrascible passions of classical and early modern thought. Whether one moves away or towards, stays or goes, is of both political and theatrical importance and my analysis of theatrical emotion here is underpinned by this sense of emotion as movement.