Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies

Ill Communications

Eric Langley

Explores the idea of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange in Shakespeare's work especially in relation to disease and contagion
Suggests that a key motivation for Shakespeare's interest in notions of individual identity, privacy, and subjective autonomy may reflect his anxiety about the dangers of interaction in a plague ravaged London
Sheds new light on Shakespeare's interaction with medical, religious, and philosophical contexts
Offers discussion of a broad range of Shakespeare plays, but also pays close attention to Troilus and Cressida, The Winter's Tale, Coriolanus, King Lear, Cymbeline, All's Well That Ends Well, The Tempest, and Two Gentleman of Verona

Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies

Ill Communications

Eric Langley

Description

Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a world preoccupied by communicable sickness, where every contact risks contraction, where every touch could be the touch of plague, where kind interaction could facilitate cruel infection, and where to commiserate is to risk 'miserable dependence'?

Counting the cost of compassion, this study of Shakespeare's plays and poetry analyses how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of his characters who find themselves precariously implicated within a world of ill communications. It examines the influence of scientific thought upon the history of the subject, and explores how Shakespeare—alive to both the importance and dangers of sympathetic communication—articulates an increasing sense of both the pragmatic benefits of monadic thought, emotional isolation, and subjective quarantine, while offering his account of the considerable loss involved when we lose faith in vulnerable, tender, and open existence.

Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies

Ill Communications

Eric Langley

Part One: Sympathy
1:Introducing Contagious Sympathies: Shakespeare at the Limits of Compassion
2:Communicating Sympathies: Shakespearean Anxieties of Influency
Postscript. The Dialogue of One: Self-relation in Montaigne and Descartes
Part Two: The Bittersweet
3:Shakespeare's Pharmacy: Bittersweet Sympathies/Sweet-bitter Antipathies
4:Plagued by Kindness: Othello, in Communication
Part Three: Tenderness
5:The Sight of Others' Anguish: Shakespeare's Tender Sympathies
6:Self-contentation: In Communication and Incommunication
Conclusion. Tender Embassies: Returned to Sender

Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies

Ill Communications

Eric Langley

Author Information

Eric Langley, Lecturer in Shakespeare, University College London

Eric Langley is a lecturer in Shakespeare at UCL having previously worked at Leeds, St Andrews, and Royal Holloway. Publishing academic writing on Shakespeare and period conceptions of interiority, his first monograph Narcissism And Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, and he has published a number of scholarly articles on early-modern optics, eyesight, conceptions of disease, atomist thought, and Renaissance erotica. His first poetry collection, Raking Light, was published by Carcanet in 2017 and was nominated for the Felix Dennis award for best debut at that year's Forward Prizes.

Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies

Ill Communications

Eric Langley

Reviews and Awards

"Langley's book contributes important insights to numerous areas of study. Work on early modern subjectivity, the body, medicine, and the sensory nature of human interaction within early modern culture would benefit from engaging with the ideas presented in Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies...the readeris always helpfully alert to the wider debates that surround the fascinating issues that are raised throughout this richly researched book." - Victoria Sparey, University of Exeter, Modern Language Review

"This is a gracefully learned book that deserves to be widely read." - Michael Schoenfeldt, The Review of English Studies