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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 and how compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are undermined by anxieties concerning contagion and disease.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
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.
Summary
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 and how compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are undermined by anxieties concerning contagion and disease.
Additional text
This is a gracefully learned book that deserves to be widely read.
