Description
Book SynopsisThis exploration of Shakespeare's engagement with compassion brings Shakespeare's classical literary heritage into conversation with key contemporary social and political debates addressing race, gender, sexuality and the relationship between humans and animals.
Drawing on both the history of emotions and Shakespearean classical studies, the author argues that Shakespeare's compassion both very precisely expresses his own historical and cultural moment and is at the same time the product of his close and continuous engagement with literature from the classical past. Through close readings of key plays, including Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear, and the main classical sources above all, Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses this book argues that Shakespeare's dramatization of compassion, far from expressing a sense of universal empathy, reveals a complex early modern emotion available to be solicited, m
