The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney

Reviewed by: The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney Lauren Robertson THE REFORMATION OF EMOTIONS IN THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE. By Steven Mullaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. 216. In The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Steven Mullaney situates the early modern commercial theatre of London amid the cultural fissures and fractures caused by the Protestant Reformation. His central argument is that the theatre became a site in this period for audiences collectively to explore the affective consequences of the uncertain and contradictory world in which they found themselves following the whirlwind of ideological changes enacted by the Reformation. Bringing a provocatively original approach to a seemingly well-worn topic, The Reformation of Emotions is a remarkable attempt to engage sensitively, through a focus on the theatre, with the lived, embodied experiences of an Elizabethan society seeking to come to terms with the recent rupture of past and present. Although his work is historically informed throughout, its methodology might more appropriately be called "emblematic," a term Mullaney employs early on in the monograph. He links representative emblems from a vast array of time periods and cultures—the untranslatable sadness captured by the Polish tęsknota, the unwritten histories of the Gonja tribe of northern Ghana, the 1549 destruction of the charnel house at St. Paul's—to his nuanced readings of early modern drama. For Mullaney, these emblems both work as analogies to Elizabethan feeling and invoke the necessarily historically and culturally determined character of social emotions themselves. The emblems, in other words, are at once like and not like the particular object of Mullaney's study, and their repeated appearances in the book keep in view what he describes as the "unanswerable but necessary question" that prompts his approach: "What did it feel like to be an Elizabethan?" (17). The very urgency of such a question, despite the acknowledged impossibility of answering it, creatively motivates Mullaney's emblematic methodology; the associative leaps he makes in each chapter evoke the affective clashes, gaps, and cohesions that marked the Elizabethan social body following the Reformation. Mullaney begins his introduction by deploying Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling in order to examine the theatre as a space designed precisely to engage Elizabethans' emotions at a social level. As he memorably puts it, the theatre was "custom-built ... to plumb and sound out the gaps that had been opened in the Elizabethan social body as a consequence of the English Reformation" (46). Mullaney's use of Williams's concept becomes a broader justification for the theatre as a site for cultural production (rather than mere reflection) that was often necessarily messy, uncertain, and indirect. In The Reformation of Emotions, the theatre emerges as an extra-discursive setting for the exploration of ideas and subject positions inextricably bound up in felt, lived experience, although not yet possible to articulate. In his first chapter, Mullaney argues that the theatre engaged its spectators by employing what he terms "affective irony" (51), a representative mode that went both beyond and against mimesis. Pointing to moments in which the effect of characters' actions seems precisely not to accord with their own expressed emotions, Mullaney advocates for attention to what performance does "beyond the discursive and mimetic dimensions of the stage" (61). With a nuanced reading of Marcus's speech about the raped and mutilated Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Mullaney demonstrates that Marcus's narcissism productively alienates spectators by jostling them out of their own affective subject positions and bringing them closer to Lavinia. In this chapter, Mullaney also makes an important intervention in critical discourses that have relied heavily, in recent decades, upon Galenic humoralism to explicate the representation of emotions on the early modern stage; taking the movement of bodily fluids as a "literal articulation of how it felt [End Page 123] to be an Elizabethan" (57), he warns, closes off the metaphorical, anti-mimetic possibilities of the dramatic representation of the emotions. Mullaney moves in the second chapter to consider the losses produced by the Reformation on a social level; this "structural amnesia" (100), as he terms it, was the paradoxical recognition of a

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