This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. While such scholarship has been important in foregrounding questions related to historical phenomenology and embodiment, it has obscured the extent to which other intellectual and creative frameworks - including religion, philosophy, rhetoric...