Author’s Forum: The Reformation of Emotions in The Age of Shakespeare

Literati is proud to be the bookseller for the Author’s Forum presentation of The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare: A conversation with Steven Mullaney and Doug Trevor.

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith. As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.

Steven Mullaney is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England.

Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space. He is an associate professor of Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan.

The Author’s Forum is a collaboration between the U-M Institute for the Humanities, University Library, & Ann Arbor Book Festival. Additional support for this event provided by the Department of English Language and Literature.