| We are all human, but we must make the choice to be humane. No playwright understood this conscious metamorphosis---from what we are, to what we will ourselves to be, and to become---with greater lucidity nor implemented it with finer precision, than Shakespeare. Key to these movements is what I call a theory of "theatrical empathy" best recognized and examined as a mode of performance which concentrates upon intricate affective set-pieces or "laboratories" within the plays themselves that---via acts of "purifying" violence (psychological, phenomenological, emotional, etc.)---provoke the audience's reactions. The prompting emotion most significant to this study is empathy, a passionate mode of feeling with, and not simply for, an individual or a collective. Responding to these points of intensity through the psychic and kinesthetic experience of being at the theater or systems of close reading and identification felt and imagined as play-text is analyzed, members of the audience transform from spectators watching only "for entertainment" into "empathetic witnesses" who valorize their affective responses to onstage performance as valid practice of interpretation. My dissertation argues that Shakespeare's magnificent use of "empathetic witnessing" proves how words and performance "work" as affective forces manipulating and contouring the social and emotional constitutions of Early Modern, and modern audiences, thus auguring and inspiring Enlightenment discourses on "fellow feeling," and our modern notion of empathy as a positive, "pro-social" response. As quintessence, Shakespeare's writing communicates to us how to elect this choice to be, or not to be, human/e. Tracing a chronological trajectory across the genres of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy proper and I anticipate, romance, chapters analyze the relationship between violent spectacle and "empathetic witnessing," "performative anamorphosis," empathetic surprise and viewing "awry" in The Taming of the Shrew, rituals of empathy in The Merchant of Venice, empathetic sadism and "wounding words" in Othello, and the structure of ethical empathy in Coriolanus. |
