Shakespeare’s Compassion: Emotion and the Classics on the Early Modern Stage

This 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, manipulated and even monopolized as a discursive vehicle for the exclusion of others.

It posits that Shakespeare inherited an understanding of the social efficacy of emotion from classical literature, and this informed the explorations of compassion in his work. As well as drawing on a number of further examples from other plays across the Shakespeare canon, this book situates Shakespeare’s thinking about compassion in relation to plays written for the early modern stage by contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger.