This chapter argues that the religious policies of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) are not limited to its frequently noted anti-Puritan satire but are also concerned with Catholic dissent and, more generally, the question of the theatre’s legitimacy and effect on its audiences. The play’s parody of martyrdom arguably reflects the discourse of pseudo-martyrdom to which the Oath of Allegiance controversy had given rise after the Gunpowder Plot and which deeply divided English Catholics, who faced a choice between recusancy, conformity, or some form of semi-conformity. Jonson’s satirical portrayal of Puritans who unsuccessfully attempt to remain ‘religious in midst of the profane’ thus also speaks to Catholic concerns that conformity may eventually lead to an erosion of dissent. This chapter further argues that the Pauline theology of things indifferent is fundamental to the play’s ideological structure and informs both its treatment of religious dissent and the legitimacy of the theatre. Despite its comic resolution, Bartholomew Fair ultimately amounts to a coercive imperative of inclusion that undermines opposition both to the theatre and to the Established Church.

This chapter examines the important cultural role played by early modern sermons in refining and developing the meaning of sympathy. The chapter begins by exploring how metaphors and concepts involving the human and social body were appropriated by religious writers in the 1580s, including Edwin Sandys, John Udall, and Christopher Hooke. It then explores a particular sermon by William James from 1589 that uses the term sympathy to describe a mutual suffering, in which James seeks to unite his listeners whilst excluding those of a different religious or political persuasion. The chapter goes on to argue that, by the mid-1590s, preachers such as Henry Holland were using the term to describe an active and imaginative engagement with the other, in ways that recall several contemporaneous dramatic works – including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595). Finally, it examines Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and proposes that these questions about the performance and representation of sympathy recur across Protestant and Catholic cultures.

Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems just as the word ‘emotion’ was emerging into common currency. In its first usages, traceable back to the 1590s, the term referred to the general disturbance suggested by the Latin term emovere (to move out), and Shakespeare and his contemporaries indeed often described as motions the impulses that aroused the mind, body and soul. The introduction to Shakespeare and Emotion explains the rationale for giving serious and sustained attention to the emotions as a way of approaching Shakespeare’s works as art from the past, as well as the place of these works in the present. It offers a brief survey of Shakespeare’s classical and early modern sources for his understanding of affect, and an account of how the present-day surge of interest in emotional experience builds on earlier strands of Shakespearean scholarship from the early to mid-twentieth century. The Introduction concludes with a survey of the volume’s chapters, organised around the assumption that emotion offers a deeply promising (and often challenging) prospect for imagining and enacting change.