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Discrepant emotional awareness in Shakespeare
in The Renaissance of emotion
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9780719098956.00019
Online Publication Date:
01 Aug 2015
Abstract only
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The suggestive phrase ‘discrepant awareness’ was coined in 1960 by Bertrand Evans to explore the ways in which Shakespeare presents differences in knowledge and understanding between characters, and between characters and audience, in order to build up irony and suspense, and to complicate plotting. This device, Evans suggests, is crucial to Shakespeare’s dramatic craftsmanship and a clue to the great range of theatrical effects he creates, respecting the multiplicity of perceptions that coexist and interact. However, while Evans shows how narrative complexity is enhanced by studying the limitations of what each individual knows or is ‘aware of’ at a particular moment he pays little attention to what each character is feeling. The argument advanced in this chapter is that the neglected notion of discrepant awareness can fruitfully be developed to include consideration of emotional fluctuations in each play, including passions (fixed obsessions), affects (humoral aspects in character creation), and emotions (fleeting situational responses). We explore emotional complexity of scenes for both characters and audiences, using scenes respectively from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Cymbeline. It might be regarded as a distinctive hallmark of Shakespeare’s dramatic method in dealing with emotional complexity.
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The Renaissance of emotion

Understanding affect in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

eISBN:
9780719098956
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover The Renaissance of emotion
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
Emotion; Passion; Affect; Shakespeare; Early Modern; Renaissance; Embodiment
Page Count:
290
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

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13 Feb 2019
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Available In:
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

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Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
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Subjects:
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Available In:
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Cover Howard Jacobson

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Author:
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Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
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Available In:
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.