Introduction: Imagining audiences

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1Introduction: Imagining audiencesKatharine A. Craik and Tanya PollardImagInIng lIterature s effectsHow did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems on minds, bodies, and souls? In what ways does the history of theatrical or literary experience overlap with the history of humors, passions, and emotions? Throughout early modern texts, writers depict playgoers and readers responding to imaginative literature both affectively and physio-logically. In tragedies, audiences at plays-within-the-play are devastated, brought to tears, startled, and killed; in comedies, they are moved to laughter, driven to lust, and agitated into redirecting the plot. Letters and poems within plays of all genres, meanwhile, lead readers to react with anger, grief, or pleasure. Poems, similarly, meditate on the transformative effects of reading, watching, and hearing.

Introduction: Imagining audiences Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard ImagInIng lIterature’s effects How did early modern writers imagine the effects of plays and poems ... Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 28–39.

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