"Imagine that you see the wretched strangers": Compassion with Migrants in Early Modern English Theater

• In Event: Performance and Emotions

Abstract

This paper explores the political impact of the theatrical performance and arousal of compassion in the context of tensions between Londoners and English as well as European migrants in Elizabethan England. Engaging with recent work on the politics of compassion in the theatre by John Staines and Katherine Ibbett, I am interested in the ways the performance and arousal of compassion in the theatre could shape affective communities that had political ramifications also outside the theatre. Focusing on Middleton’s Michaelmas Term and Munday, Dekker, Heywood, and Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More, I explore the intersections between emotion, politics, identity and community in stage representations of the problem of migration from the perspective of early modern thinking on the effect of theatrical emotions on the audience’s ethics and politics.

Author

• Kristine Steenbergh, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam