Teaching Shakespeare's Emotions

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Drawing on critical insights from the history of emotion and Shakespearean emotion studies, this Element offers a pedagogy rooted in a historicist approach as a stimulating alternative to the teaching of Shakespeare's emotions as universally and transhistorically relatable. It seeks to provide a roadmap – by way of contextual and analytical frameworks and suggested learning activities – for teaching students how to mind the gap between Shakespeare's emotional moment and their own. The benefits to this approach include not only students' enhanced understanding of Shakespeare's plays in the context of early modern emotion culture but also their enhanced ability to think historically and critically about emotions, both in Shakespeare's day and now.