This section contains 10,874 words (approx. 37 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |
SOURCE: Jardine, Lisa. “Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus's Familiar Letters and Shakespeare's King Lear.” In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, edited by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, pp. 77-101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
In this essay, Jardine begins with a study of Erasmus's letters as an example of a technical method of expressing and producing feeling. Erasmus's epistolary methods then provide a context for a reading of King Lear, in which the methodical expression of feeling consistently proves to be false. Jardine concludes that a Renaissance audience schooled in Erasmian ideals of rhetoric would thus experience the drama of Lear as strongly pessimistic about the possibility for honest communication.
A letter or epistle, is the thyng alone yt maketh men present which are absent. For among those that are absent, what is so presente, as to heare and talke...
This section contains 10,874 words (approx. 37 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |