Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion

Drawing on insights from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that disgust provided Shakespeare with a master category of language, that he consistently deployed to explore themes of physical and symbolic boundaries in his plays. Dubbed the 'gatekeeper emotion' by modern theorists in the psychological sciences, disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants.

Due to this flexibility, language associated with the things that can trigger disgust-for example, food, animals, or disease, to name but a few-provided Shakespeare with a poetic vocabulary to interrogate thematic matters concerning the violation and preservation of boundaries, such as compromised moral actors, unstable political arenas, and changing social orders. Adopting a bird's eye approach, each chapter of Shakespeare and Disgust considers a different kind of disgust elicitor to demonstrate the broad workings and effects of such language throughout Shakespeare's works.