Making sense of Shakespeare

"This book argues for the existence and deployment of non-visual imagination in the reading and viewing of Shakespeare. It seeks to save the imagination of Shakespeare from abstractness and restore such imagination to a literal concreteness of somatic sensory experience. Instead of considering "the body" from the outside in the manner of cultural critics, Frey considers the reader and viewer's body from the inside in the manner of subjective responders or some affective critics.

He argues that Lear's "howl," for example, targets and rewards physical hearing, physical speaking, and their accompanying emotions as somatically connected to current or remembered sensations in mouth, throat, and lungs."--BOOK JACKET.