In this course we will consider affective experience on the early modern stage with an emphasis on embodiment and ethico-political life. What does “experience” mean in the early modern world and how is it understood in relation to affective and embodied knowledge? How do early modern dramatists entertain us with scenes and moments that stage experiments with bodily and affective experience, social and political knowledge? The literary texts we discuss may include Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl. As we explore these dramatic texts, we will touch on the thought of figures such as Seneca, Wright, and Descartes. We will also address more recent interventions in thought concerning experience, embodiment, and affect, including those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adriana Cavarero, and Sara Ahmed. In our conversations about theater’s attempts to stage affective and embodied experience – especially the coming to or arriving at lived or experiential knowledge – we will take up topics ranging from the passionate space of the stage to historical forms of gendered embodiment, from disability knowledges to the embodied experience of voice.