ABSTRACT
One of the main things that make William Shakespeare’s plays special is their power to make people feel particular emotions: pity, sympathy, compassion, sadness, fear, horror. One of the things some of the minor scenes away from the main action of the plays do is to fill out the emotional profile of the protagonists and serve as occasions for them to display their capacity for love, charity, care, friendship, and affection for others. Shakespeare endows his morally good but imperfect and fallible protagonists with powerful emotion and intense thought, and he endows them with emotions and thoughts that are for the most part appropriate to the kinds of people they are and the situations in which they find themselves. Song is another aspect of performances of the plays that can intensify the emotions that Shakespeare wanted his audience to experience and that many have claimed to have experienced when witnessing performances of them on stage and screen.
