ABSTRACT
The Aversive Affect The word “disgust” enters the English language from the French in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Yet, early modern English literature offers numerous examples of what we would now call the disgusting, and it includes descriptive terms – loathsome, loathly, qualmish, beastly, vile – as a lexicon that seems to anticipate the introduction of the word “disgust.” Early modern writers’ relationships to disgust – particularly the canonical Shakespeare’s – are complex, under-scrutinized in early modern scholarship, and, as this collection will show, worthy of close critical attention. In The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller notes that “Shakespeare does not use the word disgust. Yet his tragedies are incomprehensible without a very strong notion of it,” and other contemporary studies of that aversive affect turn to him for examples of disgusting behaviors and disgusted reactions.1 In a recent study of the aesthetics of aversion, Carolyn Korsmeyer points to the disgusting actions in “King Lear, whose character Gloucester, suffers his eyes gouged out (‘Out, vile jelly!’), and Titus Andronicus, whose character Queen Tamora is made to eat the bodies of her two sons.”2 Rachel Herz sees Shakespeare as “an experimental psychologist way ahead of his time,” and she points to Lady Macbeth who “tries to alleviate her guilty conscience about the murder of King Duncan with a bit of hand-washing.”3
