ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the respiratory and pneumatic implications of playgoing for Shakespeare’s audiences in the contexts of early modern beliefs (Christian cosmology, Renaissance natural philosophy) about the vitality of air and its communication of spirit. It focuses on the ways that Shakespeare’s plays generate or amplify the affective experience of “pneumatic community”—a term used to theorize audience experience as shared respiratory experience—through dramatic representation and mimetic solicitation of sympathetic respiratory gestures, particularly of breathing, breath-holding, and observing/witnessing the breath. The chapter pursues these procedures through offering close readings of the climactic scenes of The Winter’s Tale and King Lear.
