...humour Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. [Love's Labour's Lost V ii 937] Lower your sights a little The apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse. [Richard II I iii 294] This might make you feel better Oft expectation fails, and most oft there Where...

...affective response is the sense of the term 'feeling' that Shakespeare used in Richard II, where he writes: 'the apprehension of the good, Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.'84 Here, feeling is understood as a feature of one's apprehensive acts. It is by means of one's...

...Shakespearean advice: see things differently and they will become different. But Bolingbroke resists it: "Who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on...December snow / By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?" (1.3.294-99). He has a point. (I might add, however, that as an impecunious and hungry graduate student...

...long, given the way your cognitive system is structured. I repeat what Shakespeare said: 'You cannot cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.' Very fortunate, for otherwise you wouldn't eat; you would just generate the qualia associated with...

...gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite The man that mocks at it and sets it light. HENRY BOLINGBROKE. O, e start he bites, but lanceth not the sore. JOHN OF GAUNT. Come, come, my son, I'll bring thee on thy way:...

...is a thorough statement of imaginative representation's impotence in the face of hard realities: O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the...Fell Sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore. (i.iii.294—303) reality, signifier and signified. But rather...

...expressing "the abundant dolour of the heart" he feels at this separation from his father (1.3.256). "Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?" he asks (1.3.293-5), rejecting the capacity of the imagination to dispel the pain of parting and extended...