"I loved my books": Shakespeare and the Modernity of Loving Literature

This article examines the representation of readerly affect in scenes from five Shakespeare plays (Love's Labour's Lost, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar and The Tempest) in order to challenge the use of Shakespearean examples in various histories of reading as well as accounts of the historical emergence of a "love" for literature. While recent histories of reading situate the origins of that love in an eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, we show that the responses to books developed by some Shakespearean characters already adumbrate specific varieties of "modern" book love. Shakespeare did not just become an object of modern readerly affections, he also created figures of loving readers with whom later generations could identify in less anachronistic ways than recent theories about "modern" reading practices allow.