SOURCE: Jardine, Lisa. “Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus's Familiar Letters and Shakespeare's King Lear.” In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, edited by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, pp. 77-101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

In this essay, Jardine begins with a study of Erasmus's letters as an example of a technical method of expressing and producing feeling. Erasmus's epistolary methods then provide a context for a reading of King Lear, in which the methodical expression of feeling consistently proves to be false. Jardine concludes that a Renaissance audience schooled in Erasmian ideals of rhetoric would thus experience the drama of Lear as strongly pessimistic about the possibility for honest communication.

A letter or epistle, is the thyng alone y^t maketh men present which are absent. For among those that are absent, what is so presente, as to heare and talke...