Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)

Shakespeare’s Entrails Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body

David Hillman

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Shakespeare’s Entrails

10.1057/9780230285927 - Shakespeare's Entrails, David Hillman

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies General Editors: Michael Dobson and Gail Kern Paster

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies takes Shakespeare as its focus but strives to understand the significance of his oeuvre in relation to his contemporaries, subsequent writers and historical and political contexts. By extending the scope of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Studies the series will open up the field to examinations of previously neglected aspects or sources in the period’s art and thought. Titles in the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies series seek to understand anew both where the literary achievements of the English Renaissance came from and where they have brought us. Titles include: Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale (editors) REMAKING SHAKESPEARE Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures David Hillman SHAKESPEARE’S ENTRAILS Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body Jane Kingsley-Smith SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMA OF EXILE

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–1164–9 (hardback) 1–4039–1165–7 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Editorial Advisory Board: Michael Neill, University of Auckland; David Schalkwyk, University of Capetown; Lois D. Potter, University of Delaware; Margreta de Grazia, Queen Mary University of London; Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame

Shakespeare’s Entrails David Hillman

10.1057/9780230285927 - Shakespeare's Entrails, David Hillman

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Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body

© David Asaf Hillman 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403942678 hardback ISBN-10: 1403942676 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hillman, David (David A.) Shakespeare’s entrails:belief, scepticism, and the interior of the body/David Hillman. p. cm. “ (Palgrave Shakespeare studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1403942676 (cloth) 1. Shakespeare, William, 15641616“Knowledge“Anatomy. 2. Body, Human, in literature. 3. Shakespeare, William, 15641616. Troilus and Cressida. 4. Shakespeare, William, 15641616. Hamlet. 5. Shakespeare, William, 15641616. King Lear. 6. Shakespeare, William, 15641616. Winter’s tale. I. Title. PR3069.B58H55 2007 822.3 3“dc22 2006049429 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

For Jessa

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‘What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours    ’

10.1057/9780230285927 - Shakespeare's Entrails, David Hillman

In everything we judge to be a noise there is always another noise heralding the end of everything, the wind in the dark and, if I listen a little harder, the sound of my own lungs and heart. (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 40) The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. (W.H. Auden, ‘In memory of W.B. Yeats’)

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And how about such an expression as: ‘In my heart I understood when you said that,’ pointing to one’s heart? Does one, perhaps, not mean this gesture? Of course one means it. Or is one conscious of using a mere figure? Indeed not. – It is not a figure that we choose, not a simile, yet it is a figurative expression. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 178 (Part II, § iv))

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

1 Visceral Knowledge Introduction Early modern bodies Psychoanalytic enclosures A brief history of entrails Topographies of doubt and belief Dissecting anatomy Religious entrails Staging guts Shakespeare’s entrails Descartes and the scene of scepticism

1 1 3 11 15 23 32 36 40 47 54

2 The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida The Matter of Troy The satirist and the cannibal Cannibalism and silence

59 59 66 75

3 The Inward Man: Hamlet The closing of the father The eating of the father Hamlet’s ‘Nerosis’ Aporia

81 87 95 102 109

4 The Body Possessed: King Lear Exorcisms Inhabitations Possessions Dispossessions

119 122 129 136 144

5 No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale ‘No bourn’ ‘In the between’ Coda

153 153 164 171

vii

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Contents

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viii Contents

Notes 173

Bibliography 233

Index 253

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1 The Course of the Veins and Arteries through the Body by Bartholomaeus Eustachius, 1552; reprinted as Plate 25 in Tabulae Anatomicae clarissimi viri Bartholomaei Eustachii quas est tenebris tandem vindicates (Rome, 1714); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 2 Self-Demonstrating Anatomy from Juan Valverde, Historia de la composition del cuerpo humano (Rome, 1556); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 3 Male Figure, Showing the Interior of the Heart, from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humain libri tres (Paris, 1546); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 4 Male Figure, Showing the Interior of the Thoracic Cavity, from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis human libri tres (Paris, 1546); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 5 Dissected Pregnant Woman as Eve, from Adrianus Spigellius (Adriaan van den Spieghel) De formato foetu liber singularis (Venice, 1626); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

ix

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xiv

58

80

118

152

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List of Illustrations

Look into someone else’s face, and see the consciousness in it, and a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, torpor and so on. [    ] Do you look into yourself in order to recognize the fury in his face? It is there as clearly as in your own breast. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel)1 ‘Shakespeare’s what?’ people have been asking me for years now, with a mixture of ‘joy, indifference, interest, excitement, torpor and so on’. Their incredulity (call it scepticism) mingled with their belief in the project’s value has been enormously instructive and helpful throughout the many fluctuations in the making of this book, which began in the 1990s as a PhD dissertation, was abandoned for several years while my career took a different path, and was eventually re-worked over the past three years into the pages you have before you. These pages undoubtedly show evidence of the layering of different periods and the writing selves that went into their making; the book is part revision, part rewriting, and certainly far from seamless. The second chapter, in particular (on Troilus and Cressida), seems to me now to bear the marks of youthful indiscretion, but I have decided to leave it more or less alone, in part as an acknowledgement of the passage of time and of my intellectual trajectory during the project as a whole. The good news is that, after all this time, I still feel lucky to have found this topic. The debts incurred in the book’s writing have accumulated over the years to an extent that it is now inevitable that these acknowledgements must feel entirely threadbare beside the sense of gratitude I feel to the many friends, advisers, colleagues and students who have contributed to and influenced my work in various ways. At the very beginning of the work on the PhD, after reading an early draft of what was to become the chapter on Hamlet’s guts, Ruth Nevo, my mentor since my first year as an undergraduate, had a dream which convinced her, and me, that I was on to something worthwhile. In conversations since, Ruth’s endless enthusiasm and fabulous insights have been simply invaluable. She has helped me to keep writing when I was running out of steam, and shown me, by both example and advice, that I should go about things (literary criticism, painting, life) in my own way. She is the very embodiment of inspiration. I began the project as a graduate student at Harvard, working with an unsurpassable triumvirate of dissertation advisers: Stanley Cavell, Marjorie Garber and Jeffrey Masten – an embarrassment of riches if ever there was x

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Acknowledgements

one. The variety of pedagogical and critical experiences they brought to bear on my dissertation is still evident throughout this book. My indebtedness to Stanley Cavell is profound and thoroughgoing. Not quite the only begetter but perhaps the first cause of so much herein, he has influenced my thinking to the quick. He best knows the impossibility of complete acknowledgement. To Marge Garber I owe so much of what I know about Shakespeare that it is now impossible for me to imagine an unGarbered Bard. She has been an absolutely critical source of advice, encouragement and support through the years. I would like to thank Jeff Masten for the sensitivity and care with which he scrutinised my original dissertation, as well as for many acute suggestions which are now embedded, with little or no acknowledgement, throughout the text. While at Harvard I found myself part of a remarkable group of early modernists writing their PhDs: Doug Bruster, Carla Mazzio, Curtis Perry, Kristen Poole, Kathy Rowe, Kate Schwartz, Scott Stevens and Doug Trevor, all co-graduate students, were amongst the first on whom I tried out some of the ideas in this book. The intellectual community provided by these brilliant scholars was even more valuable than I knew at the time. Scott, in particular, aided and abetted with his friendship, his sense of humour and his amazing knowledge of all things Renaissance (and many things not). And Carla, with her implausible energy, critical eye and wicked tongue, became then, and has remained, a true intellectual companion as well as a true friend. Many other people read and commented on parts of the original dissertation. Of these, particular thanks go to Janet Adelman, with whom I exchanged a long, extremely helpful correspondence as my PhD was nearing completion; to Elizabeth Freund, who has been giving her sophisticated blessing to my work since I was an undergraduate; and to Robert Weimann, who keeps adding new dimensions to my thinking about literature and early modernity. Jennifer Stevens accompanied me with her wisdom, humour and forbearance through several of the years of the writing of the PhD. During the years of child psychotherapy at the Tavistock, while the dissertation gathered dust on my shelf, its ideas were being reworked in the different spheres of my training. To Christopher Bollas, whose influence here is probably invisible to all but him and (perhaps) me, I owe deep thanks for his thankless task; Margot Waddell taught me much of what I understand about the internal worlds of children and adults alike; Adam Phillips has offered extraordinarily sane advice, kind help and friendship at every stage of both psychoanalytic career and intellectual journey. Two early modernists in particular have been a huge support over the past few years: Michael Schoenfeldt and Peter Stallybrass. The influence of the published work of both is unmistakeable through the following pages; the influence of their responses to my writing evident mainly to me. The book has also profited from conversations with, among others, Catherine

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Acknowledgements xi

Belsey, Linda Charnes, Maud Ellmann, Lynn Enterline, Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Holbrook, Mary Jacobus, John Kerrigan, Howard Marchitello, Cynthia Marshall, Michael Neill, Christopher Pye, Jacqueline Rose, Elaine Scarry and Nancy Vickers. Many of my students at Cambridge have unwittingly acted as sounding-boards for some of the ideas herein, and I am grateful to them for their resistance as well as their tolerance. Audiences at a number of conferences have read or heard versions of some of the following chapters and responded with sympathetic criticism. These include two meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America (2004 and 2005); a conference at the University of North Carolina (organised by Mary Floyd Wilson and Garrett Sullivan); a conference at Harvard (organised by Carla Mazzio and Doug Trevor); as well as the audiences at seminars at Queen Mary, University of London; the University of Bath; Williams College; the University of Valencia; and Cambridge University. I was fortunate to receive a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) for a term of leave to work on this project, and to be given a term of sabbatical leave from the Faculty of English at Cambridge. I am grateful to Routledge for permission to re-use some of the material that went into the Introduction (from my essays in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Hillman and Mazzio, and in Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture, ed. Mazzio and Trevor); to the editors of Shakespeare Quarterly for permission to reproduce much of Chapter 2 (from my essay on Troilus and Cressida in Shakespeare Quarterly 48:3 (Fall 1997), 295–313); and to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to re-use some of my essay ‘Homo Clausus at the Theatre’ (from Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William West). I am grateful to the series editors, Michael Dobson and Gail Kern Paster – Gail, particularly, a long-standing inspiration for her groundbreaking work on embodiment in early modern times – for soliciting the manuscript and smoothing its path through the publication process; to Paula Kennedy for overseeing the project at Palgrave; and to Barbara Slater for her meticulous and sensitive copyediting. The final shape of this book owes more than I can say to the transformative comments of Anita Sokolsky, who, at the eleventh hour, read the entire manuscript and responded with truly remarkable tact as well as with wit, critical acuity, and a great generosity of intelligence. I wish I could say that her intervention was visible on every page; had it been, had I able to follow her suggestions and their implications more fully, this would assuredly have been a better book. Those manifest blots that do remain by me be borne alone. At every stage, I have been encouraged by family and friends – the distinction becomes more blurred every day. For all their support, I want to thank in particular: Daria Keynan, the Friedman-Cohens, and my parents, Nehama and Peter Hillman.

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xii Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements xiii

Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 40e (sec. 220). 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 148.

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Finally, my deepest thanks to my wife, Jessa Leff, who – with patience and impatience in equal measure – not only read and edited every word in the book (including these) but also kept me going, kept me honest and kept me laughing throughout the whole process: ‘Inexpressible and nameless is that which gives my soul agony and sweetness and is even the hunger of my entrails.’2

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Figure 1 The Course of the Veins and Arteries through the Body by Bartholomaeus Eustachius, 1552; reprinted as Plate 25 in Tabulae Anatomicae clarissimi viri Bartholomaei Eustachii quas est tenebris tandem vindicates (Rome, 1714); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library xiv

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1

OTHELLO: By heaven, I’ll know thy thought. IAGO: Thou canst not, if my heart were in your hand. Othello, 3.3.162–3

Introduction This book is about the place of ‘visceral knowledge’ in Shakespeare’s plays: that is to say, knowledge experienced in as well as knowledge of the interior of the body. Running through these plays is a recurrent fascination with the contents of the human body, both literal and imagined.1 This fascination is due, in part, to the enduring role of entrails in the human imagination as a locus around which questions of subjectivity and otherness, as well as structures of belief and doubt, tend to cluster. But this preoccupation is also firmly rooted in the specific historical circumstances of the period during which Shakespeare’s plays were written – in what I will be describing as the somatic precariousness of the age. By this last phrase I mean the radical instability in the relations between mind and body which is such a hallmark of the early modern period, as well as the gradually changing understanding of the relation of the body to its environment, a shift that eventually cordoned off the interior of the body from the surrounding cosmos in ways which profoundly influenced the birth of modern subjectivity. Reading the Shakespearean corpus from the inside out, as it were, this book explores some of the meanings and functions of a preoccupation with the body’s innards in Shakespeare’s drama. If it seems strange to speak of Shakespeare’s imagination as reaching so insistently into the inmost parts of the human body, this is largely because of the increasingly metaphorical ways in which the language of the plays has been apprehended over the past four centuries; as I will be trying to show throughout this book, Shakespeare’s texts – and perhaps too his uncanny ability to get ‘under the skin’ of his characters – make more comprehensive sense when grasped in all their fully embodied intensity. It is not that the body’s insides no longer haunt our everyday language; quite the contrary. We still vent our spleens, have gut feelings about things, know them in our bones; we can’t stomach 1

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Visceral Knowledge

this or that, and we have the gall to be so full of ourselves! Indeed, it may be precisely the fact that our language is so suffused with the body’s inner activity that has made it difficult to register the significance of such language in the Shakespearean text.2 The reality of the body has become for us practically impalpable in these words and phrases, which have been gradually diluted and attenuated until they have been transfigured into mere figures of speech, obscuring what Michael Schoenfeldt calls ‘the profound medical and physiological underpinnings of Shakespeare’s acute vocabulary of psychological inwardness’.3 To early modern ears, however, such language had not yet mutated beyond its corporeal referents, for the period’s resolutely materialist habits of thought were in many ways closer to that of the ancients than to our modern, post-Cartesian divisions of experience. When, therefore, characters on the early modern stage speak of measuring ‘the heat of our livers with the bitterness of your galls’ (2Henry IV, 1.2.175), or of holding something in ‘my heart’s core, ay [    ] my heart of heart’ (Hamlet, 3.2.73) – or, indeed, of being ‘inward search’d’ (The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.86) or afflicted with ‘inward pinches’ (Tempest, 5.1.77) – we would do well to regard these as far from merely metaphorical referents, and to ponder how they figure into an overall understanding of bodily – and therefore psychological – interiority in a given play. In turning to read the body in a Renaissance text in particular, it is necessary to try to balance out the figurative with the physical (rather than, as happened for many years, simply to gloss the latter as the former). In order to revivify such language for our ears, we need to resist the impulse to ‘spirit’ away the body, for in the early modern period we find everywhere an interanimation of body and spirit; indeed, the word ‘spirit’ itself referred to a ‘subtile and thinne body’ – the vital corporeal fluid thought to be coursing through our arteries, veins and nerves, itself acting as the crucial connection between body and soul.4 The reigning medical doctrine, the Galenic system of humoral physiology, ‘locate[d]’, as Gail Kern Paster reminds us, ‘a form of selfhood, analogous with agency, within’: the idea of personhood, and personality, was never far from the question of the internal composition (or ‘complexion’) of the body.5 It is thus almost as if we have to clamber back into our own bodies – to read as fully embodied readers – in order to grasp the extraordinarily somatic nature of the period and its language. In this sense, the chapters that follow are an excavation of the visceral dimensions of the Shakespearean texts. The visceral engrossment of Shakespeare’s plays is related to the fact that in the early modern era what we now call inwardness or interiority was inseparable from the interior of the body – indeed, our later terms for selfhood are fundamentally derived from this intimate connection between mind and matter. In recent years, this linkage of corporeality and interiority in early modernity has been the subject of a good deal of fine scholarship.6 My project partakes of this growing body of work, much of which has tended to stress the cultural and ideological production of meaning in the Renaissance body, the ways in which the period’s intricate network of social, religious, legal and

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2 Shakespeare’s Entrails

medical discourses constructed and disciplined the body’s internal habitus and the concomitant possibilities of subjectivity. In this book I will interrogate some of the ways in which the Shakespearean corpus shared in and contributed to early modernity’s conceptualisations of embodiment. My interests lie in the interconnections between profoundly shifting attitudes to embodiment in the period and what might be described as an emergent psychology of somatic inwardness. The chapters that follow will be especially concerned with the manner in which Shakespeare seems to have imagined human relations through corporeal existence, his apparent attempts to think through ways in which one might imagine knowing others or acknowledging others in terms of entering or being within their bodies, or having one’s own body inhabited or possessed by another. There are in my view good historical reasons why these questions may have been of acute concern to someone writing around the turn of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare’s plays have an important stake in the history of embodiment, both as markers of the changing times, and as themselves instigators of historical and cultural change. My readings of these plays try to interweave historicist lines of enquiry with theoretical models, especially psychoanalytic ones. In doing so, I intend to avoid privileging either methodology; on the contrary, my aim throughout is a cross-pollination through which the theoretical lens might help to focus some of the historicist issues, and simultaneously the history of embodiment I outline might inflect and qualify the psychoanalytic ideas. It might be useful to think of these methodologies in terms of a Wittgensteinian rabbit-and-duck picture: it may not be possible to keep both perspectives simultaneously in the foreground, but even when one point of view predominates, the other needs to be kept in play. Here I am following the lead of a number of recent scholars, including Harry Berger, Jr, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Cynthia Marshall, Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, and Christopher Pye.7 My work shares with these critics a concern with alterity, both at the level of the construction of subjectivity and at the level of methodology. Just as psychoanalysis finds the subject constituted by otherness from the very beginning, so too the long-standing alienation of historicist and psychoanalytic methodologies can be understood as the product of an illusory attempt to find an Archimedean position from which to read early modern texts. As scholars are increasingly coming to realise, a move beyond a simple opposition of empirical facts and theoretical models is vital, a move into something less secure, perhaps more vertiginous and open.

Early modern bodies If the dull substance of my flesh were thought    (Sonnets 44.1) The early modern world, like psychoanalysis, might be said to have been intensely engaged in wrestling with the paradoxes of the relation between

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Visceral Knowledge 3

psyche and soma – albeit from very different starting-points.8 While the opening of Sonnet 44 may denote, above all, a wish to transcend the weightiness of the flesh, to dissolve it into pure thought, it also, more ambiguously, may be taken as pointing towards a desire to fuse body and thought completely, to become one with one’s flesh; for Shakespeare inhabited a world in which the attempt to understand and reconceive the connection between matter and spirit was particularly strenuous. While Shakespeare’s art needs to be seen in the framework of a Renaissance world that embraced what Montaigne referred to as the ‘marvellously corporall’ conditions of being human, it is by no means the case that the somatic underpinnings of human experience can be said to have been simply taken for granted by early moderns.9 The burgeoning scholarship on embodiment in early modernity has been at pains to emphasise the inextricability of selfhood and corporeality, so that we are now beginning to come to terms more fully with the pervasiveness and depth of the somatic understanding of the world for the people of this era. But what is sometimes lost in this attempt to re-ground mental and emotional activity in the materiality of the body is the instability of the relation, the fact that the pre-Cartesian belief structures of earlier periods were already beginning to clash with radical new efforts to separate the vocabulary of medical and humoral physiology from that of individual psychology. If soma can be said to have imbued early modern psyche through and through, the frequency in the period of reiteration of the mantra about how the soul works upon the body and the body upon the soul can be taken as a sign of the gathering question-marks regarding this inextricability or imbrication, a symptom of the way the marvellous corporeality of the world was beginning to lose its grip on the human imagination. The immanence of the self in the body – always to some extent a vexed matter – was becoming a deeply perplexed notion: well before the end of the sixteenth century, what Yves Bonnefoy nicely terms the ‘excarnation’ of the world was already underway.10 Though it may only have been towards the end of the period that the psyche–soma connection started truly to wither, shed in the convulsion of sensibilities labelled, for convenience sake, the Cartesian revolution, it was of course much earlier that the seeds of this division were being sown. It is upon precisely this division that the new disembodied and psychologised interiority of the modern subject is founded.11 This notion of interiority relies on a sense of the self being at one remove from physiology. Somewhere in the course of the sixteenth century, the word ‘inwardness’, for example, began to lose its primary meaning as ‘entrails’, gradually coming to mean ‘interiority, inner essence’.12 But the earlier meaning continued to shadow the later; for if the period ushered in a shift away from the notion of the embodied nature of the self, it was a move that paradoxically could not do without the body as the essential other of this new self. Modern interiority depends heavily on the perceived gap between the ‘spiritual’ inner and ‘corporeal’ outer; as Anthony Dawson puts it, ‘the body

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4 Shakespeare’s Entrails

is instrumental in delivering a sense of interiority, one that is constructed in and through the separation between inner and outer, self and body’.13 Shakespeare was writing at a crucial moment in this transition, at the juncture of two profoundly heterogeneous notions of embodiment – and thus modes of subjectivity – and the tension between these modes seems to have been profoundly creative for him and for his contemporaries. Working both with and against the notion that the ‘dull substance of [the] flesh’ is indissoluble from thought, Shakespeare’s plays thrived upon the radical instability at the core of the notion of the embodied self in the period. The newfound doubt about the body–soul relation lay at the heart of a world marked by multiple social, economic and epistemological crises – a widespread sense of extreme uncertainty born of being on the cusp of the monumental shifts that marked the transition to modernity.14 Faultlines of doubt had opened up in almost every sphere of life, inducing what Steven Mullaney has described as ‘a collective vertigo’ in early modern England.15 One can imagine this vertigo to have been, among other things, quite literal – which is to say, corporeal: these faultlines in notions of faith and identity, and the associated feelings of perplexity and confusion, may not have been divorced from a loss of somatic bearings, and concomitantly from significantly changing attitudes to the notion of embodiment – attitudes about the relation of mind and body, affect and body, body and world.16 Elaine Scarry argues that ‘when there is within a society a crisis of belief, that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief [    ] the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of “realness” and “certainty” ’.17 But what happens when that construct has itself everything to do with the human body, when the old ideology is centrally about the aura of the body itself? The very word, ‘crisis’, like so many others during this period, was undergoing a crisis of its own, a process of metaphorisation from its specific sixteenth-century medical sense – ‘the turning-point of a disease for better or worse’ – to its more abstract modern meaning, a little less than a century later.18 Words and their users were going through a crisis of disembodiment, so that ‘the sheer material factualness of the human body’ could no longer be counted on, in and of itself, to lend a grounding to new ideologies. The body was losing its ontological standing of primacy and having to struggle, as it were, in the realms of epistemology – a position from which it has never recovered. One could almost say that, gradually forfeiting its aura of presence or givenness, the body now had to defend itself, and one way of doing so in early modern England was through recourse to fantasies of a clearly defined boundary between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. In such a context we might amend Scarry’s formula and say that during periods of extreme instability in a society’s self-identity, what is turned to is often a defensive insistence on a firm distinction between the somatic ‘inner’ and ‘outer’: the sense of

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Visceral Knowledge 5

vulnerability inherent to such periods tends to bring with it an urgent desire for a reaffirmation of boundaries, an insistence on the apparently secure contours of the nation, home or body.19 Societies, like individuals, try to shore up their borders at such times, when a sense of unity and integration is threatened; thresholds become barriers, self-protective and closed. At the most volatile transitional periods (in one’s life, in history), faced with the fear of the unknown, it is the transitionality of the (individual, national, symbolic) body that becomes the focus of anxiety. The psychoanalyst Herbert Rosenfeld has drawn a distinction between ‘thick-skinned’ and ‘thin-skinned’ individuals, and has detailed the kinds of object-relations each type tends to construct;20 it is important to think of this distinction not as something fixed but rather as constantly oscillating, the two positions working in a dialectical relation to one another. This is one way of understanding, for example, the extreme emphasis on defensive formations such as shields, walls, moats and citadels – a ‘language of militant hostility towards the outside world’21 – in Phineas Fletcher’s early seventeenth-century anatomical fantasy-poem, The Purple Island: the odd combination here of an obsessive attention to every aspect of the body’s interior and an anxious stressing of protective structures suggests the alternation between these two positions, as well as the fixation on boundaryphenomena referred to above. In any event, the distinction between the thick- and the thin-skinned seems to me potentially apt when speaking of socio-cultural contexts: cultures, like individuals, can be described as leaning toward the extreme ends of the spectrum during periods of crisis, which is to say that what one might call the corporeal unconscious of such cultures constructs its subjects and objects with relatively strident emphasis upon the (im)permeability of their external boundaries.22 It is precisely a process of this kind that was taking place in early modern Europe: a fundamental shift in the way in which predominant notions of human embodiment were being constructed. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men and women were increasingly coming to imagine their bodies as closed, and progressively coming to think nostalgically of an earlier – more open or porous – mode of being embodied. By the late sixteenth century, the inevitable permeability of the body had become a matter of high anxiety, an increased sense of vulnerability to the invasions of all manner of ‘foreign agents’ which – from the point of view of subjective embodiment – might be taken to include the objectifying, prying eyes of scientific knowledge. Far from indicating a growing sense of the body’s openness, then, the early modern obsession with inwardness should be taken as a symptom of a loss of a sense of access to the interior. In terms of what Louis Montrose calls ‘the historical specificity of psychological processes’, the English Renaissance can be seen to be a period during which the relation between inside and outside was especially fraught.23 ‘In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England’, writes Katharine

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6 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Eisaman Maus, ‘the sense of discrepancy between “inward disposition” and “outward appearance” seems unusually urgent and consequential for a very large number of people.’24 In this sense, we could say that one of the main projects of early modern England was the renegotiation of inside/outside boundaries. The stridency of the rhetoric surrounding these renegotiations can be attributed in part to the fact that ideas about the separateness of the individual, the impermeability of the body, or the fixedness of the nation were as yet emergent, far less well established than they may appear to many today – and hence inevitably a source of great anxiety in the period. It is only since Harvey and Descartes and Locke that we tend to take for granted the idea that the body is, in the words of the philosopher John Sutton, ‘a static, solid container, only rarely breached, in principle autonomous from culture and environment, tampered with only by diseases and experts’.25 Modernity conceives of a subject in a fundamentally self-imposed differentiation from the environment, situated, so to speak, over and against the world (rather than, say, something closer to a model of existence as nested within a series of environments). One could think of this autonomy as an intermediate step on the way to disembodiment.26 The sense of an ‘invisible wall’ between the inside and the outside of the body – ‘as if this flesh which walls about our life / Were brass impregnable’ (Richard II, 3.2.167–8) – is to a significant degree an invention of the Renaissance, one without which it is hard to imagine the concept of the disciplined, privatised individual. This perception has been portrayed most strikingly by Norbert Elias, who dubbed this newly ‘bounded’ individual homo clausus – a being ‘severed from all other people and things “outside” by the “wall” of the body’.27 Through the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he argues, one can discern an increasingly strict demarcation of the interior of the human body as separate from and problematically related to the exterior world – eventually leading to ‘the notion of the individual “ego” in its locked case, the “self” divided by an invisible wall from what happens “outside” ’.28 Evidence for this can be found in the paradigm shifts taking place in religious, national, architectural, philosophical and, especially, medical-physiological spheres. Above all, I am referring here to the transition from a porous humoral model of the body to the circulatory one which gradually displaced – and indeed finally eviscerated – it. Harvey’s ‘discovery’ of the circulation of the blood should be understood as at once symptom and cause of the new ideology of somatic closure – the ‘discovery’ comes from and contributes to what we could almost refer to as a ‘claustrophilic’ world-view. Harvey’s circulatory body represents a radically new image of the body as a closed system – more self-contained, less permeable than its Galenic predecessor: the body, so to speak, has been taken out of circulation. Alongside this, the old physiological understanding of sensory activity (such as sight and hearing) as based upon something (eye-beams, rays, waves) entering and leaving the interior of the body was

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Visceral Knowledge 7

changing to fit in with a considerably less permeable model of the way the body naturally works, the concomitant of a vastly increased sense of urgency (as well as ambivalent anxiety) regarding the need for inner and outer to be kept separate When, therefore, we find early moderns referring to the porosity of bodies and the accessibility of various kinds of interiors, we need to consider whether the emphasis is on an embracing of the osmosis of self and environment or a far more problematic attitude – whether nostalgic or repudiatory. Are, for example, ‘the natural gates and alleys of the body’ (Hamlet, 1.5.67) – its orifices and pores – spoken of as valuable points of passage or dangerous loci of vulnerability? One might similarly interrogate the manner in which the body’s containment is characterised: is the skin a positive, protective element – as, for example, the flesh-like wall surrounding Spenser’s Castle of Alma, ‘all so faire, and sensible withall’ – or does a sense of imprisonment or claustrophobia begin to creep in, as in Sir Thomas Browne’s lament about ‘these walls of flesh, wherein the soul doth seem to be immured’?29 Generally speaking, the more clamorous the declarations of openness, the less we can believe that it is in fact taken for granted, and the more closed the body-ideal may therefore be. Too much protestation upon the accessibility of the interior can thus be understood as evidence of the pressure under which we find the ‘environmentally-open’ notion of the self. And the more confined the body is perceived as becoming, the more we can expect to find both idealising and horrified descriptions of openness. Recent scholarship examining historical transformations in the role and understanding of skin from early modern times to the present has discerned ‘an intensifying ideal of continence, in which the skin functions as the body’s principle of self-possession’ – a gradual move from a preEnlightenment way of thinking of the skin as ‘an organ of interchange, or permeable membrane, traversable in two directions’,30 or ‘a porous layer with a multitude of possible openings’ – to an idea of the skin as barrier, ‘a twodimensional and linear boundary surface’;31 these scholars (Steven Connor and Claudia Benthien) perceive ‘a general defensive closing of the pores [    ] from the end of the medieval period until the nineteenth century’, a radical shift which did away with the idea of the skin as a therapeutic organ and aimed instead ‘to achieve a static condition of closure rather than a “multidimensional” traffic of substances and qualities’.32 Perhaps one could view the obsession in early modern England with cosmetics through this lens, as a complex attempt literally to thicken the cutaneous outer layer, one which may simultaneously be taken as an admission that the skin is insufficient in and of itself. Seventeenth-century medical tenets increasingly defined health not in terms of positive osmosis with the outside world but rather in terms of control over the relations between that world and the interior. From the midsixteenth century onwards, the medicalised body was opened up primarily in

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8 Shakespeare’s Entrails

order to achieve access from without, rather than to allow freer flow between inside and outside (primarily, the egress of harmful substances or excess humours) from within. Still, through much of the Renaissance the body’s openness tends to be spoken of as a positively-inflected concept. As Schoenfeldt has written, ‘most illness in the [early modern] period is imagined to derive from the body’s inability to rid itself of excess humours’; he cites, for instance, the sixteenth-century Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, who writes approvingly that God created ‘many wayes and passages to purge forth the humours, and to wash away the excrements, lest a man might be oppressed by the abundance of them’.33 Similarly, the English doctor Tobias Venner writes that ‘they that have their belly naturally loose and open [    ] are not easily affected with sicknesse: whereas of the contrary, they that have the same bound up [    ] have for the most part often conflicts with sicknesse’.34 Death became less and less a matter of what Philippe Ariès describes as ‘[an eruption] out of the bodily envelope of the rottenness within’, and increasingly something which penetrated ‘nature’s fragile vessel’ (Timon, 5.1.199), attacking from without; the body’s permeability (and especially its sexual penetrability) was thought of more often now as the source of danger, the threat as emanating from external agents: as James I’s physician, Helkiah Crooke, put it, ‘to death and diseases we lie open on every side’.35 Jonathan Gil Harris argues that the period around the turn of the seventeenth century was marked by a heightened stress on ‘the body’s margins and orifices [    ] as potential sites of infiltration’:36 the emphasis in medical theories on the importance of protection from external threat, rather than on the restoration of internal balance, played a major part in the emergence of ideas of hospitalisation and quarantine – indeed, of a whole practical and psychic structure of notions of discipline and control (of body and body politic) in the later Renaissance. As Montaigne put it, ‘this vessell, that of it selfe is so ready to warpe, to unhoope, to escape and fall in peeces, must be closed, hooped and strongly knockt with an adze’.37 We could point to 1546 as a symbolic inaugural date for this new concept – the year Girolamo Fracastoro published his revolutionary thesis On Contagion;38 coming just three years after the publication of Vesalius’ anatomical masterpiece, this text could be placed alongside the far more famous anatomical treatise as breaking radical ground in the move toward a new notion of human embodiment. Indeed, the astonishing prominence of anatomical dissection (and its attendant discourses) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be viewed as an index of the prevalence of the newfound idea of somatic closure: the intrusive appropriation implicit in anatomy conceptualises knowledge as lying beyond a boundary, within a closed body. The growth of these proto-sciences of anatomy and physiology was one of the major contributing factors to the waning of an analogy-based view of the world. These advances were rapidly putting paid to the notion of a concrete correspondence between the cosmos and the ‘little world of

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Visceral Knowledge 9

man’; now no longer could the microcosmic body be imagined to be materially continuous with the macrocosmic world; no longer did each part of the body reflect the elements, the signs of the zodiac, the planets, the hierarchy of the entire cosmos. If we conceptualise a putative earlier modality as depending on a notion of the human body as just one more layering in the multiple concentric and analogous forms of nature – ‘entangled within a web of enclosing patterns of repetition’39 – the later relies on an idea of the body as far more individuated or monadic. While science, the microscope and the telescope were opening new vistas on the cosmos, and the Renaissance idea of ‘man’ as infinite possibility gained widespread popularity, this same ‘man’ became increasingly cut off, both from a powerful sense of access to and by God, and from the surrounding cosmos. One could say that the sense of cosmic enclosure in this period – so often thought of as a period of vast expansion of human horizons – also derived from the fact that the universe increasingly came to be delimited to what one could see or measure epistemologically: while science and technology did indeed open up new vistas and horizons of both macrocosm and microcosm, the demystification of the world simultaneously led to a kind of shrinkage – hardened its edges, so to speak. Somatically and ontologically more isolated than ever before, the human being was becoming an increasingly closed system. The drive to achieve such stasis or closure can be discerned in other areas of the early modern world. Demarcating the boundaries between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ became a significant impulse in, for example, the increased emphasis on national boundaries, on the borders of the body politic, as well as the massive growth in practices of land enclosure and the new penal arrangements in what Foucault calls the ‘carceral’ society.40 Similarly, one cannot separate the emergence of new kinds of private spaces – ‘closets’, ‘privies’, ‘studies’, inner ‘cabinets’, and other sanctuaries for the sequestration of the self41 – from the somatic trend I have been highlighting; the emergence of new notions of privacy and intimacy is the flipside, or perhaps the result, of the anxiety associated with the attempt to keep inside and outside strictly apart.42 These new spaces are architectural concomitants – even perhaps reinscriptions – of the closure of the body. To these one could add the influence of humanist educational theories, which ‘tended to conflate the inscription of moral precepts on the “walls” of the memory with images of fortifying the mind against evil influences’, as well as the rise of sceptical modes of thought which can be seen to partake of similar spatiotopographical figurations.43 These, I would contend, were all connected in the claustrophobic – or claustrophilic – cultural imagination of the time: the loci of the emergence of early modern subjectivity, like the subject him or herself, grew steadily more and more ‘immured, restrained, captivated, bound’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 3.1.122). And perhaps it is the accumulation of these different types of closure which makes it so difficult for modern subjects to imagine a different, more open, mode of embodiment. If it was the case that the notion that the body was becoming closed became increasingly prevalent in early modern England, one important

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10 Shakespeare’s Entrails

consequence of this was a problematising of relatedness as such: in so far as, earlier, relations between the self and other, and between the human and the superhuman, were understood in good part in terms of relations between permeable bodies, a difficulty must now have arisen. The growing sense of an impenetrable boundary between the inside and the outside meant that relatedness needed to be reconceived: no longer could one explain the connection between self and (human, divine or demonic) other in the old way, as a relation between the interiors of bodies open to one another – as a matter of concrete passage from body to body. Through much of the sixteenth century, agonistic and other relations had been portrayed and understood in terms of the relations between the interiors of bodies: ‘Far from constituting a mere figurative device’, writes Margaret Healy, ‘psychic transmission was construed by many as a real phenomenon; one that was rendered plausible, and was even empirically sanctioned, through the observation of the passage [of contagion] from soma to soma’.44 For early moderns – as for psychoanalysts – introjection and projection were both modelled upon and continuous with bodily events. Ethical and psychological relations with the other were imagined as indelibly corporeal, somatic interiors as literally impressionable. When speaking, for instance, of taking someone into, or banishing them from, one’s heart or bowels, one often meant something perhaps not entirely literal but with ineradicable somatic reverberations; the temple of the body was open to inhabitation by the divine, often in the shape of the holy ghost; witches could invade and attack the interiors of their victims’ bodies; human entrails could be possessed by devils or other spirits (which could be exorcised). In Shakespeare’s plays, this form of relating is still quite prominent. When, for example, Lady Macbeth calls on the spirits to ‘Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse’ (1.5.43–4), she is asking for her body to become so congested that ‘th’ milk of human kindness’ (l. 17) can have no place within her: it is an almost literal foreclosure of relations with the other. The natural flow of the body, here and in many other cases, is stopped up, suppressing the access of the ‘compunctious visitings of nature’, which is to say, an ethicosomatic relation to alterity, the acknowledgement of otherness.45 Like the congealing of Faustus’ blood at the end of Marlowe’s play, what is imagined here is neither entirely physical nor wholly ‘spiritual’, as the physician’s response to Macbeth’s demand that he ‘Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart’ implies: ‘Therein the patient / Must minister to himself’ (5.3.44–6).

Psychoanalytic enclosures    how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward! (Twelfth Night, 3.1.13) It is worth considering the fact that this description of the emergence of homo clausus bears significant parallels with psychoanalytic descriptions of

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Visceral Knowledge 11

the emergence of the coherent self, based as it is on the establishment of a boundary between the somatic inner and outer. A psychoanalytic perspective on this binary distinction might take as its point of entry Freud’s comment, in The Ego and the Id, that ‘the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’;46 that is, the ego, according to Freud’s admittedly rather opaque formulation, is to be conceived on the paradigm of the human body; and it is constructed around – as a projection of – the boundary between the interior and the exterior of the body: ‘A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring.’47 The body is both subject and object, part of the self and part of the world, and it is at the frontier between these two that differentiation, according to Freud, begins to take place. In the psychoanalytic narrative of the birth of the subject, in the beginning – strictly speaking before there is a self or ego – there is neither inner nor outer, only a state of amorphous non-differentiation between self and world, a fluid state where the idea of an ‘inside’ distinct from, and in opposition to, an ‘outside’ has not yet come into being. Out of this presumably undifferentiated state, without so much as a rudimentary definition of boundaries, the ego is born as an entity in space at the moment when it can begin to conceive of a surface, and hence of a topography of inner and outer. And, following Freud’s thought as he elaborates upon it in an essay entitled ‘Negation’, we can say that at the start, this topography is correlated with both a dialectic of self and other, and a sense of the positive and the negative per se. In ‘Negation’, Freud describes the ontogenetic origins of mental life, and suggests that the pleasure principle is directly traceable to an original somatic impulse to take something into or expel something from the body. His corporeal terminology would not, I think, have sounded at all strange to early modern ears: Expressed in the language of the oldest – the oral – instinctual impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this’, or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out’. That is to say: ‘It shall be inside me’ or ‘it shall be outside me’ [    ] the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical.48 Once the subject has become an entity in space, has begun to establish its boundaries, it begins to make decisions as to what to include and what to exclude from the fledgling ego-self. At this primitive level, self and corporeal interior are one; the decision about whether to swallow something or spit it out becomes, here, the basis of all pleasure-driven activity. It is almost as if thinking itself is born out of the oral working-out of the somatic topography

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12 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Visceral Knowledge 13

The other sort of decision made by the function of judgement – as to the real existence of something of which there is a presentation (realitytesting) – is a concern of the definitive reality-ego, which develops out of the initial pleasure-ego. It is now no longer a question of whether what has been perceived (a thing) shall be taken into the ego or not, but of whether something which is in the ego as a presentation can be re-discovered in perception (reality) as well. It is, we see, once more a question of external and internal.49 Freud portrays the opposition of the inner and the outer as inherent to the working of both the reality principle and the pleasure principle, the former through the mechanism of testing inner ideas against outer facts, the latter through (originally bodily) processes of what eventually came to be called introjection and projection. Hence it is that the earliest formative stages of infancy are, according to Freud, the oral and the anal – based, that is, on intensely cathected apertures that mark the boundary, and simultaneously the possibility of crossing the boundary, between inside and outside; nor does mature genitality – the third stage in Freud’s view of human development – escape this characterisation.50 Hence too the significance of fantasised processes of introjection and projection in the constitution of the self. The earliest form of relating, according to this line of thought, revolves around the idea or fantasy of incorporating or expelling the other (or parts of the other) into or from one’s body, and of being taken into or getting inside the body of the other – or of being rejected from that interior. Incorporation and expulsion are the raw prototypes of all later forms of introjection (or internalisation) and projection. In the paradigmatic psychoanalytic depiction, then, the growth of selfawareness and separateness, the first forms of both pleasure and reality principles, the origins of thought itself – all are constructed around the fantasised somatic differentiation of inner and outer. As Judith Butler has noted, though these are never fixed positions, they represent a binary division that helps to stabilise the coherent (if illusory) subject: ‘the spatial distinctions of inner and outer [    ] facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired’.51 Julia Kristeva points out the inherent ambiguity of the opposition inside/outside – ‘an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain’.52 It is uncertain because corporeal and mental mechanisms alike constantly reveal the vulnerability of the distinction between inner and outer: the establishment of any boundary is undermined by the very procedures of incorporation and ‘excorporation’53 that are entailed in the attempt itself: far from being hermetically sealed, we have our exits and our entrances.54

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of interior and exterior. And this, Freud goes on to suggest, is true not only in relation to the primary thinking connected to the pleasure principle, but also in relation to more developed modes of thinking (albeit now at one remove from the body):

‘Men are sponges, which to pour out, receive’, wrote John Donne, seemingly lamenting both the permeability of the body as such and the possibility that the body’s receptivity may be above all a matter of valuing discharge: as if we take in only in order to expel.55 It is worth stressing the fact that to the opposition in-out Freud attributes an implicit antagonism from the very outset: ‘What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical.’ Perhaps we should attribute this antagonism, or even aggressivity, in part to the very fact of the establishment of otherness through this process, as well as to the other-dependent nature of the formation of the self. For Kristeva, expulsion lies at the root of separateness and is the precondition of the symbolic: ‘expulsion (Ausstossung) is what constitutes the real object as such; it also constitutes it as lost, thus setting up the symbolic function [    It] establishes an outside that is never definitively separate – one that is always in the process of being posited.’56 It is because the differentiation between inside and outside is never secure or static that what is always being posited and re-asserted (in expulsion) is the boundary between the two. Jacques Lacan situates the crucial moment in the establishment of this boundary at the mirror stage, hypothesising that the fledgling, fragmented human ego perceives itself as unified only upon seeing a reflection of itself; this allows a retrospective sense of the coherence and unity of the body-self, the end result of which is a kind of permanent false boundary – ‘the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity’.57 For Lacan, aggressivity is a result of the tension and tendency to oscillation between this specularly-derived armour and the body as felt from within. It is noteworthy that in this seminal piece, Lacan’s single named example of a specific place where the ‘intestinal persecutions’ of this pre-armoured body may be found is a fifteenth-century artist: ‘the visionary Hieronymous Bosch’.58 Within Lacan’s own work, there is a tension between the idea of the mirror stage as a developmental phase in human life and a permanent structure of subjectivity; but questions could also be raised as to the transhistorical nature of the theory itself: when placed side by side with Elias’s description of the emergence of homo clausus, one is entitled to wonder about the historically conditioned nature of Lacan’s hypothesis (a question I shall return to in my discussion of Hamlet). In both cases there are countervailing pressures – towards and away from armouring and aperture.59 And while we are about it, we might also speculate about the relation between this theory and the historical-material fact of the increasing availability of glass mirrors through the course of the sixteenth century:60 for the first time, large numbers of people could see relatively clear images of themselves as complete and unified (though Hamlet, we may recall, promises to provide his mother with a ‘glass’ where she may see ‘the inmost part’ of herself (3.4.18–9)). While it is true that neither Hamlet nor Lacan specifies the necessity for actual mirrors (the mirroring element may be another person), these juxtapositions nevertheless seem to me suggestive.

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14 Shakespeare’s Entrails

If psychoanalysis, then, may help us to discern some of the fantasies that accompanied the emergence of the figure of homo clausus in the early modern world, we also need to question the degree to which this belated picture of the subject is a product of historical conditioning. In so far as psychoanalytic theory can help guide us towards a sense of the corporeal sources of subjectivity, the history of early modernity’s conceptualisations of the body may help us see some of the origins of psychoanalytic ideas about the emergence of the self. Psychoanalysis conceives of a subject in a fundamentally self-imposed differentiation from the environment, situated, so to speak, over and against the world. These ideas seem to owe a good deal to early modern notions of closure; but it is quite conceivable that the division of the self into an inside and an outside was not always so central to notions of selfhood. This possibility, however, seems to me to complicate rather than diminish the applicability of psychoanalytic ideas to early modernity.

A brief history of entrails Is it not strange, that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies? (Much Ado About Nothing, 2.3.62) As far back as can be traced, the inner recesses of the body seem to encapsulate contradictions: since ancient times they have been thought of as the most vulnerable and the most inviolable locus of the self, the meeting-point of the sacred and the abject, the sublime and the disgusting, the familiar and the alien: ‘A forrain home, a strange, though native coast’ – the very definition of the uncanny.61 Early modernity marks something of a transitional moment in the history of the significance of viscerality in human affairs. A brief survey of the history of entrails from antiquity to the present indicates that in several ancient cultures the soul was thought to reside in the torso, and consciousness and feeling were ascribed to the inner organs of the body. Both in life and in death, for humans as for animals, the entrails were considered to be the ordering principle of the entire body, lending it integrity and meaning. For Aristotle, for example, the entrails anchor the organisation of the rest of the body: ‘Thus, by means of the viscera, the cohesion of the animals is made possible.’62 Referring to ancient conceptions of the psyche, the classical scholar R.B. Onians has found ample and convincing evidence that for both Greeks and Romans, ‘emotional thoughts, “cares”, were living creatures troubling the organs in one’s chest’.63 Early Judaic notions echo this: ‘The Bible’, writes Mary Douglas, ‘locates the emotions and thought in the innermost parts of the body; the loins are wrung with remorse or grief; the innermost part is scrutinised by God; compassion resides in the bowels.’64 The seat of consciousness was often considered to be the heart

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Visceral Knowledge 15

and its neighbourhood; the inmost spring of the emotions lower down, in the region of the liver and bowels. There has been a gradual displacement upward regarding these faculties – from the bowels and loins to the heart to the brain – over the course of history, as well as a gradual metaphorisation and desacralisation of the organs involved. Thus, for example, the phrase ‘me’ay hamu ’alav’ in the Song of Songs (5:4), literally meaning ‘my entrails welled up for him’, is translated in the King James version (1611) as ‘my bowels were moved for him’; modern translators usually shy away even from such equivocally somaticised locutions, preferring something along the lines of ‘my heart beat wild’,65 and thus misplacing both the liturgical resonance and the precision and concreteness of the bodily reference. For many ancient cultures it is the viscera that are not only the source and place of the emotions but also an important locus of the sacred – they are the somatic space for the revelation of divine meaning, the place where humans meet gods. These cultures almost invariably appear to consider the internal organs as the place of transcendent truth: ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom’ is how the Psalmist puts it.66 St Augustine, following Paul, located the ‘conscience of the heart’ in the belly (‘venter interioris hominis conscienta cordis est’ – ‘the interior belly of man is the conscience of the heart’).67 The idea of an inherent connection between truth and entrails is closely related to the practice of haruspices (or, in the rarer case of human entrails, anthropomancy). ‘Plucking the entrails of an offering forth’ ( Julius Caesar, 2.2.39) was the essence of a ritual that was the centrepiece of the religious life of numerous ancient societies – and one can trace this linkage of truth and entrails from haruspices through, say, medieval tales of the incorruptible internal organs of saints, to Renaissance cults of the Sacred Heart or descriptions of anatomy as the path to knowing God, and on – albeit in a different key (as we will see) – to the writings of Nietzsche and Freud.68 Whether it was the heart, as for the Aztecs, or the liver, as for the ancient Etruscans and Greeks, the viscera were the focal point of symbolic order in such sacrifice.69 For the ancient Hebrews, the bowels were the first parts to be burnt upon the altar; for the Greeks, as for most ancient cultures, the hiera, or sacred parts, were always the splankhna, the entrails: ‘This central place in the animal is the one in which the mysterious link between the animal as bearer of meaning, the gods who give it to be seen, and the men for whom it is intended, is given material form in the secrets of the now open belly.’70 For all these cultures, it was inherent to the ultimate significance attributed to the insides of the body that they were invisible in vivo, intangible except in unusual and usually painful circumstances. Access to the real interior of the body was inseparable from death, or existed only on the threshold of death. The death of the sacrificial victim (whether human or animal) was a crucial element in the revelation of its secrets. A speculative history of entrails, reaching back to classical antiquity, would thus be a history of the gradual displacement of the corporeal interior from

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16 Shakespeare’s Entrails

its position as the central locus of consciousness, emotion and transcendent meaning to its ‘scientific’ understanding, post-Renaissance, as a merely physical system, the technological centre of a breathing, pumping, digesting machine whose consciousness lies either in the brain or in the soul. This is now more than ever the case, even though science itself is beginning to reinstate a greater mental and emotional role to these ‘lower’ parts of the body, finding a ‘brain in the gut’ that closely mirrors the chemical and neurological makeup of the central nervous system.71 I think it makes sense to hypothesise that the men and women of earlier times – specifically, for our purposes, of early modern times – may well have physically experienced their own bodies in ways that are hard for us – with what Louis MacNeice calls ‘our ascetic guts’72 – to grasp. We tend not to experience ourselves as under the aegis of our entrails – our vitals – except at moments of crisis, when we are unwell, or when we feel strong emotion; at other times we are much more dimly aware of ‘the secret life of belly and bone’.73 But given the powerful moral and personal values attached to the body’s inner phenomena throughout the Renaissance, it is not unreasonable to suppose that there would have been a more constant and delicate everyday sensitivity to internal somatic goings-on, that moods, emotions, even thoughts may have been experienced more concretely and immediately as occurring within the body. Early moderns often spoke of the human body as quite literally filled with passions – hence, in Shakespeare, for instance, one could be overcome with ‘intestine joys’ (Richard III, 4.4.128), or taken over by ‘the ardour of [one’s] liver’ (Tempest, 4.1.56), or driven by one’s ‘bowels full of wrath’ (King John, 2.1.210).74 Internal bodily events and agency were often tied together in a ‘knot intrinsicate’ (Antony & Cleopatra, 5.2.304) inseparable from the ‘knotty entrails’ (Tempest, 1.2.295) of the body. Indeed, the reciprocal nature of the body–mind connection implies that not only bodily self-experience but also to some extent bodies themselves may just possibly have been materially different in earlier times from their modern equivalents. If, as Thomas Nashe wrote, ‘the firie inflammations of our liver and stomack transforme our imaginations to their analagie and likenesse’, the reverse is no less true: as Sir Francis Bacon put it, ‘it is an inquiry of great depth and worth concerning imagination, how and how far it altreth the body proper of the imaginant’.75 The body’s innards have undergone a kind of aesthetic repression over the past few hundred years. Scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias and Jean Starobinski have traced the process of distancing ourselves from our bodies’ interiors, specifying as a crucial turning-point the sixteenth century, when (as Bakhtin writes) ‘the new bodily canon [    ] carefully removed [    ] all the signs of [the body’s] inner life’.76 These scholars have described the ways in which the ‘civilising’ and ‘disciplining’ of the body during the sixteenth century – the new norms of self-control, non-tactile interaction and politeness – led to an inhibition of external manifestations of the

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Visceral Knowledge 17

interior; standards of politeness, sanitation, diet and so on have changed radically since the early sixteenth century. Nor was it merely what derived from within that was subject to the new repression: the somatic container was now increasingly thought of as filtering out what might penetrate it from outside: as Steven Connor argues, ‘modern subjectivity [has come] to be organized around the imperative need to filter, screen, and block out excitations’.77 One could also say that the process of repression of the interior has given the modern subject what we could call a powerfully visceral unconscious. It is in the context of this changing world – of a turning point in notions of the relation of soul to body, inside to outside – that Shakespeare’s, and early modernity’s, attentiveness to the body’s interior needs to be seen. Even as the body’s internal goings-on were subjected to greater and greater social occlusion, the cultural context in which these plays were written was one which was more or less obsessed, as a number of Renaissance scholars have recently argued, with the insides of things – first and foremost, of the body. Throughout Western Europe, extraordinary levels of attention were directed to the inner world of the human frame – in the emergent sciences of anatomy and physiology, in religious rhetoric and imagery, in punitive and interrogatory practices, in visual and literary culture. Objective knowledge of the interior was frequently equated with a knowledge of subjectivity: as Piero Camporesi has argued, ‘the ancient precept of “know yourself” was taken out of its prestigious but restricted moral setting and became the symbol of the new internal panorama, the knowledge of anatomically analysed man’.78 Medical and philosophical understandings of the role of the internal organs in the constitution of the self promoted what Schoenfeldt calls ‘an introspection whose focus was physiological as well as psychological’.79 One’s subjective state depended utterly on what the influential Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius referred to as ‘the inward or internall heat, from whence proceedeth the earnest affections, vehemente motions, and fervent desyrs of the mind’.80 Montaigne, in his Essays, turned repeatedly to the body’s innards as the place most indubitably and faithfully one’s own; constantly observing and commenting upon his own ‘intestine agitation’, trying, as he put it, ‘to dispose and direct the domesticall troubles within mine owne entrailes and veines [    ] my proper, naturall and essentiall affaires’.81 His book of essays sets out ‘[to] wholy set forth and expose my selfe: It is a Sceletos; where at first sight appeare all the vaines, muskles, gristles, sinnewes, and tendons, each severall part in his due place [    ] I write not my gests, but my selfe and my essence.’82 It becomes clear, as one reads the essays, that Montaigne is thinking of this ‘essence’ as not just a metaphorical but a physical interior, and indeed subjectivity and entrails were often spoken of as one and the same throughout the period. Virtue and sin were imagined as literally inhabiting one’s innards, ‘twixt the marrow and the skin’;83 and important subjective and moral truths were understood to lie hidden within

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18 Shakespeare’s Entrails

the body – ‘in [one’s] bowels’, as John Donne put it, ‘as gold in a Mine’.84 The ‘internal cosmography of the human body’85 remained very much stagecentre throughout the early modern era, and in a wide diversity of cultural fields we find a recurrent preoccupation with these regions. Between Andreas Vesalius’ publication of the De Humanis Corporis Fabrica in 1543 and William Harvey’s publication of De Motu Cordis – the announcement of his discovery of the circulation of the blood a little less than a hundred years later – there were astonishing advances in the scientific and popular comprehension of human anatomy and physiology. And, as Jonathan Sawday has shown, it was far from just anatomists and doctors who became so preoccupied with the body’s innards; these received extraordinary levels of attention from artists, writers, and even monarchs: Elizabeth I’s most famous declaration was that ‘I know that I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too.’86 The ubiquity of this cultural imagination that bore such constant reference to the inner structures and workings of the body gave this period a profoundly visceral sensibility. Vesalius’ commentary on the ‘wondrous fabric’87 of the human body typifies the vocabulary of the marvellous and the wondrous attached so often in this era to what was being shown to be inside the body. Sir Thomas Browne, speaking of the ‘Cosmography of [his] selfe’, praised ‘all those rare discoveries, and curious pieces I find in the fabric of man’, adding: ‘Wee carry with us the wonders, wee seeke without us’.88 Correlations were ceaselessly drawn between the discoveries of the anatomists and those of the explorers and cartographers of new worlds, both earthly and galactic. Indeed, the analogical understanding of the world, still prevalent through much of the sixteenth century, found not just resemblance but actual correspondence – real continuity and connection – between all parts of the universe. Paramount amongst these were the similarities between the microcosm of the human body and various elements of the macrocosm. The body’s structure was replicated in the organisation of houses, churches, gardens, cities, nations. Entering a church, one entered a representation of the crucified body of Christ; the door through which one passed was often likened to the wound in Christ’s side.89 Spenser’s Guyon, exploring the Castle of Alma, tours the interior regions of the healthy body; the Red Cross Knight finds himself inside a representation of his own sinful (and therefore rotting) body, the house of Pride, and must struggle to find his way through the digestive system before finally exiting through the ‘fowle way’ of the ‘privie Postern’.90 Barely more metaphorically, being a member of the English nation meant belonging to its body politic, and the famous illustration on the cover of Hobbes’s Leviathan shows how un-abstractly this could be taken: except for the monarch himself – the head of this body – one was, necessarily, a member of ‘the bowels of the commonwealth’ (1Henry VI, 3.1.73). Like the proverbial pelican, the perfect magistrate was expected to open ‘his brest and bowels of

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Visceral Knowledge 19

true zeale and affection [    ] to feed and cherish’ the nation’s people.91 In all these metaphorical and semi-metaphorical instances, one’s identity was bound up with a form of bodily inwardness. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that early moderns could hardly conceive of themselves as existing outside a simulacrum or counterpart of the interior of the body. Educated people were beginning to recognise that the centre of mental activity was the brain, rather than the heart; but no one in the sixteenth century doubted that the ‘complexion’ of humours in the centre of the body had enormous influence on personality, mood, disorders of mind and soul.92 Conventional wisdom had it that the mind was constantly influenced by spirits, vapours or fumes ascending from the heart and bowels to the brain; ultimate responsibility for the mind’s activity was still located in the lower parts of the body. The early modern understanding of physiology, based as it was on classical medical texts, included detailed taxonomies and interpretations of each specific internal organ. Almost all such corpuscular systems retained the traditional tripartite and hierarchical distinction between ‘liver, heart, and brain’ (Cymbeline, 5.5.14) – the abdominal cavity, dominated by the liver, the thoracic cavity, ruled by the heart, and the head, sphere of the brain.93 Although there were variations between different authorities regarding the particular qualities and functions of each organ and region, there was overall agreement that each made its own crucial contribution to the self – indeed, that each had its own individual agency. Side by side with this medical view, however, the interior of the torso was often thought of as a single part, ‘the Arke or Chest of the spiritual members of man’,94 or the ‘tabernacle of the diviner spirit’.95 As Maus explains: ‘In vernacular sixteenthand early seventeenth-century speech and writing, the whole interior of the body – heart, liver, womb, bowels, kidneys, gall, blood, lymph – quite often involves itself in the production of the mental interior, of the individual’s private experience.’96 Shakespeare’s plays show a good working knowledge of, as well as a healthy scepticism about, these medical categorisations, attributing moods, characteristics and actions to the (mal)functioning of particular internal organs, differentiating, say, the ‘noble liver’ (2Henry IV, 5.5.31; usually associated with courage or cowardice) from ‘the unruly spleen’ (R&J, 3.1.157; one of his favourite organs, the seat of laughter as well as malice and impetuousness) from ‘bitterest gall’ (R&J, 1.5.92; the cause of rancour or envy) and so on.97 More often, though, Shakespeare seems to treat the body’s ‘inmost part’ (Hamlet, 3.4.20) as a thing in and of itself, closer to the biblical idea of the ‘hidden part’ (Psalms, 51:6) of the body than to any more detailed medical or philosophical categorisation. In so far as these physiological distinctions are brought into the plays, their explanatory force is precisely not taken for granted but brought into dispute. The bodily interior is never used in Shakespeare as a final tribunal – though certain characters attempt to ground all sorts of issues in them, deploying references to physiology and anatomy in tendentious ways. The most prominent example of this, Menenius’ fable of the belly in Coriolanus, is nothing

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Visceral Knowledge 21

‘True is it, my incorporate friends,’ quoth he, ‘That I receive the general food at first Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the store-house and the shop Of the whole body. But, if you do remember, I send it through the rivers of your blood, Even to the court, the heart, to th’ seat o’ th’ brain, And, through the cranks and offices of man, The strongest nerves and small inferior veins, From me receive that natural competency Whereby they live.’ (Coriolanus, 1.1.130–40) The interleavening of physiology, rhetoric and personal idiom here reveals the agonistic nature of Menenius’ setting out of the topos; and indeed we could say that Coriolanus in its entirety is in a sense a dramatised battle over the interior of the body – over who has access to, and who is to be identified with, the interior. It is noteworthy that Coriolanus consistently associates the city of Rome with the maternal body. As Janet Adelman has argued, here and elsewhere in Shakespearean tragedy, the problematics of intra-uterine derivation – and the associated fantasies of engulfment and suffocation – constitute one of the major sources of these tragedies. Adelman’s brilliant Kleinian reading of these plays as centrally inflected by fears of maternal engulfment tends to ignore historical dimensions of the phenomena she interrogates; but here again, we are entitled to wonder to what extent these plays might be tied to the emergence of a significantly more bounded somatic self-image in the period. Adelman’s convincing thesis can be given added dimensions by cross-pollinating psychoanalytic and historical investigations of a claustrophobic subjectivity. If one of the central issues defining Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists is the fear of contamination by or confinement within a body, it is tempting to hypothesise that it is in part attributable to the fact that the maternal body is merely the most immediate or obvious candidate upon which to displace a set of partly historically-conditioned terrors regarding the shutting-up of the body per se (and the concomitant fears of contagion). One might add here that there is nothing coincidental about the fact that the major strand of psychoanalysis interested in fantasies of a concrete inner

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if not an ideologically-biased recasting of the idea of the commonwealth as a body, as well as a battle over the representation of particular parts of the body as associated with particular parts of society. ‘I’ th’ midst a’ th’ body’, the belly, in this version representing the aristocracy of the city, stands accused of being ‘idle and inactive’. Its response, ‘With a kind of smile, / Which ne’er came from the lungs’, runs thus:

world was also the strand that recuperated a central place for the mother, and the mother’s body, in psychoanalytic theory. It was Freud’s heirs, beginning with Ferenczi and followed, most notably, by Klein, Winnicott and the object relations school that became their legacy, who explicated the notion of the ‘internal world’.98 It is a world that is made up of complex, largely unconscious fantasies of internal objects – bodily organs, people, substances, symbols and so on – relating both to the insides of one’s own body and to those of the other (‘the word “inner” in this term’, wrote Winnicott, ‘applies primarily to the belly’). Ferenczi – the originator of the concept of introjection – described the formation of a pre-metaphorical internal world, in children as in the mythological realm: ‘The little one thinks of the belly as a hollow space in which what has been eaten is contained unchanged like the children in the fairy tales or myths who are swallowed by Kronos, the wolf or the whale, etc., or are reborn by being vomited up.’99 In a similar vein, Klein wrote of the way ‘the baby, having incorporated his parents, feels them to be live people inside his body in the concrete way in which deep unconscious phantasies are experienced – they are, in his mind, “internal” or “inner” objects’.100 Winnicott summarises: ‘The individual tends to place the happenings of fantasy inside and to identify them with things going on inside the body.’101 In these theorists’ descriptions, children’s desire for relatedness often takes the form of fantasies of occupying the other’s body; like Coriolanus’ attack on Rome, these are often aggressive, even destructive, fantasies; as Volumnia puts it: Thou shalt no sooner March to assault thy country than to tread – Trust to’t, thou shalt not – on thy mother’s womb That brought thee to this world. (5.3.122–5) Psychoanalysis can help us to trace the origins of such notions – to a profound ambivalence about the interior of the body, founded upon both a terror of engulfment and a vengeful desire for re-entry into the original container, the maternal body. Here we may be reminded of Kristeva’s suggestion regarding the antagonism between inside and outside, and we may briefly reconsider the question of the original source of this aggressivity: Kristeva regards the expulsion of the other from one’s own body, Klein, the sense of having been expelled from the maternal body, as primary. Adelman’s convincing reading of Shakespearean tragedy needs to be set beside the Kristevan theory, for while it seems to me undecidable which hypothesis is more generally pertinent to Shakespeare’s protagonists, both should surely be kept in play. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy expresses it: ‘the body first was thought from the inside [    ] as in the common but

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22 Shakespeare’s Entrails

anguishing fantasy of seeing the mother’s body from the inside, as in the fantasy of inhabiting one’s own belly’.102 In any event, psychoanalytic depictions of the concrete internal world and the relations between fantasised bodily interiors are evocative of what I have called the visceral unconscious of early modernity; here again, psychoanalysis acts as a catalyst to our understanding of the corporeal fantasies of the early modern world, as these latter may give some insight into the origins of the psychoanalytic notions. It is in relation to the maternal bodily interior that psychoanalysts trace the earliest stages of what Freud calls the ‘epistemophilic instinct’ – the drive to know. As the psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer explains: ‘the epistemophilic instinct occurs at a very early age in connection with the conception of the inside of the mother’s body. The desire of the child to know about it is highest when the mother is still the “world”. The curiosity about the mother’s body extend[s] naturally to curiosity about the child’s own body and play[s] a part in the formation and creation of an internal world.’103 The desire for knowledge, in this view, appears to derive from early curious and/or aggressive wishes to know the inside of the mother’s body: the child’s confusion and doubt about her or his own bodily origins – and by extension about her or his own insides – thus becomes perhaps the earliest form of scepticism. These psychoanalytic stories lead us towards a way of conceptualising the somatic topography underlying states of doubt and conviction, and it is to this question that I would now like to turn.

Topographies of doubt and belief The dream’s still here. Even when I wake it is Without me as within me; not imagined, felt. (Cymbeline, 4.2.306–7) In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cites approvingly the ‘popular saying that “dreams come from indigestion” ’, and goes on to attribute ‘a source of dreams more copious than any we have so far considered’ to stimuli from within the body of the dreamer: [I]f we admit that during sleep the mind, being diverted from the external world, is able to pay more attention to the interior of the body, then it seems plausible to suppose that the internal organs [    ] can cause excitations to reach the sleeping mind – excitations which are somehow turned into dream-images. While we are awake we are aware of a diffuse general sensibility or coenaesthesia, but only as a vague quality of our mood; to this feeling, according to medical opinion, all the organic systems

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24 Shakespeare’s Entrails

This, in fact, was fairly close to Thomas Nashe’s inventive Renaissance dream theory: No humor in generall in our bodies over-flowing and abounding, but the tips of our thoughts are dipt in hys tincture. And as when a man is readie to drowne, hee takes hold of anie thing that is next him: so our flutring thoughts, when we are drowned in deadly sleepe, take hold, and coessence themselves with anie overboyling humour which sourseth hiest in our stomackes.105 Nashe’s study of dreams is at times strikingly similar to Freud’s – he claimed, for instance, that ‘a Dreame is nothing els but the Eccho of our conceipts in the day’.106 Freud, like Nashe, is interested in the way the psyche takes up material both from the body and from the previous day and converts it into dream-material. The intellect, posits Freud, ‘carr[ies] out its own peculiar function’ on these stimuli, which ‘are accordingly remodelled into forms occupying space and time and obeying the rules of causality, and thus dreams arise’; what takes place is a kind of ‘ “transubstantiation” of sensations into dream-images’.107 But it is not just as the source of dreams that Freud refers to the body’s innards. When he writes that ‘the interpretation of dreams is like a window through which we can get a glimpse of the interior of that apparatus’, he could be drawing an implicit analogy between dreams and entrails.108 At times in The Interpretation of Dreams the analogy becomes explicit: ‘The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams.’109 Dreams share certain characteristics with entrails; above all, it is their ultimate unknowability that twins them so often in Freud’s thought. ‘The obscurity in which the centre of our being (the “moi splanchnique”, as Tissié calls it) is veiled from our knowledge and the obscurity surrounding the origin of dreams tally too well not to be brought into relation to each other’, he wrote.110 The ‘entrailself’ (the ‘moi splanchnique’) and the dream-self share, he implies, a central inaccessibility. One might add that both have an aura of being somehow profoundly trustworthy: do our dreams or our guts ever lie? Both dreams and entrails are interpretable – up to a point; beyond this point lies something obscure, ungraspable: ‘There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable – a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown’, Freud declared, elaborating upon the thought towards the end of his tome:

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contribute a share. At night, however, it would seem that this same feeling, grown into a powerful influence and acting through its various components, becomes the strongest and at the same time the commonest source for instigating dream-images.104

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In so far as we take Freud’s spatial metaphors literally, ‘unplumbable’ and ‘down’ – relating to a horizontal body (on a bed or on a couch) – might be said to carry the implication of ‘into the interior of the body, underneath the navel’. So again Freud is making an implicit link between dreams, guts and unknowability. At the centre of every dream, as of every body, there is a kind of blind spot, ‘a tangle [    ] which cannot be unravelled’. It is almost as if Freud were imagining the entrails as a kind of inverted umbilical cord, reaching inwards from the navel to the inmost sources of the self. And even if we were able to unravel it, Freud adds enigmatically, knowing the raw material would add ‘nothing’ to our knowledge of the actual dream-content – in part, one can infer, because it has already undergone a process of ‘transubstantiation’. As Lacan glosses Freud’s statement, we are faced at this point with ‘that which marks, stains, spots the text of any dream communication – I am not sure, I doubt’.112 Here I want to return to Freud’s essay ‘Negation’, where the formation of doubt and belief are hypothesised as, at the beginning of life, having depended upon pleasure-directed bodily activities. What we might call ‘proto-belief’ and ‘proto-doubt’ derive, according to Freud, from the incorporation or expulsion of a thought felt initially to be a corporeal thing:113 ‘ “I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out”.’ It is as if Freud were tracing the sources – following the plumb-line as it were – of both doubt and belief back into their most primitive, bodily, pleasure-seeking forms. From a Freudian perspective, faith and scepticism begin in the body. The origins of scepticism – proto-doubt – lie in a somatic resistance to something, an expulsion, as at the source of belief we can dimly perceive that there was originally an acceptance of something into the body, an incorporation (as in the Eucharistic sacrament). Holding something to be true, Freud seems to suggest in this essay, stems from the earliest form of acceptance – taking it in and holding it within one’s body, just as the earliest form of rejection, the expelling of something from one’s interior, is the corporeal origin of the formation of doubt; we see here, as Freud goes on to say, ‘the derivation of an intellectual function from the interplay of the primary impulses’.114 The birth of the subject is, in this account, contemporaneous with the birth of the doubting or believing self. Winnicott, writing from a more relational perspective, speaks of ‘the extremely early age at which a human being can attempt to solve the problem of suspicion by becoming suspicious of food [  ] using doubt about food to hide doubt about love’.115 Freud goes on to suggest, as we have seen, that more developed forms of belief rely equally

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There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dreamthoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.111

26 Shakespeare’s Entrails

It is, we see, once more a question of external and internal. What is unreal, merely a presentation and subjective, is only internal; what is real is also there outside. In this stage of development regard for the pleasure principle has been set aside.116 We may wish to take issue with Freud’s surprisingly blunt assertion that the pleasure principle can be ‘set aside’ so easily. That more mature forms of judgement can ever truly be considered ‘definitive’ – can ever move so clearly beyond the earlier, pleasure-driven forms – is debatable, though it is certainly the case that the conscious link between the two can be (and often is) severed. Presumably Freud’s intended meaning is that at this stage the simple alignment of the inside with what is good and the outside with what is bad has been superseded. But we may suppose that this primitive position is one that always underlies later, more refined, types of judgement – is always there, waiting to make itself felt. The reality principle-driven judgement as to whether something is true was once, Freud infers, a pleasure principle decision. Earlier in the essay Freud notes: ‘We can see how in this [that is, negation] the intellectual process is separated from the affective process [    ] The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists.’117 Continuing along the same line of thought, we can take this as an intuition as to the primitive roots not only of the reality principle but, more generally, of all intellectual processes, which develop out of the initial bodily pleasure-ego. ‘Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart or in the head?’ (The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.63–4): it is as if the life of the mind can only be fully understood if we can begin to glimpse the underlying substratum of affective impetus, the entrails so to speak. ‘The study of judgement’, Freud goes on to say, ‘affords us, perhaps for the first time, an insight into the origin of an intellectual function [    ] Judging is a continuation, along lines of expediency, of the original process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from itself, according to the pleasure principle.’118 Judgement – by which Freud here seems to mean any kind of intellectual decision-making process – starts off as corporeal impulse, and can (in principle) be traced back to an initial determination about whether something shall be allowed, even welcomed, into – or banished from the body. The later – intellectual or epistemological – problem is here re-connected to its earlier – sensory or ontological – source.119 Doubt and belief (whether of a religious or other variety: I am referring to what Emerson called ‘the universal impulse to believe’ rather than to any specific form of faith) are from this perspective fully embodied and thus affectively motivated positions in relation to the world.120 For Freud, what we could call ‘the universal impulse to doubt’ can often be understood as a

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crucially upon the inside-outside disjunction. Believing something to be true entails a matching of inner idea and outer facts:

resistance or blockage – something to be overcome, not so much through proof as through the letting-go of the doubt. Regarding the ‘doubt with which our judgement receives accounts of dreams’, Freud asserts that it is merely part of the mechanism of dream-censorship: it ‘has no intellectual warrant’: ‘Doubt produces an interrupting effect upon an analysis that reveals it as a derivative and tool of psychical resistance’, he declares, ‘whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance.’121 It is for this reason that Freud says that when it comes to dreams, ‘I insist that the whole scale of estimates of certainty shall be abandoned and that the faintest possibility that something of this or that sort may have occurred in a dream shall be treated as complete certainty.’122 Not that Freud is urging the abandonment of the entire framework of empirical criteria; he seems to believe, though, that in matters of human subjectivity what counts in the final analysis is an acceptance akin to belief. It is not that one finally comes to judge the doubt to have been wrong; it is rather a matter of an initial decision to treat something ‘with complete certainty’ (not, that is, to yield to the temptation to be diverted or interrupted by resistance or doubt). Hence, I think, Freud’s repetition – with remarkable frequency throughout The Interpretation of Dreams – of phrases such as ‘undoubtedly    ’, ‘there can be no doubt    ’, ‘it can scarcely be doubted    ’: it is not just a matter of Freud’s insisting, in the face of resistance, upon the validity of his ideas; it is, even more than this, a matter of principle – the principle that these matters (of subjectivity, dreams, the unconscious) shall be immune from (sceptical) criteria of proof. Dreams – like the entrails from which they partially emerge – are not to be submitted to systems of identitary logic and fixity; they cannot be completely known; they demand not empirical knowledge but acknowledgment.123 The problem of certainty and doubt is intimately tied to the so-called philosophical problem of other minds, which, as I understand it, is in turn inseparable from what we could call the problem of other bodies. If this is the case from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is all the more so from the perspective of the early modern period, for which mind and body were so closely connected. From a psychoanalytic perspective, both scepticism and faith are at least initially affective wishes, each with its own somatic topography. Scepticism (conceived of here as, at root, the radical doubting of the possibility of knowledge of the other)124 and belief (construed as not so much the overcoming as the setting-aside of such doubt) are catchphrases for a set of philosophical, psychological and historical issues. As Stanley Cavell has argued, scepticism with respect to others can be taken as a model for (perhaps even the seed of) its wider form – scepticism with respect to the external world; it is ‘originally and most appropriately addressed to one’s immediate others’;125 the same may be said of belief, and both can be understood, as I have begun to suggest, in terms of a relation to the body’s topography: these are inextricably physical and metaphysical problems. Scepticism, I want to suggest, can be described as an attempt to deny the susceptibility of one’s

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Visceral Knowledge 27

interior to external influence; faith, as an attempt to deny one’s exteriority or separateness. The proto-subject’s decisions about what will be inside or outside the body are his effort to gain control over his (originally bodily) contours. If these states of doubt and belief begin in the body, with the stark yes-or-no decision whether to take something in and digest it or not to, we can hypothesise that underlying each of these states we might find a particular notion of the body, a kind of ideal ‘body-self’ which the believer/sceptic at some however unconscious level strives to approach. In belief, I suggest, we can discern a sense that the inside is accessible or corresponds to the outside; belief (or proto-belief) depends on the sense of the inherence of the outer in the inner (and vice versa) – we could say that at root this is based on a willingness to accept the other, and more generally the outside world, into one’s interior, and that there is a continuity between the other’s or the world’s insides and outsides; that the other is open to inhabitation by oneself, and that the other’s outside faithfully represents the interior. Belief seems to be inseparable from an acceptance of the interpenetrability of self and other, self and world, or self and God, an acknowledgment of the outer world or of the other akin to its incorporation or introjection into one’s own bodily interior.126 It is also a matter of the believer taking the other at, so to speak, face value – of taking it on faith that there is no ulterior place or motive behind or inside the other. This is, of course, not the same as the dissolving of boundaries tout court; it is rather a matter of transcending them or setting them aside. This notion is captured in the religious aspect of the word ‘participation’, which was such a vexed term in the early modern period. One’s participation in the community or communion was a literal, somatic matter: ‘How then is Christ in us?’ asks Donne, and answers, ‘As our flesh is in him, by his participation thereof, so his flesh is in us, by our communication thereof.’127 The sceptic, conversely, experiences the world as if it were made up of insides and outsides radically opaque to each other, as if each object in it is split into a surface and what Othello comes to call ‘an essence that’s not seen’ (Othello, 4.1.16). Scepticism derives from a refusal to accept the inherence of inner in outer (and vice versa); it relies upon an idea of a gap between causes or inner truth and that which is represented externally. The sceptic rejects dogmatism, unquestioning acceptance of appearances, blind faith. He128 holds a suspicion that the other’s or the world’s exterior is mendacious, concealing the truth (the true thoughts; the epistemological reality of things), and that one is therefore excluded from this interior; he regards the boundary between inner and outer as what is essential, requiring penetration in order for the truth to be known.129 The sceptic’s own interior matches this closure, refusing entry to the other and simultaneously refusing egress to his own deepest self. He will not take the other in, nor will he allow himself to be taken in, in all senses of the phrase. In this way, the sceptic in effect renders ‘the inner’ unknowable.130

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28 Shakespeare’s Entrails

‘Alterity’, writes Starobinski, ‘is something more concrete than the antithesis between said and unsaid. It takes on spatial dimensions: what goes unsaid is actively hidden in the heart, the space of the inside – the interior of the body is that place in which the cunning man dissimulates what he doesn’t say. A simple image attributing a palpable, invisible, forbidden place to the silent other.’131 A repeated refrain of the English Renaissance – endless variations upon Vincentio’s exclamation, ‘O, what may man within him hide!’ (Measure for Measure, 3.2.253) – partakes of this spatially-inflected form of inscrutability. The tremendous prominence of scepticism in early modern Europe can thus be taken as further evidence for the centrality of homo clausus.132 The sense of the opaqueness of the other to one’s self is the source of what I take to be a central drive of scepticism – the drive to access the interior of the body of the other. For the sceptic, the very potential for a gap between the private, interior self and its external expression (in words, gestures or actions) typically takes the form of the stark sundering of self and other into an inside and an outside. If the interior is where the other’s innermost truth is imagined to be located, the sceptic appears to be searching out this truth within the body, beyond the supposed veils of its surface: the interior (qua interior) contains ulterior motives and desires. What Cavell calls ‘the imagination of the body’s fate under skepticism’ is, I take it, a bifold matter: the fate of the body under sceptical scrutiny, and the fate of the body of the sceptic himself.133 Both remain closed; but in the first case the urge is to tear the body open, in the second the desire is above all to keep it shut. The sceptic wants to unlock what Iago insidiously dubs ‘the door of truth’ (Othello, 3.3.407); at the same time, he himself becomes ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears’ (Macbeth, 4.3.23–4). Here, in (so to speak) skeletal form, is the basic somatic shape of a sceptical relation to the world. Cavell, following the later writings of Wittgenstein, has characterised the problem of scepticism and belief as one of finding ‘the correct relation between inner and outer, between the self and its society’ – which is to say, from the perspective I have been discussing, between too much openness and too much closure, thin-skinned and thick-skinned modes of embodiment.134 It is indeed Wittgenstein more than anyone who points out the potential misperceptions underlying the uses of the inside/outside opposition. Arguing against a Cartesian dualism that posits a complete separation of body from soul and concomitantly of inner from outer, Wittgenstein’s declaration, that ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul’,135 makes the point that the outward embodiments of subjectivity are the best access we have to what we tend to think of, erroneously, as the inner. At the centre of his philosophy lies the view that there is no ‘privileged’ access to the interior – as if the inner is somehow hidden behind the outer manifestations: ‘an “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’; the search for knowledge with a gaze that seeks for hidden truths beneath or beyond a surface is, according

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Visceral Knowledge 29

to Wittgenstein, a temptation or idealisation: ‘What we so misleadingly call “the inner” infuses the outer. Indeed, we could not even describe the outer save in the rich terminology of the inner.’136 As Freud might have said, the shadow of the inside always falls upon the outside – and vice versa. Or as Starobinski memorably puts it: ‘a kind of vertigo blurs the edge between outside and inside’.137 These thoughts go some way toward explaining the peculiar significance that the body’s ‘otherworld interior’ (in Ted Hughes’s phrase)138 holds in relation to ideas of belief and doubt. The very interiority of the inner positions it simultaneously as the paradigmatic locus of doubt and of the potential for either the transcending or the attempted removal of doubt. It is one’s attitude to this ‘otherworldliness’ that separates scepticism from belief: the latter takes the interior as inaccessible except through faith-based acceptance; the former imagines that doubt can be overcome by accessing the inner. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that it is the unsharability, the unrepresentability, of pain that makes it a philosophical exemplum of both scepticism and certainty. One might say that her book complements Freud on this question: if for the latter what lies at the ontological root of faith and doubt is the pleasure principle, for Scarry it is a kind of ‘pain principle’ that provides the epistemological grounds for an investigation of these attitudes. Pain, like all inner events, whether bodily or otherwise, can be described as ‘at once something that cannot be denied and something that cannot be confirmed’139 – this can in fact be taken as a good working definition of ‘the inner’. As Descartes puts it in his Meditations: ‘is there anything more intimate or internal than pain?’140 (‘It must seem very funny to a child’, writes Winnicott, ‘when his doctor obviously knows less about his inside than he knows himself.’141 ) The interior of the body is the locus of both scepticism and faith: in both Old and New Testaments, Scarry argues, ‘the interior of the body carries the force of confirmation’, as a holding-back of this interior constitutes doubt: ‘Disbelief or doubt in the scriptures is habitually described as a witholding of the body, which in its resistance to an external referent is perceived as covered or hard or stiff.’142 (This dynamic is visible in much Renaissance poetry too – both religious and amorous; in the latter case, it is usually the beloved’s heart which is perceived as hard; in the former, it is the heart of the wayward believer that must be softened, even broken, as in so much of George Herbert’s poetry.143 ) ‘Belief in the scriptures’, Scarry writes, ‘is literally the act of turning one’s own body inside-out’ to reveal ‘the precious ore of confirmation, the interior content of human bodies, lungs, arteries, blood, brains.’144 ‘[T]he fragility of the human interior and the absolute surrender of that interior does not simply accompany belief [    it] is itself belief.’145 As the Gospel according to John has it: ‘He that believeth on me [    ] out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water’ ( John 7:38).

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Visceral Knowledge 31

But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (John 20:24–9)146 Beyond the obvious fact that the sceptic’s will-to-confirmation here is openly penetrative, there is a notable stress in the passage on multiple layers of exteriority and interiority. Thomas begins the narrative outside: outside the circle of apostles (the community of believers) and outside the structure (of faith?) in which they convene, as well as resolutely outside the body of Christ. (Almost as if to say: if one believes oneself to be outside, one is.) And if belief is a consequence of having access to the inside, Thomas is offered interior upon (or within) interior: ‘after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them’. We are not told ‘within’ what – the interiority as such, it seems, is all we need to know; and the text goes out of its way to mark the absolute boundary between inside and outside with the (apparently) narratively superfluous ‘the doors being shut’. ‘In the midst’ of this closed inner space stands Christ, offering the interior of his body, ringed by these concentric structures, as proof of his resurrection and consequent divinity. Perhaps, though, we should read the phrase about ‘the doors being shut’ as referring to the miraculous nature of Christ’s appearance in spite of the closure of the doors, to his transcendence or destruction of the gap between the inside and the outside. For Christ’s offer of his interior is an undoing of the boundary between inside and outside, as his blessing of those ‘that have not seen’ is an overcoming of the need for ‘ocular proof’ (Othello, 3.3.360). The stigmata and wound in his side literally puncture the boundary, the integument, separating him from the world; the wound becomes a kind of transitional space.147 (This can be construed as one of the ways in which Christ is meant to be undoing the damage caused by Adam and Eve: for if the original Fall involved a sudden realisation of nakedness, and a need to cover up, to fortify the integument separating the human body from the world,

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The biblical search for confirmation within is figured paradigmatically in the story of Doubting Thomas, the sceptical apostle:

here we have a precise reversal of these impulses.) As if to underline this thought, we never hear that Thomas actually touched the wounds on Christ’s hands, thrust his hand into Christ’s side; Christ’s speech – the offer itself, the potential space opened up – is apparently enough, doing away with the need for penetrative confirmation from without. In the Renaissance, both the remarkably widespread reproduction of this scene, and the fact that in so many of the period’s depictions of it Thomas’s finger actually penetrates Christ’s wound, could be taken as one mark of the era’s rapidly intensifying scepticism. For belief is precisely not the need to enter the body in this way: it is the transcending of this need, a reproof to the wish for proof. In the Bible, the interior of the body – of both believer and divinity – is resolutely the location of faith; but belief is not a matter of literally turning the body inside out. It is rather the offer of access, or the sense of being granted access, to the interior (of the divine object or of the human subject of faith) that constitutes faith. It is called a leap of faith because it crosses the inner-outer divide in one fell swoop, transcending the anxiety inherent in such crossings – it is exactly not a step-by-step traversing of the boundary between the inner and the outer. Literal intrusion – of a grotesque, violent, or medical variety – is a different matter altogether, for, as Wittgenstein put it, ‘[a]n enclosure with a hole in it is as good as none’. It is not that such intrusion suddenly grants access to the inner; rather, the interior is thereby stripped of the essence of its interiority – its intimacy, its non-consensual unavailability. It is re-made as exterior. As a character in The Revenger’s Tragedy puts it, ‘Break ice in one place, it will crack in more’ (4.4.81).148

Dissecting anatomy This was the most unkindest cut of all. ( Julius Caesar, 3.2.183) The story of Doubting Thomas can be understood to bring out what Ellen Spolsky calls ‘the cruelty of doubt’.149 The desire for access to the interior of the body of the other is one that Thomas shares with a figure who has received a great deal of attention in recent years: the Renaissance anatomist; and it is tempting here to characterise anatomy’s preoccupation with the inner layers of the human frame as a particularly concrete embodiment of what I have been describing as this central drive of scepticism, the remaking of the interior as exterior, as well as of the aggressivity inherent to scepticism. For in the last analysis, anatomy’s intrusions inevitably transform the interior of the human body into external, reified matter: as Devon Hodges argues, ‘by stripping away a body to reveal its contents the inside becomes the outside’.150 If scepticism with respect to other minds can manifest itself as a dream of absolute knowledge of the other’s interior, there can be no

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32 Shakespeare’s Entrails

more tangible embodiment of this impulse than the anatomist’s openingup of the human body. The anatomist, from this perspective, is the sceptic par excellence. The anatomist seeks empirical – and specifically visual151 – knowledge about the insides of the human frame; the sceptic, equally, seeks proof – and, indeed, quintessentially ocular proof – about the other’s interior. The multitude of early modern anatomies, and in particular Vesalius’ revolutionary book, can thus be construed as taking a not insignificant place in the history of scepticism. The ‘culture of dissection’152 which scholars such as Hodges and Jonathan Sawday have written about so exhaustively greatly contributed to the emergence of a world in which the opening of the human body was considered a central act in the obtainment of knowledge per se: ‘Some so desire to know’, as John Davies of Hereford wrote in 1603, that faine they would Breake through the Bounde that humane knowledge barres, To pry into His brest which doth infold Secrets unknowne.153 The massive resurgence of the practice of anatomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allowed the interior of the body to become the site of a rapidly growing body of ‘humane knowledge’. Michel de Certeau has written about the flourishing of anatomy: ‘The frenzy of knowing and the pleasure of looking reach into the darkest regions and unfold the interiority of bodies as surfaces laid out before our eyes.’154 Beginning, more or less, with Vesalius’ Fabrica, the body’s ‘Secrets unknowne’ increasingly became privileged – and accessible – objects of knowledge, of a reifying science that turned corporeal insides into a visible spectacle. In the anatomy theatre and in the period’s profusion of anatomical texts (as well as, we might add, on the scaffolds of disembowelment),155 human entrails were exposed to a penetrative gaze; they were treated, as Starobinski puts it, as ‘the object of an external knowing capable of being confirmed’.156 Such ‘invasions of an objectifying knowledge’157 made available a new vocabulary for the description of the inner layers of the human frame. These were displayed, measured, tamed; as Timothy Murray has written: ‘philosophy seized on the body as a chartable site of scientific advance. Its attentions turned to the body as a scopic object of analysis lending credence to larger metaphysical claims of rationality and epistemological certitude.’158 The rhetoric used by anatomists and their supporters throughout the Renaissance repeatedly implies that knowledge of the body’s interior goes beyond mere physical knowledge of the workings of the interior of the body. Vesalius, in his dedication to the Tabulae anatomicae, speaks of his desire ‘to contemplate the skill and craftsmanship of the Great Artist Himself and to

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Visceral Knowledge 33

34 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Anatomy is as it were a most certaine and sure guide to the admirable and most excellent knowledge of our selves, that is of our owne proper nature. And therefore we reade, that valiant courageous Princes, worthy and renowned Nobles, yea, and invincible Emperors, being mooved and incited with this desire of the knowledge of themselves, did most studiously practice this worke of Anatomy.160 Crooke’s rhetoric, like that of many other anatomists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conflates an objective knowledge of the human body with an understanding of subjective human nature. But of course anatomy does not in fact reveal anything about the interiority of the other: peering into ‘the house of the soul’ does not guarantee so much as a glimpse of the soul itself. Claiming that it does relies upon the very metaphysic of immanence which anatomy did more than any other discipline to dismantle. William Harvey himself appeared to concede, somewhat inadvertently, that anatomy changes the essential nature of what is being observed: [A]s wine with all its bouquet gone is no longer wine but a flat vinegary fluid, so also is blood without spirit no longer blood but the equivocal gore. As a stone hand or a hand that is dead is no longer a hand, so blood without the spirit of life is no longer blood, but is to be regarded as spoiled immediately it has been deprived of spirit.161 The anatomists’ anonymous, normative models of the insides (models which, in spite of individual variations, all human bodies were supposed to approach) did more than anything to bring about the seventeenth-century’s ‘technologising’ of the interior and the gradual move away from the location of the self within the body and towards a Cartesian or purely mechanistic understanding of the relation of self to standardised body – one that radically attenuated the sense of particularity accompanying embodied selfhood.162 Moreover, the visual and spatial drive of anatomy can be said to disable other forms of knowledge of the self (temporal, aural and so on), edging the subject ever closer to an alienation of the body from itself. In these senses, anatomy, far from revealing it, undoes interiority. (As a latter-day character in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers puts it, ‘There’s more in me than meets the microscope.’163 ) Of course, the veritable epidemic of anatomical images, treatises and theatres in the early modern period tells us far more about the interiority of the anatomists and the culture they lived in than about the interiority of their cadavers. The new science of anatomy blossomed in a world which, as I have argued, was losing a sense of the transparency of the other, and we may suppose that this loss of presence – the faith in the oneness of

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peer into the “house of the soul” ’.159 Helkiah Crooke, compiler of Microcosmographia – one of the great anatomies of the seventeenth century – pronounced that:

inner and outer – alongside the gathering ‘frenzy of knowing’, played its part in arousing the will-to-penetration of the practices and accompanying discourses of anatomy. These impulses are complementary: the fantasy of a closed body is precisely the spur which powerfully evokes a desire for (as well as, simultaneously, a fear of) laying open, the wish to see into the (now supposedly more than ever) hidden interior corporeal spaces; the sixteenth-century anatomical image (Figure 1) accompanying this chapter seems aptly to reveal such a dynamic, the flayed figure hemmed in claustrophobically by the very margins of the illustration; at the same time, these margins provide the only protection remaining for the body’s delicately exposed inner organs. The closure creates the need for more penetrative kinds of knowledge, which in turn evokes a terror and a desire to protect the boundaries of the body. The dialectic here can be compared with that of the Lacanian armoured body (of the post-mirror stage) and its ghostly other, the corps morcelé associated by Lacan (as we have seen) with the ‘intestinal’ imagery of Bosch: in both cases, the haunting of the imagination with ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’ stands in a dialectical relation to a new image of the self as alienated and delimited.164 That this haunting contains not only a terror of but also a nostalgia for something imagined as previously available might be glimpsed in the numerous images of the figure of Marsyas of which artists and anatomy illustrators of the period were so fond, for it is not difficult to imagine the look of agony on the face of Marsyas as simultaneously a look of ecstasy, as if he were not merely tortured but also liberated by the flaying – liberated, that is, from homo clausus’ thick-skinnedness.165 That anatomy’s ‘admirable and most excellent knowledge’ is only attainable in the case of a deceased other is not merely coincidental, for anatomy is, I think, a particularly graphic example of what Stanley Cavell calls ‘the violence in human knowing’.166 ‘To know our enemies’ minds’, as Edgar comments wryly in King Lear, ‘we rip their hearts’ (4.6.260 – that ‘rip’ speaks volumes); similarly, the impetus behind Lear’s own call to ‘anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart’ (3.6.74–5) has much in common with what Nietzsche calls ‘the bliss of the knife’.167 In Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the bitterness becomes ghoulish humour: SARANZO: If thou could but see my heart, thou’dst swear – ANNABELLA: That thou’rt dead! (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 3.2.23–4) Giovanni’s display of Annabella’s own heart at the end of the play literalises the metaphor tragically. My implication, it should be clear by now, is that the motivation to anatomy, like the impulse to scepticism, goes far beyond any simple desire for knowledge. The ‘fell anatomy’ of which Constance speaks so gleefully in King John (3.4.40) cannot be contained within the parameters of

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Visceral Knowledge 35

a detached and objective search for knowledge. Nor can it be construed, as it so often is, as altogether a didactic exercise in the memento mori tradition.168 ‘Anatomy’, William Hunter famously remarked, ‘familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary Inhumanity.’169 There is a kind of necessary complementarity to this ‘Inhumanity’ and the ‘humane knowledge’ to which Davies refers, as if penetrating the body of the other inevitably brings with it a hardening of one’s own heart; we could say that the practice of anatomy leaves the anatomist himself more callous; the deeper one cuts into the other, the thicker one’s own skin must become. Walter Benjamin’s comments on ‘the surgeon [    who] greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating the patient’s body’ seem pertinent: ‘at the decisive moment [he] abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him’.170 Here one might be reminded of Shylock’s desire to make incision into Antonio, coupled with his own ‘impenetrable’, ‘stony’ (4.1.4) vengefulness: he is likened, in the trial scene, to one of those ‘of brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint’ (4.1.31); we are then invited to think of the pound of flesh as coming from Antonio’s bosom – ‘nearest his heart’ – 4.1.254).171 And one might wonder about the relation between this dynamic and what we could call the problem of the somatic consequences of not sharing a faith with the other, a problem that is so centrally at issue in The Merchant of Venice as elsewhere in the period.

Religious entrails This is the liver-vein, which makes flesh a deity (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.72) Just as the emergent new science turned its attention first and foremost (through dissection) to the body’s innards as a locus of confirmation, religious discourse in early modernity became increasingly saturated with the rhetoric not just of interiority, but specifically of the body’s contents. The spectacularly bleeding and wounded corpus of Christ now became a nearobsessional topic of sermons, religious poetry and visual iconography, as if Doubting Thomases everywhere suddenly needed confirmation of his divinity, as if the priest was to become the anatomist of Christ.172 Perhaps we should understand this engrossment with entrails as a kind of rearguard action in view of science’s invasions and reifications of the inner layers of the human frame, a last-gasp assertion of a faith linked to somatic openness in the face of the encroachments of the new scepticism. But again: it seems more likely that this powerful fascination with the interior of the divine body bears witness to a loss of certainty about access to the divine interior, which could no longer be taken for granted. Early modern visual and verbal iconography emphasised Christ’s penetrability and interior as never before. His wounds, blood, heart and bowels became

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36 Shakespeare’s Entrails

a near-obsessive topic of sermons, poems and artistic representation – as well as of everyday language: interjections such as ‘zounds’ (or ‘’swounds’), ‘’ods body’ and ‘’sblood’ all referred to this open body. The emphasis was often upon Christ’s consent, the willing enfleshment and the accompanying vulnerability. Religious poetry in particular lavished rapturous attention on Jesus’ wounded or otherwise open corpus; as Richard Rambuss writes of Crashaw’s poems about the crucifixion: ‘The effect of turning Christ’s whole body into wounds, mouths, eyes, orifices, is to render his body open – or to render open that body – to all sorts of heightened emotive, even erotic possibilities for bringing together that body and the body of the worshipper.’173 Everywhere, we find imagery of the divine heart, and, with great regularity, references (based on Luke 1:78 – ‘viscera misericordiae Dei nostri’ – and Philippians 1:8 – ‘in visceribus Iesu Christi’) to Christ’s ‘Bowels of pitie’, or to his ‘bowels of compassion’ which, as Donne wrote, ‘are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds’.174 Throughout the early modern period, the bowels are spoken of as the locus of compassion and forbearance. For both the human and the divine, they are imagined as the space into which the other is almost literally taken in, sheltered, pitied; God himself is often imagined as taking the other into his bowels: in John Davies’ poem, ‘Of Gods unutterable Being’, for example, the speaker expresses his desire ‘to be swallowed up’ by the Lord: ‘O! bottomlesse Abysse of Charitie / Engulph me in thy Bowels’;175 Francis Quarles speaks of ‘Great God [    ] within whose tender bowels are / Deepe gulfes of Mercy, sweet beyond compare’.176 Tracts such as John Wells’s The Anchor of Hope [    ] Or Gods Bowels Let Out, Opened, [and] Proclaimed to Afflicted Saints (1645) and Richard Sibbes’s Bowels Opened: Or, A Discovery of the Near and Dear Love, Union and Communion Betwixt Christ and the Church (1648) repeatedly refer to God’s openness as one of the central beliefs of Christian faith.177 ‘He speaks of himself’, writes the seventeenth-century theologian Thomas Goodwin, ‘after the manner of Men, as of his Heart and Bowels being turned within him [    ] with a Mercy (represented by Bowels and Heart) which is as infinite as his Godhead is, yea it is his very Godhead’; ‘The Eye that served to express God’s Omniscience, the Arm his Omnipotence; these are outward Parts: but the Bowels are of all the most inward, and therefore of all other speak what is most inward in God himself.’178 God’s bowels were available to all who were themselves open to being inhabited by God (or by Christ). The mutuality here is crucial; it is indeed an inherent part of faith – the very opposite of scepticism’s one-sided demand for access. Throughout the early modern period, alongside the stress on divine entrails, there are constant reminders that human interiors ought to be open to the entry of the divine: our relation to Christ, admonishes Donne, should become ‘more viscerall’.179 With the fading of a Eucharistic sense of Christ’s being ‘swallow[ed] downe into the guts’180 of believers’ bodies, what we find in the early modern period, as a repeated refrain, is

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Visceral Knowledge 37

the assertion that God’s omniscience – ‘that eternal eye that sees through flesh and all’181 – is always able to access the living human interior. ‘God’s immediate, superhuman knowledge of the hidden interior of persons is one of the primary qualities for which he is admired and feared by many early modern Christians’, writes Maus.182 The notion is based in part on the Book of Revelations, which speaks of the ‘scrutans corda et renes Deus’ [God who searches the heart and kidneys] (2:23). God, as Levinus Lemnius has it: is the tryer of the very hearte and reynes. That is to say, hee perfectly searcheth out and knoweth all thinges, findeth a way into the most secret corners and innermost places [    ] For there is nothing in mans body, inwarder then the heart and Reynes.183 ‘The domain of God’, summarises Schoenfeldt regarding much of this period, ‘is the internal organs of the devotional subject.’184 The ascription of omniscient knowledge of the interior to an all-seeing God renders human insides the central locus of connection with the divine, as they are – in a sceptical world – the principal locus of separation within the human sphere, ‘th’Inward Parts, which God did secret make’:185 hence, for example, Thomas Wright’s declaration that ‘hearts [    ] be inscrutable, and only open unto God’.186 But this language of somatic belief was gradually diminishing in potency through the course of the Renaissance.187 The Reformation, as several critics have recently argued, highlighted the gap between material sign and invisible reality, inculcating a distrust of externals and a corresponding turn away from physical signs toward inner conviction.188 Somewhere around the middle of the sixteenth century in England, the word ‘carnal’ became pejorative, associatively linked to sinfulness and popery. The ‘restriction of the impulse for physical embodiment in the new Protestant worship’,189 with its emphasis on inward belief and private prayer, was edging towards a disembodied ideal of interiorised selfhood. It is thus closely linked to the emergence of homo clausus, though the links are undoubtedly complex and elusive. Faith, no longer as communal – or as physical – an act as it had been, now increasingly came to be based on direct communication between the ‘spiritualised’ human interior and the divine. One thing the Reformation dispensed with can be described, from this perspective, as something to do with somatic openness – or, to the psychoanalytically-trained ear, something to do with what the title of Winnicott’s best-known essay refers to as ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’.190 The rejection of the sacrament of the Eucharist (the incorporation of the body of Christ into the body of the believer), the denial of Purgatory (the very word derives of course from an idea of somatic inbetweenness),191 the suppression of relics (the veneration, above all, of saints’ bones), the virulent debates regarding possession and exorcism (the possibility of the body’s physical interior being taken over by a demonic other), the arguments about the reality of stigmata (the evidence of divinity in the puncturing of the skin), even the abandonment of Catholic sacraments of anointing with holy unguent (which softened the skin – almost as if Protestantism was

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38 Shakespeare’s Entrails

determined to allow the integument between the inner and the outer quite literally to harden) – all these may be seen, from a corporeal point of view, as being in part disputes about notions of the significance and more particularly the openness of human bodies.192 If Christ’s offering of himself as bread and wine, to be incorporated literally in the bodies of the believers, is the central symbol in Christianity of the mutuality of access to the interior of the body of the other, one could say that part of the quarrel between Catholicism and Protestantism is around this problem of the material availability of the human interior to the divine or demonic other.193 And one could generalise that after the Reformation, the accessibility of the interior of the believer’s body could no longer be taken for granted. Protestant theology can be described as attempting to do away with transitional space, defined by Winnicott as the ‘intermediate area of experiencing’ between self and other.194 Protestantism may be said to resituate faith from a transcending of the somatic division between the inside and the outside to an (increasingly ‘excarnated’) interior self. If we accept this idea, we might briefly consider the much-debated issue of the precise location of Martin Luther’s great moment of illumination – the moment which brought him the fundamental understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith: ‘This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.’195 Generations of commentators have strenuously denied that this statement should be allowed to bear any weight in the history of the Reformation, in spite of its apparent superfluity in Luther’s account. The psychoanalyst Norman O. Brown was perhaps the first to accord Luther’s placement of the event any deep significance, arguing that ‘it is Luther’s grossly concrete image of the anal character of the devil that made the privy the appropriate scene for his critical religious experience [    ] Protestantism was born in the temple of the Devil, and it found God again in extremest alienation from God’.196 But we can add to, or vary, this in light of what I am suggesting about the link between Protestantism and the problematisation of the body’s transitionality. If indeed Protestantism defined itself in part in opposition to the profound somatic openness of the Catholic faith, then Luther’s enlightenment-in-the-privy is neither insignificant nor merely a personal obsession or pathology, but intimately tied to a historicallyconditioned sensibility inseparable from the emergence of homo clausus. And we might add that his placement of the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg may be no more coincidental, but may be taken as part of a general process of the problematisation of transitionality. In this context, it is worth pondering the significance attributed to anatomy by Protestant theologians. Luther himself claimed ‘that anatomy was almost as important as religion in imparting morality’; Calvin was apparently similarly enthusiastic; Melanchthon wrote that ‘the soul cannot be properly understood without a knowledge of the workings of the body’.197 In The Anatomy of Melancholy Burton asks rhetorically: ‘And what can be more ignominious and filthy (as Melanchthon well inveighs) than for a man not to know the structure and composition of his own body?’198 To these we

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Visceral Knowledge 39

might add, for example, the odd conjunction of extreme anti-Catholicism and obsessive anatomical fantasy in Fletcher’s The Purple Island.199 What, then, are we to make of the alignment of Protestantism and the emergent anatomical culture? Just as anatomists routinely framed their discoveries as unveiling the beauty of the inner workmanship of God, post-Reformation theologians spoke of the body’s inner mechanisms as revelations of moral truths. On the face of it, though, the thought-system out of which scientific anatomy arose appears to be in stark contrast to that of religious belief; each can be construed as (among other things) an alternative epistemology of access to the body’s inwardness. Yet the pervasiveness of the idea of access to the interior (of God or Christ, as of the believer) in religious rhetoric of this period can also be read as a different facet of the emergent sceptical worldview. Michael Neill argues that ‘the ostentatiously opened body of Christ, displaying his sacred heart, which appears for the first time in baroque art, may be read as a sacralized counterpart of this anatomical trope’.200 It is indeed just this ostentation which I have been taking as a sign of the loss of confidence, after the Reformation, regarding access to the interior. There is a link (which is not to say a causal relation) between the emergence of new modes of access to human innards and the very gradual attenuation of a religious frame of reference predisposed to conceiving of a divinity in direct corporeal contact with the interior of the human body. Indeed, if we accept that both post-Reformation Christianity and the anatomical pandemic partook of a Weltanschauung of closure, one can perhaps begin to sense an even deeper commonality between the two. For it may be that Protestantism’s ‘distrust of incarnational ways of thinking and seeing’201 – its de-corporealisation of belief – was a necessary consequence of its need to explain, in the world of homo clausus, just how the divine other could get into the human person. Protestantism’s transubstantiation of the Eucharist into a figure of speech is an attempt, in one way, to solve the problem of access to the interior: it is now through language that God enters the human being. While the practice of anatomy aims to master the body, reducing it to a reified, mechanistic entity, the rejection of the Eucharist can be understood as beginning to demystify the relationship between the ‘carnal’ and the sacred. The alliance between anatomy and Protestantism is based, I suggest, on an attempt to replace mystery with mastery.

Staging guts But, sirrah, there’s no room for faith, truth, nor honesty in this bosom of thine; it is all fill’d up with guts and midriff. (1Henry IV, 3.3.153–5) The body’s interior, then, through its capacity to function as a vital locus of both belief and scepticism, became one of the arenas in which some of

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40 Shakespeare’s Entrails

the multiple crises of the early modern period were worked out – where the psychic structures of modernity were being formed. It is in this space, or upon this stage, that the lines of battle between profoundly different attitudes were drawn. Distinctly contrasting epistemologies of access to human inwardness jostled against each other. New technologies were opening up the body and turning it into an object of empirical knowing, while still speaking of its interior as the locus of the soul; religious and socio-cultural forces were distancing the body’s inner spaces and rendering them less and less accessible to faith, while still clinging to the remnants of the old belief in the interior as a sacred location. It is in the space opened up between these fault-lines that we should consider the interior of the body on the early modern stage. And it is within the context of this changing landscape of the interior that, as I shall argue in the remainder of this book, the interior of the body in Shakespeare’s plays is to be situated and understood. Drawing on these deep tensions, reacting to the countervailing pulls on this world, Shakespeare’s plays have a significant stake in the collision of what we could call an episteme of openness and an episteme of closure. On the face of it, one might have thought that there must be few things less stageable than entrails. The body’s hidden inner realms are profoundly unsuitable for presentation onstage; they would seem to be inherently antitheatrical. Yet it is for this very reason that the gesture towards the interior can be so powerfully dramatic, for pointing – physically or symbolically – to an unseen dimension of experience is of course essential to theatricality. The illusion of theatre derives its power largely, as the Chorus to Henry V makes clear, by calling upon the audience’s ‘imaginary forces’ (1 Chorus, 18) to ‘digest / Th’abuse of distance’ (2 Chorus, 31–2) between the staged presentation and the undisplayable representation, so that the very inaccessibility of the body’s interior might be taken to epitomise theatre’s challenge. And indeed it is not merely the vast theatre of war that the audience’s ‘winged thought’ is enjoined to ‘digest’ in this play’s Choruses. We are invited to think of England’s ‘inward greatness / Like little body with a mighty heart’, and to contrast the traitors’ ‘hollow bosoms’ with the honour which ‘Reigns solely in the breast of every man’ (2 Chorus, 16–21); this done, the promise is that ‘We’ll not offend one stomach with our play’ (2 Chorus, 40). The audience’s imagination is directed towards realms beyond theatre’s practical reach: outward, to a world of actions and events elsewhere, and inward, to the world inside each character – and simultaneously to the corporeal world inside each audience member. There may even be an implication that the entire ‘wooden O’ may be thought of as a bodily interior: the question of what can be ‘cram[med]’ (the word is almost invariably used in a corporeal context in Shakespeare)202 ‘within the girdle of these walls’, set beside the humorally-inflected language depicting the actors as ‘flat unraised spirits’ (1 Chorus, 9–19), hints at this possibility. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama repeatedly gestures towards the invisible inner spaces of the body. While Jonson’s humours’ comedies, along with his

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42 Shakespeare’s Entrails

I feel my liver pierced, and all my veins, That there begin and nourish every part, Mangled and torn, and all my entrails bathed In blood that straineth from their orifex. (2 Tamburlaine, 4.3.417–20)204 And from Webster: O I smell soot, Most stinking soot, the chimney is a-fire, My liver’s parboil’d like Scotch holy-bread; There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts. (The White Devil, 5.6.139–42)205 And Ford: Here’s a stitch fallen in my guts [    ] O, my belly seethes like a porridgepot; some cold water, I shall boil over else. (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 3.7.9–20)206 These memorable lines bring out a peculiar feature of the use of innards in these plays: the way these tend to come very close to the borderline between the comic and the tragic. Entrails can slide either way – towards the horrifically painful and the tradition of memento mori, or towards the grotesquely ludic, the revelling in bodily excess. Often the line between these is hard indeed to draw – Hamlet’s macabre jokiness about Polonius’ corpse (‘I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room’) being a case in point. Used in invective, guts can be amusing, and Shakespeare in particular seems to revel in this aspect of them (hence the many visceral epithets in his plays – ‘lily-livered’, ‘dog-hearted’, ‘swag-bellied’, ‘guts-ripping’, ‘fat-kidneyed’, ‘fullgorged’, ‘boil-brained’ and the like). There is a kind of jouissance in these curses, as in so many of the visceral references in early modern drama, a relish which may be in part an effect of the dramatists’ ability to bridge the gap between inaccessible interior and displayed exterior through the sheer excesses of language. But it is not just through rhetoric that entrails are evoked onstage; the proclivity for satirical or sensationalised reference to protagonists’ innards can bubble over into the staging of grotesquely real bodily organs. Some

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‘enduring fascination with alimentary matters’,203 capitalise on the digestive (and excretory) processes that are so often the province of satire – aiming to purge his audience members more or less literally – several other major dramatists seem to be almost perversely interested in the violently damaged interior. Some typical lines from Marlowe:

of the most memorable images of early modern drama consist of moments when that which should remain safely within the body is brutally externalised: Hieronymo’s self-castrated tongue at the ending of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Annabella’s displayed heart in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Gloucester’s extracted ‘vild jelly’ in King Lear (3.7.83). The bodies here are not open bodies, they are opened, like bodies in anatomy theatres; the analogy is hardly new – but it is important to recognise that what takes place in the anatomy theatre at the presentational level is re-enacted at the representational level in the theatre. This is why early modern drama and the practice of anatomy cannot be seen as simply analogous, as if the former participated in an epistemic valuation of looking into the closed body, rather than simultaneously constituting a powerful critique of it (in ways that were tangential at best in the anatomy theatres). The depiction of the extravagantly opened bodies of the early modern stage – ‘out of joint’, dismembered, tortured, pierced, raped, flayed – can be understood, I suggest, as signifiers of the pressure (to be closed) under which the body was perceived to be placed during this period. It is as if early modern theatre, while at one level pushing somatic closure further than it had ever been, at another level provided a kind of safety-valve to relieve the pressure placed upon the body to be shut. The end-point of this pressure is depicted most starkly by the ‘monumental alablaster’ of Desdemona’s suffocated body (Othello, 5.2.5), or by the ‘marmorialisation’ of Hermione; but it is visible everywhere on the Renaissance stage, coupling a profound loss of transparency – a sense of the inaccessibility of other people – with a new kind of corporeal isolation. As we shall see, I take the Ghost of Old Hamlet to be the father-figure, the pattern, of this closure, his death-throes symbolically the birth-pangs of homo clausus: his formerly open body, which is described as having easily and rapidly let in the poison, is now enclosed in a ‘tetter’, ‘barked about’. This instantiates the moment when a more positive spin on the body’s openness becomes negatively valorised onstage: ecce homo clausus. It is striking that it is the closing of the paternal body that institutes the commencement of the regime of interiority: the founding moment of modern subjectivity, so often associated with Hamlet, is the moment the body is described as resolutely shut up, confined in solitude; when the subject can declare that he has ‘that within which passes show’. Hamlet’s mission of revenge can be seen as a form of nostalgia, an equivocal desire for reparation for the historical process of the closure of the body. Similarly, Othello can be said to stage (and simultaneously diagnose) the transition from (call it) homo agoricus to homo clausus (‘my unhoused free condition / Put into circumscription and confine’ – 1.2.26–7).207 It is partly for this reason that the play has become such a central test-case for many of the recent studies of early modern subjectivity.208 The disembodied inwardness of the future, along with the depth-effects of the new interiorised subject, depend upon the arrival onstage of homo clausus – which is to say, of a new kind of solitary confinement in the body.

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Visceral Knowledge 43

One could posit that early modern theatrical versions of the closure of the body represent a thought experiment: asking – what would happen if this somatic closure goes too far? This is in part a matter – at the representational level – of showing either the effects or the failure of closure – that is to say, in the tragic vein, death, isolation, a rejection of empathy; or in the comic key, either festive release (where, as C.L. Barber puts it, ‘the body and its environment interpenetrate’209 ) – or a more exclusionary type of comedy, in which the desire for closure – Malvolio’s, Duke Vincentio’s and so on – is undone. In so much Renaissance drama, as in the anatomy theatres, the body is fully substantiated only in its aperture – its destruction or its embarrassment. The period’s tragedies tear apart the flesh of their protagonists; its comedies make merciless fun of the ways in which characters aspire in vain to a classical, decorous body. In either case, pride in the body’s imagined closure and self-sufficiency precedes a fall. One might say, without wanting to adhere too strictly to generic categories, that if the tragic muse’s thanatos attempts (in vain) to suppress the body’s incapacity to respect boundaries, the comic spirit of eros depends upon an embracing of the body’s desire to go beyond itself; the latter is, we could say, a kind of ‘anti-enclosure riot’ (a frequent enough occurrence in England in the 1590s). This is loosely correlated with an emphasis in comedy on the grotesque or ‘orificial’ body’s natural openings, in tragedy on a ‘carnal, bloody, and unnatural’ (Hamlet, 5.2.387) forcing open of the ‘artificially’ classicised body – in the former it is the shamefully open body, in the latter the violently opened body, that is being staged. One can view this from a comic point of view – how ridiculous the desire for closure can seem, and how pleasurable aperture can be – or from a tragic one – how much suffering, as well as freedom, are involved in learning that one is anything but enclosed. They are surely not that different. [‘Exit, pursued by a bear    ’] The vitality of much early modern drama relies crucially upon both a re-enactment and a resistance to the sealing of the body. Indeed, the enclosure is always in a dialectic relation to the disclosure. One could say that this theatre played with the idea of trying to construct bodies under the sign of enclosure through the medium of bodily re-opening. At times, this bifold impetus can be divided perhaps a little too conveniently into the representational and presentational planes, with characters attempting – and, crucially, failing – to keep inner and outer strictly separate, even as, at the level of the activity of the theatre itself and at a meta-theatrical level, what is enacted is a crossing of bodily (and other) thresholds. In these cases, the exhibition – the performative or presentational dimension – keeps undoing the inhibition that is represented and is associated with the characters’ interiority. But simultaneously there are powerful complicities between the two, and we should not accept this division too wholeheartedly.210 Early moderns repeatedly understand the theatregoing experience as a potential destabilisation of corporeal boundaries.211 All sorts of things can

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get into or out of the bodies of ‘Theatre-haunters’ (to use William Prynne’s term): ‘A Christian woman [    ] going to see a Stage-play acted, returned from it possessed with a Devill’, he warns;212 on the other hand, we can think of numerous instances of dramatic art providing ‘a civilized equivalent for exorcism’.213 One important reason given by both pro- and anti-theatricalists for either going or not going to the theatre was precisely the promise of a relinquishing of corporeal self-possession: the ‘carnall solace’ of the stage is, according to Prynne, ‘sinfull in regard of its excess, it being altogether boundlesse’.214 Early modern apologists for the theatre similarly portray playgoing as an opening of the body, whether through tragic catharsis or through a kind of Jonsonian comic purge.215 As Thomas Dekker puts it: ‘Of what stamp soever you be, current or counterfeit, the stage, like time, will bring you to most perfect light, and lay you open.’216 In Dekker’s equivocal characterisation, going to the theatre is almost akin to being flayed, as if every member of the audience ‘Of what stamp soever’, is in danger of being transformed into a Marsyas. Pro- and anti-theatricalists alike shared a view of the stage as perpetrating a form of violence upon the bodies of the spectators. Sidney, in The Defence of Poesy, speaks of ‘the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours’.217 Anthony Munday warns audiences that in going to a play they will ‘receive at those spectacles such filthie infections, as have [    ] turned their bodies into sicknes’.218 Thus the ‘poisonous Stage-plays’ are associated over and over (not entirely without reason) with the plague or other forms of contagion.219 It is above all through its medium (rather than its content) that this theatre reinstates somatic transitionality. Theatrical mimesis equivocates with the subject’s openness to the external world. Even as it presupposes that the actor can enter into another’s character and body, and that the audience can be corporeally affected by what is happening onstage, it puts limits on these processes and pressurises the notion of empathy. Actor and spectator alike must be simultaneously inside the order of representation and outside it, balancing their belief and scepticism through, among other things, the potential openness and closure of their own bodies. Elin Diamond has described theatrical mimesis as ‘impossibly double’: theatre may be ‘understood as a symptomatic cultural site that ruthlessly maps out normative spectatorial positions by occluding its own means of production’; at the same time, it is utterly reliant on ‘drama’s unruly body, its material other’.220 In foregrounding these means of production, early modern theatre troubled such ‘normative spectatorial positions’ by making any fantasy of an opened-out relation of viewer to character a form of identification based on violence or shame.221 The dual purpose of theatre is related to a duality in the use of theatrical space – to the different uses of locus and platea. One could say that

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Visceral Knowledge 45

the shifting relations between locus and platea mirrored to a great extent changing conceptions of the closure of the body.222 These kinds of spaces are correlated, on the one hand, with relatively closed and symbolic staging (houses, courts, chambers and so on) and, on the other, with more open and playful uses of the stage in direct communication with the audience.223 They are also in good measure aligned – as Robert Weimann has demonstrated – with a more learned and exclusive ideal of theatricality associated with the ‘author’s pen’: a text-based, literate, ‘antihistrionic’224 dimension, and an older, more ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’ tradition of playing inseparable from the ‘actor’s voice’, a body-based practice which was increasingly being placed under pressure during the course of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To put it in corporeal (and rather over-generalising) terms: where the former tends to idealise the classical body, the latter – what Marlowe refers to as the ‘jigging veins of rhyming mother wits’225 – is repeatedly associated in the texts of the period with the less savoury, more grotesque or open, aspects of the body. A particularly striking exemplification of this can be found in John Marston’s Histriomastix, Or The Player Whip’t (1598/99). Here, the ‘common’ actors – with names such as ‘Gutt’, ‘Belch’ and ‘Gulch’ – are totally aligned with the lower bodily stratum, fit only ‘to fill the paunch of Esquiline’.226 They refuse to conform to the new standards of bodily enclosure, to the emergent ideal of homo clausus, forcing upon the spectators’ attention the life of the internal body in the face of its growing repression or disciplining by ‘the more judicious sort’. What we could call the new poetics of bodily enclosure was eventually matched by a dramaturgy and architecture that worked not only as a correlative but almost literally as a mirror for the confinement of the actors’ bodies: in a manner not unlike the development of cordoned-off spaces in homes and palaces, created to facilitate the privacy of the self, theatres too became increasingly circumscribed, epitomising the move to a more somatically contained style of acting.227 One of the things early modern drama excelled at was the interlacing of locus and platea, the joining-up of the interiority primarily associated with the first with the exteriority primarily associated with the second. In ‘the long drawn-out cultural landslide [    ] from body-oriented playing to text-oriented acting’, this mixture of closed and open spaces, and more and less somatic acting traditions, exemplifies what Weimann calls, in relation to theatrical space, ‘the thrill of liminality’228 – a phrase which could equally be applied to the theatrical body. This is one reason, I believe, why key dramatic moments such as the knocking on the gate in Macbeth (2.3), the wind tapping on the door in Othello (4.3), the shutting of the doors in King Lear (2.4), or the opening of the posterns in The Winter’s Tale (2.1), have such potent symbolic and emotional force: their power is in good part derived from the corporeal subtext; the associative register in these – and many other – instances is that of an opening or closing of the body.

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46 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Visceral Knowledge 47

Shakespeare’s entrails

(Measure for Measure, 2.2.137–8) Consider, for a moment, the sequence in Macbeth, at the beginning of Act Two. The knocking at the gate spans the moments between the murder of Duncan and the opening of the gates by the Porter: the emotional charge of the knocking comes in part from the repetition of the idea of the opening of a closed body – the ‘breech in nature’ made in the body of Duncan and the Porter’s lewd chatting about urination and sex. The so-called comic relief in the latter’s riff depends largely on the transformation from a shockingly violent opening to a benign, natural form of bodily aperture. And indeed, Macbeth is a play that interrogates almost obsessively the problem of how to keep what is inside the body – especially blood – in its ‘proper’ place, how to stop the inside from becoming outside, and vice versa, almost as if the play gives us a paranoid version of a world in which homo and clausus have been radically separated. Shakespeare’s plays are poised between the dying strains of fully somatic inwardness and the new-born notion of modern interiority. What is being worked out over and over in Shakespeare’s plays is a set of questions about the somatic relation of self and other in a world that, as I have argued, was becoming more and more closed, a world uncertainly poised between a material explanation of psychic transmission and an emergent immaterial account of the self and its relation to others. The problem of explaining the invisible effects people have on one another is central to these plays: the problem of how one gets the other inside oneself, and how one gets inside the other (or how one avoids these eventualities). Perhaps this is why in so many of Shakespeare’s plays, as we will see, characters display a powerful desire to open up or enter the body of the other – a fantasy of inhabiting the other corporeally which is often coupled with a refusal to allow the other in. But what I will be describing as the somatic defensiveness of the Shakespearean sceptic is not simply a matter of individual character traits; it should be clear by now that I am thinking of it as a historically-constituted position, of his characters as caught between these countervailing pulls. It is in this context that I wish to view the place of entrails in Shakespeare’s plays. These make use of the wide variety of possibilities in relation to the body’s innards, running the gamut from the visceral grotesqueries of Titus Andronicus – where, as John Kerrigan has written, ‘intestines take on an extended, figurative life’229 – to the humoral playfulness of Twelfth Night.

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Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know

48 Shakespeare’s Entrails

I cannot weep, for all my body’s moisture Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart; Nor can my tongue unload my heart’s great burthen, For self-same wind that I should speak withal Is kindling coals that fires all my breast. (3HenryVI, 2.1.79–83) My bowels cannot hide her woes, But like a drunkard must I vomit them. (Titus Andronicus, 3.1.230–1) Within my bosom, whereon thou dost lie, My boding heart pants, beats, and takes no rest, But like an earthquake, shakes thee on my breast. (Venus and Adonis, 646–8) What seems to be of inexhaustible interest to Shakespeare is the physical experience of emotion – the felt interior of the human body. Repeatedly his characters draw attention to internal somatic feelings in order to interrogate their relation to the world around them: ‘there is so hot a summer in my bosom / That all my bowels crumble up to dust’ (King John, 5.7.30–1); ‘Why do’s my blood thus muster to my heart?’ (Measure for Measure, 2.4.20); ‘I am pigeon-liver’d, and lack gall / To make oppression bitter’ (Hamlet, 2.2.573–4); ‘O me! my heart, my rising heart! but, down!’ (Lear, 2.2.118); ‘It stops me here; it is too much of joy’ (Othello, 2.1.197); ‘I bleed inwardly for my lord’ (Timon, 1.2.205). It is, of course, in the sheer excessive viscerality of Sir John Falstaff that entrails are most palpably present on the Shakespearean stage. The two parts of Henry IV are nothing if not an extended meditation on ‘that stuff’d cloakbag of guts’ (1Henry IV, 2.4.451), so it is worth considering what these plays, and this character, can tell us about the uses of guts in Shakespeare. Perhaps the first, and most obvious, thing to say is that one cannot separate the vitality of the character from his vitals. In being so irreducibly embowelled, Falstaff is Hal’s antipodean, precisely what Hal is not: ‘gross as a mountain, open, palpable’ (1Henry IV, 2.4.240), a ‘fat-kidneyed rascal’ (2.2.5), a man of ‘clay-brained guts, [    a] huge hill of flesh’ (2.4.225–30), ‘surfeit-swell’d’ (2Henry IV, 5.5.49), a ‘globe of sinful continents’ (2.4.284). Hal, by contrast, is a ‘starveling, [an] eel-skin, [    a] sheath, [a] bowcase’ (1Henry IV, 2.4.240–7) – he is depicted as a thin, all but empty shell, seemingly devoid of innards.230 The somatic capaciousness of ‘Sir John Paunch’ (2.2.63) is emphatically

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From his earliest plays and poems onwards, characters often allude in detail to what they imagine to be taking place within their bodies:

absent from the calculatingly un-visceral Prince. Where the former is unruly, unyoked, impossible to contain or pin down, the latter is almost disembodied, a lean and hungry cipher who tightly controls his words, his body, his surroundings: ‘I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyok’d humor of your idleness    ’ (1Henry IV, 1.2.195–6): Hal’s relation to entrails is one of appropriation, mastery and suppression; he ‘knows’ his companions’ ‘unyok’d humors’ only in order to reject them, to ‘purge’ (3.2.20) himself and his eventual kingdom, from which ‘the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstalffe’ (1Henry IV, title-page) must be banished. This is one way of understanding the moment near the end of the First Part of Henry IV, when, upon seeing what he believes to be the dead body of his erstwhile companion, the first thing Hal imagines is his evisceration: ‘Embowell’d will I see thee by and by’ (5.4.109). This is one of those instances when the comic and tragic dimensions of viscerality are juxtaposed, and also when the complexity of the relation between the potential fullness and emptiness of the interior surfaces. A Falstaff sans bowels would be not just dead but no longer Falstaff at all, quite literally devoid of the essence of the man. Perhaps we can take Hal’s use of the relatively rare word ‘embowelled’231 as a not entirely conscious acknowledgement on the part of the Prince of the impossibility of disembowelling his old companion – or maybe as Shakespeare’s wink to the audience about the impossibility of disembowelling the character of Falstaff. ‘The state tells lies in all the tongues of good and evil’, wrote Nietzsche, adding, ‘Everything about it is false. It bites with stolen teeth, and bites easily. Even its entrails are false.’232 Falstaff’s retort – ‘Embowelled? If thou embowel me today, I’ll give you leave to powder me and eat me tomorrow’ (5.4.111–12) – can be taken as a half-joke about power’s appropriative, even cannibalistic relation to the entrails of the other. For Hal’s words are of course first and foremost a reference to the practice, enacted regularly on the scaffolds of early modern Europe, of disembowelling traitors to the state. The notion of disembowelment is thus an attempted insertion of Falstaff into a political sphere – a rejection of the apolitical, atemporal ‘frivolity’ of his overflowing corpus. Hence, the dialectical relationship between Falstaff and the Prince needs to be seen within the context of the socio-political dimensions of embodiment. From the beginning of 1Henry IV, Britain is depicted as an internally ailing body politic. The ‘intestine shock’ (1.1.12) of the civil wars has caused ‘the thirsty entrance [F4 has ‘entrails’] of this soil’ to be ‘daub[ed    ] with her own children’s blood’ (ll. 6–8); the country is afflicted with an ‘inward sickness’ (4.1.31), caused by these ‘inward wars’ (2Henry IV, 3.1.107). From his father, Hal has learnt how power can distance itself from internal conflict: ‘to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’ is, as Harry Berger, Jr, has argued, ‘to shift the source of guilt and anxiety from grief to grievance, from inner condition to outer circumstance, to alienate it to some more manageable and culpable scapegoat on whom bad humors

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Visceral Knowledge 49

can be vented’.233 Henry IV’s relation to the interior is marked by fear and avoidance, an attempt to repress the inner; he repeatedly works to direct attention away from the interior of his own body politic. We can thus imagine that one facet of the (to him) galling nature of Hal’s connection to Falstaff is, precisely, the constant reminder that the figure’s ‘fat guts’ (1Henry IV, 2.2.31) provide an indelible connection to the aspects of corporeality he so wants to repress.234 Power in these plays, as often in Shakespeare, is almost defined by its distancing of itself from its own ‘entrails’; in Bakhtinian terms, we could say that there is an attempted ‘classicisation’ of the ‘grotesque’ lower parts of the body politic of Britain (PISTOL: ‘I do retort the “solus” in thy bowels’; NYM: ‘I would prick your guts a little, in good terms, as I may; and that’s the humour of it’ (Henry V, 2.1.48–59)). Hal’s foils are not just his Eastcheap companions but also Hotspur, defined as he is by his humoral changeability (‘drunk with choler’ (1.3.128)), and it is explicitly the ‘governing’ of the interior of the body that Hotspur lacks (he is described as ‘altogether governed by humours’ (3.1.233); ‘govern’d by a spleen’ (5.2.19)), and that Hal possesses in spades. One aspect of Shakespeare’s relation to the interior of the body which will concern me over the following chapters is the question of how the plays think through the problem of the relation between the social corpus and scepticism – the growing problem in this period of how to accommodate sceptical modes of being into a body politic. As Berger has shown, over and over again in Shakespeare’s plays we find characters displacing the sources of their inner conflict outward from their own interiors, and over and over we find that these interiors come back to haunt their suppressors. This motion is epitomised in, for example, Henry IV’s intent to displace the inward wars onto a crusade to Jerusalem: a place ‘out there’ to which he turns to avoid the inner turmoil in his body politic – only to find in the end that it was always within, an interior space in his own palace (and indeed the locus of his own death, the room called ‘Jerusalem’). As Montaigne put it: ‘We seeke for other conditions because we understand not the use of ours; and go out of our selves, forsomuch as we know not what abiding there is.’235 The relation of many Shakespearean characters to their own psycho-somatic interiors is often marked by fear and attempted occlusion, and the impulse to ‘go outside of our selves’ is often imagined as an urge both to close one’s own body and to open that of the other. Take, for example, Duke Vincentio’s wish to retain an impregnable or ‘complete bosom’ (Measure, 1.3.2–3) coupled with his institution of a regime of panoptical surveillance;236 or Othello’s ‘my heart is turned to stone’ (4.1.183), associated as it is with his ‘need for encavement’ which, as Michael Neill writes, ‘grows in exact proportion with his longing to tear open and discover’ the hidden interior of the other;237 or Coriolanus’ dismissal of his own corporeal openness, his drive to become ‘Jove’s statue’ (Coriolanus, 2.1.266), joined to his vengeful return to Rome – an attack which, as we have seen, is portrayed as the tearing of ‘his country’s bowels

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50 Shakespeare’s Entrails

out’ (5.3.103); or Prospero’s penchant for controlling the world around him by causing in them a panoply of inner-bodily pains – ‘cramps’, ‘aches’, ‘pinches’ and the like – while himself remaining ‘dedicated / To closeness’ (1.2.89–90);238 the list is extended in the following chapters. The sceptical urge to pry open or enter the other can be understood as a way of avoiding the opening or inhabiting of the sceptic’s own body: as Troilus says, ‘hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe’ (Troilus and Cressida, 5.10.31). The problem of knowledge of or access to the viscera is, as I am suggesting here, intimately tied in Shakespeare’s plays as elsewhere to the sceptical problem of other minds. If one way of avoiding the acknowledgment of the other, according to Cavell, is by (ostensibly) trying to achieve certain knowledge of him or her, one form this cover story takes (especially in a culture with such materialistic habits of thought as the Renaissance) is the idea that such knowledge is equivalent to entering (like an anatomist, or a satirist, or a surgeon) the interior of the other’s body (thus puncturing the fallaciousness of external manifestations of the self): ‘the block to my vision of the other is not the other’s body but my incapacity or unwillingness to interpret or to judge it accurately [    ] The suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this darkness upon the other’.239 The tables are turned: the refusal to let something (the other, or painful knowledge of some kind) into one’s body is projected onto the other, who is then seen as the obstinately rejecting one who must therefore be opened up if she or he is to be known. The Shakespearean plays I address in the following chapters explore the contours – and the costs – of this dynamic. In the remainder of this book I will attempt to map out a tentative arc of these plays’ relation to the problem of other bodies. The trajectory mapped out here is intended primarily to suggest an ongoing struggle with these issues of corporeality and otherness. The chapters, then, broadly follow the vicissitudes of the relations between language and the interior of the body, between action and its visceral sources, moving from the most cynical of the plays, Troilus and Cressida, where the satiric urge collapses almost completely into radical scepticism; through the struggles with the forms and costs of scepticism in Hamlet and King Lear; and finally, in The Winter’s Tale, towards a diagnosis of the way fantasies of the overcoming of these sceptical impulses can be as powerful as the sceptical fantasies themselves.240 Not coincidentally, the trajectory is at the same time from the radical antitheatricality of Troilus and Cressida, through an interrogation of theatre’s role in balancing scepticism and belief, to an eventual consideration of the way in which the stage can offer a potential space for the bridging of inner and outer.241 Chapter 2, ‘The Gastric Epic’, argues that Troilus and Cressida portrays an extreme scepticism regarding the possibility of any real integrity between the corporeal interior and its emanations in the world. Through a foregrounding

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Visceral Knowledge 51

of the body’s ‘putrefied core’ (5.8.1), the play reintroduces the ‘matter’ of the body to the Matter of Troy, revealing, so to speak, the soft underbelly of epic and undercutting idealisations of all kinds. The play’s restoration of language and action to their sources within the body serves both to undermine the overblown, idealised rhetoric of the protagonists (within the play) and to counteract the disembodied, over-rhetoricised status of the heroes; the turn to entrails can be seen as, among other things, a reaction to the growing excarnation of the cultural milieu in which Shakespeare was working. Hamlet and King Lear both move towards a diagnosis of the conditions angrily attacked in Troilus and Cressida, enacting a struggle to recover the possibility of a meaningful kind of relating to otherness in a world growing nostalgic for the body, and particularly the body conceived of as formerly open. Chapter 3 (‘The Inward Man’) examines the fact that Hamlet spends an inordinate amount of his time imagining what is within both his own and others’ bodies. His extreme solitude is as much somatic as psychological; his relentlessly penetrative fantasies are interpretable as consequent upon a sense of corporeal closure all around him. I take this to be Shakespeare’s assessment of one reaction to the surfacing of the sceptical world of homo clausus. As I indicate above, it is in the description of the death of Hamlet the elder that a nostalgic relation to an earlier mode of embodiment emerges most clearly. In many ways, King Lear is about precisely this longing to be absorbed in the world or in the (divine or human) other, a form of historical homesickness for the body. The play reveals the tragic consequences of this way of thinking about one’s place in the world, manifested concretely through Lear’s self-conception as having been expelled from the bodies of his daughters; throughout the play, parental and filial acknowledgments and disownings are consistently figured in terms of what is taken into or expelled from the body. Lear’s tragedy, which is simultaneously the tragedy of his body politic, is portrayed as a consequence of his sceptical rejection of the other as part of his own flesh and blood. The harshly exterior landscape of King Lear can profitably be set beside the pastoral and nurturing landscape of the second part of The Winter’s Tale.242 Here, the sense of the self as being born under the sign of expulsion, a sense of being exiled to the world rather than of being at home in it, is shown to be just one fantasised possibility among others. The play depicts (like Lear) the dangers as well as the possibilities of allowing oneself to be inhabited; the threat of a bursting, or swelling, of the interior, or a breaking of the heart, is repeatedly associated with the taking-in or acknowledgment of the other. Alongside its placement on stage of a pregnant maternal body, The Winter’s Tale portrays the imagined recovery of a world in which language is accepted as emerging from the interior of the body and in which mutual corporeal inhabitation is a newfound possibility. While the loss of original insideness

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52 Shakespeare’s Entrails

(presumptively the source of this terror) can breed a Lear-like nostalgia or ressentiment, Shakespeare’s late play suggests that it is also possible, less tragically or perhaps self-pityingly, to conceive of oneself as nevertheless inhabiting other kinds of interior spaces on earth (its contours, its habitations, its inhabitants) – to conceive of oneself as, to use a Heideggerian term, indwelling, or Being-in, the world – though the play does not shirk an interrogation of the costs of this fantasy too.243 Shakespeare’s plays, poised on the brink of, and heralding, profound historical changes, appear to allocate to the body’s interior a decisive place in the comprehension of subjectivity – even as they question and problematise this notion. In each of the plays I discuss there is both a corporealisation of selfhood and an emptying-out of meaning from the bodily interior. This interior, though constantly invoked, does not answer any questions; rather, it poses them. These plays engage with differing religious attitudes to embodiment, with the growth of intrusive, empirical epistemes of access to viscerality, with the ordinary felt immanence of emotions in the body’s interior. Both humoral theory and anatomical knowledge inform these plays, not in order to resolve matters but as a kind of provocation; one could say that the plays take the pulse of a world or a character – rather than taking their blood and coming up with a definitive diagnosis. A religious frame of reference which found in the corporeal interior the ultimate space of connection to the sacred is no less of an influence on the plays, without ever becoming a safe resting place.244 Shakespeare constantly questions what lies behind the desire to attribute this or that physical symptom or belief to either an inner or an outer place or cause. In a sermon preached at Whitehall on 8 April 1621, Donne declared: We know the receipt, the capacity of the ventricle, the stomach of man, how much it can hold; and wee know the receipt of all the receptacles of blood, how much blood the body can have; so wee do of all the other conduits and cisterns of the body; But this infinite Hive of honey, this insatiable whirlpoole of the covetous mind, no Anatomy, no dissection hath discovered to us.245 The physical capacities of the body’s entrails can be measured, argues Donne, but it is never possible to judge the mind with such precision. Shakespeare, like Donne and Montaigne and so many other writers of the early modern period, returns again and again to the complex, contradictory interior of the body, to its ‘conduits and cisterns’; but renounced in this return is either the sceptic’s ‘covetous’ fantasy of absolute legibility or the believer’s complete transcendence of the problem. For though ‘the capacity of the ventricle, the stomach of man’ may be measurable, the capacity of the body to love, to pity, to be inhabited by the other – these are ‘insatiable whirlpooles’ indeed.

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Visceral Knowledge 53

54 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Descartes and the scene of scepticism

(Hamlet, 1.5.174–5) Many of the issues I have been discussing in this chapter resonate through the writings of Descartes. These epitomise not only a philosophical trend – that of the radical form of scepticism which emerged towards the latter part of the Renaissance – but, more than this, a whole culture’s relation to embodiment and inwardness; Descartes’ thinking takes from ‘the very age and body of his time its form and pressure’ (Hamlet, 3.2.24). His writing sums up, in its fully mature form, an early modern scepticism regarding the accessibility of other people and of the external world; in it we can discern the bodily contours of doubt, as well as a profound solitude, his attempt to deny the accessibility, the being-in-the-world, of his body-self.246 Descartes dramatises the beginnings of his thought-experiment as an almost literal shutting-out of the external world: I shall now close my eyes, stop up my ears, turn away all my senses, even efface from my thought all images of corporeal things [    ] and thus communing only with myself, and examining my inner self, I shall try to make myself, little by little, better known and more familiar to myself. I am a thing which thinks, that is to say, which doubts    247 Alone in his study, in the splendid seclusion of his own thoughts, ‘like a man who walks alone, and in the dark’ (Method, ii, 37), Descartes begins the experiment first, by imagining the closing-off of his body, wishing to make himself impermeable, and, second, by removing from his mind ‘all images of corporeal things’, annihilating the material world. He encloses himself in his study, and begins to doubt – a hermit, hermetically sealed. It is a kind of self-analysis, like that of Freud almost three centuries later: but where Freud began in the consulting room, in the presence of, listening to, the other, Descartes communes only with his ‘inner self’, to the exclusion of all else – ‘without the help of any external things’ (Meditations, iii, 118). ‘Were I independent of every other and were I myself the author of my being, I should doubt nothing and I should desire nothing’ (Meditations, iii, 168), he writes, echoing Coriolanus’ self-description: ‘As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (5.3.36–7). Descartes’ writings provide a vivid picture of the bodily contours of scepticism. If belief, to quote Scarry again, is ‘the act of turning one’s own body inside-out’, here we can see the precise inverse of such an act – a sealing-off, a stubborn refusal to take anything into the body, and an insistence on its complete independence; a kind of corporeal self-confinement. Repeatedly,

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Visceral Knowledge 55

I perceived that this body was placed among many others, from which it was capable of receiving various agreeable and disagreeable effects, and the agreeable ones I observed by a certain feeling of pleasure, and the disagreeable ones by a feeling of pain. And besides this pleasure or pain, I also felt within me hunger, thirst, and other similar appetites    (Meditations, vi, 152–3) It is as if Descartes feels somatically besieged, both from within and from without: ‘nor th’ exterior nor the inward man’ (Hamlet, 2.2.6) provide him with the certainty for which he strives. Where, as we have noted, Freud sees in the pleasure/unpleasure divide the root of all later intellectual judgement, Descartes attempts to exclude precisely these ‘effects’ from his calculations. Descartes’ project of basing all knowledge on reason and mathematical certitude suggests an intolerance for uncertainty inseparable from a distrust of the body – and especially its interior. It is because the internal organs are exempt from conscious control that Descartes can separate body from soul absolutely: ‘I found precisely all those which can be in us without our thinking of them, and therefore, without our soul’ (Method, v, 65). He imagines that, setting aside the soul, human bodies would be like ‘automata’ (Method, v, 73), and famously compares the insides of the body to clock mechanisms (Method, v, 73–5). We can see before our eyes here the culmination of the long process – we could almost call this one of the main projects of the Renaissance – of the simultaneous desacralisation, mechanisation and cordoning-off of the corporeal interior. It is only in the context of the world of homo clausus that it becomes axiomatic and centrally important that no two bodies may occupy the same space: ‘by body, I understand all that can be terminated by some figure; that can be contained in some place and fill a space in such a way that any other body is excluded from it’ (Meditations, ii, 104). We could surmise, following all that has been said hitherto, that the exclusion of the other from the sceptic’s body is itself a central impetus in Cartesian scepticism. And the division of the universe into res extensa and res cogitans is but a short step from the rejection of corporeality as such. Body for Descartes is little more than a distraction or interruption on the path to certain knowledge (‘my thought distracted by the continual presence of the images of sensible objects’ – Meditations, v, 147). For him, as for much of the sceptical tradition dating back to ancient times, the unreliability of the senses and the variability of material circumstances are what make our access to knowledge so problematic. In Descartes’ view, though, it is not merely as the treacherous path to

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Descartes announces his intention to be ‘firm and resolute’ (Method, iii, 46), to base his work on the ‘firm and solid foundations of reason’ (Method, i, 31), and wishes that it were possible to have a body ‘made of some material as incorruptible as diamonds’ (Method, iii, 48). The problem seems to lie, on the one hand, in the body’s susceptibility to influence from without, and, on the other, in its inherent uncontrollability and internal uncertainty:

56 Shakespeare’s Entrails

   considering that all the same thoughts that we have when we are awake can also come to us when we are asleep, without any one of them being true, I resolved to pretend that nothing which had ever entered my mind was any more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I became aware that, while I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. Then, examining attentively what I was, and seeing that I could pretend that I had no body [    ] I thereby concluded that [    ] this ‘I’, that is to say, the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body    (Discourse, iv, 53–4) The notion that the body can be dispensed with leads Descartes repeatedly to an analogy between the body and dreams: ‘Now I know already for certain that I exist, and at the same time that it is possible that all those images, and, in general, all the things one relates to the nature of body, are nothing but dreams’ (Meditations, ii, 106). It is striking how precisely Freud’s method reverses the coordinates of Descartes’. If for the former, dreams are ‘the royal road’ to what knowledge we can achieve of ourselves, for the latter they are unambiguously dead ends; if the former uses phrases such as ‘undoubtedly’ because he has made a decision to take some things (dreams, the unconscious, the other’s revelation of herself) on faith, the latter’s self-analysis proceeds on the principle that ‘reason tells us that, it not being possible that our thoughts should all be true, because we are not absolutely perfect, what truth there is in them will undoubtedly be found in those we have when we are awake than in those we have in our dreams’ (Method, iv, 60); if for the former it is the very partiality of our understanding of dreams – their being ‘unplumbable’ – that confirms their value as truth, the latter makes it his task to equate truth and objective knowledge, adjusting his opinions ‘by the plumb-line of reason’ (Method, ii, 37). Descartes’ philosophical position of doubt is, I have been arguing, both historically-driven and comprehensible from a psychoanalytic perspective. It cannot be divorced from the changing relationship of his culture towards the interior of the body. There is an odd moment right in the middle of Descartes’

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knowledge that soma is problematic; the body itself is precisely defined as the fundamental object of doubt, while the act of doubting belongs to the realm of thought. Indeed, doubting is the first principle of thought: ‘What is a thinking thing? A thing that doubts    ’ (Meditations, ii, 106). Thought (his own) is for Descartes the only thing of which he can be certain; this, of course, is the meaning of ‘cogito, ergo sum’:

Discourse on Method, when the philosopher suddenly exhorts his readers to take up anatomy: ‘I would like those who are not versed in anatomy to take the trouble, before reading this, to have cut open in front of them the heart of some large animal which has lungs, because it is [    ] similar enough to that of man’ (Method, v, 66). This is followed by a lengthy and detailed explanation of the working of the heart and the circulation of the blood. Descartes’ point is of course to show how our interiors are nothing more nor less than mechanical marvels. But his is a view of rather than from the body; and we could perhaps take this, coupled with Descartes’ bodily self-confinement, as a rather precise portrait of the sceptic’s dual impulse: to open the body of the other in place of – as a cover story for – allowing access to his own interior. Descartes’ presentation of the heart for his readers’ inspection is strangely reminiscent of the climactic moment in the Aztec sacrificial ceremonies I spoke of near the beginning of this chapter, or of the way that hearts were often held up to the watching crowds round the scaffolds of early modern Europe as proof of the treasonous nature of the executed criminal. But for Descartes, the moment has lost its meaning as divinely sanctioned: all that is revealed in the handling of the heart is a lack of transcendent meaning, a mechanical structure with no signification beyond itself. If the ancient believers and the early modern spectators viewed the hearts from below – looking past them, so to speak, to the gods who gave them their transcendent sense – Descartes, like the anatomists of his time, views the heart from above – dissecting and looking down into the body of the cadaver. Descartes’ peculiar resort to the dissection of the heart brings us back to the epigraph to this chapter: OTHELLO: By heaven, I’ll know thy thought. IAGO: Thou canst not, if my heart were in your hand. (Othello, 3.3.162–3) Descartes’ anatomising impulse puts him in the position of an Iago, thus precisely highlighting the gap between his enactment of scepticism and Shakespeare’s diagnosis of the position. Shakespeare’s plays, unlike Descartes’ writings, incorporate a view both of and from the body, understanding carnal knowledge in the fullest sense of the term – knowing as something which not only goes into but also emerges from the entrails.

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Visceral Knowledge 57

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Figure 2 Self-Demonstrating Anatomy from Juan Valverde, Historia de la composition del cuerpo humano (Rome, 1556); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 58

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2

Ignorance in physiologis – accursed ‘idealism.’ (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo1 )

The Matter of Troy Why did Shakespeare write Troilus and Cressida? Why, that is, did he turn his attention to a story that was so overdetermined as to have become, by the end of the sixteenth century, little more than a compilation of clichés? The Trojan story was enormously popular during the decades preceding the composition of the play; the most obvious motive suggested by this popularity is the play’s crowd-drawing potential (written by an alreadyfamous playwright, reworking material that was all the rage in contemporary London). Yet this motive is called into question not only by the strangely arcane, difficult nature of the play itself, but also by the preface to the 1609 Quarto, which claims that the play was ‘neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar’;2 in fact, Troilus and Cressida may not have been written for the popular theatre at all, and there are no records of its having ever been performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But the pervasiveness and massive popularity of the Matter of Troy, the fact that ‘no traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan Age as that of the siege of Troy and some of its episodes’ may nevertheless have been a decisive factor in Shakespeare’s turn to this material.3 For in placing these endlessly reiterated and textualised heroes on stage, he could not help but embody them;4 and the limning of these rhetoricised figures in flesh and blood presented an opportunity to wrestle with the issue that, I will argue, lies at the very heart of the play: the question of the relation between language and the body out of which it emanates. Both within the play and in the cultural milieu in which it was written, Troilus and Cressida enacts a restoration of words, and of the ideals created out of them, to their sources inside the body, a resistance to an ongoing historical process of textualising the body. The play thrusts both its protagonists and the audience back into the body, ‘recorporealising’ the received story of the Trojan War. The story’s unparalleled canonicity had created heroes of a deeply textual nature, protagonists who had become by Shakespeare’s time little more than ‘rhetorical 59

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida

and proverbial figure[s]’5 – in the language of the play, ‘unbodied figure[s]’ (1.3.16). The play’s ‘dependence on a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy’ deeply entangles it (as many critics of the play agree) with issues of citationality and originality.6 When Shakespeare turns to the legend, he places the relationship between origins and citations at the centre of his play. He does this by reintroducing, as it were, the substance or ‘matter’ of the body to the ‘Matter of Troy’. Indeed, the very word ‘matter’, often associated in Shakespeare with the interior of the body, recurs no less than 25 times in the play.7 The missing materia which Shakespeare reintroduces into the story is that of the truth of the body, which has been displaced over the countless reiterations of the story by something like pure citationality. For the overdetermined nature of the tale has rendered it disembodied, ‘pale and bloodless’ (1.3.134): what Hamlet refers to punningly as ‘senseless Troy’.8 (‘Troy’, apostrophises Spenser’s Paridell, ‘[thou] art now naught, but an idle name’.9 ) By the time Shakespeare comes to write the play, these post-Homeric heroes have all become ‘Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’ (5.3.108). What may have interested Shakespeare about this was the challenge of giving these rhetoricised figures a corporeal existence; perhaps it was not so much what Shoshana Felman calls ‘the scandal of the speaking body’ that attracted Shakespeare to the Trojan tale as what could be termed the scandal of disembodied speech.10 Written at the opening of the seventeenth century, Troilus and Cressida appears to have a premonitory – and angry – sense of the gradual ‘excarnation’ of the world. The rhetoricisation of the figures of the Trojan legend could be taken as a symbol for this process. ‘Tir’d with iteration’ (3.2.174), the heroes’ identities have become ever further removed from their material sources: the pun on ‘tir’d’ (attired/tired) implies the increasing distance from the body; as if each retelling has added a layer of covering – a cover story – to the protagonists’ flesh. For – as I argue in my introductory chapter – side by side with the growing divide between body and soul we find in this period the emergence of an increasingly closed image of the human body. Perhaps we could understand the fact of the play opening with a ‘Prologue armed’ in this context; as an emblem of homo clausus – a figure standing in a similar position, as we shall see, to that of the Ghost of Old Hamlet, ‘armed cap-à-pie’. (Hence perhaps the emphasis on the symbolically ‘strong immures’ (Prologue, 8) of Troy.) Troilus and Cressida ends, we might already note, with the removal of the ‘gorgeous armour’ of the unnamed knight in the fifth act and the opening of the body in Pandarus’ diseased epilogue, a trajectory which I will be tracing throughout this chapter. Troilus and Cressida has often been described as being ‘consciously philosophical’, as coming ‘closer than any other of the plays to being a philosophical debate’.11 There is little action in the play; mostly, there are disputations, rhetorical arguments about degree, honour, time and value. Yet the play is at the same time compulsively body-bound; from start to finish, its language is replete with inner-somatic imagery, the body’s entrails and the ebb and

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60 Shakespeare’s Entrails

flow of its humours looking out at every joint and motive of the text. How are we to understand this linkage between the play’s intellectuality and its unyielding corporeality, its ‘unsettling combination of abstract speculation and greasy concreteness’?12 It is in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I suggest, that the most illuminating answer to this question can be found, and I propose to spend some time here attempting to understand the relation of philosophy and physiology – and in particular, of truth and entrails – in the thought of this ‘physiologist of morals’.13 Nietzsche elucidates the linkage between human consciousness and the body’s interior by attacking philosophy’s long-standing negation of the body. Philosophical discourse, from Plato onwards, has relied upon a deep rift between mind and body, upon a move toward the ‘unbodied figure of the thought’ (1.3.16), and it is in challenging this rift that Nietzsche puts the physics, as it were, back into metaphysics. The genealogical and philological project of re-linking words, and the ideals and values constructed out of them, to the body’s internal matter lies close to the heart of his work. Etymology helps to uncover the hidden origins of words, origins which are in the end always corporeal. Over and over, Nietzsche stresses that it is ‘essential: to start from the body and employ it as a guide’, for ‘belief in the body is better established than belief in the spirit’;14 ‘the body is a more astonishing idea than the old “soul” ’.15 Starting from the body offers the (partly illusory, partly disillusioning) hope of returning us to something approaching a first cause or origin: ‘The human body, in which the most distant and most recent past of all organic development again becomes living and corporeal, through which and over and beyond which a tremendous inaudible stream seems to flow.’16 Like Shakespeare, Nietzsche turns to the ancients as catalysts to his thinking about human existence and about his own historical period. Like Troilus and Cressida, Nietzsche’s writing exposes the self-interest (political, social, personal) underlying the construction of value and ostensibly disinterested philosophical judgements;17 these issues are all related directly, both in Nietzsche and in Troilus and Cressida, to the body and especially its interior. On the face of it, philosophy and viscera may appear to have little in common; Nietzsche, however, reinstates entrails to a place of weighty philosophical significance. He generally refers to innards as a locus of truth and a way of undercutting idealisations of every kind – above all, the haughtiness of the human intellect and its claims to knowledge. ‘Would that you dared to believe yourselves – yourselves and your entrails’, he proclaims.18 ‘Your entrails [    ] are what is strongest in you.’19 A recurrent theme of his writing is the inherently anti-idealising nature of entrails, recourse to which helps to undercut certain metaphysical and transcendent aspirations: going into the body lies at the opposite pole from going beyond it. Idealisation usually involves a turning away from or repression of the messy truth of the body, or, alternatively, a conception of the body as a perfect, finished surface.20

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62 Shakespeare’s Entrails

What offends aesthetic meaning in inner man – beneath the skin: bloody masses, full intestines, viscera, all those sucking, pumping monsters – formless or ugly or grotesque, and unpleasant to smell on top of that! Therefore suppression through thought, whatever, in spite of that, appears outside awakens shame (faecal matter, urine, saliva, sperm).22 Nietzsche’s graphic language, coupled with his customary hyperbole, aim to make the reader aware of precisely the revulsion he is describing – our own intestines are meant to give evidence of the truth of his statement. It is the fact that they remind us of our interiors that creates our distaste for ‘faecal matter, urine, saliva, sperm’ (and one might add: blood and menses, sweat, vomit, phlegm – bodily secretions). And: ‘Just as the bones, flesh, intestines and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes the sight of man endurable, so the agitations and passions of the soul are enveloped in vanity: it is the skin of the soul.’23 Reminding us of the existence of this monstrous ‘inner man’ is, throughout Nietzsche’s work, a way of revealing the reality beneath thoughts, systems, ideals – though it is worth remembering (as pointed out in Chapter 1) that to a significant degree this shame or disgust is historically and culturally determined: before the sixteenth century the standards of ‘suppression through thought’ appear to have been quite different from those of post-Reformation Europe. Nietzsche repeatedly equates entrails with threatening truths from which we turn away in fear and out of a desire to see ourselves as higher animals. The more ‘civilised’, in his view, the more necessary, and the more difficult, it is to perceive our bodily origins. Noticing what Georges Bataille, following in Nietzsche’s footsteps, calls the ‘frenzy just about perceptible, with difficulty, in the bloody palpitations of the body’ is an act of will, and one which humanity in general prefers to avoid: ‘Mankind enjoys conceiving of itself as the god Neptune grandly imposing silence on his own waves: and yet the deafening waves of the viscera, swelling and shaking almost incessantly, abruptly put an end to his dignity.’24 Indeed, the very drive designated by Nietzsche as ‘the will to power’ is conceived of at its root as an ‘inner phenomenon’, a physiological drive to assimilate or incorporate the environment; and ‘exegesis itself is a symptom of certain physiological conditions’.25 Nietzsche proposes that the self is ultimately driven, however obscurely, by the body’s internal physiology. Excavating the body thus becomes, in a manner of speaking, a central act of Nietzsche’s philosophy. One meaning of the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols – ‘How One Philosophizes with a Hammer’ – is that the philosopher can (and must) listen to the interior of the body, using the hammer as a tuning-fork: ‘Sounding out idols [    ] For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow

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But while the exterior of the body is easy enough to idealise, its interior has a rather more offensive, unsavoury reality, as Nietzsche repeatedly points out. ‘It is in order to contrast an abominable truth to the surface of the ideal’, explains Eric Blondel, ‘that Nietzsche speaks of entrails.’21 Thus:

sound which speaks of bloated entrails – what a delight!’26 The revealing of the ‘Most putrefied core’ (Troilus and Cressida, 5.8.1) of our ideals and of ourselves is one of the crucial impetuses of Nietzsche’s work. Hence he repeatedly speaks of the ‘hard, unwanted, inescapable task’ of philosophy as a type of anatomy, even perhaps a kind of vivisection.27 Access to the entrails, however, is no simple matter. For one thing, cutting into the flesh and heart cannot help but compromise the integrity of the target of such scrutiny. Nietzsche’s violent imagery – the shattering of idols with a hammer, the ruthless cutting of the flesh – can be taken to be implicitly acknowledging this. But there is throughout Nietzsche’s writing a curious and significant balance between the violent and the delicate: the act of investigating the interior may involve a violent rending, but it also entails a careful, almost tender attention: the hammer is both a sledgehammer and a tuning-fork. As Walter Ong has written: ‘Sound has to do with interiors as such, which means with interiors as manifesting themselves’; sound ‘reveals the interior without the necessity of physical invasion’.28 The kind of knowledge gained by such sounding out is a question of listening – of hearing the ‘tremendous inaudible stream’ or ‘the deafening waves of the viscera’ – and not of visual or empirical knowledge: nature, writes Nietzsche, ‘threw away the key’ to this kind of knowing – the kind of knowing that was becoming dominant during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers?29 Laid out, like a corpse, ‘in an illuminated glass case’, one could perhaps see nearly everything – but know very little. Nietzsche never forgets the limits of the epistemological inquiry into the interior of the body: However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown to him [    O]ur moral judgements and evaluations too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of acquired language for designating nervous stimuli.30 While denying the possibility of meaningful knowledge of the body’s inner intricacies, Nietzsche nevertheless insists on the necessity of pursuing the paths that lead back to the body. But while repeatedly and resolutely affirming the status of the body and especially its innards as a key to interpretation –

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 63

Nietzsche shows that this is not the same as ‘the key’ to knowledge referred to above. The folly of believing that one can ever fully comprehend the physiological sources of our existence is clear in Nietzsche’s writings. There is a double movement here – both radically towards the body (and especially its entrails) and, of necessity, away from it. The interpretation of the world is for Nietzsche a matter both of refusing idealist transcendence of the body and of rejecting the recourse to reductive materialism or biologism.31 There is a simultaneous acknowledgement of the importance of the body’s interior and an affirmation that real knowledge of it can only be a dream. I offer this brief reading of Nietzsche’s ideas about entrails as a potentially instructive analogue to my reading of Troilus and Cressida; for both use corporeality in order to expose the self-interest underlying the construction of value and of ostensibly disinterested philosophical or political judgements, as well as the perspectival nature of truth. Both are uncompromising when it comes to revealing the distance between our proudly deployed language and the body’s internal reality. The return to the body in Troilus and Cressida is sceptical, often cynical, but not reductive. From the opening moments of the play, high-flown language and the lowly body are juxtaposed, in, for instance, ‘The princes orgulous, their high blood chafed’ (Prologue, 2). Bloated entrails are one of the dominant images of the play; as Patricia Parker has argued, ‘the inflation or bloating that affects both bodies and words in Troilus also affects its presentation of its epic theme, matter, or argument, repeatedly said to represent an overheld or inflated value’.32 In foregrounding the physiological processes taking place within its protagonists’ tumid bodies, the play ‘sounds out’ the Homeric idols, the epic heroes at the source of European culture; it finds at the centre of their beings little more than disease and raw appetite, representing them all, more or less, as ‘idol[s] of idiot-worshippers’ (5.1.7). ‘Mad idolatry’ (2.2.56) is a subject repeatedly addressed by the play, which, we could say, depicts a kind of Nietzschean ‘Twilight of the Idols’ – ending, as it does, as ‘the sun begins to set, / [And] ugly night comes breathing at his heels’ (5.8.5–6). The play uses a turn to the interior of the body to debunk time-honoured ideals – to reveal the ‘putrefied core’ of the heroic ethos, whether this is ancient or Medieval-chivalric; as Eric Mallin writes of this phrase, which has sometimes been taken as a symbol for the entire play, ‘Hector discovers that the ideal has become entirely flesh, a corrupted thing.’33 The play depicts ‘the veins of actions highest rear’d’ (1.3.6) in the most literal sense of ‘veins’; the ‘nerves and bone of Greece’ (1.3.55) as in the end no more than ‘greasy relics’ (5.2.166; the joke on ‘Greece’ and ‘greasy’ is typical of the play); even Hector’s relatively honourable soldiership is – in his own words – no more than ‘th’vein of chivalry’ (5.3.32) on a good day. In Troilus and Cressida, the twin ideals of heroism-in-war and idolism-in-love are exploded, largely through the attention directed to the ‘polluted’ interior – ‘more abhorr’d / Than spotted livers in the sacrifice’ (5.3.17–18).

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64 Shakespeare’s Entrails

The idea that the play evinces a general disgust with corporeality was for many years practically undisputed; and indeed, the vast majority of the play’s references to the body insist upon its internally diseased and profoundly corruptible state. My argument here runs not so much ‘against the hair’ (1.2.27) of these interpretations as under it; for to take this as a rejection of corporeality as such does little more than reproduce Thersites’ bitter invective against the body – echoing his perspective rather than interpreting it. Admittedly, his can easily be taken to be the dominant tonal voice in the play, but accepting his degraded view of the roots of human action would be like accepting as the overall message of Othello Iago’s cynical avowal that love is ‘merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’ (Othello, 1.3.333). Troilus and Cressida is an angry play, its world pervasively defiled; but the anger, I think, is bifold – directed at both the facts of embodiment and the ideals of disembodiment. Alongside an attitude of disgust towards the body it is important to see the way in which the play turns not just against but also back towards the body, however degraded – in the same way that Nietzsche’s philosophy embraces corporeality with all its ‘formless or ugly or grotesque’ aspects. Perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that even as it furiously forces the audience to confront ‘the most paranoid version of the grotesque body’,34 the play simultaneously encourages the audience to rethink the relation between subjectivity and embodiment. It is more concerned with the degradation of the relation between language and the body than with the defilement of ‘what hath mass and matter by itself’ (1.3.29). Shakespeare’s response to the endless reiteration of the legend of Troy is simultaneously a response to the major genealogical project of Tudor mythographers – the tracing of the ancestry of the British nation to the Trojan wars, a teleology culminating in the great Elizabethan nation. But, as I am describing it, it was not so much this genealogy that Shakespeare was interested in as a kind of Nietzschean genealogy, an enterprise of (re)linking words, and the values and ideals constructed out of them, to their bodily origins, to ‘the basic text of homo natura’.35 Shakespeare’s attempt to restore materia to the Matter of Troy constitutes a powerful countermovement to this founding narrative of English nationalism – as if to say that this narrative does not delve far enough.36 That is, while Tudor mythographers sought a heroic site of origin in the Trojan epic, Shakespeare’s ‘sceptical satire’ seeks the origins of the legend of Troy in the bodies of its heroes.37 The implied repudiation of the idealising narrative of Elizabethan nationalism simultaneously suggests a radical rereading of the progress-bound idea of time upon which this history relies. Troilus and Cressida comes closer to a view of history as reiterative or circular in its perpetual return to the sources of action in human physiology. The play, in fact, thematises the question of what the perspective of time does to historical events.38 Time here is repeatedly personified – as an all-consuming scavenger, a thief snatching at scraps of history with which to cram up his thievery, a vulture pouncing

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 65

upon the leftovers of every human deed. And as ‘raging appetite’ is imagined as the origin of both the love-plot and the war-plot, this same appetite is figured as the terminus of all action, the universal wolf which last eats up himself. Shakespeare’s anti-mythologising return to the body here could be described as nostalgic, though it is anything but idealising. It is in a sense a turning against his medieval and early modern sources and back towards Homer. The Iliad, ‘stuffed with gore’,39 never flinches from describing the horror of the utter destructibility of the body. Both the Iliad and Troilus and Cressida – to exceedingly different effects, to be sure – present the human being as ‘a bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh’ subjected relentlessly to ‘force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter’.40 It is this restoration of the body which produces the play’s ubiquity of corporeal images. It is a restoration of the heroically repressed, or the unveiling of what we might call the entrails of epic. The return, as it happens, is simultaneously an etymological return, since the very name ‘Ilium’ meant, in Latin (in the plural form of ile): intestines, guts. The play can thus be described as not only a genealogical excavation but also, in true Nietzschean fashion, a philological one. And (in case Shakespeare’s ‘small Latine’ did not extend this far) we might note that ‘Ilium’ and ‘Ilion’ (the two forms of the Homeric designation for Troy used alternately in the play) are – and were in the sixteenth century – alternate anatomical names for the largest part of the intestinal tract (the part affected in the apparently then-common disease called iliac passion: bloating of the intestines).41 If Tudor historiography traced the birth of the British nation to Ilium, Shakespeare traces the word ‘Ilium’ back to the body. In this sense – and speaking hyperbolically – the entire play can be said to take place within and around one large, bloated intestine.

The satirist and the cannibal I do here think fit to inform the Reader [    ] that in most Corporeal Beings, which have fallen under my Cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In. (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub42 ) Perhaps, then, we can see in the Prologue’s ‘Beginning in the middle, starting thence away, / To what may be digested in a play’ (28–9) a little joke about high and low origins: the epic tradition of beginning in medias res here becomes a different, earthier kind of ‘middle’, just as the common Renaissance rhetorical idea of ‘digestion’ as distribution or methodical arrangement is partially given back its somatic meaning.43 The ending of the Trojan legend, we might here recall, is ineluctably linked to the idea of full intestines – to the Trojan horse, that is, with its bellyful of Greek warriors,

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66 Shakespeare’s Entrails

‘couched in the ominous horse’ (Hamlet, 2.2.453).44 This horse was a proverbial symbol of guile throughout the English Renaissance, figuring the idea of deceit quintessentially in terms of the gap between the interior and the exterior.45 (And the point of the horse, of course, was itself the penetration of an interior – the walls of Troy.) Here again, Shakespeare neatly turns around the question of origins and ends: the normative conclusion of the Trojan story is in the horse’s belly; Troilus and Cressida, as we will see, makes the belly the origin rather than the culmination of the tale.46 Traditionally, the origin of the Trojan legend lies in a contest among the gods: Paris, called upon to judge who is the most beautiful goddess, is rewarded by the winner, Venus, with the gift of Helen (designated in the play as ‘the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty’ – 3.1.31). Troilus and Cressida, however, seems more interested in an altogether more cynical competition amongst the gods. A story particularly popular in early modern England was Lucian’s version of the tale of Momus. In his Hermotimus, or Concerning the Sects – a satire of all manner of philosophical schools and pretensions – Lucian relates the story of how Momus, the mocker of the gods, judged a competition between Athena, Poseidon and Hephaestus (Vulcan). Sparked by a quarrel between the three gods over which of them was the best artist, Momus is appointed to judge their creations: Athena designs a house, Poseidon a bull, Hephaestus a man. ‘What faults he found in the other two’, writes Lucian, ‘we need not say, but his criticism of the man and his reproof of the craftsman, Hephaestus, was this: he had not made windows in his chest which could be opened to let everyone see his desires and thoughts, and if he were lying or telling the truth.’47 This tale was well known in the early seventeenth century; it is referred to by, for example, Francis Bacon, who speaks of ‘that window which Momus did require: who seeing in the frame of man’s heart such angles and recesses, found fault there was not a window to look into them’; and by Robert Burton: ‘How would Democritus have been moved, had he seen the secrets of [men’s] hearts! If every man had a window in his breast, which Momus would have had in Vulcan’s man [    ] Would he, think you, or any man else, say that these men were well in their wits?’48 Lucian – ‘the Merry Greek’, as he was known to sixteenth-century Englishmen49 – was the kind of philosopher whose caustic, disillusioned perspectivism may very well have influenced Troilus and Cressida directly (the epithet ‘merry Greek’ is used twice in the play);50 Shakespeare’s comic satire shares with him a disenchantment with ideals, a deeply relativist attitude to questions of value, and a level of scoffing unparalleled elsewhere in the canon. But my interest here lies less in Lucian’s influence on Shakespeare than in the way Momus’ tale succinctly highlights a tendency that is central to satire in general and to Troilus and Cressida in particular. Momus’ criticism of Hephaestus’ man exemplifies a desire shared, in one form or another, by many sceptics and satirists: the desire to puncture pretence by revealing the body’s innards, figuring deceit in terms of the gap between words and the

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 67

bodies out of which they emerge.51 This sceptical impulse, as described in Chapter 1, often takes the form of a desire to see into, or to open up, the body of the other. Troilus and Cressida partakes of this satirical tradition of figuring the puncturing of deceit and delusion as a puncturing of the body. The scepticism evinced by the play is itself described within the play in just such terms: ‘Doubt’, says Hector, ‘is call’d / The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches / To th’bottom of the worst’ (2.2.15–17; a ‘tent’ is a surgeon’s instrument for opening and probing a wound).52 As we saw in Chapter 1, such a penetrative impulse stems from an imagination of the interior of the body as capable of concealing an ulterior truth, a fantasy of the possibility of absolute knowledge of the other. Jean Starobinski has discussed the origins of such a corporeal schema in its archetypal form. Turning back to Homer’s Iliad – ‘one of the first poetic documents in which the censure of duplicity is given full and emphatic voice’ – Starobinski quotes Achilles’ rebuke to Agamemnon (‘For hateful in my eyes, even as the gates of Hades, is that man that hideth one thing in his heart and sayeth another’) and comments: ‘the doubling, the splitting which causes one thing to be hidden and another said [    ] takes on spatial dimensions: what goes unsaid is actively hidden in the heart, the space of the inside – the interior of the body is that place in which the cunning man dissimulates what he doesn’t say’.53 The Iliad is, to be sure, a particularly effective place to look for such corporeal dimensions, as the exegeses of such scholars as R.B. Onians, Bruno Snell and Ruth Padel have made abundantly clear.54 But the bodily schema pointed to by Starobinski has been too tenacious over the centuries to be dismissed either as a manifestation of ‘primitive’ or archaic thought or as merely a convenient metaphor. The explicitly somaticised nature of the urge to puncture deceit and delusion was never more evident than during the English satire-vogue of the final decade of the sixteenth century, a vogue to which Troilus and Cressida was Shakespeare’s main contribution.55 ‘I do anatomize and cut up these poor beasts, to see these distempers, vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made on man’s body’, announces Robert Burton’s Democritus Junior, adding that he hopes the ‘unskilful knife’ he wields should not ‘lance too deep, and cut through skin and all unawares’.56 ‘The Satyre should be like the Porcupine, / That shoots sharp quilles out in each angry line, / And wounds the blushing cheeke’, notes Joseph Hall.57 John Marston, perhaps the chief proponent of the form, writes: ‘I up do plow / The hidden entrails of ranke villanie / Tearing the vaile from damn’d Impietie’.58 He speaks of the task of the ‘firking satirist’ as to ‘draw the core forth of imposthum’d sin’ or ‘to purge the snottery of our slimie time’.59 But just who is being purged? When George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie discusses ‘Satyres’ and epigrams – ‘The manner of Poesie by which they uttered their bitter taunts, and privy nips, or witty scoffes and other merry conceits’ – he writes that ‘all the world could not keepe, nor any civill ordinance to the contrary

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so prevaile, but that men would and must needs vtter their spleens [    ] or else it seemed their bowels would burst’.60 The satirist might appear to be above it all, commenting from a position of superiority as well as exteriority upon the ills of society; but as Duke Senior comments in As You Like It, this is merely a pretence, a cover story: ‘Most mischievous foul sin in chiding sin’, he scolds Jaques; ‘all th’embossed sores, and headed evils, / That thou with license of free foot hast caught, / Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world’ (2.7.64–9). There is a powerful corporealisation of the satiric impulse throughout this period; whether the trope is one of injury, anatomical dissection, or medical purgation, both the penetrative drive and the target of this drive – the bodily interior of the satirised object – are practically explicit.61 ‘The Gods had their Momus, Homer his Zoilus, Achilles his Thirsites’, writes Burton in his discussion of satirists and calumniators, whose ‘bitter jests [    ] pierceth deeper then any losse, danger, bodily paine, or injury whatsoever’.62 Troilus and Cressida’s chief satirist, ‘rank Thersites’, pierces each and every one of the play’s protagonists with his ‘mastic jaws’ (1.3.73). As this last phrase indicates, the penetrative drive of satire can appear at the same time as an impulse to devour the object under attack – it often manifests itself in a specifically oral form of aggression; as Mary Clare Randolph writes, ‘Renaissance satirists frequently picture themselves as [    ] sinking their teeth deep in some sinner’s vitals.’63 This idea of oral sadism is a recurrent theme of satirists; it is often figured as a compulsion to bite. Marston, for example, writes of himself as ‘the sharpe fangd Satyrist’: ‘Unlesse the Destin’s adamantine band / Should tye my teeth, I cannot chuse but bite’; and Burton, quoting Castiglione, says of satirists that ‘they cannot speake, but they must bite’.64 To say that the aggressive impulse of ‘Byting’ satire is predominantly oral is to approach redundancy (as Milton points out in dismissing Joseph Hall’s ‘toothlesse Satyres’: it is ‘as much as if he had said toothlesse teeth’).65 But there is in satire, over and above this oral aggression, an urge to devour – an urge, moreover, specifically directed at the human body. The satirist typically fantasises not only penetrating the other’s body but devouring it, as if entering this body is a concomitant of being inhabited by it.66 The derivation of the word satire – from the Latin satura, full, satiated – points to this cannibalistic drive; as Walter Benjamin writes, in his remarkable essay on Karl Kraus: ‘The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization.’ And, he adds, ‘the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of his [the satirist’s] inspiration’.67 The projective mechanism of satire, in this view, makes it both embody and thematise a cannibalistic desire, an inclination epitomised by the delicious ending of one of the earliest Menippean satires, Petronius’ Satyricon, where the rich Eumolpus bequeaths his wealth to his friends ‘upon the satisfaction’, as his will puts it, ‘of the following condition: they must slice up my body into little pieces and swallow them down in the presence of the entire city’.68 The misanthropic cannibalism of satire is glimpsed in Troilus and Cressida’s relentless absorption with imagery of food, eating, digestion and spoiling.69

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 69

And while this alimentary obsession has often been noticed, a distinct pattern emerges when we examine its figurative trajectory through the course of the play.70 Beginning with the ‘starv’d [    ] subject’ (1.1.93) of the story, the play continues with imagery of the preparation of food, and ends with the greasy leftovers of a meal. The outline is one of more or less linear progression, from the early talk of culinary preliminaries (‘The grinding [    ] the bolting [    ] the leavening [    ] the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking’ – 1.1.18–26; ‘the spice and salt that season a man [    ] a minced man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie’ – 1.2.259–62; the ‘bast[ing]’ in one’s ‘own seam’ or grease – 2.3.186) and of ‘tarrying’ (1.1.15), before the meal; followed by the promises of ‘tasting’ on the ‘finest palate’ (1.3.337–8, 389), the readiness of the stomach (2.1.128), the ‘raging appetites’ (2.2.181), and the preparation of ‘my cheese, my digestion’ (2.3.44); then the ‘imaginary relish’ (3.2.17) leading up to the meal itself, associated as it is with sexual consummation (‘Love’s thrice-repured nectar’ – 3.2.20); and thence to the ‘fullness’ (4.4.3; 4.5.271; 5.1.9) and ‘belching’ (5.5.23) of engorgement, of having ‘o’er-eaten’ (5.2.158) – and the ensuing nausea, associated with the ‘spoils’ (4.5.62), the rancid leftovers, ‘The lees and dregs’ (4.1.63); the ‘orts [    ] The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics’ (5.2.157–8). In view of this, it would not be going too far to call Troilus and Cressida a bulimic play, one which evokes in its audience (as has often been noted in a general way) a reaction akin to the figurative nausea of the imagistic trajectory delineated above. The play, in fact, begins with a ‘disgorg[ing]’ (Prologue, 12) and proceeds through overeating to its anti-cathartic ending in Pandarus’ stomach-turning epilogue.71 The prologue has referred to the ensuing action as ‘what may be digested in a play’ (Prologue, 29), and there is, I think, an implication of the nauseating effect of this ‘unwholesome dish’ (2.3.120) upon the digestive systems of its spectators.72 What should also be noted here is that the lion’s share of the imagery of food and eating in the play is cannibalistic – that is, it consistently imagines the object of alimentary consumption as a human being. The play thus places its spectators in the position not only of diseased ‘traders in the flesh’ (5.10.46) but also of uneasy ‘eaters of the flesh’ – of cannibals: little wonder that it was apparently ‘never stal’d with the Stage’ in Shakespeare’s time, and that audiences still find it somewhat unpalatable. The notion of cannibalism is implicit, too, in the play’s repeated evocation of images of self-consumption. The connection between the two is remarked upon in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: ‘We are what we all abhorre, Antropophagi and Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh which wee behold, came in at our mouths: this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In briefe, we have devoured our selves.’73 The most prominent image of self-consumption in the play is of course Ulysses’ speech on appetite, which ‘Must make perforce an universal prey, /

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And last eat up himself’ (1.3.123–4);74 but the idea takes several forms (for example, ‘He that is proud eats up himself’ – 2.3.156; ‘lechery eats itself’ – 5.4.35), so that in this play at least, self-consumptive cannibalism begins to appear pervasive. The entire project – comprising Shakespeare’s relation to his sources, the audience’s relation to the play, and the characters’ relation to each other – is implicitly cannibalistic. Forcing the idea of cannibalism upon the audience entails, among other things, forcing it to come to terms with the embodiedness – the very flesh – of the protagonists of the story. It is Thersites, above all, whose constant punning obsessively returns language to the body’s internal ‘matter’. Thersites even appears to know (and this is typical of the play’s proleptic manner) that he himself is destined to become, quite literally, a disembodied figure of speech, the rhetorical figure of ‘the standard rhyparographer’ (or ‘filth-painter’):75 when threatened by Ajax with ‘I shall cut out your tongue’, he replies – ‘’Tis no matter’ (2.1.107–8): this last phrase becomes a refrain for Thersites, whose pun here takes the material organ of speech to be ‘immaterial’, construing his ‘tongue’ in its entirely figurative meaning (that is, speech), and thus constituting himself, in one sense, as pure citation – Shakespeare is here (as so often) having fun with his sources: Chapman’s version of The Iliad calls Thersites ‘A man of tongue’.76 The irony, of course, is that the actor playing Thersites must use his material tongue to say these words, thereby revealing the odd status of the body in Troilus and Cressida: the play both depicts and – in its reiteration of the tale – enacts the body’s displacement by speech even as it reverses this displacement by both foregrounding the role of the body and embodying the tale on stage. Thersites’ quibbling ways with the word ‘matter’ begin earlier in the same scene: ‘Agamemnon – how if he had boils, full, all over, generally? [    ] And those boils did run – say so – did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core? [    ] Then would come some matter from him: I see none now’ (2.1.2–9). With his first words in the play, Thersites, whose every third thought is of the body’s putrefaction, points punningly to the gap between the substance of the body and the argument of words; as Patricia Parker explains, ‘The “head and general,” supposed to be a source of ordered and reasoned argument, the generation of “matter” for discourse as well as the hierarchical embodiment of order itself, is in this play only a “botchy core”, the source of “matter” in an infected body politic.’77 As James O’Rourke argues, the play demolishes master-slave hierarchies of all kinds, and this includes the usual hierarchy between reason and the body: each of these heroes could be described as wearing ‘his wit in his belly and his guts in his head’ (2.1.75–6).78 Here, Thersites’ ‘Then would come some matter from him: I see none now’ announces a lack of ‘matter’ at the core of Agamemnon, thereby hinting, synecdochically, at a lack at the heart of the entire legend of Troy as it arrived in Elizabethan England, an emptiness at the core. The story’s hero, Achilles, is figured in Troilus and Cressida as ‘a fusty nut with no

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 71

kernel’ (2.1.103–4);79 Ajax is a ‘thing of no bowels’ (2.1.52); and Agamemnon ‘hath not so much brain as earwax’ (5.1.48). Troy itself, with the death of Hector, is deprived of interior matter: ‘Come, Troy, sink down! / Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone’ (5.8.11–12). All can be described as having been ‘baked with no date in the pie’ (1.2.262). Critics of Troilus and Cressida tend to discuss its two salient imagistic strands – those of disease and of eating – separately. But the two are repeatedly intertwined in the play: they are twin manifestations of a pervasive ‘appetite’ – ‘an appetite that I am sick withal’ (3.3.237). We could say that as hunger is taken metaphorically for all beginnings of desire, disease is understood synecdochically as the terminus of all desire – hence the play’s ending with Pandarus’ bequeathal of his ‘diseases’ to the audience’s already ‘aching bones’ (5.10.57, 51).80 Nor is the disease imagery in the play solely a matter of syphilitic or venereal sickness, associated with a narrow (sexual) definition of ‘desire’: Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’th’ back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, whissing lungs, bladders full of impostume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’th’palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take again and again such preposterous discoveries! (5.1.16–24) Thersites’ cursing, while specifically attacking homosexual activity (‘preposterous discoveries’), encompasses a dozen kinds of illness, most of which have nothing to do with sexuality but are rather the end result of quite diverse forms of ‘appetite’. Disease and alimentary imagery are linked, first, by their relation to internal physiology, and, second, by their relation to ‘appetite’ in the broadest sense of the term. This is why the idea of selfconsumption recurs so often in the play: appetite contains – or wills – its own end. For the play seems to me to conceive of appetite as something very like Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ – an insatiable, appropriative urge which, for all its myriad manifestations, finds its sources in the physiology of each and every organism: Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite, And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. (1.3.119–24) The deflation of the ideals and of the high-flown rhetoric of these epic heroes centres on this idea of an insatiable, pervasive, polymorphous

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(‘universal’) ‘appetite’: ‘He eats nothing but doves [    ] and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love’ (3.1.123–25). The Renaissance’s hierarchy of desires, from the merely appetitive to the ‘spiritual’, is here portrayed as reducible to its lowest common denominator; it is only the arbitrary imposition of degree that stops this collapse. And it is this reduction of all forms of desire to the merely appetitive – the refusal to separate sexual, martial and alimentary forms of desire – which makes the play so cannibalistic. I am suggesting here that we think of ‘desire’ in Troilus and Cressida in a very broad scope. Catherine Belsey has argued that the play ‘shows a world where desire is everywhere [    ] Desire is the unuttered residue which exceeds any act that would display it, including the sexual act.’81 As Troilus himself puts it, ‘desire is boundless’ – boundless, that is, not only in aspiration but in origin. Troilus’ famous lament – ‘This is the monstruosity in love, lady: that the will is infinite, and the execution confined: that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.79–82) – has too often been taken to imply little more than that all lovers fall short of their aims. But desire, the entire play seems to be saying, is not only unsatisfiable in relation to its objects – it is insatiable (or, to use Belsey’s term, ‘excessive’) at its very source; it is a ‘slave to limit’ not only in that it can never fulfil its aims, but also in that it must, perforce, choose these aims, these objects (of love, of hate, of identification), though in and of itself it is ‘infinite’. The various manifestations of desire here – alimentary, martial, amorous, hetero- and homosexual, mimetic – are all conceived of as just that: manifestations of some absolutely voracious and polymorphous physiological drive. All these expressions of desire are merely its protean forms, ‘Dexterity [    ] obeying appetite’ (5.5.27). The theme of alimentary ‘appetite’ appears everywhere in the very fabric of this play, which comes perilously close to embracing the ruthlessly deidealising notion of the world as merely appetite. As in Nietzsche, the alimentary process is here a central metaphor for any manifestation of a will to power; eating and digestion appear indiscriminately as tropes for the play’s two main themes of love and war: the ‘generation of love’ is figured as ‘eat[ing] nothing but doves’ (3.1.123–7), the origin of the ‘factious feasts’ (1.3.191) of bellicosity as having a ‘stomach to the war’ (3.3.219; 2.1.127; 4.5.263). This is not, I think, merely a matter of an interpretive reduction to the level of physiology; it is a way of understanding human activities and processes metaphorically. To describe the ‘spirit’, Nietzsche – like Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida – turns to the body: ‘The spirit’, he writes, ‘is more like a stomach than anything else’:82 This inferior being [the stomach] assimilates whatever lies in its vicinity, and appropriates it (property initially being food and provision for food), it seeks to assimilate as many things as it can and not only to compensate itself for loss: this being is greedy.83

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The ‘raging appetites’ (2.2.182) of both Greeks and Trojans figure the insatiability of this process; their actions, again and again, constitute an almost explicit display of ‘the will of the weak to represent some form of superiority’.84 Troilus and Cressida’s depiction of the endlessly shifting shapes that desire can take (the folie circulaire of heterosexual activity expressing itself as martial activity expressing itself as homosexual activity, and so on)85 ultimately means that the protagonists ‘lose distinction’ (3.2.25) between these shapes, as the audience, by the end of the play, loses any sense of distinction between Greeks and Trojans, ‘hot’ (3.1.125) lovers and ‘hot’ (4.5.186) warriors. Nor, at this level, is there a differentiation between male and female: entrails (in this play) are conspicuously ungendered; nowhere is ‘matter’ linked (as it is, for instance, in Hamlet) to mater, the maternal. All difference is, to use Nietzsche’s term, ‘assimilated’ – ‘consum’d / In hot digestion of this cormorant war’ (2.2.5–6) – even, it seems, the distinction between comedy and tragedy. The play displays an in-difference to, or at least a profound scepticism about, the many forms of desire, including their generic concomitants; as Valerie Traub points out, ‘Troilus and Cressida declines to differentiate types of desire.’86 It is almost, as Joel Fineman puts it, ‘as though in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare had turned against desire itself’,87 exposing its ostensibly distinct manifestations as inextricable from each other at their source. The endlessly ‘dextrous’ forms of desire seem to amount, in the end, to little more than ‘the performance of our heaving spleens’ (2.2.197), the ‘pleasure of my spleen’ (1.3.178), ‘a feverous pulse’ (3.2.35), ‘the hot passion of distempered blood’ (2.2.170), ‘the obligation of our blood’ (4.5.121), ‘bawdy veins’ (4.1.70), ‘too much blood and too little brain’ (5.1.46), and so on; this approaches Nietzsche’s ‘the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers’. Metaphors all, in a sense, but for all that figuring the distance between the deep sources of human motivation and their manifestations in rhetoric and action. It is precisely the question of the ‘ebbs and flows’ (as Agamemnon puts it) of the body’s ‘humorous predominance’ (2.3.131–2) – what Nietzche refers to as the ‘ebb and flood’ of the body’s drives – that the play opens up.88 Carol Cook speaks of ‘the play of drives’ depicted in Troilus and Cressida.89 Such a view goes some way towards explaining the strangeness of the play, the fact that Troilus and Cressida is so difficult to discuss profitably in terms of ‘character’ or coherent ‘character-development’. This almost Menippean quality is linked to the difficulty in assessing the play in terms of genre: in its refusal or rejection of tragedy the play allows for nothing approaching tragic individuation.90 Indeed, it seems almost perversely to flout any attempt to perceive full subjectivity in its dramatis personae; these are, without exception, flattened out, reduced to little more than caricatures. This is where I part ways with Charnes’s powerful account of the play: it is not, I think, Shakespeare’s enterprise here to take on ‘the task of

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giving mimetic spontaneity to, and representing viable subjectivity in’ these Homeric characters – quite the contrary.91 The source of many of the jokes in the play is the unrecognisability or exchangeability of characters – of Helen and Cressida (1.1.39–74), Troilus and Hector (1.2.54–88), Agamemnon and any of the other Greek heroes (1.3.215–56), Ajax and Achilles (2.3.140–57) and so on.92 It is only the arbitrary imposition of degree that allows for distinction to be found between ‘the bold and coward, / The wise and fool, the artist and unread, / The hard and soft’ (1.3.23–5). For as Shakespeare ‘recorporealises’ the story, he (quite uncharacteristically) ‘decharacterises’ its heroes; they become little more than ‘ciphers’ in the ‘great accompt’ (Henry V, Prologue, 17) of the Trojan legend. As Matthew Greenfield points out, ‘the play works through two related theories of human behaviour, one physiological (humors) and the other psychological (emulation, or what René Girard calls “mimetic desire”). Both are theories of damaged agency, of compulsive, involuntary action.’93 There is something profoundly stripped-down, rather than fully rounded, about all the play’s characters (one concomitant of this stripping is the abundant animal imagery in the play). The unflinching nature of this vision can, again, be viewed as a turn back to Homer, to the ‘geometrical rigor’ of what Simone Weil has called ‘the poem of force’.94 One could understand this as one more way in which, in the context of the Poets’ War, Shakespeare ‘out-Jonsons Jonson’, whose comedies rely so heavily on a humoral version of character.95 The spirit of the play drags any metaphysical or psychological pretensions back down to earth, portraying the characters as little more than ‘vain forms of matter’.96 In radically shifting our view of these heroes of the Western world, in its materialist reduction of motivation to something like the corporeal ‘will to power’, Troilus and Cressida delves deeply into the question of the relation between language and the body.

Cannibalism and silence Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent! (Karl Kraus, In These Great Times97 ) For all its grand rhetoric – or perhaps, more accurately, as a necessary concomitant to this rhetoric – Troilus and Cressida reveals an extreme distrust of (not to say disgust with) language. If the play leaves one with a sensation of satiety with words, it is likely that this sensation was one which Shakespeare, in coming to write this play, was himself unable to avoid. Many writers of the period comment on this idea, several of them in the process using a specifically oral metaphor: George Whetstone declares that ‘the inconstancie of Cressid is so readie in every mans mouth, as it is needlesse labour to blase at full her abuse’; Montaigne writes that ‘there is nothing liveth so in mens mouthes [    ] as Troy, as Helen and her Warres’; Burton describes the story’s popularity vividly, using a phrase that evokes the play’s nausea: ‘our Poets

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 75

steal from Homer, he spewes, [and] they licke it up’.98 Perhaps it was this sense of verbal surfeit which impelled Shakespeare to turn the Trojan legend into material for satire, satura; such a sense may in fact be an inherent component of satire – oral satiety turned to oral sadism. Burton, in his discussion of satirists and calumniators, warns against ‘fall[ing] into the mouths of such men [    ] for many are of so petulant a spleene, and have that figure Sarcasmus so often in their mouthes, so bitter, so foolish, as Baltasar Castilio notes of them, that they cannot speake, but they must bite’.99 Confronted with a glut of retellings of the legend of Troy, Shakespeare may indeed have found, when he turned his attention to the writing of Troilus and Cressida, that he could not speak without biting; hence, perhaps, the play’s turn towards cannibalism.100 This difficulty in speaking without biting perfectly figures the perplexed relation between language and the body in Troilus and Cressida; and for early modern Europeans, the idea of cannibalism has a recurrent stake in interrogating this problematic matter. We are speaking here of a period of crisis in the understanding of this relation, a period during which print technology and the exhaustion of the humanist project of ‘ fattening up’ language – to name just two factors – had resulted in a profound dissatisfaction with the hollowed-out discourses of European culture. As Sir Francis Bacon put it, the men of his age ‘began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clear composition of the sentence [    ] than after the weight of the matter’.101 It is in the framework of this widespread sense of linguistic degradation that I suggest we should see the use of the notion of cannibalism in the play. Troilus and Cressida links the disgustingly obscene or diseased interior of the body with a degradation of language. Here I would like to turn briefly to Montaigne, whose ‘motivated confrontation of the philosophical and the anatomical’102 recalls Troilus and Cressida’s linking of the two, and whose essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ can provide us with some illuminating parallels to the play’s staging of these issues. Both these texts portray an attitude to love and an attitude to war as exemplary cases for the judging of a society’s ethical value. Montaigne displaces the idea of savagery back onto European civilisation, describing his own countrymen’s behaviour as far crueller than that of the New World’s cannibals; in the process of this displacement, as Michel de Certeau explains, ‘the word “barbarian” [    ] leaves behind its status as a noun (the Barbarians) to take on the value of an adjective (cruel, etc.)’.103 From one perspective, Troilus and Cressida’s trajectory is a diametric inversion of Montaigne’s: instead of revealing and ratifying the deeply ethical imperative underlying the culture of cannibal society (and thereby assimilating the latter to ‘civilisation’), it defamiliarises (or disassimilates) the epic ethos, infusing it with a ‘cannibalism’ which is seen as ‘savage strangeness’ (2.3.128). The former society’s ‘noble and generous’104 heroism-in-war (the heroism of

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76 Shakespeare’s Entrails

the victim) and polygamy-in-marriage (based on the love of the wives) are precisely inverted in Shakespeare’s barbarism-in-war (the anti-heroism of the perpetrator, exemplified by Achilles’ butchering of Hector) and cuckoldry-inmarriage (based on the infidelity of the women – both Cressida and Helen). Yet the play ends up in more or less the same place as ‘Of the Cannibals’, proclaiming the ‘barbarism’ (5.4.17) of the heroes of the Iliad – the cradle of its own European culture. ‘We are all hollow and empty, and it is not with breath and words we should fill our selves. We have need of a more solide substance to repaire our selves’, wrote Montaigne.105 Both texts evince a profound dissatisfaction with the slipperiness of language, with what Montaigne repeatedly thinks of as the vanity of words; as C.C. Barfoot writes, ‘Troilus and Cressida leads us to the conclusion that we can no more trust our heroes, or even our antiheroes, than we can trust our words.’106 But Montaigne’s (idealised) savage culture is everything which Shakespeare’s (debased) European culture is not. Where the former, as de Certeau brilliantly shows, ‘is founded upon [    ] a heroic faithfulness to speech [which] produces the unity and continuity of the social body’, the latter’s ‘Bifold authority’ (5.2.143) emphasises the antiheroic faithlessness of language, and fragments any vestige of social – and, ultimately, individual – unity. Why is cannibal speech so reliable? Because it is ‘sustained by bodies that have been put to the test’ (73): ‘These muscles’, sings the Cannibals’ prisoner before he is eaten, ‘this flesh, and these veines, are your own’.107 Why is the speech of Shakespeare’s Greeks and Trojans so unreliable? Because it contains ‘no matter from the heart’ (5.2.108). The enigma of the relation between body and speech lies at the very core of both Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s texts. Both are concerned with the question of the corporeal source of words, a question about the veracity or duplicity of voice. It is this turn from bodily source to disembodied discourse – the trope of voice – which is the target of much sceptical and satirical attack. Scepticism questions the accuracy of the connection between words and things; here, more specifically, it is the question of the coherence of the link between the source of things (words, desires) within the body and their emanation in discourse that is at issue. Montaigne’s cannibals have no need of scepticism, no use for it, since they are materially inhabited by the body of the other, and this inhabitation guarantees the quality of the link between language and corpus. Cannibalism, here, contains a fantasy of speech as ‘a thing inseparate’ (5.2.147) from the body. It is in this sense that what is taken into the body – the gastric – can be imagined as an antidote to the speech – the rhetoric – which leaves it: both Montaigne’s cannibals and Shakespeare’s protagonists are, in a sense, what they eat. But for the Shakespearean characters, the gap ‘’twixt [the] mental and [the] active parts’ (2.3.170) yawns wide, and the play repeatedly tries to force words back into the body – precisely because they cannot be trusted to emanate from this source faithfully.

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 77

Troilus and Cressida offers a debased version of the supposedly open body nostalgically imagined as prevalent in pre-Renaissance Europe. It is opened by disease and corruption – it is not even accorded the pathos of the violently opened body of tragedy. Blood here, for example, is not what is spilt by epic heroes dying for a cause – it is envisaged by Troilus as a kind of rouge (‘Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus’ – 1.1.86–7): in this image, the interior of the body, instead of being the royal road to truth or nobility, provides nothing more than an additional layer of pretence. And if, the play implies, the alternative to this kind of grotesque openness is silence, so be it; there is in Troilus and Cressida hardly a glimpse of other ways of being open; the play itself, we might say, ‘admits no orifex for a point as subtle as Ariachne’s broken woof to enter’ (5.5.155). Montaigne’s cannibal society is ‘a body in the service of saying. It is the visible, palpable, verifiable exemplum which realizes before our eyes an ethic of speech’ (75). Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida holds out no such hope of ‘faithful and verifiable speech’ (75). But where Montaigne offers, as an alternative to the morally depleted discourses of early modern Europe, a new ‘ethic of speech’, Shakespeare here offers no hope of a language guaranteed by the body. Instead, he offers the only other possible alternative: an ethic of silence. In the context of the play’s outpouring of alternately highflown, empty rhetoric and scurvy invective, one character stands out in his utter wordlessness: Antenor. A.P. Rossiter, the only critic (as far as I know) who comments on his existence, calls him ‘Shakespeare’s one strong silent man’.108 Onstage on at least five separate occasions, mentioned by those around him a dozen times, he utters not a single syllable throughout. In his silence he is strikingly at odds with his traditional role: Homer, for example, calls him ‘strong in talking’, and Caxton says of him simply that he ‘spacke moche’.109 His speechlessness in Shakespeare, then, is quite deliberate, a kind of rebuttal of the nauseatingly ‘cramm’d’ (2.2.49) rhetoric circulating in and around the play. (And Shakespeare’s knack for squeezing meaning out of the names he is given may be at work here, for ‘Antenor’ can be related readily enough to the Greek privative an-(‘not or without’) prefixed to tenor (the male voice).110 ) If Troilus and Cressida as a whole shares with Montaigne a sceptical, Pyrrhonic sense of pervasive relativism, Antenor’s tenacious muteness may be imagined as a Pyrrhonic commitment to aphasia, a ‘silence, / Cunning in dumbness’ (3.2.130–1), or what Montaigne calls ‘la fidelité du silence’.111 Leaving behind (like Pyrrho) no textual trace of his voice, Antenor is the embodiment on stage of what de Certeau calls the ‘(t)exterior [horstexte]’ (73) – the space carved out by Montaigne for the figuration of the perfect corporeality of the savage. In his mimetic immediacy, Antenor literally fills this space of the ‘hors-texte’. If Troilus and Cressida ‘thematizes the relationship between the mimetic and the citational’,112 Cressida, upon being ‘chang’d for Antenor’ (4.2.94), becomes the purely citational to his

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78 Shakespeare’s Entrails

purely mimetic. She is his precise opposite: ‘unbridled’ (3.2.121) in her speech, ‘glib of tongue’ (4.5.58), she has betrayed herself from the outset by having ‘blabb’d’ (3.2.123) to Troilus.113 She becomes, in the end, a figure of pure textuality – even her body, in Ulysses’ mocking description of her, is a text: ‘Fie, fie upon her! / There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip – / Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body’ (4.5.54–7). Indeed, her final appearance in the play is as a text – the letter that Troilus tears up in 5.3.114 Her faithlessness is figured as the faithlessness of language itself: ‘I will not keep my word’ (5.2.98). In these descriptions, her ‘wide unclasp[ed]’ (4.5.61) body becomes the misogynistic ‘whore-text’ to Antenor’s ‘hors-texte’ – ‘right great exchange’ (3.3.21) indeed. Antenor, the man of silence, exists only as body, the word made flesh. His silence offers the only real space of alterity to the surfeit of degraded language with which he is surrounded, both inside and outside the play. It is an eloquent silence, one that may remind us of Montaigne’s description of the King of Sparta, in the ‘Apologie of Raymond Sebond’: An Ambassador of the Citie of Abdera, after he had talked a long time unto Agis King of Sparta, said thus unto him: O King, what answer wilt thou that I beare backe unto our citizens? Thus (answered he) that I have suffered thee to speake all thou wouldst, and as long as thou pleasedst, without ever speaking one word. Is not this a kinde of speaking silence, and easie to be understood?115 In De Augmentis, Sir Francis Bacon relates the story of Zeno, who, having remained silent throughout an audience with a foreign ambassador, told the latter to ‘Tell your king that you have found a man in Greece, who knew how to hold his tongue.’ This, writes Bacon, was truly ‘the art of silence’.116 Nietzsche uses the same phrase – an ‘art of silence’117 – to depict his own practice of a kind of necessary ‘hardness and cruelty’. ‘Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm against “beautiful words” ’ – this is how I imagine Antenor.118 I imagine, too, that the actor who played Antenor originally might have been Shakespeare himself – his own silent, sly escape from the overwhelming citationality of his material. A playwright, though, cannot of course long remain silent. And if Troilus and Cressida signals an impasse, or an uncertainty about how to return to the body without nausea, Shakespeare’s great tragedies portray repeated – and often failed – attempts to recover the possibility of a meaningful kind of language, a place for words that retain their integrity with the bodies’ interiors from which they emerge, a way to heave the heart into the mouth – ‘to unpack [the] heart with words’, without becoming ‘like a whore’ (Hamlet, 2.2.581).

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The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida 79

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Figure 3 Male Figure, Showing the Interior of the Heart, from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humain libri tres (Paris, 1546); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 80

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3

Misanthropy and love: – One speaks of being sick of man only when one can no longer digest him and yet has one’s stomach full of him. Misanthropy comes of an all too greedy love of man and ‘cannibalism’; but who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet? (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science1 ) I’d like to start with the oysters. Why, of all possible foods, did Nietzsche imagine these particular creatures as Hamlet’s objects of ‘greedy love’? Is it because of something about the way we tend to eat these shellfish – slurping out their entrails with a certain greedy intensity so that the eater himself begins to seem like one of those ‘sucking [    ] monsters’ that Nietzsche elsewhere describes entrails themselves as being?2 There are no oysters in Hamlet – though in the play’s prehistory we find Thomas Lodge’s allusion to the so-called Ur-Hamlet, in which the ghost ‘cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge’.3 The oyster-wife’s dubious reputation – like that of the ‘fishmonger’ (2.2.174) for whom Hamlet pretends to mistake Polonius – is connected with issues of both class (Richard II refers disparagingly to Bolingbroke’s doffing his bonnet to an ‘oyster-wench’) and sexuality.4 Oysters are associated in various ways – in the Renaissance and since – with sex: they are notorious aphrodisiacs; their shape and texture are erotically suggestive; they can connote a provocative mixture of desire and disgust (perhaps we can say: oysters can make desire seem disgusting and disgust appear desirable). All these have, as we will see, no small relevance to Hamlet; but the thing about oysters that is most likely to have caught Nietzsche’s imagination is the basic structure of the creature, with its hard external covering protecting its soft interior; to get at the meat one must pry open or break the shell and scoop out the insides. ‘Swallow[ing] men like oysters’ implies a view of men as similarly bifold, secreted away within a shell-like exterior. Nietzsche’s enigmatic 81

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The Inward Man: Hamlet

alimentary choice seems to imply a whole world-view, one that reflects what I have been describing as the sceptic’s corporeal understanding of selfhood.5 It is perhaps little more than an odd coincidence that when William Warburton, the great eighteenth-century editor of Shakespeare, noted the confusion (at 3.2.128) among his editorial predecessors between ‘sables’ (the fur) and ‘sable’ (the colour black), his complaint was that ‘the critick only changed this fur for that; by a like figure, the common people say, “You rejoice the cockles of my heart,” for “the muscles of my heart”; an unlucky mistake of one shellfish for another’.6 Warburton’s associations bring together a notion of the heart as the repository of the deepest self with a structure meant to protect the core from the world through its shell-like covering – a view of the human being that permeates Hamlet. More than any other work in the Shakespearean corpus, the play’s world is, through and through, one of claustrophobic, enclosed spaces, of nunneries, closets, nutshells and the like. From the opening moments of the play, with Francisco’s command to a muffled figure in the night, ‘Stand and unfold yourself’ (1.1.2), a persistent concern throughout is with what cannot be seen – what is beyond a threshold, an arras or a ‘bourn’ (3.1.79). The paradigmatic sceptic’s question of what lies behind or within – behind, for example, the armour of the Ghost, beneath the smiling exterior of a person, or, as this chapter argues, within the very bodies of the different protagonists – occupies a number of the play’s characters, not least among them Hamlet himself. In this ‘incorps’d’ (4.7.86) play, full of ‘carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts’ (5.2.385), bodies have their own truths, and access to these truths often veers close to being equated with access to the interior of the human body – to what Hamlet feels to be ‘in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart’ (3.2.73). The sceptical self-consciousness of this ‘inward man’ (2.2.6) is inseparable from his viscerality. What is anatomically and physiologically inside people is something the play and its protagonist both harp upon, in the process tying together a number of Hamlet’s obsessions. We could include among these the problem of death and mourning, and of what happens to the body after death, as well as the problem of birth and bodily origins; the difficulties of sexuality, and of Hamlet’s apparent distaste at the thought of sexual activity; a concept of gender which is linked to the contents of the body; and Hamlet’s ‘preoccupation with absolute truth’,7 based on an idea that ‘truth’ is an internal matter, to be discovered by getting inside something – above all, the body of the other. All these have connections with what I have been calling visceral knowledge: a sense of one’s own as well as others’ entrails, understood as ineluctably bound up with the core of one’s being, one’s innermost truth. In his essay on the play, Stanley Cavell speaks of ‘the everyday, skeletal manner in which human beings present themselves to [Hamlet]’.

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82 Shakespeare’s Entrails

He adds: ‘I think of this in connection with Nietzsche’s statement in his autobiography (I mean Ecce Homo) that one trait of his nature that causes difficulty in his contacts with others is the uncanny sensitivity of his instinct for cleanliness, or, say, truthfulness, so that the innermost parts, the entrails (we might perhaps say drives) of every soul are smelled by him.’8 For Hamlet, as for the Renaissance in general, one should beware of an overhasty move from ‘innermost parts’ to ‘drives’; from ‘cleanliness’ to ‘truthfulness’. These things were intimately tied to one another – though in the process of becoming decoupled as the nascent modes of interiority towards which the play gestures were gradually severing bodily inwardness from selfhood. In the passage referred to by Cavell, Nietzsche speaks specifically of ‘entrails’ – and of his sensitivity to them as ‘physiological’: ‘My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity or – what am I saying? – the inmost parts, the “entrails” of every soul are physiologically perceived by me – smelled.’9 As we have already seen, the ‘inmost parts’, those least accessible to epistemological inquiry, are used again and again by Nietzsche as his central metaphor for both the truth and the undecipherability or opacity of human thoughts and actions; and there is more than a hint of revulsion in Nietzsche’s access to the entrails of the other. The distaste resurfaces in his best-known commentary on Hamlet, in The Birth of Tragedy, where he describes the character Hamlet as, more or less, the man who knew too much: his ‘insight into the horrible truth’ is paralysing: Hamlet has ‘gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action’. (‘One speaks of being sick of man    ’) The Prince is described by Nietzsche as the supreme exemplar of Dionysian man, who has ‘truly looked into the essence of things’.10 Commentators on Hamlet have often noted the play’s insistent focus upon the inner. Yet the location and contents of this ‘inner’ often remain unspecified. Coleridge wrote that Hamlet is ‘a tragedy the interest of which is eminently ad et apud intra [towards and about the inside]’, without further elaboration upon this enigmatic comment.11 G. Wilson Knight described Hamlet as one who ‘has seen through all things, including himself, to the foulness within’ – while declining to specify ‘within’ what.12 ‘Hamlet’, as T.S. Eliot famously complained, ‘is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.’13 The play itself points to similar opacities: Polonius’ declaration, for example, that he ‘will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre’ (2.2.157) leaves vague the referent of this ‘centre’ – is it of the earth? Of the body? Of some other, more abstract, concept? ‘Something’ in Hamlet is repeatedly said to lie within, but this something is unidentified, hovering between corporeality and abstraction without ever quite becoming explicit: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.90); ‘There is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out’ (2.2.363–4); ‘There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’ (3.1.165–6); ‘This

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 83

something settled matter in his heart’ (3.1.173); ‘Yet have I in me something dangerous, / Which let thy wiseness fear’ (5.1.255–6).14 Through much of the play, Hamlet displays a reticence about expressing precisely what is ‘within’. We are left with the impression of a profound doubt about what is inside not only the various figures around him but also within himself, within his own body. If his soliloquies, as Michael Neill writes, resemble ‘a kind of self-dissection, recalling those self-demonstrating figures in anatomy textbooks who open their own bodies to display their inward operations and framework’,15 his attacks on those around him – especially the various paternal and maternal figures – resemble a forensic examination of their bodily interiors. One might describe him, as Nietzsche described Socrates, as one ‘who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the “noble,” with a look that said clearly enough: “Don’t dissemble in front of me! Here – we are equal”.’16 For Hamlet, dissembling is a corporeal activity akin to disease. Thus, he warns his mother to avoid the ‘flattering unction’ of a self-deluding lie which will but skin and film the ulcerous place, Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen. (3.4.149–51) The unction (that is, salve or ointment) seals up the skin, leaving the diseased interior to fester ‘unseen’. In the absence of ocular evidence, the assumption throughout the play is that what lies within – the body or the state of Denmark – is a sickness or corruption.17 Typifying this is Hamlet’s explanation of Fortinbras’s Polish expedition: This is th’impostume of much wealth and peace, That inward breaks, and shows no cause without Why the man dies. (4.4.27–9) The play goads us over and over to reach towards this ‘unseen’, ‘inward’ ‘something’, and over and over frustrates our desires to know what it is that we are reaching for. As Marjorie Garber has written, Hamlet himself is ‘the poet of doubt’; it is also the case that the play is a poem of embodied scepticism.18 The signal moment of such non-specific pointing towards the interior is Hamlet’s own rather opaque ‘I have that within which passes show’ (1.2.85),19 which lays claim to an internality the contents of which are not merely unspecified but apparently unrepresentable. This comes in Hamlet’s

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 85

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.77–86) Hamlet’s declaration is a paradigmatically sceptical avowal of the unbridgeable gap between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’. It is because breath can be ‘forc’d’ – because all visible manifestations are potentially false – that all signs are dismissed as unable to denote the innermost truth; even ‘moods’ here are lumped along with ‘forms’ and ‘shapes’ as having more to do with their outward expression than with their inner reality. The uncompromising nature of Hamlet’s statement goes beyond a self-protective impulse to avoid exposure; as Katharine Maus points out in discussing the speech, ‘it is hard to imagine what could possibly count as “true denotation” for Hamlet’.20 The exterior, simply by dint of being exterior, is insufficient as a means of expressing one’s inner self. But what kind of exterior is Hamlet referring to here? He includes not merely clothes and words but even corporeal signs – sighs, tears, facial expressions – which clearly emerge from the interior of the body. It is as if the inside of the body and its outside can be fully separated – as if the body’s skin were an epistemological boundary;21 and the play, as we shall see, gives us image upon image of boundaries and sealed bodies. The notion of the body as a more or less sealed container is accompanied by an idea of an immaterial selfhood within – a ghost in what Hamlet calls ‘this machine’ (2.2.123). As Francis Barker (among others) has argued, the play is set on the cusp of modernity, which means, in this context, on the threshold between an idea of selfhood as at one with the body’s inner realms and an idea of selfhood as fully disembodied. But it is not, I think, quite accurate to say that Hamlet’s claim to inwardness is ‘in the name, now, not of the reign of the body but of the secular soul’:22 the play is more ambiguous, more two-footed, than that – as for example Laertes’ comment that ‘nature crescent does not grow / In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes / The inward service of the mind and soul / Grows wide withal’ (1.3.11–14) indicates: body and soul (or mind, or self) have

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first sustained speech in the play, in his rejection of the exteriority of ‘seeming’:

not yet fully parted company in the play. Hamlet’s celebrated modern introspection includes an equivocally corporeal, early modern mode of self-consciousness. Hamlet is constantly playing both with and against the notion that ‘that within’ is ‘within’ in a bodily sense. On the one hand, underlying Hamlet’s sceptical declaration (as well as at many other moments in the play) there seems to be a fantasy that it is the body’s interior that is in some way connected to the true self. When Hamlet thinks of catching the conscience of the king, for example, he thinks in terms of penetrating his body: ‘I’ll tent him to the quick’ (2.2.593),23 he says, as he plans the staging of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. Repeatedly, Hamlet refers defiantly to the innermost reaches of the body as a kind of sanctum sanctorum – his ‘heart’s core, ay, [    his] heart of heart’ (3.2.73). He speaks of the bodily interior as the locus for that which he wishes to give the highest praise – ‘the pith and marrow of our attribute’ (1.4.22), or ‘enterprises of great pith and moment’ (3.1.86),24 while the exterior is disparaged: though it ‘must show fairly outwards’ (2.2.370), ‘one may smile, and smile, and be a villain’ (1.5.108). In this sense, Eliot’s ‘stuff’ may be more apt than he knew, for the word ‘stuff’ in Shakespeare is often associated with the internal matter of the body; Hamlet himself uses the word to refer to his mother’s semi-metaphorical ‘heart’ (‘if it be made of penetrable stuff’ – 3.4.36).25 But at the same time, this ‘stuff’ is never reducible to any definable substance: the play gestures both towards and away from the idea that the ‘something settled matter in his heart’ is close to the ‘matter’ of the interior of the body.26 Hamlet’s statement about ‘that within’ entails a separation of, at one and the same time, self and other (you cannot know what is inside me), corporeal inside and outside (what is outside cannot represent the interior), and body and disembodied interiority (what is within passes show because it is non-material). It is the fantasised conjunction of the three registers that creates modern subjectivity. Hamlet’s preoccupation with his own inner being is closely tied to his melancholy inclinations. When Marsilio Ficino writes that ‘[t]he mental activity of being drawn away from the periphery and becoming fixed at the centre is the special characteristic of that area of the mind to which melancholy is akin’, or when Burton asks, ‘How should a man choose but be [    ] melancholy, that is so inwardly disposed?’27 , one is hard pressed to distinguish between the somatic and psychic meanings of ‘melancholia’. In a Renaissance context one can hardly speak of the concept without including its physiological underpinnings, above all of course the humoral basis of ideas of temperament – melancholy being one of the four humours from which the entire psycho-physiology of the body was derived. It is, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, the extreme corporeality of the baroque world which ties it to such a psychology: ‘The physiological explanation of melancholy [    ] could not but make an impression on the baroque, which had such

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86 Shakespeare’s Entrails

a clear vision of the misery of mankind in its creaturely estate.’28 From this perspective, we could say that there is a kind of wry jokiness about Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’ speech; for, from a humoral point of view, his clothes do in fact accurately denote something about his interior: physiologically speaking it was believed to be the preponderance of black bile that caused, or rather constituted, melancholy.29 Hamlet’s claims about surface and depth are subjected to this kind of irony throughout. In taking the idea of viscerality in the play to be central and complex, I am taking issue with a notion which was for a long time practically a commonplace of Hamlet criticism: the perception that Hamlet feels ‘a disgust at the physical body of man’,30 a ‘despairing contempt for the body’31 as such. Hamlet’s often grotesque visceral fantasies, coupled with his apparent ‘sexual disgust’,32 have led many critics of the play to think of him as having, as Francis Barker puts it, a ‘desire to refine away the insistent materiality of the body’.33 ‘The play enacts and re-enacts queasy rituals of defilement and revulsion, an obsession with a corporeality that reduces everything to appetite and excretion’, writes Stephen Greenblatt.34 But distinctions need to be made between Hamlet’s attitudes to bodies which are healthy or sick, open or closed, full or empty, paternal or maternal. Paying heed to ‘the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (3.1.62–3) does not necessarily turn one against the body; on the contrary, its very fragility may elicit a tenderness towards the facts of mortal embodiment; both attitudes are in evidence in Hamlet – the empathy in the fifth act of the play more than elsewhere. Hamlet lurches between a rejection of the body and a desperate need to find meaning in it; his aversion to the state of corporeality is far less absolute and more specific than these descriptions of his ‘hatred of the flesh’35 might suggest. It is rather the pervasive lies that people tell about their bodies, with their bodies, that he hates: the possibility of giving someone ‘the lie i’th’ throat /As deep as to the lungs’ (2.2.569–70). Throughout the play Hamlet expresses an ambivalent attitude to corporeality – a desire for aperture coupled with a disgust at openness; a need for, alongside a rage about, bodily closure.

The closing of the father (‘One speaks of being sick of man    ’) My prison cell – my fortress. (Franz Kafka, Diaries36 ) Much of the first act of the play can be said to be about the fate of the body at a time of crisis – a crisis that is at one and the same time Hamlet’s own and Denmark’s, as well as a reflection of a much wider socio-historical set of circumstances and issues around the turn of the seventeenth century.

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As a number of critics have pointed out, this wider crisis has a great deal to do with a collapse of traditional distinctions, emblematically conceived of in the play as a breakdown of normative separations (between night and day, death and life, ‘mirth’ and ‘dirge’, father and uncle, wife and sister, and so on). The concomitant moral and metaphysical problematic cannot be divorced from the pervasive somatic language of the play. Hamlet himself repeatedly imagines the epoch in which he is living in terms of embodiment, speaking of the ‘very age and body of the time’ (3.2.24), describing his epoch as almost literally dislocated (‘the time is out of joint’ – 1.5.196) or finical (‘the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe’ – 5.1.136–8), and decrying ‘the fatness of these pursy times’ (3.4.155); the unusual, ambiguous adjective ‘pursy’ could be taken to mean ‘pursed up, closed’, ‘puffed up, bloated’, or even ‘shortwinded’.37 All these meanings have relevance, as we shall see, to Hamlet’s scepticism. It is the first of these that strikes me as most immediately relevant to the opening of the play, with its emphasis on the defending of borders. We might say that the play starts, as it were, from the body: as Coleridge was perhaps the first to note, the opening scene is filled with ‘the language of sensation [    ] the broken expressions of a man’s compelled attention to bodily feelings’.38 This ‘compelled attention’ is epitomised in Francisco’s ‘’Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart’ (1.1.8–9), a seemingly superfluous comment from a minor character about whose heartsickness we never hear anything further. But we should note that the trajectory of Francisco’s words directs our attention from the external fact of the cold night to the interior – and moreover to an interior that is suffering, perhaps in need of protection from the harsh external conditions. The body politic of Denmark itself is in similar shape: under threat of attack from without (hence the first scene’s ‘most observant watch’ – 1.1.74), but also, as we soon learn, ‘rotten’ (1.4.90) within. It is because of the threat of external invasion that the sentries on the ramparts are so nervous; we hear in detail about the feverish preparations to defend the borders of the state. If it is the case, as suggested in Chapter 1, that moments of crisis in the life of an individual (or nation) bring with them a shoring up of the bodily envelope and a concomitant insistence on the unbridgeable distance between the interior and the exterior, perhaps we can begin to see why, as Joel Fineman puts it, ‘border imagery and the establishment of boundaries is so important in Hamlet’.39 As if to place concretely onstage the idea of a sealed body with a hermetic boundary between inner and outer, we are given the Ghost’s narration of the manner of his death. The crisis in the play, we learn, has been occasioned by an attack on the body of the King – an attack that sharply emphasises the body’s boundaries. In the Ghost’s return to the prehistory of the play,

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Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial, And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, And a most instant tetter bark’d about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. (1.5.59–73) The account strikingly depicts the effects of the poison upon the body of Old Hamlet: first, an internal thickening (‘it doth posset / And curd [    ] The thin and wholesome blood’), followed immediately by a hardening of the boundaries of the body. The formerly markedly open body of the King is underlined: the gaping ‘porches’ of the ears and welcoming ‘natural gates and alleys’ of the body have easily, almost eagerly, received the poison, as if the very openness of the body were the cause of death.40 The body’s borders are too easily breached, as indeed are the walls of the symbolically significant orchard, which is anything but ‘secure’. The speediness of the process of constriction is heavily underlined (‘swift as quicksilver’; ‘with a sudden vigour’; ‘most instant’). The corpse is now emphatically shut, ‘bark’d about’, ‘All’ enclosed in a ‘tetter’, a ‘vile and loathsome crust’. I take these multiple, accentuated layers of confinement to be symbolic of the end-point of the process I described in Chapter 1 as the historical closure of the body, a process culminating in the emergence of homo clausus. The Ghost’s tale works as a kind of founding narrative, providing a blueprint for the corporeal imagination of the rest of the play – indeed, if I am right, of the whole period. It is the ‘tettering’ of the body of the father that institutes the commencement of the regime of interiority – the founding moment of modern subjectivity is the moment the body is shut up, confined in solitude. The encrusting of King Hamlet’s corpse acts as a ghostly precursor or model for the several other bounded bodies in the play, above all that of Hamlet himself, characterised by Laertes as ‘circumscribed / Unto the voice and yielding of that body’ (1.3.22–3). Perhaps there is a metaphorical

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in his relation of his own murder, we can find a number of indications of Hamlet’s bodily state. His account is vivid in its details:

connection between the otherworldliness of this paternal afterlife and the inaccessibility of the bodily interior, between the deathly closure of the paternal body and the secretive interiority of the son.41 The alienation of Hamlet, this proto-modern man, is strongly associated with somatic closure and isolation; it is in this sense (among others, to which we will come) that the Ghost describes his murder as a matter of being ‘Cut off’ (1.5.76) – severed, that is, from the external world and its denizens. If so, we may imagine that the markedly open body of King Hamlet prior to his death represents, nostalgically, an older mode of being. This nostalgia is part of the Ghost’s legacy: a fantasy of corporeal openness as connected to a greater trust in the environment, perhaps to a greater ease of being-in-the-world – a world in which the need to defend the body’s borders was not so urgent. It is only from the perspective of homo clausus that the body’s being laid ‘open to incontinency’ becomes a ‘scandal’ (2.1.29–30). At the same time, the Ghost’s arresting description of his death embodies the corporeal contours of scepticism, its tendency to make the body more ‘covered, or hard, or stiff’.42 The rigidifying of the integument between the inside and the outside can only leave one in a state of doubt regarding that which lies within. My implication here – again following Cavell’s thoughts – is that scepticism and modernity go hand in hand, both entailing a severing of inner from outer, body from mind – something of which we are given intimations, if not yet a full representation, in Hamlet.43 What Graham Bradshaw calls ‘the sceptical pessimism that invades and corrodes Hamlet’s mind’44 can be seen equally as an attack on his body; and we can take the way the poisoning of Old Hamlet seems to spread its corporeal effects to the other characters in the play as a sign of the almost bodily infectiousness of the sceptical fantasy. A picture of the relation between scepticism and bodily closure emerges in Hamlet’s first confrontation with the Ghost: Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again. What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon    (1.4.46–53) Already here, Hamlet emphasises the several layers enclosing his father’s corpse; Old Hamlet’s body has been wrapped in ‘cerements’, ‘hearsed’ (that is, coffined), then ‘inurn’d’ (that is, entombed)45 in its ‘sepulchre’. As we have already seen, the imagery of the Ghost’s bodily enclosure continues

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in his description of his death, so that he accrues multiple – indeed, superfluous – layers of corporeal impermeability: internally ‘posseted’, epidermically ‘bark’d about’, wrapped in cerements, placed in a coffin, and interred with apparent finality in its ‘ponderous and marble’ sepulchre. Even his return is in armour or ‘complete steel’ – a fact that is repeatedly stressed: ‘Armed at point exactly, cap-à-pie’ (1.2.200); ‘Arm’d [    ] From top to toe [    ] from head to foot’ (1.2.226–7). Hamlet’s ‘Let me not burst in ignorance’ expresses a relation between not knowing and a need to be open – a desperate plea for ‘the hatch and the disclose’ (3.1.168) of something that lies within: there is here a sense of being shut out, as though the obstacle to knowledge were the non-transparency of the exterior – the externality of the ‘limbs and outward flourishes’ (2.2.91) – of the other’s body. Several critics have commented upon the play’s stress on skin as well as on images of seals; and the conjoining of these two strands of imagery – skin and sealing – leads to a sense of the membrane covering the body in Hamlet as existing primarily to separate the self from the world rather than to connect to it.46 Perhaps this ‘mis-use’ of skin is the reason Hamlet repeatedly thinks of it, in an almost abstract manner, as subject to whipping: it is because of ‘the whips and scorns of time’ (3.1.70) that he contemplates suicide, and, implicitly, speaks of all skin as warranting scourging: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?’ (2.2.524–5). It is, we can speculate, its non-permeability – its use as a covering ‘film’ (3.4.149) – that turns the skin into an object of denigration. The court of Elsinore is a world of ‘relentless surfaces’;47 the Prince is surrounded by figures that he imagines as rejecting not only emotional but specifically corporeal openness to himself (Claudius’ imperturbability, Gertrude’s inaccessibility, Ophelia’s rebuffs are described as corollaries of the skin’s impermeability). Hamlet speaks repeatedly of his sense of the ‘flatness’ of the world: it is ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’ (1.2.133); he accuses himself of being ‘made of stuff so flat and dull’ (4.7.31) – as if the world has become two-dimensional, and his own body mirrors the sealed bodies around him.48 This lack of any open bodies to turn to or identify with, a lack of ‘visceral matching’, appears to leave Hamlet with a sense of simultaneously corporeal and spiritual isolation. In psychoanalytic terms, ‘the sense of being faced with an impervious object’ is often linked to melancholia, even despair,49 as well as to a reactive type of ‘self-impermeation’ or hardened façade.50 If Hamlet’s sense of being deprived of knowledge manifests itself as a sense of internal pressure, a danger of bursting, it is because his own body must feel implicitly too closed. The Ghost’s ‘eruption’ (1.1.72) onto the stage evokes a corresponding impulse – and fear – on the part of Hamlet: ‘Let me not burst [    ] but tell / Why thy canoniz’d bones [    ] / Have burst’. Before his father’s spirit begins speaking, Hamlet’s ‘prophetic soul’ already seems to be imagining a mirroring of the paternal body. The Ghost indicates something of this kind when he avers that, were he able to relate the secrets of his Purgatorial existence, the tale

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would ‘freeze [Hamlet’s] young blood’ (1.4.16), rather as his own blood was curdled by the poison. His ‘Remember me’ (1.5.91) is (among other things) an almost literal injunction to his son to ‘re-member’ – that is, bodily reproduce – his own hardened body. Both before and after the Ghost’s narrative Hamlet indicates an internal bodily stiffening which we could describe as a kind of ‘visceral matching’: ‘My fate cries out /And makes each petty artire [artery] in this body / As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve’ (1.4.81–3); ‘O fie! Hold, hold, my heart, / And you, my sinews, grow not instant old, / But bear me stiffly up’ (1.5.93–5).51 There is here, as elsewhere in the play, a forced rigidifying of Hamlet’s own body, a countermovement to the urge to ‘burst’. But ‘re-member’ is also a plea to be fleshed in the open manner of the time prior to the poisoning. ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me’ (1.5.91): is there not a punning echo here, a memory of Hamlet’s own earlier wish for his flesh to ‘resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.130) – a yearning to recover the ‘thin and wholesome blood’ before the curdling and tettering? Perhaps, then, we should say rather that there is an oscillation between the two somatic impulses – the hardening, inside and out, and the desire to break free of the resultant constriction are complementary. One way of understanding Hamlet’s use of the phrase ‘this mortal coil’ (3.1.67), for example, is within this imaginative somatic field: ‘coil’, while most immediately denoting a ‘turmoil of activity’, is also, as the Arden editor puts it, ‘something wound around us like a rope’:52 the constriction implied by it is, among other things, specifically corporeal. If so, then the wish to ‘have shuffled off’ the coil parallels Hamlet’s apparent yearning ‘to shatter all his bulk / And end his being’ (2.1.95–6). There is throughout the play a sense of Hamlet as, on the one hand, protecting his interior – his ‘heart of hearts’ – from all comers and, on the other hand, imprisoned within his own body, as both fearing the consequences of having ‘a heart unfortified’ (1.2.96), and longing to escape ‘the watchman to my heart’ (1.3.46) – even at the price of his own death. Psychoanalysts have described a similarly ambivalent relation to embodiment; D.W. Winnicott describes the emerging self-consciousness of the child succinctly: ‘it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found’; Adam Phillips writes eloquently of the way the adolescent seems often to be ‘both weaving and rending a veil around [    his] body’.53 From a historical perspective, we could think of such an impulse as at once an adherence to and a protest against the ideals of homo clausus. ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew    ’: the oscillation between these positions bleeds over, so to speak, into textual issues. In what is one of the best-known textual cruces in the play, we can see the somatic problem encapsulated in a single word: both the first and second Quartos have ‘sallied’, a variant of ‘sullied’; the Folio has ‘solid’.54 And the uncertainty (as well as the fame of the crux) is telling, for the alternatives appear to offer diametrically contrasting views of Hamlet’s

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corporeal sensibility: ‘too too sallied’ implies a fear of contamination, of the body being too vulnerable or open; ‘too too solid’ laments the hardness, the confined or over-circumscribed nature, of the flesh. Again, the two options converge in their underlying view of the body as having an absolute boundary between interior and exterior – whether that boundary is lamented or protected. No matter which we choose, the alternative will remain secreted within the other – the pun, like so many others, acts as an aural analogue to the oft-noted use of doubling and hediadys in the play: Shakespeare offers us alternative possibilities at every turn of this play, and these include a choice between open and closed bodies. This is, for instance, one way of thinking about the much-discussed problem of what Hamlet means when he tells Ophelia to ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (3.1.121): the proffered meanings of the term (religious house versus brothel) are diametrically opposed in terms of the closure or openness of the female body. Hamlet seems torn between these alternative somatic ways; his wish to ‘melt, / Thaw, and resolve’ his flesh, like the wish to ‘have shuffled off’ the mortal coil, may be taken to express an anguish over his solitary incarceration within his body. His environment is described by Hamlet as a kind of ‘prison’; the whole world is, for him, a collection of different kinds of ‘confines, wards, and dungeons’ (2.2.243–6). In this perception, again, he matches his father, who has earlier depicted himself as ‘confin’d’ in his Purgatorial ‘prison-house’ (1.5.11–14; compare 1.1.160). These accounts, along with the Ghost’s narrative of the effects of the poison, accord strikingly with descriptions of that most fashionable of Elizabethan ailments, melancholy. These depictions of melancholy concur with what I have been describing as the corporeal sensibility associated with the sceptical crisis of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Affinities between Hamlet and the most widely available Elizabethan text on the illness, Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586), have long been recognised,55 but in our context we might note the congruence between some of Bright’s bodily metaphors of closure and Hamlet’s images of bodily confinement. Bright speaks of the ‘hardness whereof the flesh of melancholy persons is’ (128): ‘the nature of the humor’, he explains, ‘closeth up the poores, or straightneth the passages’ (127).56 Melancholics ‘locketh up the gates of the hart, whereout the spirits should breake forth upon just occasion, to the comfort of all the family of their fellow members’ (100). And, he adds, ‘The house [    ] seemeth unto the melancholicke a prison or dungeon’ (263).57 It is illuminating to juxtapose these formulations with certain psychoanalytic descriptions of depressive states. Wilhelm Reich, for example, depicted in great detail the muscular rigidities and ‘stiffness’ of ‘melancholic or depressive patients’.58 Reich compares such ‘encasing’ to the donning of a protective suit of armour. This concept of armouring has been echoed and broadened by Lacan: in the context of the ‘mirror stage’ and ‘the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form

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of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic’, Lacan describes ‘the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development’.59 For Lacan, this alien armour is not confined to people suffering from particular neuroses; it is part of every subject’s psycho-physical make-up. Lacan goes on to outline the ways in which the original fantasised ‘corps morcelé’ – which includes ‘images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’60 – re-emerges in the form of disintegration anxiety: ‘This fragmented body usually manifests itself in dreams [    ] It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those limbs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions – the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting.’61 Perhaps it is stretching the point to juxtapose Lacan’s structure – the mutually constitutive fantasies of a closed, complete body and a fragmented, open ‘intestinal’ body – with a statement such as Hamlet’s ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams’ (2.2.254–6).62 But the image of a nutshell perfectly encapsulates the ambivalence Hamlet feels about the ‘armouring’ of the self: for while a nut’s casing acts as an indispensable protective layer, it only exists in order to allow the eventual emergence of the nut; the kernel is always awaiting, so to speak, the cracking open of its shell. Portraying himself as ‘bounded in a nutshell’, while allowing a matching of Hamlet’s closed-off father (‘and count myself a king’), might also be an implicit plea of this kind. We never learn the content of Hamlet’s ‘bad dreams’; we can conjecture a connection, though, with his desire for – and fear of – transcending the constrictions of the ‘mortal coil’ (‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil’ – 3.1.66–7).63 Perhaps we can tentatively relate them, through Hamlet’s repeated fantasies about innards, to Lacan’s nightmarish ‘intestinal persecutions’. (In humoral physiology, ‘bad dreams come from the spleen’.64 ) As we saw in the first chapter, Freud too brought dreams and entrails into close relation, largely through the ultimate obscurity of both; and the unspecified nature of the content of Hamlet’s dreams may remind us of the vague nature of the undisclosed ‘something’, the opaque ‘stuff’ within, at ‘the heart of [his] mystery’. Given the profound changes in corporeal fantasies during the course of the Renaissance, we are entitled to wonder just how historically contingent Hamlet’s – and Lacan’s – formulations are; to what degree ‘the armour of an alienating identity’ existed before the Renaissance; and whether what we call ‘character’ is not to some extent a modern invention, based in large part on the rigidifying of the body that was part and parcel of the fullfledged emergence of homo clausus. We could even ask, on an admittedly speculative note, whether what we call ‘character’ is modernity’s revenge for the historical closing-off of the human body.

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 95

The eating of the father (‘    when one can no longer digest him and yet has one’s stomach full of him’)

The provenance of Old Hamlet’s Ghost has long posed a difficulty for commentators, since Elizabethan Protestantism had officially dispensed with the idea of Purgatory. Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that the play’s investment in the notion of Purgatory is its way of wrestling with the problem of how to negotiate with the dead in a post-Catholic society: the problem, we could say, of how to deal with the loss of certain ways of dealing with loss.66 Here it seems worth recalling that the difference between Catholic and Protestant beliefs impinges, as we saw in Chapter 1, upon the problem of somatic openness; what is significant for our purposes here is that this proto-modern play hearkens back to a notion – the ‘middle state’ of Purgatory – that has much to do with transitionality. It is because Old Hamlet, asleep during the moments preceding his poisoning, is unable to ‘season’ himself prior to death – is captured by it and fixated in all his unexpurgated ‘fullness’ – that he is consigned to Purgatory. In other words, for this figure, it is because of the abrupt closing of this body that the transitional space that Catholics termed Purgatory becomes necessary. Whether or not we can discern here some personal investment by Shakespeare in the Old Religion, the play seems to evince a nostalgia for some way of imagining possibilities of passage into and out of the body in the face of its closure. As we have seen, the play portrays the sealing-off of Old Hamlet’s somatic boundaries in conjunction with a sense of breakdown in what is fantasised as the body’s former openness to the world. One way of describing the imagined conditions of being-in-the-world prior to this ‘fall’ is as a kind of transitionality, a potential which D.W. Winnicott described as ‘an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’; ‘a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated’.67 This potential is based in faith – a faith in the unity of (the other’s) interior and exterior and a matching willingness to abjure the temptation to split one’s own interior and exterior beings, to secrete one’s innermost self deep within. Hamlet implies that what one is left with in the absence of such belief are a set of fantasies of access to the other’s interior – concrete fantasies of eating, purging, or penetration. The play depicts this move towards the absence of transitional possibilities in a number of different ways, including, as we’ve seen, the opening scene’s stress on the defence of the borders of Denmark, the failure of rituals of mourning, and the emphasis in the Ghost’s narrative not only on the way

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I eat greedily out of greed for non-eating. (Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths65 )

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Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d, Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O horrible! O horrible! most horrible! (1.5.74–80) It is not merely the loss ‘Of life, of crown, of queen’ that is so triply ‘horrible!’ but also the (equally tripled) pain of his being ‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’. The verse works like the tolling of a bell to emphasise the fact that this man at his death is ‘Cut off’, a kind of island.68 The swiftness of the poison’s action and the absoluteness of the bodily closure have already combined to give the effect of a trapping within – as if something which should have been allowed to issue forth has been stopped up inside the instantly-mummified body. What has not taken place here is the preparation which is thought of as crucial to the passage into the undiscovered land of the dead. Hamlet later returns to this aborted process when he refuses to kill Claudius during just such an attempt at purgation: his uncle ‘took my father grossly, full of bread, / With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May [    ] And am I then reveng’d, / To take him in the purging of his soul, / When he is fit and season’d for his passage?’ (3.3.80–6). The fullness (‘full of bread’ – perhaps recalling the Ghost’s use of the phrase ‘loathsome crust’) is what is galling to Hamlet, as it is contrasted to a ‘purging’ which would prepare Claudius for the ‘passage’ to the other world. When told later that Claudius is ‘marvellous distempered [    ] with choler’, Hamlet pretends to take ‘choler’ to mean the physiological humour (bile) and replies: ‘for me to put him to his purgation would perhaps plunge him into more choler’ (3.2.293–8): Hamlet as purging-agent would send Claudius plunging down, as Greenblatt glosses it, ‘into the rage of infernal punishment and torture’.69 In his posthumous location, the Ghost is ‘confin’d to fast in fires, / Till [his] foul crimes [    ] Are burnt and purg’d away’ (1.5.11–13). Fasting, purging, burning away are purification rituals connected with death in many cultures; they are all, in their different ways, attempts to distinguish the pure from the impure or abject, that which is acceptable within a culture from that which a culture would prefer to eliminate. Such last rites are at least partially an emptying-out, originally of the body, later (in, for example, confession) of the soul, a discharge seemingly entailed by the process of dying.70 We could say that disembowelling permits closure, in the most corporeal sense; as a character in The Revenger’s Tragedy puts it, ‘the bowelled

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the body becomes impenetrable but also on Old Hamlet’s unpreparedness for his death:

corpse may be seared in’ (1.2.15). But this fantasised emptying-out seems to be Janus-faced in its uses: it is meant to allow both the passage of the deceased into the next world, and a form of continued existence of the dead person in this world. Death is symbolically overcome by a continuity in the very bodies of the survivors, and the latter are able to retain a kind of contact with the one they have lost – able at least temporarily to have a sense of filling the gap created by the loss – by taking what is emptied-out symbolically into their own bodies; hence, in part, the widespread custom of funerary feasts. Most obviously, these feasts simply mark an embracing of the ongoing life of the survivors; but there is an underlying sense of a connection between the filling of the entrails of the living and the emptying of the entrails of the dead. It is as if the existence of food in transit within a body denotes that that body still belongs to life, that the owner of these full entrails is not yet prepared for the transition to the country of death. Georges Bataille has discussed the necrophagic impulse underlying the taboo regarding the touching of corpses: ‘The taboo protected the corpse from other people’s desire to eat it. This is a desire no longer active in us, one we never feel now. Archaic societies, however, do show the taboo as alternately in force and suspended. Man is never looked upon as butcher’s meat, but he is frequently eaten ritually.’71 In the wake, the company of mourners symbolically cannibalise the deceased; the collective nature of the practice is a crucial constituent in its effectiveness, presumably because it marks the continuity of the community in the face of the loss.72 It is, we can guess, implicitly the emptying-out of the deceased which makes possible the taking-in, the incorporation, by the survivors – a kind of symbolic equation between the two. Freud’s interpretation of the ‘work of mourning’ in some ways parallels this description of funeral rituals. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, he describes the process of overcoming the loss of a loved object as an installing of the lost object within ourselves followed by a ‘bit by bit’ disengagement of the libido from the object.73 The slow and gradual nature of the process permits the ‘hallucinatory’ prolongation of ‘the existence of the lost object’ (166) until new libido-attachments can replace the lost one; this ‘hallucination’ dispenses with the need to acknowledge loss. The melancholic, Freud says, refuses this displacement of the libido onto a new love-object; he becomes stuck in ‘obstinate condolement’ (1.2.93), establishing a fixed ‘identification of the ego with the abandoned object’ (170). It is as if the mourning process involves an acknowledgement not only of the lost object but of death itself, whereas melancholia is founded upon a death-rejecting fixation (as if death, and the death drive, could somehow be vanquished). Both involve a temporary regression to a primitive oral stage: ‘The ego wishes to incorporate this [lost] object into itself, and the method by which it would do so, in this oral or cannibalistic stage, is by devouring it’ (171); introjection loses its metaphorical aspect and becomes, in extremis, ‘incorporation’ pure and simple (171), the ‘devouring’ of the other. But for the

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 97

melancholic this concretising or ‘un-metaphoring’ of the notion of introjective identification is long-lasting. Freud’s later writing, however, implies that this process of identification, of the falling of ‘the shadow of the object [    ] upon the ego’ (170), is not something confined to the melancholic, but is in fact at the root of character-formation as such. Then the difference between mourner and melancholic appears to be based in part on the idea that for the latter, something goes wrong with the ‘digestive’ (or perhaps ‘purgative’) process of de-cathexis: the lost object is incorporated, but the slow disengagement intrinsic to mourning does not take place. Is this something like what Nietzsche means when he speaks of being sick of man ‘when one can no longer digest him and yet has one’s stomach full of him’? ‘In all the instances of mourning in Hamlet’, writes Lacan, ‘one element is always present: the rites have been cut short and performed in secret.’74 These ‘maimed rites’ (5.1.219) are epitomised in Hamlet’s description of the proximity of his father’s funeral and his mother’s wedding: ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral bak’d meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.180–1). We may wonder at the exact nature of the relation between the ‘bak’d meats’ and the body of Old Hamlet, remembering that a ‘coffin’ meant, at the time, both a burial-chest and the crust of a pie or meat casserole, and that in the Pyrrhus speech the bodies of the ‘fathers, mothers, daughters, sons’ are described as ‘Bak’d and impasted’ (that is, encrusted, like a pastry), ‘Roasted in wrath and fire’ (2.2.455–7).75 A common practice in Elizabethan England involved the paying of ‘sin-eaters’ to take upon themselves the deceased’s sins: ‘The manner was that when the Corps was brought out of the house and layd on the Biere; a Loafe of bread was brought out, and delivered to the Sinne-eater over the corps, as also a Mazarbowle of maple (Gossips bowle) full of beer, which he was to drinke up, and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they were dead.’76 Apart from the obvious relevance of this to the ‘Thrift, thrift’ of reusing the funeral meats at the subsequent wedding, Hamlet’s bitterness about the drinking habits of the Danes takes on another layer: just about the only ‘dram of evil’ (1.4.36) which has not been drunk is the one containing his father’s sins. The implication of Hamlet’s ‘funeral bak’d meats’ comment is not only that there has been an over-hasty transition from ‘dole’ to ‘delight’ (1.2.13); the fact that the same meats furnished both the funeral and the wedding implies that – in his imagination at least – they were not consumed at the earlier truncated occasion. What this Danish community shares is the non-incorporation of the funerary meal. Neither end of the ‘bargain’ of dying has been allowed: both the opening and purging of Old Hamlet’s body, and the symbolic ‘incorporation’ demanded by mourning, have been aborted. There is thus no sense of there having been any real grieving – it is both the meat and the mourners which are cold.

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98 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Gertrude’s coldness towards her first husband is repeatedly and specifically portrayed by Hamlet as a transferral of her feeding from the body of King Hamlet to that of Claudius: ‘Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed / And batten [grow fat] on this moor?’ (3.4.66–7) he exclaims, inveighing against ‘that monster, custom, who all sense doth eat / Of habits evil’ (3.4.163–4). Hamlet seems to be thinking of his mother as unable, or unwilling, to retain her connection with her former husband through the symbolic incorporation of his body. Already in his first soliloquy Hamlet has depicted Gertrude’s love for King Hamlet (while he was alive) as a relation of feeding; like Cleopatra, who ‘makes hungry / Where most she satisfies’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.242–3), Hamlet imagines the consumption of his father’s body as – up until his death – an endlessly renewable act: ‘Why, she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on; and yet within a month – / Let me not think on’t – ’ (1.2.143–6). This is the very opposite of the ‘thrift, thrift’ of Old Hamlet’s funeral; what is unthinkable to Hamlet is the notion that his father should have become no more than ‘the first corse’ (1.2.105)77 for Gertrude, whose ‘base respects of thrift, but none of love’ (3.2.178) have allowed her to proceed, blackwidow fashion, to the next course. And, in spite of (or rather, because of) his wish ‘not [to] think on’t’, Hamlet’s necrophagic fantasies take on a compulsive quality. His melancholic refusal to let go thus may be a reaction to Gertrude’s refusal to incorporate the lost object in the first place; she has elected to substitute the immediate, sensual satisfaction of Claudius’ body for the painful, slow process of mourning (the taking-in followed by the slow dissipation of the attachment). Both she and her son thus decline to mourn ‘properly’. We can surmise that Hamlet’s cannibalistic fantasies are in part an attempt to grieve for his father; in the absence of any community of mourners, they are also his insistent, angry rejoinder both to the imagined terminal closingoff of his father’s body and to the symbolic non-incorporation of this body by its survivors; to these, and to the ‘relentless surfaces’ of the Danish court, he defiantly opposes the image of a disturbingly edible paternal body, a concrete and grotesque form of transitional openness. The comment about the ‘funeral bak’d meats’ not only perfectly encapsulates the problematic status of mourning in the play but also marks the beginning of this angry preoccupation with the idea of male innards as food, culminating in Hamlet’s disquisitions on the ‘worm that hath eat of a king’ and the progress of an emperor ‘through the guts of a beggar’ (4.3.27–31). The upbraiding of Gertrude in terms of who she is ingesting picks up on the Ghost’s lament that, in marrying Claudius, his former Queen is revealing her ‘lust’, which ‘Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage [that is, entrails]’ (1.5.55–7) – will, that is, gratify its appetite by eating Claudius. Hamlet will later refer to a ‘fat king’ and a ‘lean beggar’ as ‘variable service – two dishes, but to one table’ (4.3.23–4), and here too there is (not, as we shall

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 99

see, for the last time in the play) an idea of a king’s body as ‘service’ – that is, food. We have heard Hamlet speaking about Claudius’ being ‘fit and season’d for his passage’ (3.3.86): when used as a transitive verb, ‘to season’ in Shakespeare usually means ‘to spice, to give relish to; to mature, as food’. Hamlet may thus punningly refer to Claudius as being readied to be eaten. Hamlet declines to kill his uncle in the prayer scene because Claudius is (apparently) purged (through prayer) and ‘season’d’ – ready, that is, to be incorporated by his survivors: the diametric opposite of Old Hamlet.78 The emphasis on the ‘passage’ into the otherworld of the dead, like Hamlet’s relishing of the ‘progress’ through the beggar’s intestines, point to forms of transitional phenomena denied, it seems, to King Hamlet – and, by extension, imagined to be denied to a whole new generation. If death and burial are associated with ingestion – ‘Death’ as a personification in Shakespeare is often figured as eating the flesh of the dead – disinterment in the play is portrayed as a kind of regurgitation. The body’s interior is often imagined as the metaphorical place to which we return after death – ‘the womb of earth’ (1.1.137) or ‘the womb of death’ (Romeo & Juliet, 5.3.45) or ‘Abraham’s bosom’ (Richard III, 4.3.38).79 The return of the Ghost is represented by Hamlet as a disgorgement – the image is again of the father as food, this time vomited forth from the grave, whose ‘jaws’ have opened ‘To cast [    ] up’ (1.4.50–1) the corpse. Here the earth becomes almost explicitly identified with the body; Old Hamlet is imagined as returning from the terra incognita of the earth’s stomach. The Ghost’s subsequent appearance ‘in the cellarage’ (1.5.158), ‘under the stage’ (l.157sd thus has an undertone of being akin to a presence inside the body; ‘cellarage’ (Shakespeare’s only use of this word) is a ‘room under ground, used as repository of provisions’ (from the Latin cellarium, storehouse for food;80 the association of ‘cell’ with eating and death recurs at 5.2.369–70: ‘O proud Death / What feast is toward in thine eternal cell    ?’). Perhaps there is also a faint memory in this scene of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy: upon learning of his son’s death, Hieronimo exclaims, ‘Away! I’ll rip the bowels of the earth’ – and begins digging in the ground with his dagger.81 Here this is rather neatly reversed – the near-hysterical son now imagining the father under the stage/ground, the sword upon which Horatio and the sentries are enjoined repeatedly to ‘swear!’ replacing Hieronimo’s dagger. As Michael Neill puts it, Hamlet here ‘is as if possessed by the Ghost’, and I do not think it entirely fanciful to take his highly excitable state during this episode as in part connected to his feeling that his father is at this moment an incorporated presence.82 If one apparent problem with his father’s corpse is its not having been consumed at his funeral, Hamlet’s imagined revenge on his uncle takes the form of implicitly replacing the human community of mourners with birds

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 101

Am I a coward? Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’th’ throat As deep as to the lungs – who does me this? Ha! ’Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should ha’ fatted all the region kites With this slave’s offal. (2.2.566–76) Hamlet here seems to imagine violent action as deriving from visceral strength or fullness; his self-accusation in this soliloquy takes the form of seeing himself as wanting, quite literally, guts: ‘for it cannot be / But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall /To make oppression bitter’. He describes himself as ‘A dull and muddy-mettled rascal [    ] unpregnant of my cause’ (2.2.562–3). A curious relation is implicit here, between Hamlet’s innards and those of his uncle, as though the fullness of one entails the emptying of the other. Coming as it does at the end of this self-castigating tirade (which began with Hamlet calling himself a ‘slave’ – l. 544), and after the repeated mention of his own viscera (lungs, liver, gall), ‘this slave’s offal’ may sound for a moment like a reference to himself – almost as if there were some confusion between killing his uncle and killing himself (and indeed the ending of the play may be taken to imply that there is a link between the deaths of the two). Perhaps there is a clue here as to why Hamlet forces the already-dying Claudius to drink the poisoned cup of wine at the end of the play. The apparently excessive act (‘objection has been made to Hamlet’s forcing the liquor on the King’, as the Arden editor notes) may be understood as a final act of vengeance, filling the very body of Claudius with his own sin-tainted liquid, and thus not allowing the emptying-out prior to death which Claudius has denied Old Hamlet. As Hamlet says to Horatio early on in the play: ‘We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart’ (1.2.175): does ‘deep’ refer to the emptying of the cup or to the filling of the body? While Gertrude is repeatedly portrayed as feeding on her husbands, and Claudius as keeping people ‘like an ape, in the corner of his jaw – first mouthed, to be last swallowed’ (4.2.16–18), Hamlet is never described as eating anything – except, like a chameleon, the ‘promise-cramm’d’ air (3.2.88). He shows no real appetite for revenge. We might note in passing Nietzsche’s definition of the Stoic as one who ‘wants his stomach to become

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of prey; the body is to be incorporated by ‘all the region kites’ rather than at the funerary meal:

ultimately indifferent to whatever the accidents of existence might pour into it’;83 but even more apt here are Freud’s comments on self-starvation, poverty and emptiness in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In this essay – so obviously influenced by Hamlet – Freud comments upon the melancholic’s ‘refusal to take nourishment’; ‘devoured by remorse and self-reproach’, he or she becomes, as it were, anorexic.84 Hamlet’s sense of lacking the guts to take action, as well as his rejection of food, are linked to a broad impression of internal emptiness, a feeling that is repeatedly expressed in economic terms: ‘so poor a man as Hamlet is’ (1.5.192); ‘Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks [    ] my thanks are too dear a halfpenny’ (2.2.272–4).85 Perhaps Hamlet’s anger over the ‘thrift, thrift’ (1.2.180) of reusing the ‘funeral bak’d meats’ at the subsequent wedding partakes of this monetary structure of feeling. Fortinbras, by stark contrast, is imagined in terms of bodily plenitude: he is portrayed by Hamlet as willing to spend ‘twenty thousand ducats’ to ‘debate the question of this straw’ (4.4.25–6); he is ‘of mettle hot and full’ (1.1.99); he has ‘Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes / For food and diet to some enterprise / That hath a stomach in’t’ (1.1.101–3). Moreover, Fortinbras is no respecter of boundaries; his free-flowing movements throughout the play treat borders and thresholds with a certain contempt.86 If Hamlet’s difficulty in seeing himself as viscerally potent can be understood as connected to his having been infected with his father’s legacy of bodily closure, Fortinbras may be taken to represent a throwback to a less self-conscious pre-modern moment, one in which transitionality is imagined as less problematic.

Hamlet’s ‘Nerosis’ (‘Misanthropy comes of an all too greedy love of man    ’) And I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the Coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts Opening like jaws, drops from your glands Clinging to my walls like pearls in the night. (Sharon Olds, ‘Possessed (for my parents)’87 ) Hamlet does not imagine the figures around him to be closed in any absolute way – he depicts his mother, as we have seen, as feeding on Claudius’ body, the two of them as ‘one flesh’ (4.3.55); he thinks of them, rather, as closed or inaccessible to him, and his cannibalistic fantasies are a consequence of this perception. But we should note that the association of human innards with food in Hamlet is almost exclusively limited to male bodies. Janet Adelman’s insight into ‘the play’s fusion of eating and death and sex’ needs to be pressurised further.88 Her formulation collapses important differentiations, such as those between who is being consumed and who is doing the eating, origins and ends. There are significant differences between the ways Hamlet

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appears to imagine the opening of paternal and maternal bodies. The former, as I have been arguing, is primarily imagined as being violently opened and eaten; the relation to the latter is marked by an impulse to open the body as a way of knowing or inhabiting it. Nowhere does Hamlet imagine eating a maternal body; but his epistemophilic impulse expresses itself, like that of Coriolanus, in persistently violent and bodily terms.89 The differentiation may be thought of, too, along a different axis: for while the maternal body may indeed, as Adelman argues, be ‘always already sexual’ and the source of death in the world, it is the paternal body which ends up in the worm’s digestive tract. Maternal and paternal bodies are associated, respectively, with the bodily origins and ends of death – the two poles, as it were, of the lifelong process of dying.90 Hamlet is habitually interested in this way-of-all-flesh. His apparent pleasure in bringing up the idea of the decay and putrefaction of dead bodies (for example, ‘How long will a man lie i’th’earth ere he rot?’ – (5.1.15); ‘if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog    ’ – (2.2.181–2); ‘we fat ourselves for maggots    ’ – (4.3.22)) may be connected to the fact that through decomposition, and the idea of the generativity of decomposing matter, the two ends of the process are brought together: note the cyclical structure of many of Hamlet’s comments about decomposition: ‘Not where he eats, but where he is eaten [    ] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots [    ] A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm’ (4.3.19–28). In archaic societies, as Bataille writes, ‘decay summed up the world we spring from and return to, and horror and shame were attached both to our birth and to our death’.91 Immediately following his harangue on the subject of Polonius’ guts, Hamlet’s taunt to Claudius (‘Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh’ – 4.3.54–5) may be taken to refer to, among other things, his sense that maternal and paternal bodies are united not only in intercourse but also in the circular economy of birth and death. One might have expected to find an outlet for Hamlet’s frustrated desire to enter the body of the other in the realm of sexuality. Since Freud and Ernest Jones, there have been numerous interpretations of Hamlet’s sexual attributes – of his incestuous drives, of his disgust at the corporeal aspects of sex, of his possible homosexuality: these matters have become practically commonplaces of Hamlet criticism. Such interpretations often place a wide range of bodily material under the category of the sexual. Here, I want to take the sexual in Hamlet as one aspect of what I have called visceral knowledge, understanding the urge to penetration as partly driven by an urge to open up, to know or inhabit, the other: carnal knowledge in the fullest sense of the term. Take, for example, Hamlet’s banter with Ophelia before the playwithin-the-play: ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’ (3.2.110) is undeniably sexual, but may it not equally betray a desire simply to be inside the other? Hamlet’s rather vicious turn to ‘country matters’ (l. 115) a few lines on would then

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 103

be a vengeful cheapening of this kind of knowing to mere sexuality. The ‘sexual’ here, I think, becomes subsumed in a wider context. Ophelia had once reciprocated his love; at her father’s behest, she ‘did repel [Hamlet’s] letters and denied / His access’ (2.1.109–10). Hamlet has thought of these love-letters as ‘in her excellent white bosom’ (2.2.112): the metaphorical meaning of the phrase (in the bosom of her dress, where a love-letter might be kept) does not abrogate the underlying sense that Ophelia’s ‘repulsing’ of the letters is akin to a closing-off of her body – her bosom – to his love. ‘And he, repelled – a short tale to make – / Fell into a sadness’ (2.2.146–7).92 We have already seen that there is a close connection between Hamlet’s melancholia and his sense of being denied access to the bodily interiors of those around him. Freud and Jones, followed by many later critics, have portrayed Hamlet’s desires as Oedipal – indeed, as prototypically Oedipal.93 If we try to imagine what the Oedipus complex would look like from the perspective of what I’ve called visceral knowledge, we might consider whether a central aspect of the Oedipal situation is not, quite simply, the triangular organisation of the self in relation to a sense of access and the denial of access to the parental objects. The desire to know one’s mother and one’s father can manifest itself as a desire to inhabit, or to find a way into, their bodies; this may have a tendency to be sexual in the former case (as R.D. Laing has written, even incest fantasies may be merely defences against the dread of being alone),94 and violent in the latter. This, of course, oversimplifies the gender dynamics; but it has the advantage of extending the penetrative aspects of the Oedipal triangle beyond the merely sexual or violent, in the direction of a primary desire for knowledge – a (Nietzschean) Oedipus of the Sphinx’s riddle, let us say, rather than a (Freudian) Oedipus of murder and incest. In any event, in turning to the play for evidence of Hamlet’s Oedipus complex, we find not so much an incestuous impulse as what we might call a Nero complex: an urge to open the parental body – to know one’s parent’s entrails (inseparable from a wish to have one’s own entrails known): less, perhaps, a sexual organisation, let alone a sexual neurosis, than a ‘Nerosis’. The classical figure invoked by Hamlet at the point of entering his mother’s closet is not Oedipus but Nero: Soft, now to my mother. O heart, lose not thy nature. Let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom; Let me be cruel, not unnatural. I will speak daggers to her, but use none. (3.2.381–5) First, there is no hint here of a sexual desire. What Hamlet expresses is a violent impulse, suppressed only with difficulty, to use daggers on his

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104 Shakespeare’s Entrails

mother. We can call the daggers phallic (though the plural seems to work against such a reading), the Neronian impulse incestuous; but neither the immediate nor the wider context requires such a reading. In King John, as the Oxford editor tells us, ‘Shakespeare refers to the legend that Nero committed the murder [of his mother] himself and ripped open [her] womb in order to see the place whence he came’: the Bastard brands the rebels as ‘You bloody Neroes, ripping up the womb / Of your dear mother England’ (5.2.152–3).95 Elsewhere in Shakespeare, Nero appears simply as the type of cruelty, without reference to incest. In addition, there is here again a striking relation between Hamlet’s bodily self-image and that of a parent. In his determination to be more a Dane than an antic Roman, Hamlet forces a shutting-off and hardening of his own body (‘O heart, lose not thy nature. Let not ever / The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom’), in order that he not have to open up his mother’s (with daggers): the prohibition, in either case, reveals the desire for aperture. When we turn to the closet scene (not ‘the bedroom scene’, as many critics have referred to it since John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in ‘Hamlet’),96 we find Hamlet railing against his mother’s ‘braz’d’ (3.4.37) heart and ‘skin[ned] and film[ed]’ (l. 149) body, and threatening to disclose ‘all within’ (l. 150). Here again we can find no evidence of direct sexual intent; on the contrary, as Adelman points out, Hamlet attempts in this scene to separate his mother from her sexuality. His penetrative wish is markedly different from the kind of sexual opening he imagines of her relationship with Claudius, which for Hamlet is ‘rank’ (l. 150), ‘enseamed’ (l. 92) and ‘stew’d’ (l. 93). His desexualisation of Gertrude is by no means incompatible with an imagined opening of her body: Peace, sit you down, And let me wring your heart; for so I shall If it be made of penetrable stuff, If damned custom have not braz’d it so, That it be proof and bulwark against sense. (ll. 34–8) This expresses a desire, more than anything, for ingression, without any sense of the transgression which would accompany a sexual or incestuous impulse. And Hamlet is insistent about this wish to fashion a mother whose heart consists of ‘penetrable stuff’: ‘You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ (ll. 18–19). (Hamlet’s rather convoluted syntax here – ‘I set you up a glass’ – leaves open the possibility that he is positioning himself as the mirror for his mother’s ‘inmost part’: there is something of the psychoanalyst about the Danish Prince.) What this ‘inmost part’ is precisely we never learn; throughout the scene, it hovers, like so much else in the play, somewhere between corporeal and

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 105

abstract registers. Hamlet’s prayer on the way to his mother’s closet might remind us that Nero’s anatomising of his mother was a brutal concretisation of a common metaphor (the notion of ‘knowing where one came from’). Hamlet’s disavowal of Nero’s act (‘let not ever the soul of Nero enter this firm bosom’) paradoxically imagines the rejection of this concretisation – the move towards metaphor – as a closing-off of his own (bodily) interior: the closure of the body and the de-corporealisation of language are graphically linked here. Where Nero committed unspeakable acts, Hamlet determines to ‘speak daggers’ rather than use them. Hamlet’s language, though, throughout this scene, is relentlessly body-bound, the attribution of motivation always converging on the somatic interior. He speaks of his mother’s sexuality in specifically inner-bodily terms: ‘the heyday in the blood’ (l. 69); the ‘ardour’ in ‘a matron’s bones’ (ll. 83–6) – ‘his version’, as Adelman writes, ‘of her soiled inner body’.97 His own body’s ‘healthful’(l. 143) inner life is foregrounded – ‘My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time’ (l. 142) – and compared to his mother’s ‘sickly part’ (l. 80), as well as to heaven’s description as ‘thoughtsick’ (l. 51, recalling the earlier ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought – 3.1.85); the compound adjective epitomises the two-footedness. His imagery harps on the idea of bodies which are diseased, internally corrupted in ‘the ulcerous place’ (l. 149): ‘Sense sure you have, / Else could you not have motion; but sure that sense / Is apoplex’d’ (ll. 71–3). The word ‘sense’ is used seven times in the scene (ll. 38, 71, 72, 74, 80, 163, 194), the meaning moving restlessly between perception, sensuality, sensibility, and the faculty of reason, the repetition bringing out the equivocation. In the same way, it is never clear whether Hamlet thinks he is dealing with a diseased body or a diseased soul. Nor do Gertrude’s words clarify the matter. Though her anguished cry that ‘These words like daggers enter in my ears’ (l. 95, echoing Hamlet’s earlier determination to speak but not to use daggers) seems to move towards the metaphorical, the somatic status of the internal ‘black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct’ (ll. 90–1) is ambiguous, as is her later lament: ‘O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain’ (l. 158). Indeed, the closet scene thematises the problem of the relation between the somatic and the psychic through the contrasting reactions of mother and son to the appearance of the Ghost. The intense corporeality of Hamlet’s words clashes with Gertrude’s reaction to the arrival of the Ghost: ‘you do bend your eye on vacancy, / And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse’ (ll. 117–18), she tells her son; ‘This is the very coinage of your brain. / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very cunning in’ (ll. 139–41). There is perhaps a relation between the inaccessibility of the body of Old Hamlet here and Gertrude’s earlier failure symbolically to ingest this body at its death. This may be imagined as a causal relation: the symbolic non-incorporation of the deceased incapacitates any relation with his ghost. But the uncertainty about the corporeality of the Ghost here – we can hardly help but wonder why Hamlet can see and hear it and Gertrude fail to – extends the debate to

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a meta-dramatic level; and the Ghost’s own words continue to tread the line between the corporal and the bodiless: ‘O step between her and her fighting soul. / Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works’ (ll. 113–14). This recalls not only Hamlet’s earlier accusation that his mother’s deed is such ‘As from the body of contraction plucks / The very soul’ (ll. 45–7), but also his refusal to let ‘The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom’: over and over, this part of the play seems to be wrestling almost obsessively with the problem of the inhabitation of the body with something incorporeal, whether it is a soul, or a spirit, or a Ghost. If the ‘penetration’ of Gertrude in this scene is ambiguously metaphorical, the penetration of Polonius is of course emphatically physical. Perhaps the decision to use a weapon (and not just ‘words like daggers’) speaks to a difference between maternal and paternal figures in relation to what I’ve called the Nero complex, though it should also be remembered that the Ghost has instructed Hamlet to leave Gertrude ‘to those thorns that in her bosom lodge / To prick and sting her’ (1.5.86–7). In any case, what Hamlet finds within Polonius’ bosom is not a soul, or truth, but ‘guts’ (3.4.214) – truly ‘the inmost part’. If we had thought that Gertrude’s closet was the innermost physical space in Elsinore, we are now reminded, with a kind of ‘Russian Doll’ effect, that the architectural interiority of the closet conceals other layers within it – behind the arras, and beyond this, within the body of Polonius.98 As Gertrude describes it, Hamlet In his lawless fit, Behind the arras hearing something stir, Whips out his rapier, cries ’A rat, a rat,’ And in this brainish apprehension kills The unseen good old man. (4.1.8–12) Let us follow this rat by way of digression: in fact what Hamlet had cried out was, ‘How now? A rat! Dead for a ducat, dead’ (4.3.23); Gertrude’s report stresses the word – doubles it, in fact, like so much else is in this play. This is not the first time Hamlet has come up with associations of rodent-like animals such as rats, mice, moles and weasels. These animals appear at a number of highly-charged moments, including, in addition to the killing of Polonius, the appearance of the Ghost under the stage (‘Well said, old mole’ – 1.5.170), and the build-up to the catching of the conscience of the King (‘The Mousetrap – marry, how tropically!’ – 3.2.232).99 (We could perhaps add to these Hamlet’s complaint about his uncle’s drinking habits, associated with ‘some vicious mole of nature’ which takes away ‘The pith and marrow’ of one’s reputation – 1.4.22–4: the image of the mole, usually taken as denoting a growth, can also be understood to refer to an animal burrowing away at the core, eating away the pith and marrow.) These rodential animals share

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the characteristics of being small and able to gnaw and to burrow into or under a surface with the help of sharp teeth. Shakespeare elsewhere thinks of rodents in conjunction with death (for example, King John, 2.1.352–4: ‘[Death    ] feasts, mousing the flesh of men’); at the broadest level, rodents are often a reminder of the edibleness of human bodies – this is a large part of their horror-effect.100 Rats, as Maud Ellmann has written, often embody the Kristevan abject, ‘dissolving the bounds between self and non-self, inside and outside, civilised and savage’.101 They seem to imply, for Hamlet, an entering of the body, and since in the main these instances envision (‘tropically’) a father-figure (Old Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius) as a rodent-like animal, we can hypothesise that the excitement is connected to a sense of the possibility of the incorporation of the father’s body.102 Rats, mice and weasels feature prominently in early modern accounts of diabolic possession – they are imagined by mentally disturbed patients as the devils’ familiars literally taking over the insides of their bodies.103 Perhaps this is all a little far-fetched; but certainly it is the case that Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is accompanied by imagery not only of rodents but also of the maggot-and-worm variety, linked as they are to the eating of a king’s ‘guts’ (4.3.31). Hamlet’s surge of penetrative anger is turned away from his mother and towards something stirring behind the arras. Instead of attacking ‘the mobbled [that is, muffled or shrouded] queen’ (2.2.498), he attacks another ‘mobbled’ body; or rather, he thrusts his rapier into the cloth hanging. The action strikingly brings together two associated strands of the play’s imagery: an invasive instrument (the rapier), and a separating integument (the arras). Perhaps we should not be too quick in assuming that the object of Hamlet’s aggression is beyond this repeatedly-mentioned arras – rather than, in some measure, the symbolically obstructive object itself. This is not the first arras we hear about (2.2.163), and, as we have already seen, there are numerous prominently obstructive integuments in the play; these can be understood to symbolise for Hamlet the sense of other people’s veiled or closed-off bodies. The corollary of these integuments is an overabundance of piercing weapons and tools104 – of ‘fell incensed points’ (5.2.61) – a plethora which bespeaks the violence born of the frustration of somatic inaccessibility.105 Many of these objects appear as actual props on stage, making not only metaphorically but physically present the sharpness, the ‘edge’ (3.2.244), of Hamlet’s desire (‘You are keen, my lord, you are keen’ – 3.2.243). Benjamin speaks of ‘the precision with which the passions themselves take on the nature of stage-properties’ in baroque drama; if this is so, the play’s passions are nothing if not irruptive.106 As Elaine Scarry has written, ‘as an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes into the body and produces pain; as a perceptual fact, it can lift pain and its attributes out of the body and make them visible’.107 The penetrative stageproperties in Hamlet re-cross the inside-outside boundary of the body: these piercing weapons externalise, so to speak, the idea of the innards, and their

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ubiquitous presence works to ensure the audience’s ‘re-membering’ of these hidden parts. The penetrative passions of Hamlet, symbolised by the plenitude of these props, are the other side of the play’s cannibalistic currents: both can be seen at root as radical attempts to overcome loss or separateness – either by entering the very guts of the other or by taking the other’s flesh into one’s own guts. Perhaps it is in this sense that Nietzsche speaks of ‘misanthropy’ as ‘an all too greedy love of man’: ‘greediness’ here may connote the doingaway with of the otherness of the other, a greed-for-the-inside which tries to destroy separateness. In this sense, anatomy and anthropophagy – two favourite Renaissance topoi (in the face, perhaps, of the emergence of homo clausus) – are twinned: two literally fantasmatic sides of the same scepticallyinflected coin. And indeed, in both cases the other is destroyed through the greediness of the fantasy.

Aporia (‘    but who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?’) There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Circles’108 ) Perhaps the most famous, instantly recognisable image derived from Renaissance literature is that of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull: a sombre Prince, in tragic mode, looking at the other, and seeing the truth of the body’s interior; the grinning skull, in comic mode, steadily returning Hamlet’s gaze. Sceptic and skeleton face to face. It is in the graveyard scene of Act 5 that Hamlet’s penetrative urge, along with his strident insistence on the absolute rupture between the inside and the outside, finally make their quietus. Hamlet has been repeatedly associated with the earth – seeking his noble father ‘in the dust’ (1.2.71), imagining ‘this goodly frame the earth’ as a ‘quintessence of dust’ (2.2.298, 308) and himself as ‘muddy-mettled’ (2.2.562), promising to ‘delve one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon’ (3.4.210– 11), spurred on by ‘examples gross as earth’ (4.4.46); throughout, one could say, Hamlet has had ‘his fine pate full of fine dirt’ (5.1.106). (With this in mind, we might even hear, buried within the ‘solid/sallied’ crux, another option: that of ‘soiled’, or ‘soiléd’.) From the first to the last act, the play has been fascinated by the underground; it is bookended by a body returned from its sepulchre and the disinterred body parts of the graveyard scene; in both cases, the underground is associated with the interior of the body, and in each case, the breaking of the surface of the apparent ‘solidity and compound mass’ (3.4.49) of the earth is analogous to an opening of the body. Here in the graveyard what Benjamin calls the ‘earth-boundedness’ of the baroque world reaches its consummation, as Hamlet hits something like the rock-bottom, the ground-zero, of his scepticism.109 Wherever he has broken

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through a surface he has encountered death and corruption – beneath the earth in which his father was buried, behind Polonius’ arras, beneath the seal of his own death warrant; now he finds that the central truth hidden within the body, his fantasies and desires notwithstanding, is the truth of mortality – that there is no final access to thought, emotion, or living knowledge through access to the interior of the human frame. Neither ‘th’exterior nor the inward man’ (2.2.6) can offer irrefutable access to truth. What had begun, for Hamlet, as an insistence on the insufficiency of the external, has turned by the end of the play into an understanding of the insufficiency of the internal. Or, perhaps better, into an understanding of the sufficiency of the external. It is as if the relentless probing of his scepticism finally arrives at a Montaignean form of doubt which calmly accepts the value of all things external: clothes, habits, faces, tastes: Most of our v[o]cations are like playes [    ] Wee must play our parts duly, but as the part of a borrowed personage [    ] Wee cannot distinguish the skinne from the shirt. It is sufficient to disguise the face, without deforming the breast. I see some transforme and transubstantiate themselves, into as many new formes and strange beings, as they undertake charges: and who emprelate themselves even to the heart and entrailes.110 ‘We must live by the World, and such as we finde it, so make use of it’, concludes Montaigne. The tone of this, the acceptance of life as it is presented to us, seems close to the calmness of Hamlet’s pronouncement that ‘The readiness is all’ (5.2.218). His new-found determination to ‘Let be’ (5.2.220) involves an implicit renunciation – almost a recantation – of his earlier idealisation of depth: let us know Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our deep plot do pall; and that should learn us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. (5.2.7–11) The sceptic’s urge to pierce has evolved into a ‘rough-hewing’ which can only ever approximate to the truth. It is in part the gravedigger, with his rough-hewing ‘pickaxe and a spade’ (5.1.92), that pushes Hamlet towards this seeming rejection of the idea that what lies beneath the surface is what counts (what Wittgenstein considered to be a cardinal philosophical error: the search for knowledge with a gaze that seeks for hidden truths beneath or beyond a surface or boundary – a kind of idealism, or temptation). The ultimate ‘truth of entrails’ finally seems to have a dampening effect on Hamlet’s penetrative temperament in the graveyard, as his own bodily interior reacts

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 111

HAMLET: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’earth? HORATIO: E’en so. HAMLET: And smelt so? Pah! (5.1.191–4) We might here recall Nietzsche’s comment on Hamlet’s nausea, and on his own olfactory sensitivity – ‘so that [    ] the inmost parts, the “entrails” of every soul are physiologically perceived by me – smelled’. Hamlet’s subjectivity is never more embodied than in this scene: his reactions to the body parts strewn about him are strongly visceral: his ‘gorge rises at it’ (5.1.181); his very ‘bones [    ] ache to think on’t’ (ll. 90–1). His sensibility here resembles a form of ‘knowing in one’s bones’. This visceral knowledge encompasses the ambiguous place of the interior of the body in the play. For, on the one hand, all, it seems, that one can ever know of the living interior of the human body is that it is destined for death and decay; but at the same time, the acknowledgement of that reality comes from within Hamlet’s body, from his gorge and his bones and his sense of smell. It is – paradoxically – only upon inhabiting his own body and noting its reactions that Hamlet can finally acknowledge the inaccessibility of truth through access to the body’s interior.111 By the end of the play, Hamlet can be seen to acknowledge the truths revealed within his own body, and to relinquish the fantasy of attaining knowledge of the interior of the other; this is something like an inversion of the sceptical position with which he began the play – with a refusal to acknowledge the expressibility of his own interior, coupled with a desire to access the interior of the other. ‘Is the “terrible” truth not that no amount of knowledge about the act ever suffices to ensure its performance, that the space between knowledge and action has never yet been bridged even in one single instance?’ asks Nietzsche in Daybreak, adding: ‘Actions are never what they appear to us to be! We have expended so much labour on learning that external things are not as they appear to us to be – very well! The case is the same with the inner world!’112 If in the early part of the play Hamlet’s ‘inaction’ may be attributable in part to his desire for certainty, by the fifth act his abandonment to fate is tied to a relinquishing of the notion of the attainability of certainty by treating the world and its denizens as if truth always lies just the other side of a frustrating integument. ‘Certain things’, wrote Wittgenstein, ‘are in deed not doubted.’113 What Hamlet keeps coming back to in the graveyard is an acknowledgement that the inside and the outside are not as separate as he might earlier have believed. ‘To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole?’ (5.1.196–8). As if to say: is this all there is stopping

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with revulsion to the skeletal remains strewn about him: looking upon these remains, once ‘incorps’d’ (4.7.86) in a human body, he finds that, to put it bluntly, mortality stinks:

112 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole, to keep the wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw. (5.1.206–9) There is here still a last-ditch attempt to hold inside and outside apart, but the wryness of Hamlet’s ditty expresses just how near he is to relinquishing the fantasy. Gone is the stark insistence on the clear disjunction of the two – the separation between them is, Hamlet seems to be realising, a precarious patchwork, as tenuous as the gap that separates life from death. The realisation, we can now see, has been coming for a while. Even in Hamlet’s final soliloquy we can discern some movement away from the image of a disparaged exterior covering a desired interior: in the equivocal praise of the soldiers fighting ‘Even for an eggshell’ (4.4.53); perhaps we can see a trajectory from, say, the Ghost’s armour, to the nutshell, to the eggshell, and now, to the Gravedigger’s ‘pocky corse’ (5.1.160) – the boundary ever thinner, offering less protection or distance between inner and outer: HAMLET: How long will a man lie i’th’earth ere he rot? GRAVEDIGGER: Faith, if a be not rotten before a die – as we have many pocky corses nowadays that will scarce hold their laying in – a will last you some eight or nine year. A tanner will last you nine year [    ] his hide is so tanned with his trade that a will keep out the water a great while. (5.1.158–65) The fantasy of closure epitomised in the image of homo clausus is dissolving before our eyes. The Hamlet of the early acts saw through everything and wanted his over-hardened body to dissolve; the Hamlet of Act 5 may see deeper, may see that the dissolving of the body’s boundaries solves, resolves, nothing. The scene emphasises the thinness of the integument separating the inside and the outside over and over: HAMLET: Is not parchment made of sheepskins? HORATIO: Ay, my lord, and of calveskins too. HAMLET: They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that. (ll. 112–15)

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the inside from becoming the outside? A little dust, even if it is that of Alexander? A patch of clay, though it may once have been Caesar’s own body?

It is the futility of trying to keep inner and outer separate – the futility of identity, we could almost say – that Hamlet harps upon, almost wonderingly, in the scene. ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come’ (5.1.186–8): where earlier it was as if the skin seemed so thick that each character was in a world of his or her own, now Hamlet realises that no matter how thick the skin or its cosmetic coating may be – even painting one’s face an inch thick – there is no ‘assurance in that’, no way of keeping inner and outer separate in the end. ‘A mans looke or aire of his face, is but a weake warrant’; writes Montaigne the sceptic; and adds, with markedly un-sceptical equanimity, ‘notwithstanding it is of some consideration’.114 The sceptic’s doubts about the accuracy of the relation between the inner and the outer focus on the unreliability of the passage between the two. Hence the sceptic’s disappointment with the senses, which are the only demonstrable conduit between the self and the outside world; but the senses being demonstrably untrustworthy, true knowledge of the outside world – or of the other’s inner world – is (says the sceptic) unattainable.115 This is why essays such as Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Sceptic’ are so obsessed with the relation between inner and outer; one’s senses, writes Raleigh, are profoundly affected by who and what and where one is: ‘in men there is great difference, both in respect of the outward shape, and also of the temperature of their bodies; [    ] and as several humours are predominant, so are the phantasies and conceits severally framed and affected’. That is to say: the internal bodily constitution of the observer is so variable, that we can never rely on the mere senses: ‘It is evident also that men differ very much in the temperature of their bodies, else why should some more easily digest beef than shell-fish?’116 ‘But who asked you to swallow men like oysters, Prince Hamlet?’ As I have been arguing, Nietzsche’s sphinxlike comment in The Gay Science contains an oblique reference to the obsession with the inner as be-all and end-all. By a ‘gay science’, writes Debra Bergoffen, Nietzsche means ‘a science that understands its truths as experiments, that appreciates the distance between Oedipal truth and happiness, and that creates a symbolic order that respects the sovereignty of the Thing by valuing the circle around it rather than the line to it’.117 This respect for ‘the circle around’ the Thing – for the oystershell, the skin, the surface of the earth or of the other, even perhaps the ill-fated arras enfolding Polonius – is another name for abjuring penetrative epistemophilia, the making of a bee-line for the inside as the sole locus of truth.118 For, as Nietzsche writes elsewhere, ‘the “apparent inner world” is governed by just the same forms and procedures as the “outer” world’.119 Ironically, it is the imagining of truth as something beneath or beyond a surface that itself leads to epistemological impasse, to the inability to know; to aporia, in the most literal sense of the word’s etymology: a-porein, without pores, non-porous.120 As Bright writes of melancholy: ‘the nature of the humor closeth up the poores’; thus the heart is left ‘shut up [    ] as it were in a dungeon of obscurity’.121

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‘Is Hamlet understood? Not doubt, certainty, is what drives one insane’, writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo.122 It might be more precise to say that it is the notion of certainty as something attainable – the truth that always lies just the other side of a surface – that drives one insane. Nietzsche’s choice of oysters signals, I think, his apprehension of the centrality to Hamlet of this view. Perhaps too his choice contains a sly reference to the pearl at the end of the play – to the poisoned pearl ingested by both Claudius and Gertrude. For the pearl, like the oyster, is an apt image of the pitfalls of the greedfor-the-inside I have been portraying: I take it to symbolise the inadequacy of this idealisation of the interior: for within the oyster one might find a pearl – ‘Richer than that which four successive kings / In Denmark’s crown have worn’ (5.2.270–1) – but this pearl may also be poisoned; and by the time Hamlet finds out which of these it is, it is too late. Moreover, rather like the ‘nunnery’, the crux of ‘solid/sullied’, and indeed the oyster, the pearl refers simultaneously to openness and closure, inciting both desire and disgust. The pearl in the Renaissance is at once a marker of perfection and of death; a symbol of virginity (as it is for Troilus) and a signifier of venereal disease (as it is for Falstaff).123 The pearl at the close of Hamlet is an image, too, of that which is seemingly hard through and through – until one finds that it too has dissolved in the chalice. As Marie McGinn puts it, explicating Wittgenstein’s redescription of the connection between ‘inner’ pain and ‘outer’ pain-behaviour: ‘If we conceive of the relation between pain and the human body as an empirical relation between two kinds of objects – so that pain occurs in the body like a pearl in an oyster shell – then the body cannot be regarded as the real bearer of pain; it just exists alongside it.’124 The pearl is called by Claudius, oddly, a ‘union’ (5.2.269) – and the word is emphasised when Hamlet repeats it in forcing his uncle to ‘drink off’ the remaining potion: ‘Is thy union here? / Follow my mother’ (5.2.331–2).125 Nowhere else does Shakespeare use the word to mean a pearl; usually he uses it to refer to the marriage union. Here too there is a reference to the uniting of man and wife in ‘one flesh’ (4.3.55), and perhaps one target of Hamlet’s rage is the sense of having been excluded from the bodily access implicit in the matrimonial bond, the perception that these incorporated bodies are, as we have seen, open to one another and feeding upon one another. Here, we could say, is Hamlet’s revenge for the exclusion from the realm of open bodies. What the ‘union’ at the end of Hamlet is decidedly not, in any event, is a communion, the central religious ceremony of the Catholic faith (just as Yorick’s skull is decidedly not a religious relic, and as Old Hamlet’s Ghost is decidedly not the Holy Ghost). If, as Greenblatt has argued, Hamlet’s jesting about a king going a progress through the guts of a beggar is a ‘grotesquely materialist reimagining of the Eucharist’, the forcing of the poisoned union down Claudius’ throat is a kind of anti-communion, a reversal of what was meant to take place at the end of the Catholic mass.126

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114 Shakespeare’s Entrails

The ritual of the taking-in of the bread and wine, incorporating the very flesh of the lord into the communal body of believers, was, as we saw in Chapter 1, Christianity’s central ceremony of corporeal interanimation; the Protestant move away from the profoundly carnal nature of the ritual – the turning of the Eucharist into a ‘spiritualised’ Host – was a crucial part of the historical process of ‘excarnation’. In a world in the midst of a process of losing a sense of the openness of bodies to the environment, to one another, and to the divine, Hamlet’s ‘union’ might be taken to signify the loss of the kind of ‘communion’ that might have participated in the ingestion of those ‘funeral bak’d meats’. The final moments of the play reveal a Hamlet who has come some distance from his earlier sceptical self. Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio could hardly be further from his opening speech about ‘that within which passes show’: If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story. (5.2.351–4) ‘If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart’: a possibility that a man in the grip of scepticism’s boundedness could not bring himself to believe. But the doubter has ‘let belief take hold of him’ (1.1.27). As Carla Mazzio has written, ‘the question [in Hamlet] is not only of the heart’s stability, but of what the heart might hold, can hold, or if the heart can be held or beheld’.127 Where earlier Hamlet had rejected as inherently untruthful all external emanations from the body’s interior – all ‘windy suspirations of forc’d breath’ – he now enjoins Horatio to ‘draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story’. His way of putting this, his slightly odd accent on the drawing of the breath before its exhalation in the telling of the story, calls attention to the process of respiration. In Act 5, wrote Benjamin, Hamlet ‘wants to breathe in the suffocating air of fate in one deep breath’,128 and indeed breathing becomes a focus of understated but repeated attention throughout this act: ‘why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?’ (5.2.122); ‘It is the breathing time of day with me’ (l. 171); ‘The King shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath’ (l. 268); ‘He’s fat, and scant of breath’ (l. 290); ‘draw thy breath in pain’ (l. 353). Breathing, as Winnicott has pointed out, ‘may be associated now with intake and now with output. An important characteristic of breathing is that [    ] it lays bare a continuity of inner and outer, that is to say, a failure of defences.’129 In Act 5 of Hamlet, we might speak less of a failure than of a relinquishing of defences. Hamlet’s implicit acceptance of the interpenetration of internal and external in this final phrase undoes his perception through most of the play that breath can only be a kind of contagion. Breathing is still imagined here as a difficult, painful act, but it is now no longer something horrifying.

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The Inward Man: Hamlet 115

Hamlet is a play that hovers on the border between a pre-modern world of permeability and the regime of homo clausus. Cavell speaks of ‘the death of our capacity to acknowledge’ the other as ‘the turning of our hearts to stone or their bursting’.130 Hamlet, torn between the longing for the dissolution of the ‘too too solid flesh’ and the rage over the ‘union’ of ‘too too sullied flesh’, is a character straddling a great historical divide; as Yves Bonnefoy puts it, contextualising the play within the vast historical changes taking place at the time of its writing: ‘The fracture line that broke the horizon of atemporality and gave over the history of the world to its ever more uncertain and precipitous development passes through Hamlet; it is obviously one of the causes of the play and could be said to run right through its heart.’131 If the interior of the body is one locus of the historical battleground between pre-modern and modern, Catholicism and Protestantism, faith and empiricism, Hamlet – living out these fissures in his own being – dies of a kind of internal fracture, an embodiment of these fissures which run through his (and the play’s) heart. From the opening scene of the play, with Francisco’s ‘I am sick at heart’, the heart, heartsickness and the heart-breaking have been constantly brought to our attention: ‘But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue’ (1.2.159); ‘hold, hold, my heart’ (1.5.93); ‘in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart’ (3.2.73); ‘This something settled matter in his heart’ (3.1.173); ‘the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’ (3.1.62–3); ‘O heart, lose not thy nature’ (3.2.381–7); ‘let me wring your heart’ (3.4.35); ‘O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain’ (3.4.158); ‘you would pluck out the heart of my mystery’ (3.2.356); ‘in my heart there was a kind of fighting / That would not let me sleep’ (5.2.4–5); ‘Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart’ (5.2.208–9). Of the ‘heartache’ in the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, Maurice Charney wonders: ‘Can you imagine being in the audience when the word “heartache” was used for the first time in its modern sense of spiritual perturbation?’132 But the argument I am making here is that the transition had not yet been made – the play itself is one of the central transitional points between the physical and the ‘spiritual’ in Western culture; Hamlet’s death a corporeal representation of these faultlines, half-metaphorical, half-somatic: ‘Now cracks a noble heart’ (5.2.364).

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116 Shakespeare’s Entrails

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Figure 4 Male Figure, Showing the Interior of the Thoracic Cavity, from Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis human libri tres (Paris, 1546); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 118

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4

Gazing into the sky, this man is also gazing in fantasy inside his own physical body, yes, at those physical constellations, those objects or figures all of us imagine inside us, figures both loving and hateful that we would have at peace. (Adrian Stokes, ‘Colour and Form’1 ) If it is the case that Hamlet gives us a portrait of the emergence of homo clausus’s new regime of bounded, sceptical interiority, King Lear can be seen as an attempt to grapple with the problems of relatedness in such a culture. As I argued in Chapter 1, the sense of an increasingly impenetrable boundary between the inside and the outside of the body, and concomitantly between body and soul, meant that such relations needed to be reconceived: in such a context, where the corporeal demarcations between self and other are increasingly starkly felt, the question of whether one is inside or outside the other – of, as Lear expresses it, ‘who’s in, who’s out’ (5.3.15) – becomes acute. Lear’s kingdom is just such a world, where the difficulties of knowing or acknowledging the other, whether that other is human, divine or demonic, are imagined as excruciatingly somatic problems.2 Setting Lear beside Hamlet is instructive in many ways, not least when it comes to these two plays’ underlying corporeal imaginaries. If Hamlet feels himself to be trapped within his own body, Lear’s fantasies gravitate, as we shall see, towards imagining himself to be excluded from, cast out of, the other’s interior: it is in this sense, among others, that he describes himself as more sinned against than sinning. Where Hamlet’s is a claustrophobic world, set almost entirely in the oppressively interior spaces of Elsinore, Lear’s is essentially an agoraphobic one, its signal location the terrifyingly open spaces of its third act. To put it much too starkly: Hamlet, somatically imprisoned, longs to count himself a ‘king of infinite space’; Lear, corporeally exiled, wants nothing more than to ‘be bounded in a nutshell’ (Hamlet, 2.2.254–5). Forms of scepticism, we might say, of the profound historical and psychological rupture between inner and outer realms we have been tracing throughout this book. Both kingdoms could be described as saturated with scepticism. 119

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The Body Possessed: King Lear

In both plays, then, these versions of scepticism take on powerfully embodied forms. If in Hamlet an important motif, epitomising the disjunction between greatness and misery, is that of how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar, in Lear a central notion is how a king may become a beggar, down to the very guts. From start to finish, the language of King Lear is replete with somatic imagery, the body’s inner realms hovering just below the surface of the play, somewhere between the realm of metaphor and the realm of physicality. It stands out as perhaps the most painfully corporealised play among Shakespeare’s works, as has been recognised ever since Caroline Spurgeon affirmed, in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, that ‘there runs throughout [Lear] only one overpowering and dominating continuous image [    ] of a human body in anguished movement’.3 The agonies evinced by the play are inextricably metaphysical and physical. At no point are we allowed to forget ‘the fleshment of this dread exploit’ (2.2.120), the pressures and sufferings undergone by the very ‘flesh and bones’ (4.2.67) of these characters. At the centre of this ‘fleshment’ stands, of course, Lear himself, who, as Spurgeon’s contemporary Wolfgang Clemen wrote, ‘transforms all feelings into bodily terms’.4 It would be more accurate to say that for Lear (as for much of the early modern world) all feelings are bodily: indeed, the notion that he transforms feelings into somatic terms is an index of the pressure being placed on the relations between psyche and soma in this period – and in this play. Lear’s emotions are described as taking place quite literally in the inner spaces of the old King’s body: as I argue below, this interior is in a sense the arena in which the agon of the play takes place. In the somaticity of the language one can discern a carefully wrought design that turns primarily on notions of taking into the body and casting out of it. Bodied forth through this pattern is a profound concern with what inhabits the human frame – with what, or who, is taken in, loved, forgiven or acknowledged, and what or who is refused access to the interior and thereby disavowed or dispossessed. The pervasive imagery of the interior of the body is part of a pattern which brings together several diverse strands of King Lear’s subject matter. These include the problem of the (absent) maternal bodies, best analysed by Janet Adelman, as well as that of the (constantly present) paternal bodies and their insides; the thematics of hunger and the poor, emptiness and homelessness; and the problem of love and its avoidance – the subject of Stanley Cavell’s seminal piece.5 Looking at the play through its entrails puts into relation these ostensibly divergent aspects. One might say that King Lear is an extended meditation on the concept of possession, on what it means to own someone or something (to have it, to acknowledge it), to be inhabited by the other (to love another, to be unable to resist an other – whether human, divine, or diabolical), to be in or out of control of oneself, possessed or self-possessed. Being possessed – having the (divine or human) other within you, means being taken over by something

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120 Shakespeare’s Entrails

perceived as foreign, alien (for good or ill): being mad, transported, infatuated, in love. Having this alien entity within implies not being self-possessed, not being in one’s right mind (and hence being out of one’s mind), not being in control of oneself.6 At the same time, much is made in the play of various possessions – those things (houses, clothes, appurtenances, retainers and so on) that provide one (and especially one’s body) with some degree of protection. Lear places this (relatively material) meaning of the term beside the other (more psychosomatic notion) of being possessed; it interrogates the relation between these forms of possession, the extent of the subject’s reliance on the external (social relations, physical location, material objects, name and title and so on) and the internal (an inherent sense of identity, or a ‘natural’ propensity to, say, madness or love). The problem of possession thus incorporates issues of ownership, rationality, madness, abdication and disinheritance. The fantasy of having someone or something alien inside one’s body was a particularly topical question during the period of the writing of King Lear, some time between 1604 and 1606.7 A bitter and sensationalised struggle was being waged in England during the early years of the seventeenth century over the validity of the idea of diabolic possession of the body and its concomitant, exorcism.8 Indeed, two texts directly involved in this controversy have been put forward as sources, or at least significant subtexts, for Shakespeare’s play: Edward Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, and Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures.9 Published (respectively) the day before and the day after the ides of March 1603, the main thrust of each of these two sceptical documents lies in revealing the mythological status of possession and exorcism, the imposture inherent in the notion that there may be wicked spirits lurking in the torsos of the ostensibly possessed. While Jorden’s tract is primarily interested in presenting a medical, proto-scientific way of explaining bizarre somatic phenomena, Harsnett’s expends most of its considerable energy on debunking the ‘cozenage’ of those who believe (or pretend to believe) in the efficacy of bizarre practices of exorcism. Both attempt to show that ‘divers strange actions and passions of the body of man, which in the common opinion, are imputed to the Divell, have their true naturall causes’; both are preoccupied with the differentiation between ‘what is naturall, what not naturall, what preternaturall, and what supernaturall’.10 This differentiation is an evident concern of King Lear; a play exceedingly interested in the definition of nature and the natural; and the issue (in both play and treatises) is inseparable from the question of what it is precisely that is going on within the bodies of the ‘possessed’ and ‘hysterical’ men and women of these tracts – and of the protagonists of Shakespeare’s play. This question can indeed be said to provide a kind of epitome of the growing divide between two ways of understanding the world: the proto-scientific (which we have associated loosely with a disenchanting strain of Protestantism) and

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 121

the magical-religious (aligned in important ways with Catholicism). Possession and exorcism narratives circa 1600 stand at a crucial historical juncture in Western culture’s explanation of the interior of the human body. In both Harsnett’s and Jorden’s texts there is a powerful investment in the question of what is imagined to inhabit the body, and of what is ostensibly cast out of it – closely connected to what Jorden calls ‘the actions of expulsion or retention’;11 in Lear, parental and filial acknowledgments and disownings are repeatedly figured in terms of what is taken into or expelled from the body. Reading King Lear alongside Harsnett’s Declaration, a virulent demystification of the practice of exorcism, has produced interpretations relating the play to questions of recusancy and the religious conditions in England at the time, as well as to questions of theatricality and the position of Shakespeare’s drama vis-à-vis structures of power;12 reading the play with Jorden’s Discourse, a medical treatise detailing the characteristics and cures of something akin to our modern ‘hysteria’, has tended to be conducive to feminist and psychoanalytic construals of the play, restoring to it a powerful ‘maternal subtext’.13 Each reading tends to downplay the importance of the other. Through its interest in an ontology of bodily interiority, however, King Lear seems to me to engage at once both psychic and political dimensions; both the gender/family dynamics and the religious polemic – though, as one might expect, at something of a tangent. Instead of engaging directly in the polemic about exorcism, theatricality and hysteria, Shakespeare, characteristically, addresses the question of what human urges lie behind (or inside) the belief in corporeal possession and exorcism, of what desires and fears are involved in the fantasy or pretence of taking in or expelling the other. Shakespeare, as I have been arguing, showed a good deal of interest in these problems in earlier plays; but nowhere is the issue of the somatic relationship to the other examined with such thoroughness – indeed, ruthlessness – as in King Lear. For it is only from the point of view of the closed psyche-soma – of homo clausus – that the either/or exclusionary logic of confinement or exile is so central. Each major movement in the play has a correlative corporeal set of images; each movement elicits a reaction based on a relentless rationale. King Lear, writes John Jones, is ‘a play whose personal, acted-out logic drives on through division and subtraction’.14 The play of desire that is so radically critiqued in Troilus and Cressida is revealed as anything but arbitrary. As we shall see, a ferocious quasi-geometrical rigour underlies the apparent freefor-all of desire in King Lear. What this geometry is trying to work out is a set of questions about human relatedness in a world in which the connection between the inner and the outer was in the process of being ruptured.

Exorcisms There is a tremendous elaboration of the two parts of the fantasy I have just briefly outlined, namely ideas of what happens inside

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122 Shakespeare’s Entrails

The Body Possessed: King Lear 123

King Lear is a rewriting of an old play, the anonymous The True Chronicle History of King Leir. Here Shakespeare found an adroit (if rather unsophisticated) interweaving of familial and political narratives, and perhaps this was enough to draw his attention to the older play. What he also found, however, was a play chock-full of imagery of the human heart. From the beginning of the play – with Leir’s early laments ‘Oh, what a combat feeles my panting heart’ (1.3.4) and ‘This throbbing heart is pearst with dire annoyes’ (1.3.13) – to its end, with Cordella’s odd comment ‘Now is my heart at quiet, and doth leap / Within my breast for joy’ (5.4.239–40), and Gallia’s echo, ‘If e’er my heart do harbour any joy, / Or true content repose within my breast’ (5.4.249–50), there is in this text a remarkably steady attention to the physical condition of the heart within the chest.16 Interestingly, Leir also repeatedly makes use of the idea of possession – the words ‘possess’, ‘dispossess’, and ‘repossess’ are employed over and over in the play.17 But the terms are used almost exclusively in relation to the ownership of the throne, or the rights of kingship, without any apparent interest in their corporeal dimension, or in the intricate linguistic and contextual web that brings into relation ownership, madness, corporeal inhabitation, power and love in Shakespeare’s play. King Lear, additionally, pointedly does away with the religious framework of its precursor. When, for example, Leir explains his motivation in giving up the crown, the old play makes clear the pious impulse behind the act: Leir ‘would fain resign these earthly cares, / And think upon the welfare of [his] soul’ (1.1.23–4). Shakespeare’s King begins by announcing that he has a ‘darker purpose’ (1.1.35); and from his first words on stage, there are hints at what this purpose might be: Know that we have divided In three our kingdom; and ’tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburdened crawl toward death. (1.1.36–40)18 ‘Unburdened’: the proto-Miltonic rhythm of the sentence emphasises the word, calling attention to its derivation. Etymologically related to ‘birth’, ‘burden’ (or ‘burthen’) meant, originally (and in numerous other places in Shakespeare), a child carried in the womb.19 An underlying meaning of ‘unburdened’, then, is ‘without a child in the womb’. Already here we can perceive the first hint of the idea, borne out through the remainder

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oneself and, along with this, ideas of what is the state of the inside of the source of supply, namely the mother’s body. (D.W. Winnicott, ‘Appetite and Emotional Disorder’15 )

of the scene, that Lear is not simply renouncing his royal function: he is rejecting the notion of his children’s corporeal possession of his interior. Critics have been drawn to the word ‘crawl’, with its connotations of a return to childhood; and indeed we might speculate about the implication of the conjunction of ‘unburdened’ and ‘crawl’ – that Lear wishes to become (rather than carry) a baby. Already a relation is being established, or hinted at, between being within the other and (not) having the other within oneself, a relation that will be examined throughout the play. Such a somatic interpretation of these lines may seem a little far-fetched, but the image of a paternal body refusing its inhabitation is sustained throughout the scene. Indeed, the entire opening scene of King Lear can be described as a portrait of a man emptying the interior of his body. We have in fact already been somewhat prepared for this notion in the short exchange between Gloucester and Kent that opens the play. Here, Gloucester speaks of his son Edmund in terms which make clear that he is (as Adelman points out) very much his mother’s ‘whoreson’ (1.1.23) rather than his father’s son, the product of her ‘round-womb’d’ (l.13) interior rather than of Gloucester’s ‘braz’d’ flesh: ‘I have so often blush’d to acknowledge him’, he declares, ‘that now I am braz’d to’t’ (ll. 8–10) – that is, hardened, plated with brass.20 The blush, an involuntary corporeal form of acknowledgment (of one’s own vulnerability to another), has been replaced by an image of corporeal hardening, a refusal of access to the interior. (The implication of Gloucester’s words seems to be that corporeal hardening, the refusal of access by the other to one’s insides, is a warding off not only of the other but of the shame that follows on from this original warding off and refusal to acknowledge the other.21 ) Gloucester’s language, here and elsewhere in the play, implies that he is hardened, steeled against the entry of the other into his body; there is no place within himself (within his heart) for Edmund – the ‘unpossessing bastard’ (2.1.67) – who ‘hath been out nine years, and away he shall again’ (1.1.31–2). Of this exchange Adelman writes: ‘In distinguishing between his legitimate and illegitimate sons, Gloucester manages to do away with the womb altogether.’22 Doing away with the womb can be said to serve two purposes: as Adelman and other feminist critics have written, it may figure an occlusion of the maternal role – of the fact of one’s emergence from within the maternal corpus and the continuing ‘contamination’ potentially experienced as a result of that origin. A related but distinct reading might depict the womb as the place within the body most incontrovertibly open to being inhabited by the other, and its disavowal as the corporeal correlative of the refusal to acknowledge the other. Distancing oneself from the womb serves the double function of distancing oneself from the maternal body and at the same time excising the other from one’s own body; whether the aim here is to separate oneself from the maternal or to avoid the acknowledgement of the other, the means take the form of the repression of one’s bodily interior as such.

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124 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Lear’s rejection of the ‘burthen’d’ interior has, then, been glancingly foreshadowed by Gloucester’s. If the latter describes himself as ‘braz’d’, Lear declares himself ‘firm’ (1.1.244) in the rejection of his child. At this point still far from the realisations of the storm, Lear is here able to imagine that he has absolute control of what enters and leaves his body. As so often in Shakespeare, in the fortunes of a single word can be glimpsed a microcosm of the entire drama: Lear’s ‘Nothing; I have sworn; I am firm’ is in implicit contrast with what he has already termed Cordelia’s ‘infirmities’ (l. 202). The word – a dead metaphor to modern ears, but far more directly somatic during the early modern period23 – is harped upon at the end of the opening scene by his two eldest daughters: following Regan’s ‘Tis the infirmity of his age’ (l. 292), Goneril pronounces her father to be ‘infirm and choleric’ (l. 298); the humoral meaning of ‘choleric’ implies that Lear’s ‘infirmity’ is associated by Goneril with a bodily weakness, an internal imbalance. The ironic reverberations of the word continue with Lear’s eventual self-pitying assessment that he is but ‘A poor, infirm, weak, old man’ (3.2.20), subject to the ague. When Lear banishes Cordelia, he not only denies his paternal relation to her but phrases the banishment explicitly in terms of her expulsion from his very flesh and blood: Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbour’d, pitied, and reliev’d, As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.112–19) It is specifically from Lear’s ‘heart’ and ‘bosom’ that Cordelia is banished, the ‘propinquity and property of blood’ shared by their bodies that he disclaims; and the strong alliteration of this last phrase makes Lear, in his anger, seem to be almost spitting Cordelia out of his body – an early foretaste of his later, nauseated ‘pah, pah!’ (4.6.128). ‘From this’ – in ‘And as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever’ – can be taken to mean ‘from this time’; but since Lear is somewhat given to melodramatic deictic gestures such as wiping his hand and falling to his knees, we are entitled to ask whether perhaps he here indicates his heart, as he presumably does, for instance, at 2.2.323–4: ‘she hath tied / Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture, here’.24 When Lear tries to imagine the very worst type of humanity to compare to Cordelia, what he comes up with is the hyperbolic ‘he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite’: it is not entirely clear whether ‘generation’ here means parents or children;25 and precisely this question – of

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 125

who should or should not gorge upon whom, and, as a consequence, of who should or should not be within whom – is one that King Lear raises repeatedly. Evidently, the most horrible thing Lear can imagine is someone who takes the other into his body. (And it seems worth noting that at this point it is not a maternal but surely a paternal figure that Lear holds up as the exemplar of dreadfulness.) Placed within the context of Lear’s bodily fantasies through the rest of the play, it becomes clear that it is less this figure’s cannibalism as such than his desire to literally take in – to incorporate – his ‘generation’ that horrifies Lear. Or perhaps we should say horrifies, but also attracts; the idea is stated positively (‘as well neighbour’d’) because, as we shall see, the Scythian represents a part of Lear that he is unable to give up – the part that has already incorporated Cordelia; the ‘barbarous’ desire is already ‘neighbour’d’ to Lear’s ‘bosom’. The image of incorporation continues a few lines later, when Lear turns to his sons-in-law: ‘With my two daughters’ dowers digest the third’ (l. 127), he tells them, referring, ambiguously, either to the third daughter or to her dowry (or inheritance). (The quarto text has ‘this third’: does Lear here point to the map or to Cordelia?) The ‘third’ may be digested by Cornwall and Albany, Lear implies, but it, or she, will not be digested by him. Between these two sentences, Lear uses a slightly odd phrasing in his continued imprecation: ‘So be my grave my peace, as here I give / Her father’s heart from her!’ (1.1.124–5). The use of ‘give [    ] from’ is unusual in Shakespeare;26 one would expect him to take his father’s heart from her, or perhaps to give it to someone else. ‘Give [    ] from’ suggests an action which removes his heart not only from Cordelia but also from himself – indeed, the two actions turn out to be inseparable. Lear’s recovery will take place, we should recall, not so much when Cordelia gives her heart to him – her heart has been his all along – but when he recovers his father’s heart sufficiently for him to be able to give it to her; he is restored through, we could say, the acknowledgment of what lies within him: Cordelia, his heart. If the King’s thrust in the first scene is, again and again, toward the emptying out of his interior, Cordelia’s very name – almost literally ‘cor de Lear’ – works towards her expulsion.27 The etymology of Cordelia’s name has often been commented upon, but I want to emphasise here how materially I think we should understand the numerous references to hearts in King Lear.28 One cannot do justice to the intricacy of the bodily imagination in the play if one takes these as metaphorical references to a non-physical (or pre-physical) emotional realm. In so far as the play is about love, it locates this emotion firmly at the centre of the body: as the psychoanalyst Michael Eigen puts it (perhaps reductively, but not I think ad absurdum), ‘It is in the chest that one ultimately experiences simple feelings of love.’29 If in Hamlet the ‘heart of hearts’ is at once the symbolic and the physical locus of personal and by extension historical disruption, in King Lear it becomes the space of psychic and historical pain.

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126 Shakespeare’s Entrails

It is the absolute focus of the play, becoming almost a character in its own right. To this we should add that speech in King Lear is repeatedly imagined in densely material ways. This is especially true of Cordelia’s speaking, from the early ‘I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue’ (ll. 76–7) and ‘I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth’ (ll. 90–1) to the late ‘Faith, once or twice she heav’d the name of “father” / Pantingly forth, as if it press’d her heart’ (4.3.25–6) and ‘Her voice was ever soft    ’ (5.3.270). The disjunction between word and matter, so pervasive in Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet, is here made to dovetail with the characters in which love is conspicuously impaired. Throughout the play, Cordelia’s speech, figured as emanating directly, though with great difficulty, from the insides of her body, is portrayed in stark contrast to the empty words and ‘professed bosoms’ (1.1.271) of her sisters, both of whom are ‘more in word than matter’ (3.2.81); hence the heavy irony in Goneril’s ‘I do love you more than word can wield the matter’ (1.1.54) and Regan’s ‘In my true heart / I find she names my very deed of love’ (1.1.70–1).30 We are invited to conclude not only that this material weightiness of speech is at the root of Cordelia’s difficulty in the opening scene, but that it is precisely this inseparability of language and the interior of the body that Lear cannot bear – whereas for Hamlet it is exactly the separability of the two that is the problem: Hamlet believes, on this sceptical basis, that he can’t bare his interior; Lear, that he can’t bear it. There are hints throughout this opening scene that Cordelia has been expelled from Lear’s body.31 That Lear’s abdication entails a division of his land can be taken as an indication of his corporeal intentions, for the oneness of monarch and territory was a commonplace of the period: in Renaissance England ‘the land is the body of the king’.32 Dividing ‘the whole Body, and Monarchie intire’33 is thus understandable as a form of self-anatomisation; and it is worth remembering that the first act of any anatomy was almost invariably the removal of the cadaver’s innards – the parts quickest to rot. Similarly, in the juridical doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, it was accepted that ‘the King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic’; ‘the body natural and the body politic are not distinct, but united, and as one body’.34 On one level, it is as if the play were addressing a question whose outlines those living in Shakespeare’s time may have been beginning to sense: namely, how can a body politic incorporate the advent of scepticism, if scepticism is in part a somatic condition? Lear’s solution to this problem is his abdication. His division of the land and of the body politic is an attempt at cancelling the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, as well as another form of corporeal self-division, one which denies the integrity – and therefore, among other things, the inhabitability – of the body of the king. Moreover, the king was conventionally identified as the heart of the body politic (and vice versa: the heart is ‘Lord and King’ of the body; within it, the king’s place is ‘the chest, or middle belly, in which the Heart as King

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 127

keeps his Court’);35 in so far as this identification is taken literally, Lear’s vacating of the throne is a removal of the heart from his own body politic, its evisceration. So we need to think of the extremely complex acts of banishment in the opening scene as shadowing a kind of self-banishment. Both the abdication of Lear’s throne and the banishing of Cordelia and Kent may be construed as simultaneously ways of emptying the interior of the King’s body. And while Kent and Cordelia may literally be exiled from the body politic rather than the body natural, Lear’s rhetoric implies that he feels these as expulsions from his own individual ‘heart’ and ‘bosom’. (Indeed, if we accept the notion of the indivisibility of the King’s Two Bodies, anything cast out of one is automatically cast out of the other.) We might here add that the fact that we meet both Kent and Cordelia so soon back in England indicates the doomed nature of the attempt to empty the body’s insides: like the rising womb and the coming of the storm (as we will see), what is repressed internally always returns, in one form or another. Lear calls the proposed division of his kingdom ‘giving’, but this giving is at least as much an aggressive act of evacuation – a disowning of the other – as an act of generosity. It is an act of avoidance (a word that often meant the same thing as ‘voiding’ in early modern England).36 His wilful act of self-voiding is unlike, for instance, that of Othello, who is ‘purged’ (as Graham Bradshaw puts it) by an externalised agent (Iago).37 In so far as the catharsis achieved at the end of a tragedy has something to do with a somatic purgation, Lear can almost be said to be trying to effect a premature self-catharsis from the word go; perhaps we could even say that he is trying to pre-empt his own tragedy. He is, in any case, unwilling to wait for nature to run its course – for death to end his ‘cares and business’. By the close of the first scene, Lear has apparently succeeded in voiding his interior, as the Fool repeatedly implies: Lear, he says, is like an egg ‘cut [    ] i’th’middle’, with its meat eaten out (1.4.155–6); he is ‘an O without a figure’ (1.4.189– 90), and ‘a sheal’d peascod’ (1.4.197) – a peapod whose insides have been removed (Dr Johnson’s gloss on this phrase: ‘the outside of a king remains, but all the intrinsic parts of royalty are gone’).38 That it is so often the Fool who reminds his master of his former plenitude may possibly be related to the near-homonymy between ‘fool’ and ‘full’,39 as well as, perhaps – taking account of Shakespeare’s ever-present interest in etymological derivation – to the fact that the term ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, belly.40 The Fool’s response – ‘Lear’s shadow’41 – to Lear’s anguished question – ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (1.4.227–8) – can be taken among other things as the answer one might give to a man who, having emptied himself of his insides, has become two-dimensional, flat – a shadow.42 As the Fool sums up: ‘I would not be thee, Nuncle; thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides, and left nothing i’th’middle’ (ll. 182–4).

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128 Shakespeare’s Entrails

The Body Possessed: King Lear 129

Inhabitations

But ‘nothing i’th’middle’ is what Lear has wanted all along – where his own body is concerned. With regard to his daughters’ bodies – and above all to Cordelia’s – the opposite is very much the case. For the other side of Lear’s wish to evacuate his interior is his simultaneous demand to be taken into the body of the other; it is his scepticism about his inhabitation of their bodies that sets the entire plot in motion. Lear offers his daughters an exchange (or bribe): his corpus – his land – in exchange for their taking this body into theirs, which seems to be his picture of what love amounts to. The demand is entirely one-sided, a fact that helps to explain Cordelia’s reaction to the love test. At this point Lear has no apparent need to expel his two eldest daughters from his ‘bosom’, presumably because he doesn’t feel them to be in it in the first place (it is only later that he will discover, willy-nilly, that they too are inside him). So what they say doesn’t appear to be of any real importance to him: he shows no sign of having paid attention to a single detail of their formal, glib speeches in the abdication scene; still relying on Cordelia to be his ‘nursery’, he doesn’t, at this stage, seem to care what’s in these first two daughters’ hearts; it is the content of the third ‘casket’ that matters. Cordelia’s silence seems to imply, for Lear, a hidden inner space, one that is inaccessible to him.44 The claim on his daughters’ bodies is, however, not made explicit in the abdication scene, though even here there are hints of Lear’s desire to be ensconced. It is discernible most of all in his response to the thwarting of the demand, in his violent, visceral reactions to the perception that it has been refused. Indeed, ‘nothing i’th’middle’ may be precisely what Lear hears in Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ (1.1.86) – her answer to Lear’s original demand that she declare her heart.45 Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ is to Lear, as Kent seems to understand, a sign of her being literally ‘empty-hearted’ (l. 152); but her ‘low sounds’, Kent tries to assure him, ‘reverb no hollowness’ (ll. 152–3). Cordelia’s declaration, however, refuses to acknowledge her father’s sway within her heart: this is her stubborn (if understandable) response to his scepticism about his place within her. In fact, she matches her father, almost step for step, in her refusals. As he gives power in place of love, she gives duty; as he has divided himself, she splits herself: ‘That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty: / Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all’ (ll. 100–3). ‘Love is a Possessory Affection, it delivers over him that loves into the possession of that that he loves’, wrote Donne. King Lear is a meditation on

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Bodies run the risk of resisting one another in impenetrable fashion, but they also run the risk of meeting and dissolving into one another. (Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Corpus’43 )

what it means, in corporeal terms, to love and to be loved. Love is envisioned in King Lear as something akin to the state of being possessed by the other (having the other within one’s body) or as something that is linked to possessions, to a kind of possessiveness (of the other-as-property, of objects taken for or in lieu of the other). Othello portrays a transformation in its protagonist from something like the first state to the second; Lear, less neatly, questions the relation between these forms of love. Terry Hawkes points out how the play juxtaposes two meanings of the verb ‘to love’ (deriving from two entirely different Old English roots – lufian and lofian): ‘to care for, to adore’ and ‘to appraise, estimate, or state the price or value of’ – akin to the French homonymic ‘collision’ between aimer and esmer (to estimate or calculate). Regan and Goneril, argues Hawkes, adhere to the second notion of love; Cordelia to the first.46 We may wish to take issue with these neat alignments, for it is precisely in the places they are least convincing that King Lear marks out and probes the relations between these notions of possession and of love.47 In matching Lear’s self-division, Cordelia allows no room for the idea that her father might be sole possessor of her interior. She gives as good as she gets: ‘According to my bond; no more nor less’ (l. 92). Lear’s swift reaction is to the perception that her heart is not his to inhabit: LEAR: But goes thy heart with this? CORDELIA: Ay, my good Lord. LEAR: So young, and so untender? CORDELIA: So young, my Lord, and true. (1.1.104–6) And with this he launches into his imprecation, banishing her, along with the barbarous Scythian, from his bosom. Her refusal to heave her heart into her mouth feels to him like a refusal of access; so he thinks her ‘untender’, hard or ‘braz’d’, as ‘firm’ as he believes himself to be. And just as Lear’s selfperception as ‘firm’ is eventually confounded in his understanding of his own ‘infirmity’, so too his perception of his youngest daughter as ‘untender’ reverberates hollowly through the play and eventually returns to haunt him.48 That Lear associates the word ‘untender’ with a refusal of access to an interior space soon becomes clear, when he applies the adjective to Regan: ‘Thy tender-hafted nature shall not give / Thee o’er to harshness’, he half-tells, half-begs her; ‘’Tis not in thee [    ] to oppose the bolt / Against my coming in’ (2.2.360–6). The much-emended ‘tender-hafted’ means – according to the Arden editor – ‘set in a delicate bodily frame’;49 this makes perfect sense from the point of view of Lear’s relation to his daughters’ bodies: ‘’Tis not in thee    ’. When he speaks these words, no one has yet spoken of opposing any bolts against Lear’s coming in – only of curtailing his train, of reining in his men; indeed, Lear is never in fact expelled by any of his daughters (Regan and Goneril simply ‘entreat him by no means to stay’ and,

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130 Shakespeare’s Entrails

once he has left, order Gloucester to ‘Shut up your doors’ – 2.2.489, 494). It is Lear himself who feels expelled from each of his two eldest daughters’ abodes, as he has earlier felt himself denied a place within his youngest daughter’s heart. Unable to enter that idealised space, he is forced to rely on Goneril and Regan to take him in – not only literally, in the sense that he becomes a tenant in their homes, but, more importantly, psychically, or psycho-somatically, in the sense that it is to their ‘profess’d bosoms’ (1.1.271) that he now turns. And, though framed in terms of the nature of Lear’s inhabitation of their ‘hard’ (3.2.63; compare 2.2.431) homes, it is the perception that there is no place for him within their flinty ‘bosoms’ that makes him pre-empt any expulsion and rush out into the storm. Again and again what Lear comes to condemn in his daughters is the hardness of their hearts: he calls Goneril ‘marble-hearted’ (1.4.257) and wonders ‘what store [Regan’s] heart is made on’ (3.6.53);50 ‘these daughters’ hearts’, he says, ‘stir[    ] / Against their father’ (2.2.463–4); ‘Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?’ (3.6.74–6). The image of the heart here is decidedly physical: as the idea that anatomising Regan implies, it is no merely metaphorical hard-heartedness that Lear is bemoaning, but a flintiness he construes as corporeal – the denial of access to Goneril and Regan’s bodily insides. Just as Lear earlier repudiated any inhabitation of his own body, so now he is denied access to his daughters’ insides; and his subsequent curses are directed at their somatic interiors. Anatomy here for Lear may be thought of as both a diagnostic discipline and a vengeful fantasy of penetration of the ‘untender’ bodies of his daughters. Though the affective weight of Lear’s maledictions is, as Adelman points out, directed ‘specifically against the female site of origin’51 (‘Into her womb convey sterility! / Dry up in her the organs of increase, / And from her derogate body never spring / A babe to honour her! If she must teem, / Create her child of spleen’ – 1.4.270–4),52 it is also the case that their target is, more generally, what lies within. Lear indulges in visions of penetration: ‘Th’untented woundings of a father’s curse / Pierce every sense about thee!’ (1.4.292–3);53 ‘You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames / Into her scornful eyes!’ (2.2.162–3); ‘Strike her young bones, / You taking airs, with lameness!’ (2.2.352–3).54 It is presumably the perception of being denied access that leads Lear to these penetrative curses on his daughters’ bodies; the possibility of these interiors being inhabited by another leads him to the attack on their wombs, their fertility. This may partially explain the odd locution ‘Into her womb convey sterility’ – as if sterility is a thing that needs to be transmitted physically into Goneril’s body. Coupled with this perception is Lear’s agonised fantasy of his own interior as damaged, of himself as ‘heart-strook’ (3.1.17), or ‘cut to the brains’ (4.6.189). Interestingly, it is primarily Regan who is imagined as the marblehearted denier of access, and Goneril who is described as penetrating his innards: complementary versions of a single condition, one might guess.55

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 131

His exclamation, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!’ (1.4.286–7) is the first in a series of images of his daughters as predatory animals that pierce his body with their ‘boarish fangs’ (3.7.57). He calls Goneril a ‘Detested kite!’(1.4.262); alluding to the torture of Prometheus, he accuses her of having ‘tied / Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here [Lays his hand on his heart]’ (2.2.323–4); she has, he says, ‘struck me with her tongue, / Most serpent-like, upon the very heart’ (ll. 349–50). ‘Twas this flesh’, he concludes, ‘begot / Those Pelican daughters’ (3.4.73–4) – the daughters, that is, who feel to him as if they have pierced him to the core.56 As Thomas Nashe describes the myth of the pelican’s thankless offspring, in a passage that may have influenced Shakespeare’s writing of the play: This is the Desolation of the Pellican in the Wildernesse, that when she hath her bowels unnaturally torne out by her young ones (into the world tirannously entring) [    ] Blood and teares equally she spendeth, and as her wombe is rent out with ungrateful fruitfulnesse, so now her hart she rents out with selfe-gnawing discontentment, and dyeth, not decayed by age, but destroyed by her of-spring.57 In Nashe’s version, the young pelicans apparently destroy their mother upon their entry into the world, as if the very act of giving birth is necessarily accompanied by a complete emptying of the body: blood and tears are spent along with the rending of the womb and bowels, and the pelican ends up gnawing its own heart out in ‘discontentment’ (a pun – on ‘content’ as ‘internal matter’ – which Shakespeare reverts to in the play). In King Lear, as I have been describing it, ‘selfe-gnawing discontentment’ of the heart is where the action begins; and it is with Lear’s ‘’Twas this flesh begot / Those Pelican daughters’ that we see the first inklings of an admission about his own somatic responsibility for the actions of his daughters. If his main thrust in the abdication scene was the voiding of his innards, now Lear increasingly realises the untenable nature of such an attempt: if the ‘wrench[ing]’ of his ‘frame of nature / From the fixed place, drew from [his] heart all love’, it has thereby only ‘added to the gall’ (1.4.266–8).58 Like it or not, he realises, his paternity entails the existence of his children within his ‘flesh’, as well as his within theirs: But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter; Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh, Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil, A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood. (2.2.410–14) The fantasy that these daughters are strangers to the propinquity and property of his blood cannot be sustained. Repeatedly, Lear comes close to

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132 Shakespeare’s Entrails

equating corporeal innards and children: when, for example, he speaks of Goneril’s ‘young bones’ (2.2.352), it is unclear whether he is referring to his daughter’s children or to her body’s contents.59 Here Lear feels his blood to be ‘corrupted’ by the presence within it of his children, and he now realises his interior to be not empty but overwhelmingly ‘full’ (2.2.462, 473), almost, indeed, possessed: ‘O! how this mother swells up toward my heart; / Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow!’ (2.2.246–7);60 ‘O me! my heart, my rising heart! but, down!’ (2.2.118); ‘O sides! you are too tough; / Will you yet hold?’ (2.2.195–6). ‘Suffocated by the emotions that he thinks of as female’, argues Adelman, ‘Lear gives them the name of the woman’s part, as though he himself bore that diseased and wandering organ within: for “mother” is a technical term for the uterus; [    ] if he was once inside it, it is now inside him.’61 In one respect what Lear finds within must indeed be the (hitherto repressed) ‘mother’. But we could also say, more generally, that the rising ‘mother’ or womb is only the most obvious place within the body occupiable by a real (human) other. Moreover, this is not the only symptom he portrays: what he feels within his torso is ‘a disease [    ] a boil, / A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle, / In my corrupted blood’: it is as if he is groping for the most accurate description of the feeling growing within him; it is a swelling upward of the ‘mother’ toward the heart, but also, apparently, an expansion or a rising upward of the heart itself. In trying to explain the sense he has of being perilously ‘full’ – of having, we can say, the other inside his very flesh – Lear finally comes to feel it as simply a general pressure outward upon his ‘sides’. The pain he feels in finding his body to be inhabited is what he has been desperately trying to avoid from the opening moments of the play. Now that he realises his daughters to be within rather than without, his ‘sides’ are no longer ‘firm’ in withstanding their entry but ‘too tough’ to allow him to rid himself of their presences: ‘Will you yet hold?’ expresses his bewilderment at his body’s capacity not to be overcome by the other’s unavoidable – or unvoidable – presence within it. It is perhaps the combination of having (in fantasy) emptied out the torso and yet finding it to be full (of the other) that makes Lear feel his sides will crack.62 Lear seems to feel as if bodily inhabitation must be an either/or proposition. For him, it appears, either he can inhabit his daughters’ bodies (and then, he seems to believe, he need not take them into his body), or he is inhabited by them (and then they cannot be taking him in). It is undecidable, it seems to me, whether the primary impulse here is the desire to access the interior of the other or the refusal to be inhabited; what seems clear is that at the heart of the problem is, as Cavell has argued, an inability to tolerate separateness as such. And this problem, as I have been arguing throughout this book, is not simply personal and psychological – it has cultural and historical dimensions, emerging at a juncture when the human body was increasingly being portrayed as shut up, and when ways of relating to otherness were therefore becoming more uncertain. The logic underlying

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 133

Lear’s notions of bodily inhabitation is of a piece with his oft-noted tendency to take matters in all-or-nothing terms, and it makes inevitable the cycle of exclusion and avoidance with which the play begins. It is a logic Lear loses, along with his sanity, and its loss, for all that it costs him, allows him eventually to glimpse – though never to Eembrace – the possibility of mutual corporeal inhabitation. What Lear excludes from his interior is not only the other but also abstractions that he feels as other. His anguished ‘O Lear, Lear, Lear! / Beat at this gate that let thy folly in’ (1.4.268–9) can be seen as one among several instances of this inability to acknowledge the inherence of anything undesirable within himself. Coming as it does near the end of a scene full of the Fool’s biting wit, an underlying referent of ‘folly’ here may possibly be the Fool himself; we could say that he has got under Lear’s skin (‘A pestilent gall to me!’ – 1.4.112). Where does he imagine this ‘folly’ to have originated? Why does he think of it as having been ‘let [    ] in’? The outburst is part of a habitual tendency on the part of Lear toward the disowning, or projection outward, of things that, one assumes, originate in himself (including his daughters) – followed by an enraged bewilderment at finding them within. His earlier warning to Kent, for example – ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ (1.1.123) – seems to imagine his own anger as an entity separate from himself.63 Similarly, the blaming of ‘this mother’ can be seen as an attempt to associate his internal pain with something alien, naming what he feels within as a foreign body. Something similar to this process of the externalisation of the internal seems to set in motion the storm at the end of the second act. It has often been suggested that the storm is associated with Lear’s impending madness – that it is constituted in some sense by his own tears and ‘flaws’ writ large in the cosmos.64 Indeed, the storm into which he now thrusts himself turns out to be something very like the interior of his own body: You think I’ll weep; No, I’ll not weep: I have full cause of weeping, [Storm heard at a distance] but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep. (2.2.471–5) As the tears are transformed into rainwater, the ‘flaws’ or fragments of Lear’s heart merge with the ‘flaws’ or wind-gusts of the approaching storm.65 The maelstrom he has attempted to ignore within his own body returns, externalised, in the shape of the tempest without, ‘the to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain’ (3.1.11). Lear’s own logic is turned back relentlessly upon him: if he

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134 Shakespeare’s Entrails

has striven to repress his insides, he now finds himself enveloped in them, as if his sides have expanded to include within him the entire world. There can hardly be more apt a portrayal of the return of the repressed. Why the refusal to weep? The text makes available two complementary answers. The tears are, as Lear himself says, ‘women’s weapons’ that ‘Stain [his] man’s cheeks’ (2.2.466–7): the storm that is associated with them thus becomes, as Adelman writes, ‘the embodiment of the female force that shakes his manhood’.66 At the same time, since tears emerge quite obviously from inside the body, they are an indelible acknowledgment of the living corporeal interior, an overflowing of something that cannot be contained or repressed any longer: as the early seventeenth-century sermonist Richard Sibbes put it, ‘Tears are strained from the inward parts, through the eyes; for the understanding first conceiveth cause of grief upon the heart, after which the heart sends up matter of grief to the brain, and the brain being of a cold nature, doth distil it down into tears.’67 ‘I have full cause of weeping’; ‘these hot tears, which break from me perforce’ (1.4.296): Lear’s announced refusal to shed tears can thus be understood as one further attempt to repress what his body contains. But as the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley once remarked: ‘The sorrow that has no vent in tears makes other organs weep.’68 Lear’s madness is, in any event, linked to a rejection of internality, to an externalisation of what should ‘rightly’ stay within. In this context, it is worth thinking about the unusual (and unusually frequent) uses of the prefix ‘out-’ in Act 3. Prominent among such uses are: ‘out-storm’ (3.1.10; the Quarto has ‘out-scorne’), ‘out-jest’ (3.1.16), ‘out-wall’ (3.1.42), ‘out o’door’ (3.2.11), ‘out-paramour’d’ (3.4.91) and ‘Outlawed’ (3.4.163). Most of these are used by Shakespeare uniquely in these instances.69 Ruth Padel has shown how the Greek prefixes ek (out of) and para (beside or aside) are what she calls ‘madness prepositions’ (as in ‘ecstasy’ and ‘paranoia’). In Greek tragedy, she writes, ‘words meaning “outside” – ex¯o, ektos – can mean “mad”’70 – rather like the English expressions, ‘out of one’s mind’ or ‘beside oneself’. What the ‘out-’ words in the third act of King Lear point to (and to the list above we might add the unforgettable ‘Out, vild jelly!’ – 3.7.82, and the repeated ‘pluck out his eyes’ – 3.7.5, 56) is the painful externalisation of something internal, the threat of being ‘turned the wrong side out’ (4.2.9). The terribleness of the third act lies in its very exteriority; its central principle of organisation, as John Gillies points out, is of a ‘phenomenological division between insides (house and hovel) and outsides’.71 Where earlier he himself had ‘abjure[d] all roofs’ (2.2.397) – hence all interiors – Lear’s rage now becomes all-sweeping, turning itself upon the very existence of any

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136 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! [] You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world! Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man! (3.2.1–9) The object of attack here approaches abstraction, though at the same time the language used is nothing if not corporeal.72 Container and contained together are to be cancelled out in a single tumultuous upheaval that will put an end to all containing, all ‘rotundity’. As Coppélia Kahn writes, ‘Shakespeare portrays the storm as the breaking open of something enclosed. [    Lear] wants the whole world struck flat and cleft open, so that the bowels of sympathy may flow.’73 At this point, however, it is not so much the bowels of sympathy that Lear is seeking as the abolishing of all bowels, of the very possibility of anything remaining ‘pent-up’ within: ‘Tremble, thou wretch, / That hast within thee undivulged crimes [    ] close pent-up guilts / Rive your concealing continents’ (3.2.51–8). ‘Continents’ are unacceptable to Lear in part because they can conceal the truth, can harbour ‘covert and convenient seeming’ (l. 56).74 The attack on interior space seems to me to lie at the root of Lear’s attack on the feminine, and on female sexuality in particular, for as we have seen, it is above all the female body which is so often construed in the early modern period as encompassing a hidden interiority: where men ostensibly kept their organs of procreation out in the open, women’s ‘inverted’ genitalia were tucked away in a secret and therefore threatening place within. But this only partially explains Lear’s cursing of containment; we are also invited to see it as a result of his having been excluded from the interiors of his daughters’ bodies and houses: if Lear – king, father, more sinned against than sinning – has been unable to quell his insides, internality itself is to be annihilated. In the emptying of the storm’s ‘bellyful’ (3.2.14), the riving of ‘continents’, and the cracking of ‘Nature’s moulds’, all interiors are to become exterior.

Possessions The human need for shelter is lasting. [    ] Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather,

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hidden, inner space; where he had earlier lashed out at each of his daughters’ insides in turn, now he denounces insideness as such:

by touch and by sight. [    ] For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. (Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’75 ) A further observation presents itself in relation to the imagination informing ‘Beat at this gate that let thy folly in’: namely, that Lear speaks of himself here metaphorically as a house or enclosure. (The ‘gate’ is presumably his skull or head, though it is not inconceivable, in an early modern context, that it is his chest.) The notion of the body as a dwelling (and vice versa) is one that recurs too often in King Lear to be merely casual; on the contrary: houses consistently function in the play as material counterparts to the psychological wish to inhabit an interior space (home is where the heart is). The language of buildings permeates the fabric of the play at every level: Goneril refers to her hopes, for example, as ‘the building in my fancy’ (4.2.86), and Edgar, unable to pretend any more, ‘cannot daub it further’ (4.1.55) – cannot, that is, hide the truth as one would plaster a wall. Dwellings in this play are often closely associated with their inhabitants:76 hence, for example, Lear’s rather odd-sounding question to Regan, ‘Do you but mark how this becomes the house?’ (2.2.342). As Lear calls his elder daughters ‘hard’ (3.6.76) and thinks of them as ‘oppos[ing] the bolt / Against [his] coming in’ (2.2.365–6), Kent describes the house in which they repose as ‘this hard house, – / More harder than the stones whereof ’tis rais’d, / Which even but now, demanding after you, / Denied me to come in’ (3.2.63–6). Reflecting the repeated refusals of access in the early part of the play, there is in the first two acts an emphasis on objects that stop the passage across a threshold: gates, chamber-doors, bolts, bars.77 Throughout the play, there is a tremendous insistence on things that encase the body, physically and psychologically: houses,78 clothes,79 ‘skin’ (3.4.7), ‘fur’ (3.1.14, 4.6.161), ‘fell’ (5.3.24) and ‘hide’ (3.4.102, as well as, punningly, at 4.6.161), egg-, oysterand snail-shells (1.4.149–52, 1.5.25–8), pea-pods (1.4.197) and so on.80 In her essay on the relation between persons and things in Lear, Margreta de Grazia argues that ‘the play’s unusual use of “accommodations” to refer to clothing rather than lodging reflects its primacy in the play’s economy’.81 Both, however, seem to me to be of equal significance in King Lear. Both clothes and lodgings provide the body with ‘accommodation’, a protective interior for it to inhabit.82 Indeed, the two forms of encasement, habit and habitation, often coalesce in the play’s imagination. Kent, for example, refers to his clothing as his ‘out-wall’ (3.1.45); the stocks he is put in are both a ‘shameful lodging’ (2.2.168) and ‘cruel garters’ (2.2.198);83 the Fool jokes about ‘The cod-piece that will house’ and comments that ‘He that has a

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house to put’s head in has a good head-piece’ (3.2.25–8); but it is above all Lear himself who associates the two, in, for example, his meditation during the storm on the ‘houseless [    ] raggedness’ of the poor, whose tattered clothes he describes as ‘window’d’ (3.4.30–1); or, again, in his later ‘all the skill I have / Remembers not these garments; nor I know not / Where I did lodge last night’ (4.7.66–8). Why the importance, at this crucial moment in the play, of remembering both the garments and the lodging? Because, I think, what is at stake here is the encasement of Lear’s body, the very possibility of its inhabiting an interior. This is why the idea of Lear’s exposure in the storm – not only ‘out o’door’ (3.2.11) but also ‘bare-headed’ (l. 60), ‘unbonneted’ (3.1.14) – is so painful: true, the physical discomfort of the wind and the rain are perhaps dangerous to a man of fourscore and upward, but it is the unprotected exteriority that is truly terrible, the notion of exposure as such. Hence the emphasis, during the storm, on the fact that even ‘the cub-drawn bear would couch’ (3.1.12) and ‘the very wanderers of the dark [    ] keep their caves’ (3.2.44–5). The open spaces of Act 3, in their stark lack of any protection (‘for many miles about / There’s scarce a bush’ – 2.2.491–2) are a landscape of unavoidable exteriority, literally uninhabitable – an ontological condition. This is one reason, I believe, why the play is so devoid of specific place-names: the particularity of place is supplanted by a sense of terrifyingly open spaces, because it is the psychological terrain of the human body and its setting that is paramount throughout. A.C. Bradley notes that in Lear ‘the localities and movements are unusually indefinite’; Shakespeare ‘perhaps deliberately chose to be vague’.84 Wherefore, then, Dover, the one major exception to this rule? Harry Levin offers the beginnings of a possible explanation for this: ‘There the gleaming white cliffs’, he points out, ‘mark a perpetual bourn.’85 If we remember that elsewhere Lear’s body and his land are closely associated, the bourn would seem to connote (symbolically) something like ‘the very verge / Of [his] confine’ (2.2.336–7), ‘th’extreme verge’ (4.6.26) of Lear’s body, the border between self and other. This is of course highly speculative; but, continuing along the same line of thought, we might note the irony of the fact that the location of Act 3 – call it the heath86 – is within the borders of the kingdom. The place imagined as that into which one is cast when exiled or outcast is in fact always already within. What one imagines to be most threatening outside oneself is usually that which one is most threatened by within oneself. ‘Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies’ (3.4.99–100), Lear tells Poor Tom: any enclosure, he imagines, even that of the grave, must be better than the condition of being ‘uncover’d’.87 It is both Poor Tom’s near-nakedness and his homelessness that bring Lear to this opinion: garments and abodes, in the interpretation put forward here, are simulacra of an original interiority. Clothes here, like lodgings – and like the fantasy of being inside another’s body – help

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to ‘accommodate’ human beings to the condition of being exterior to the other by, among other things, replacing the original maternal container with other protective encasements. ‘On the Renaissance stage’, as Peter Stallybrass has argued, ‘the transmission of cloth figures the formation and dissolution of identity, the ways in which the subject is possessed and dispossessed, touched and haunted by the materials it inhabits’;88 nowhere is this more true than in King Lear, where the materials (cloth, mortar, flesh) inhabited by human bodies are precise figurations of the possession and dispossession of these bodies and the subjects constituted by them. The play’s repeated emphasis on the ‘unprovided body’ (2.1.51), or the ‘uncover’d body’ (3.4.100), leads up to Lear’s conclusion that ‘unaccommodated man’ is ‘the thing itself’ (3.4.104–5) – not nothing, that is, but inside nothing, beyond any illusion of containment. It is in this sense that ‘going without’ (lacking) and ‘being without’ (outside) coalesce in the Lear imagination. Lear’s own desire for an interior space to inhabit transcends physical need – or, perhaps better, is a psychological need inseparable from the physical, one of the basic demands of a psyche-soma. This is surely one meaning of his speech on ‘need’: O reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need – (2.2.453–9) True need – as Lear implies without quite spelling out the thought – is not what ‘nature needs’ but what human nature needs. Even when superfluous from a merely material perspective, the necessity for encasement for the body – whether that offered by a tattered blanket or that offered by Regan’s gorgeous robes – runs deeper, is more primitive, than what can be explicated on the basis of the material need for warmth and protection. As de Grazia puts Lear’s thought: ‘All persons, from highest to lowest, must possess something beyond need – a superfluous thing’89 ; superfluous, that is, from a purely material (not a psychological) point of view (it is unclear that it is ever possible to judge psychological need). Lear’s plea for a bare minimum of covering comes, tellingly, just at the moment when he feels himself to be finally expelled from the house (and, inseparably, the body) of the third of his three daughters, hence, apparently, from the last of his potential interiors.90 (In this sense, Lear is using this philosophical truth about covering as, at the same time, a cover story – an avoidance of the specificity of his own needs in relation to these particular daughters to whom he is

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speaking. There is a convenient generalisation about ‘nature’ and ‘Man’s life’ here, one which allows him to elide the question of what his own particular ‘nature needs’.) The exposed loci of Act 3 are a counterpart to the starkness of Poor Tom in his exposed state, with his ‘presented nakedness outfac[ing] / The winds and persecutions of the sky’ (2.2.182–3). Just as the hovel represents the hope of psychic quite as much as physical interiority, Edgar’s ‘poor, bare, forked’ body (3.4.105), through its lack of accommodation, expresses not only the condition of the social outcast but also, and perhaps primarily, that of the psychological outcast – the state of being exiled from the body of the other, the inevitability of post-natal exteriority. ‘Man’, wrote Montaigne in a passage which has been adduced as a source of King Lear, is the onely forsaken and out-cast creature, naked on the bare earth, fast bound and swathed, having nothing to cover and arme himselfe withall but the spoile of others; whereas Nature hath clad and mantled all other creatures, some with shels, some with huskes, with rindes, with haire, with wooll, with stings and bristles, with hides, with mosse, with feathers, with skales, with fleeces, and with silke, according as their quality might need, or their condition require.91 This may well have influenced Lear’s ‘Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool’ (3.4.101–2), as well as the by-play between the Fool and Lear at 1.5.25–30: FOOL: Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? LEAR: No. FOOL: Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house. LEAR: Why? FOOL: Why, to put’s head in, not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case. (1.5.25–30) The point here, one supposes, is slightly different from Montaigne’s: it is not so much that we are the only out-cast creatures on the earth, the only ones to whom covering is not native but ‘borrowed’,92 but rather that the human animal, in having to have these coverings, is the only one given to wilfully dispossessing itself of its accommodations, or the only one given to representing itself, self-pityingly, as unaccommodated (perhaps we could say that homo is the only creature capable of thinking of itself as clausus). This is one burden of the Fool’s proddings: that tragedy is not inevitable, that if Lear has made himself into a tragic outcast he is a fool for doing so. The burden of Lear’s commentary on Edgar, though, is that it is precisely because we have no natural covering that we are dependent on others for our ‘accommodations’, reliant on external agents to ‘bring some covering

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for this naked soul’ (4.1.46). True covering, in the vision of this play, derives from the other: this is why Lear calls these objects ‘lendings’; the derivation from the other is of the essence of the effectiveness of such objects; whence Albany’s strange-sounding imprecation to his wife, ‘Thou changed and selfcovered thing’ (4.2.63).93 To be ‘self-covered’ is as bad as being ‘unaccommodated’: both turn the human being into a ‘thing’, ‘the thing itself’; we transcend thing-ness only in being ‘other-covered’. If the Fool underlines the foolishness of ‘self-uncovering’, the play as a whole seems to point to the foolishness of relying on ‘self-covering’. Possessions lent or given by the other, in King Lear, appear to ward off the threat of being possessed by the other, whether human or supernatural; appurtenances seem to provide a buffer against threats to the self: illusory though they may be, as Gloucester puts it, ‘Our means secure us’ (4.1.22).94 They are a kind of second skin, a protection (not just against the hostile environment, but more profoundly against the risk of being taken over, or going out of one’s mind) – a way of keeping inner and outer separate, which may be why the idea of dispossession – of being ‘unpossessing’ (2.1.67) – is so threatening. The play is among other things an investigation of what Kenneth Burke calls ‘ownership in the profoundest sense of ownership, the property in human affections, as fetishistically localised in the object of possession, while the possessor is himself possessed by his very engrossment’.95 This is the paradox of ‘accommodation’: that one’s ‘commodities’ (4.1.23) help to constitute the self; those ‘external’ possessions that one inhabits have a tendency to start to inhabit the ‘interior’ self. And in their absence, one is left vulnerable to being inhabited by the other: this is one basis of cults of poverty as well as of beliefs in demonic possession – that without the protection afforded by property, one is available for occupation (by either a loving divinity or a satanic entity). But this protection or encasement, as Burke goes on to argue, is contingent, not something to be taken for granted: Man’s moral growth is organised through properties, properties in goods, in services, in position or status, in citizenship, in reputation, in acquaintanceship and love. But however ethical such an array of identifications may be when considered in itself, its relation to other entities that are likewise forming their identity in terms of property can lead to turmoil and discord.96 Lear’s madness has something to do with this realisation of the ethical and agonistic impetus in such identity-formation through ownership – so contrary to the absolute shelter (of robes and furr’d gowns, of the throne of kingship, of being at the centre of his social and familial world) that we may imagine him to have enjoyed throughout his life. We can understand this as, among other things, an early modern allegory of a historical fall from earlier possibilities (nostalgically believed in, from the perspective of homo clausus) of being securely held within a web of containing symbolic structures, of having an unquestioned spatial location in the world.

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 141

It is at the point of relinquishing his ressentiment, his nostalgia for beingwithin, that a change takes place in Lear. And in so far as there is a peripeteia in his relation to the insides of his own body, it is Kent who sets it in motion. Kent’s offer of the hovel – ‘Gracious my Lord, hard by here is a hovel; / Some friendship it will lend you ’gainst the tempest’ (3.2.61–2) – immediately follows Lear’s all-out assault on interiority; it is to all intents and purposes the first time in the play that Lear has freely been offered an interior to inhabit, and it has a powerful effect upon him: his immediate response is ‘My wits begin to turn’ (3.2.67). Only once before can anything resembling such an invitation be discerned, and in that instance too it was Kent who made the offer. During his attempted intervention in the play’s opening scene, Kent is warned off by Lear: ‘The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft’; his answer: ‘Let it fall rather, though the fork invade / The region of my heart’ (1.1.142–4). At that point Lear is unable even to hear what is implicit in Kent’s words; he is still secure in the belief that he can do better than the lowly region of Kent’s heart. But he has learnt something about ‘true need’ in the interim: Kent’s hovel is not, of course, the container Lear has been desperate for all along, but, as he says now, ‘The art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious’ (3.2.70–1). ‘How is it’, Gaston Bachelard asks in The Poetics of Space, ‘that, at times, a provisional refuge or an occasional shelter is endowed in our intimate day-dreaming with virtues that have no objective foundation?’97 It is the ‘unpriz’d, precious’ (1.1.261) hovel proffered by Kent that suddenly opens up the possibility of a hesitant reciprocal gesture, the beginnings of a new-found acceptance by Lear of the inhabitation of his own body: ‘Come, your hovel. / Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my heart / That’s sorry yet for thee’ (3.2.71–3). The Fool’s ditty following this speech makes much the same point: ‘He that has and a little tiny wit, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, / Must make content with his fortunes fit, / For the rain it raineth every day’ (3.2.74–7). ‘Make content with his fortunes fit’ could be taken to mean not only ‘be content with what fortune supplies’ but also something like ‘make an interior, something contained, out of what fortune supplies’. ‘Content’ in its various forms recurs through Act 3, notably in the Fool’s later ‘Prithee, Nuncle, be contented, ’tis a naughty night to swim in’ (3.4.110), as well as in Lear’s description of the storm as ‘contentious’ (3.4.6) and in his earlier reference to the ‘concealing continents’ (3.2.58).98 The Fool, as usual, takes up and puns on Lear’s thoughts (the cursing of containers) and gently suggests an alternative (don’t be so quick to do away with containers altogether): ‘be contented’. This dynamic of invitation and gingerly proffered reciprocation is repeated the next time we see Lear and his companions. The short exchange between Kent and Lear that opens Scene 4 compresses a good part of what I have been discussing:

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KENT: Here is the place, my lord: good my lord, enter: The tyranny of the open night’s too rough For nature to endure. [Storm still.] LEAR: Let me alone. KENT: Good my lord, enter here. LEAR: Wilt break my heart? KENT: I had rather break mine own. Good my lord, enter. (3.4.1–5) The offer of the hovel could not be more highly charged: indeed, it is precisely the triple invitation to ‘enter [    ] enter here [    ] enter’ that threatens to ‘break [his] heart’.99 (The hammering on the word ‘enter’ may be peculiarly apt in the context of Lear’s somatic fantasies, if one recalls the word’s etymology – from the Greek o, bowels.100 ) Part of what is unbearable to him may be the fact that this ‘place’ is so unlike the interior place he had originally imagined; but what may be even more painful to him is the fact that the offer is tendered without any concomitant claim upon him.101 The power of Kent’s ‘I had rather break mine own’ derives from the implication that Kent’s heart is pre-occupied by Lear. And indeed, Lear never does enter this hovel.102 ‘Let me alone’ is the alternative (for Lear as for anyone) to the dread (and hope) of acknowledgement. It is at this precise point that Lear’s attack on interiority as such disappears, and that he seems to apprehend something new about the mutuality of bodily inhabitation. He himself offers the hovel, first to Kent, then to the Fool: ‘Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease [    ] In, boy; go first’ (3.4.23–6). And then he turns his attention to the outcasts of his society, to those who do not even have the minimal protection of a hovel, let alone the kind of accommodation we can assume Lear has had throughout his life: Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just. (3.4.27–36) Deliberately exposing himself ‘to feel what wretches feel’ instead of entering the hovel, Lear opens out his understanding of the condition of the outcast to take in not only his own psychological fear but also others’ material, social

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suffering. Lear’s is not an isolated epiphany; his sudden moment of caritas needs to be seen within the psychic context we have been tracing of somatic emptiness and exposure. Such a reading ties Lear’s moment of socio-political cognisance to his desire to void his body: we are back, in a sense, with the idea of the King’s Two Bodies, as well as with a realisation that the personal and philosophical meanings of the word ‘outcast’ are ineluctably linked to the social sense of the term. Lear’s prayer contains a cluster of images pertaining to houses and clothes, the absence of the encasement provided by either coupled with the notion of the outcast.103 But there is one telling difference here: for the first time in the play, the idea of exposure is associated by Lear not with fullness but with emptiness – the poor have not only ‘houseless heads’ but also ‘unfed sides’, and the injunction to Pomp to ‘Take physic’ and at the same time to ‘Expose thyself’ implies a simultaneous purging and uncovering of the body.104 The bodies of society’s outcasts are empty, Lear seems to realise, by necessity – out of hunger, not choice.105 Just as the poor are both houseless and empty within, Lear has voided his interior and ended up unhoused. Gone now is Lear’s earlier notion that the ideal condition is one of encasement and simultaneous emptiness. Kent’s offer of an interior seems to have brought about a twofold change: a reciprocal gesture by Lear (proffering the hovel to his companions); and a transformed sense of bodily inhabitation, from the either/or logic we saw earlier to the beginnings of an understanding that one can be both empty and exposed – and hence, presumably, both full and taken in. It is no longer a question of emptying the self in some obscurely necessary relation to being taken into the other.

Dispossessions We are not so full of evill, as of voydnesse and inanitie. (Montaigne, Essayes106 ) Lear’s speech on the poor bears significant parallels to a passage in Harsnett that attacks the Catholic priests who, he writes, refuse ‘to embrace the pure naked synceritie of the Gospell of Christ’, and who do keepe themselves warme in theyr Cloysters at home, and doe feede themselves fat with the spoiles of your confusion. These lighter superfluities [    ] they disgorge amongst you [    ] either trenching themselves in the mines of your labyrinths at home, or masking in your gold and silver abroade, in the fashion of great Potentates; untill Gods revengefull arme doth uncase them to the view of the world    107 The cluster of images relating to feeding and housing, nakedness and clothing, as well as the use of the word ‘superfluities’, link the passage, as has been noted by several commentators, to Lear’s prayer about what is

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denied the poor. His speech, like Harsnett’s, is framed by religious discourse: ‘I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep’, he begins, and ends with: ‘and show the heavens more just’. But in Harsnett’s tract, there is never any doubt about the power of ‘Gods revengefull arme’ to ‘uncase’ the superfluities of the overfed, cloistered and gorgeously attired priests. In the ‘post-Christian’ world of Lear, as C.L. Barber and others have argued,108 the heavens show no such justice, and it is left to mortals to ‘uncase’ (or ‘case’)109 one another without benefit of the supernatural (let alone of clergy). The godlessness of the play means that they can no longer comfort themselves with an idea of ‘living in Christ’ or being enfolded in a divine otherworld. A similar effect ensues if we compare Act 3 with the following passage from Job: Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are? Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart? (Job 38:34–6110 ) These words are God’s rebuke to Job. The rhetorical nature of the questions implies, of course, that it is only God who can truly ‘cover’ us with waters and penetrate us to ‘the inward parts’. But God does not speak from Lear’s whirlwind; left to their own devices, human beings must themselves ‘put wisdom in the inward parts’ and provide ‘understanding to the heart’. Again, we can see here the nostalgia evinced by the play for a world in which the somatic relation between human and divine interiors was taken as given. The oft-commented upon emptying out of the divine voice in King Lear is accompanied by the necessity of the filling up or acknowledgement of the human interior by human agents: possession in King Lear is a human affair. The play interrogates the problem of possession and exorcism as if the relation to otherness within the body is a relation to human others. (Perhaps one could say that even demonic possession may be better than internal emptiness, and that in so far as King Lear contains a lesson, it is that the only thing one can do with one’s demons is not to try to exorcise them, but to confront them, and if need be, live with them.) Just as there are unanswered gestures throughout King Lear towards the divine, so too there are gestures towards more secular, rational explanatory frameworks such as anatomy and medicine, and these too are met with no form of confirmation.111 We could conjecture that it is precisely the absconditi nature of Lear’s dei that provides the impetus for the search for alternative loci of authority. Lear’s call for a dissection of his daughter – ‘Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?’ (3.6.74–6) – is surely something like what D.W. Winnicott calls a ‘flight from fantasy to anatomy’.112 His attempts

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to medicalise his condition – ‘hysterica passio’ (2.2.247), or ‘A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood’ (2.2.413–14) – are equally futile; we could almost call them obscurantist. Again, when he demands, ‘Let me have surgeons; / I am cut to th’brains’ (4.6.190–1), it is the fantasy in Lear’s mind rather than the injury to his brain that we perceive. In Lear, as Stephen Greenblatt has written, ‘nothing breeds about the heart but human desires’,113 Edgar’s comment – ‘To know our enemies’ minds, we rip their hearts’ (4.6.257) – is heavy with irony. For in this world there is of course no empirically determinable cause for hard-heartedness, or for madness, or for love. And though a doctor is present to attend Lear’s recovery, it is clearly not the physician but Cordelia who effects his cure: the ‘medicine’ of ‘Restoration’ hangs upon her lips (4.7.26–7), not in the doctor’s vials. As the play is agnostic about the existence of devils or gods, it is diagnostic about the turn to science. Alongside the challenging of the medical-anatomical impulse, King Lear, as Gillies has argued, juxtaposes a cartographic principle with a concrete, lived-in landscape of exteriority which undoes the comfortable certainties of mapped geography.114 Valerie Traub has shown how the play’s ‘anatomicocartographic consciousness’ conjoins the two disciplines in its materialisation of tragedy in the play by images of dissection (of the body and of the land).115 The epistemic standards of these scientific practices may be seen as part of a general historical move towards an idea of space – and its occupants – as fully measurable. In King Lear, just as cartographic standards are undermined by the featurelessness and existential blankness of the landscape of Act 3, the anatomical impulse is interrogated by the contraposition of images of dissection (of the body and of the land) with the pressure placed upon the question of their motivation. In both anatomy and cartography, there is a necessary reduction of the three-dimensionality of the material world, a flattening impulse which King Lear examines through the figure of its protagonist and his motivation in the emptying out of his body and in his desire to dissect the bodies of his daughters. The episteme within which cartography and anatomy were able to flourish was one which privileged the visual over other modes of coming to know the world. As Walter Ong has pointed out, ‘sight situates the observer outside what he views [    ] The eye does not perceive an interior strictly as an interior: inside a room, the walls it perceives are still surfaces, outsides’.116 One could say that the ocular drive encapsulates a desire both for exteriority and for mastery which receives its comeuppance in King Lear, above all in the blindness visited upon Gloucester. A.C. Bradley claimed of the play that ‘there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses’, and it has been argued that this attack on the senses is a sign of the play’s scepticism.117 But it is of course above all the visual modality that is attacked in the play, and it is not because it is inherently more fallacious than any of the other senses that this is so. It is the misuse of the eyes that the

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play seems to condemn, a misuse epitomised in the turn to an anatomicocartographic episteme. The senses are under attack here not because they are untrustworthy or merely external, but precisely because they are paths (the only paths available to us) to knowing the heart; one can see feelingly, can smell one’s mortality, can hear even a ‘soft’ voice, or one can deny the burden of such truths by attacking the messengers – the fallible senses. ‘The safer sense will ne’er accommodate / His Master thus’ (4.6.81), says Edgar; but what is the ‘safer sense’? It is usually glossed as simply ‘sanity’ (hence Lear’s wild attire shows that he has taken leave of his senses), but we should allow for the possibility that Edgar’s phrase means something closer to the words he uses: that we can only be accommodated in the world through a safer use of our senses, that an ‘unsafe’ use of them provides unsuitable ‘accommodation’. The sceptic takes the senses as blocks to objective knowledge because they are unreliable; but for acknowledgement of the deepest truths the play seems to imply that the senses must – and can – suffice. The play continuously brings the idea of space back to the felt, lived body. As Walter Benjamin argues, coming to terms with one of ‘the turning points of history’ demands not just ‘optical means’ but, perhaps more importantly, ‘habit, [    ] the guidance of tactile appropriation’.118 Habit – custom, clothing, habitation – allows one to become habituated to a new environment, and this need is at its starkest during periods when one is forced to accommodate oneself to radically new forms of being-in-the-world.119 Lear’s restoration consists of a series of reversals of the elements that have contributed to his madness. The final straw in the cracking of his sanity was the finding of what must have seemed to him to be the last interior left on earth – the hovel – more or less literally possessed by the near-naked Poor Tom (‘Come not in here, Nuncle; here’s a spirit’ – 3.4.39); so it is significant that for his restoration he has been transported both into Cordelia’s tent and into a new set of clothes: Is he array’d? CORDELIA: GENTLEMAN: Ay, Madam, in the heaviness of sleep We put fresh garments on him. (4.7.20–2) His recovery is, then, closely associated with his ’re-covery’.120 Where Lear had earlier tried to annihilate all ‘covert’ (3.2.56) interiors, Cordelia, the agent of these reparative encasings, now prays that All bless’d secrets, All you unpublish’d virtues of the earth Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate In the good man’s distress! (4.4.15–18)

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 147

As the repetition of ‘all’ reverses Cordelia’s own earlier repetition of ‘nothing’, so her blessing inverts Lear’s earlier curses. The imagery of fertility springing from the ‘concealing continents’ (3.2.58) of the earth neatly reverses Lear’s ‘Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once’ (3.2.8); her willing tears counter Lear’s repeated refusals to weep. Both tears and fecundity, united in the word ‘Spring’, emerge from an unambiguously generative interior, a redemptive world within. Hence, perhaps, the conjunction in Lear’s imagination of ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’the grave’ (out of a safe interior place) and ‘mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead’ (4.7.45–8). One meaning of the weeping imagery of the reconciliation scene comes from Lear’s recognition that his teardrops spring from his own full interior; from the same place, we might almost say, as Cordelia’s. It is these latter tears that allow him to recognise her as his daughter: as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. [    ] Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not: If you have poison for me, I will drink it. (4.7.69–72) If at the play’s beginning she had seemed to Lear to be denying him her interior, her apparent ‘hollowness’ (1.1.153) has now been replaced by a plenitude that overflows in the indubitable moisture of her tears. No longer is an inner fullness the cause of a cracking of one’s sides: tears are now a natural flow, or overflow, from a generative interior. The reality – the wetness – of her tears frees Lear to ingest even Cordelia’s poison; perhaps Lear is obscurely thinking of her tears as his particular poison. In any event, ‘If you have poison for me, I will drink it’ powerfully, if ambiguously, expresses Lear’s willingness, at last, to take her in (even if this taking-in still threatens to crack his sides). We are given an intimation of a potential path out of Lear’s sense of exclusion; for if, in a claustrophobic universe such as Hamlet’s, the overcoming of scepticism entails an embracing of exteriority (the acknowledgement that the outer can faithfully reflect the inner, that ‘that within’ does not necessarily pass show), in King Lear’s cosmos what is required is an acceptance of interiority (the acknowledgement, let us say, of one’s own interior and its contents as one’s own, including the existence of the other within oneself). In either case, the starkness of the inner-outer distinction is radically diminished. Lear’s reverie of perfect oneness with Cordelia in their prison – ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage’ (5.3.9) – imagines a union so complete that it can transcend the question of, as he puts it, ‘Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out’ (l. 15) – the question with which the entire tragedy was set in motion. (From Lear’s perspective, I think we should understand

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148 Shakespeare’s Entrails

this line as a chiasmus, the assonance underlining this possibility.) It is as if he imagines the two of them safely, permanently inside, locked into their ‘walled prison’ (l. 18) – ‘forgetting any other home but this’ (Romeo & Juliet, 2.2.175); and from this perspective, they can keep a safe distance from the world’s struggle with the problem of inside and outside; they will remain above it, in a vertical axis that transcends the painful horizontal axis of ‘who’s in, who’s out’ – perhaps this is part of the attraction here of birds.121 They will be, in fact, as Cavell has argued, like an audience in the theatre, safe in their position beyond the action (though the audience is safely outside, not inside).122 But the reverie of the prison is wiped away by the play’s final vision of humanity as doomed to the condition of exteriority (‘Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air / We wawl and cry’ – 4.6.177–8). No interior, throughout the play, has ultimately proven to be safe: ‘Intelligence is given’ of Edgar’s hiding place (2.1.21); Lear must be hurried away from the hovel, where his life ‘stand[s] in assured loss’ (3.6.93); Gloucester is blinded in his own house; and the prison proves to be not the idealised space Lear had imagined but the death-place of Cordelia. We are led to think of the inner-outer borderline as exceedingly vulnerable.123 All the hope of generative, full interiority that was built up through the fourth act is whisked away from Lear’s (and our) grasp and destroyed in Act 5. This last act consists of a relentlessly sustained ‘splitting’ and ‘cracking’ of the interiors of the protagonists’ bodies, whether they belong to the socalled ‘good’ characters or to the ‘bad’. Gloucester’s ‘flaw’d heart’, says Edgar, ‘Alack, too weak the conflict to support! / ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly’ (5.3.195–8); Kent’s ‘strings of life’ begin ‘to crack’ (ll. 215–16) as he implores, ‘Break, heart; I prithee, break!’ (l. 311);124 Regan’s ‘stomach’ (l. 75) is poisoned by her sister, and her ‘bloody’, ‘smok[ing]’ knife punctures ‘the heart of’ Goneril (ll. 221–5); both Albany and Edgar promise to ‘make’ or ‘prove’ their oaths ‘upon [Edmund’s] heart’ (ll. 94, 139). Albany’s imprecation, ‘Let sorrow split my heart’ (l. 176) matches Edgar’s ‘O! that my heart would burst!’ (l. 181). And Lear dies, implicitly, of a broken heart.125 The only one who remains intact is Cordelia, who is hanged; though perhaps we should see this too as an attack on the interior of the body, given how closely she has been associated with the heart itself. By the final lines of the play, the entire kingdom is described by Albany as ‘the gor’d state’ (l. 319). Throughout this act, there is also a striking insistence on hunger, on the starved condition of the body’s insides. Lear’s mysterious lines, ‘The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell, / Ere they shall make us weep: we’ll see ’em starv’d first’ (5.3.24–5) strongly contrast with the intimations of plenitude in Act 4, embodied by Cordelia’s and his own tears. Instead, there is an awful de-metaphorisation of Lear’s willingness to drink Cordelia’s poison, with Regan’s ‘I am not well; else I should answer / From a fullflowing stomach’ (ll. 74–5). Albany’s ‘There is my pledge; I’ll make it on thy

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The Body Possessed: King Lear 149

heart, / Ere I taste bread’ (ll. 94–5), and Edgar’s ‘know, my name is lost, / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit’ (ll. 120–1), create the suggestion of an attack on the body’s innards imagined as a pervasive hunger. Even the anonymous officer dispatched by Edmund to kill Cordelia expresses his very humanity in terms of the refusal to feed: ‘I cannot draw a cart nor eat dried oats’ (l. 39). Only at the very end does Albany promise, hollowly, that – at some point in the future – ‘All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings’ (ll. 301–3). It is as if the human condition is one of unappeasable hungering: but ‘Necessity’s sharp pinch’ (2.2.400) is surely not so much the pangs brought on by the need for food but also, and more profoundly, the need to be inhabited by the other. Act 5 is, then, an act of simultaneous starvation and wholesale devastation for the insides of the body, as if it has been impossible to stem the effects of Lear’s original vision, of the voiding of the body coupled with the penetration of the other (or vice versa), as if the scepticism with which the play began has overflowed the measure and become, finally, uncontainable. The final tableau, of Lear in the open air with the dead Cordelia in his arms, is an embodiment of ‘man’ at his most ‘unaccommodated’ – without, that is, any interior left to inhabit;126 as the anguished Lear cries out, ‘heaven’s vault’ itself ‘should crack’ (l. 258) at the sight. ‘Pray you, undo this button’ (l. 308) may represent his last attempt to reject all illusions of encasement, to match his physical condition in the world to his metaphysical state as (to quote Montaigne again) an ‘out-cast creature, naked on the bare earth’;127 as if to say, if one is not to be inside the other, then let’s get rid of all illusions of being within. And yet, Lear at this very moment is asking for help from the other. In spite of everything, somehow the dream of corporeal inhabitation survives. ‘Man’ may be the only forsaken and outcast creature, but he (or she) is also the only ever-hopeful creature (and it is in the human breast where hope springs eternal). Lear’s ending enacts a desperate aspiration – to balance hope against the awful costs of scepticism. To the very end, Lear is, as he was at the beginning, concentrating on Cordelia’s breath, on what Montaigne elsewhere calls ‘this ayrie body of the voice’:128 ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?’ (ll. 305–6); ‘Lend me a looking-glass; / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives’ (ll. 260–2); ‘This feather stirs; she lives!’ (l. 264). The Elizabethan pronunciation of ‘feather’ was a hair’s-breadth from that of ‘father’;129 as if the only place left for Lear to survive is in the emanation of the interior of his daughter’s body – in the intense materiality of her breath, which is not to be lived without.

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150 Shakespeare’s Entrails

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Figure 5 Dissected Pregnant Woman as Eve, from Adrianus Spigellius (Adriaan van den Spieghel) De formato foetu liber singularis (Venice, 1626); by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale

Let humility be thy ballast, and necessary knowledge thy fraight: for there is an over-fulnesse of knowledge, which forces a vomit; a vomit of opprobrious and contumelious Speeches, a belching and spitting [    ] and a losse of charity for matters that are not of faith; and from this vomiting comes emptinesse. (John Donne, Sermons1 )

‘No bourn’ The Winter’s Tale, like King Lear, opens in a kingdom suddenly overflowing with scepticism. In each case, the intensity of the sceptic’s fall is graphically brought to life in the precipitousness and apparent arbitrariness of the opening; in both, the king abruptly and shockingly rejects a beloved female figure; the expulsion is portrayed as being from the very body of the king, whose interior is felt to be quite literally over-full. While it is common to see in The Winter’s Tale a rewriting of Othello, I want here to think about this late Shakespearean romance as a return to King Lear – as an attempt to revisit, and to escape from, the intensity of that play’s engagement with the terrors and hopes regarding who or what can inhabit the human body in the world of homo clausus. The Winter’s Tale seeks to discover whether the rupture between the inside and the outside in the kingdom of the sceptic is as irreparable as it appeared in the earlier tragedy. The opening scenes of The Winter’s Tale, marked as they are by the presence onstage of the conspicuously pregnant body of Hermione, present us with Shakespeare’s most concentrated depiction of the sceptical rejection of the possibility of bodily inhabitation. If Leontes’ scepticism seems on the surface to be about his wife’s fidelity or the paternity of his children, its deepest sources seem to me to lie in the potential of the body – the male body, his own, quite as much as the female – to be ‘fill’d up’ (1.2.4), to take in and let out the other.2 Hermione’s ‘bulk’ (2.1.20), the ‘big[ness]’ into which she ‘swell[s]’ (ll. 61–2), is the play’s ur-image of an inhabited bodily interior. Indeed, his wife’s pregnancy can be understood as a rather precise figuration 153

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5

of what is so agonising to Leontes: for if Hermione’s ‘fertile bosom’ is, ‘past doubt’ (1.2.268), an image of a physical interior which cannot but be seen as letting in the other, Leontes’ own interior is, as we shall see, both envious of and steeled against exactly this kind of inhabitation of one body by another.3 In the most concrete way, we can say that in so far as scepticism is, among other things, a rejection of one’s physical possession of and by the other, pregnancy (and the potential for pregnancy) can seem to offer an overcoming of this doubt. In part this may be the result of the difference in what we could call parental certainty (the mother, unlike the father, can be imagined to know without doubt that she is a child’s mother, whereas there is always room for doubt when it comes to paternity; Freud, among others, makes this point, quoting the maxim ‘pater semper incertus est’).4 But we can understand this as a kind of cover story, for, even more fundamentally, the disparity may be a result of the potential that the woman’s body has – to be filled quite literally with the other in a way denied to the man; to experience a certainty about the other in her body, with literally no room for doubt, no need for any empirical proof, at least in terms of the physical. And yet, as the second half of The Winter’s Tale suggests, if the maternal body is a sign of male loss, it is also, in its very corporeal plenitude, a sign of male hope, of the (desired as well as dreaded) possibility of having the other within one’s flesh. The possibility offers the hope of a form of visceral knowledge. If in Shakespeare, as elsewhere in the early modern world, the refusal to acknowledge another is figured as a quelling or denial of the contents of one’s body, one way of partially accounting for the peculiarly merciless nature of the Shakespearean sceptic, the relentlessness with which he pursues his revenge upon the world, is to remember that in the sixteenth century the bowels are almost invariably thought of in connection with, and as the locus of, ‘pitie’, referred to consistently as the ‘bowels of commiseration and compassion’.5 God, writes Thomas Goodwin, ‘planted the Inwards of us Men, and Bowels of Mercy and Pity in them’, and from thence spring the possibility of ‘forbearing one another, and forgiving one another’; indeed, bowels are not just the human locus of compassion: God’s own mercifulness is ‘represented by Bowels and Heart’.6 The placing of mercy in the bowels derives from the notion that this is where the other is to be taken into the self; suppressing one’s entrails, denying the presence of the other within them, is imagined as a shutting off of one’s bowels and heart, a refusal of ‘th’ access and passage of remorse’ (Macbeth, 1.5.44) – hence a negation of any need for forbearance or compassion. So that we can say that the sceptic’s revenge is very precisely (and ironically) aimed at his (assumed) impossibility of overcoming or forbearing the impulse to revenge. And if philosophical scepticism is, as Stanley Cavell expresses it, the conversion of a failure of acknowledgement into a failure of knowledge, and if acknowledgement in the early modern world entails accepting the other into one’s very entrails,

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154 Shakespeare’s Entrails

one conclusion seems to be becoming clearer. For if I am right about the prevalence of the notion of homo clausus in early modernity, then the historical insulation of the body’s interior is inseparable from the diffusion of profoundly sceptical modes of thought in this world. Goodwin, like other early modern writers, traces the Hebrew etymology of the word Racham to both mercy and bowels – or, more precisely, womb [Rechem].7 And perhaps here we can glimpse one reason why the Shakespearean sceptic is so often gendered male: for in terms of the possibility of being corporeally inhabited by another, the woman’s womb as a potential space for such inhabitation may play no small role in scepticism’s gender gap, so evident in Shakespeare’s plays.8 If, as I’ve been arguing throughout this book, scepticism (and belief) are somatic phenomena as much as they are intellectual or philosophical positions, there are implications for the question of the extent to which scepticism is, on this basis, a gendered issue. Leontes’ sudden jealousy of Hermione can be taken not only, to quote Cavell, as ‘a portrait of the skeptic at the moment of the world’s withdrawal from his grasp’,9 but also as a portrait of a repudiation of the contents of both the other’s and the sceptic’s own corporeal interiors – or, more precisely, of the former through a rejection of the latter. Leontes’ repudiation is depicted somatically, as that of a body in pain. ‘Scepticism’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness’; elsewhere he added, ‘If anyone is unable to get rid of a psychological pain, the fault lies not in his “psyche” but, more likely, in his belly.’10 But what is the nature of Leontes’ ‘psychological pain’? He himself represents that problem as one of knowledge, of what Donne calls ‘an over-fulnesse of knowledge’. What does he think he knows, or think he wants to know? In the epistemological sense of the word, Leontes knows essentially nothing – unless we construe ‘knowing’ as something like ‘knowing in one’s bones’, which is just what he refuses to do. The Winter’s Tale uses the word ‘know’ (and its derivatives) eighty-seven times by my count, counterposing the epistemological and ontological meanings of the word, notably in the exchange between Camillo and Polixenes at 1.2.376–80: CAMILLO: I dare not know, my lord. POLIXENES: How, dare not? do not? Do you know, and dare not? Be intelligent to me: ’tis thereabouts: For to yourself, what you do know, you must, And cannot say you dare not. The Winter’s Tale is a play that repeatedly thematises the desire not to know, or not to ‘dare to know that which I know’ (4.4.452) – not to dare, as we might put it, following Nietzsche, to believe in one’s own entrails.11

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 155

The play opens, though, not with Leontes in the present but with a memory of his past, of his perfect twinship with Polixenes. The brief conversation between Camillo and Archidamus hints at a relation between the two boys so close as to constitute these kings’ two bodies as a single body: ‘They were trained together’ – like plants – ‘there rooted between them such an affection [    ] that they have seem’d to be together, though absent’ (1.1.22–9). Their friendship, one which transcends separateness, might remind us of Montaigne’s striking account of his friendship with La Boétie: Our mindes have jumped so unitedly together, they have with so fervent an affection considered of each other, and with like affection so discovered and sounded, even to the very bottome of each others heart and entrails, that I did not only know his, as well as mine owne, but I would (verily) rather have trusted him concerning any matter of mine, than my selfe.12 Such friends, as Thomas Nashe writes in a different context, ‘reciprocallie embowelleth to the one what the other goes about’.13 In The Winter’s Tale too, ‘affection’ reaches to ‘the very bottome’ of the characters’ ‘heart and entrails’; but the mutual accessibility of the interior of the body, the visceral connection Montaigne describes, is, in a sense, the source of Leontes’ problem. The young Leontes and Polixenes are described in a prelapsarian state of almost physical fusion, before the ‘dissevering’ associated with the entry of alterity. We can take this as yet another instance in the Shakespearean oeuvre of a powerful nostalgic reverie of a lost past, prior to the arrival of scepticism and, indeed, of homo clausus. Like Lear’s yearning for a lost interior existence, Leontes remembers a time when there was ‘No bourn ’twixt his and mine’ (1.2.134). Immediately upon the entry of these two old friends onstage, we are given an echo of Lear’s ‘while we / Unburdened crawl toward death’ (1.1.39– 40), in Polixenes’ ‘we have left our throne / Without a burden’ (1.2.3), and here too the phrasing is telling: in both cases, we are given hints that one of the darker purposes of the play lies in its interrogation of the physical ‘burden’ of paternity.14 The issue is given concrete figuration in the evocation of bodily plenitude, the ‘round-womb’d’ (Lear, 1.1.13) state of the maternal body. In each case – Lear’s and Leontes’ – we are shown what Donne refers to (in this chapter’s epigraph) as ‘a losse of charity for matters that are not of faith’ (we could take this as a working definition of scepticism). What the sceptic is rejecting is not empirical knowledge but rather what Donne calls ‘necessary knowledge’, ballasted by humility, or what Hermione terms ‘clearer knowledge’ (2.1.97). This kind of

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 157

Alack, for lesser knowledge! how accurs’d In being so blest! There may be in the cup A spider steep’d, and one may drink; depart, And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge Is not infected), but if one present Th’abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (2.1.38–45) No humility of knowledge here: Leontes, in typical sceptical fashion, reimagines the gaps in his knowledge as a kind of epistemological hypersaturation. For Julia Kristeva, we may here recall, it is expulsion that establishes the subject’s outside and at the same time constitutes the object as lost.15 Throughout the opening scenes of the play, Leontes appears to need to re-establish the exteriority of his objects over and over. Caught in the web of his scepticism, he construes the ‘knowledge’ of his wife’s infidelity as something mortally dangerous – dangerous to ‘his gorge, his sides’; his scepticism is founded upon an expulsion of this ‘knowledge’ from his own body, for in his fantasy, its incorporation is seen by him as holding the potential to destroy his interior ‘With violent hefts’.16 The sense of being too full is something that Leontes shares with Lear in his approaching madness. Leontes speaks of ‘crack[ing] his gorge, his sides’ (l. 44) – Lear, of his ‘sides’ as being ‘too tough [    ] will you yet hold?’ (2.2.195–6); Leontes complains of having ‘tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, / But not for joy; not joy’ (1.2.110–11), Lear, of his ‘rising heart’ (2.2.118) – ‘O! how this mother swells up toward my heart; / Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow!’ (2.2.246–7). The violence of the attack and its specific location in the royal body are shared by the two characters, as is the struggle to avoid having to acknowledge a female element within. So too, strikingly, is the recourse to medical Latinisms – the technical-sounding tremor cordis and Hysterica passio. The turn to medical terminology can itself be understood as a sceptical one: it is as if each king takes refuge in his chosen medical-diagnostic label in order to distance himself from his physical pain – ensconcing himself in ‘seeming knowledge’ in lieu of submitting to the ‘unknown fear’ felt within.17 It is in fact the ‘bounty’ of his wife’s ’fertile bosom’ (1.2.113) that Leontes is troubled by: it is this which ‘My bosom likes not, nor my brows!’ (l.119). In the apparent afterthought – ‘nor my brows’ – we might get a sense of what Cavell calls the sceptic’s conversion of an ontological difficulty into an intellectual one, the displacement upward from bosom to head, from

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will-to-ignorance is depicted in The Winter’s Tale as a profoundly somatic impulse:

finding something somatically intolerable to finding it mentally perplexing; here it is in fact almost literally a cover story. The move from heart to head is precisely the transformation found in Lear (‘I am cut to the brains’ – 4.6.189) and in Othello (‘I have a pain upon my forehead, here’ – 3.3.283); indeed, we might take this opportunity to speculate about the remarkable abundance of horned cuckolds in the early modern cultural imagination in relation to the proliferation of sceptical habits of mind in the period. From the perspective I am advancing here, it is possible to think of this as (among other things) a tendency to displace somatically unbearable truths upward; to choose, in short, a headache over a heartache. The Winter’s Tale makes clear, though, that what Leontes feels most directly is extreme discomfort in his torso. All ‘tenderness’ becomes to his imagination no better than ‘a pastime / To harder bosoms’ (ll. 152–3) – becomes, in other words, something a true (hardbosomed) sceptic can only scorn as ‘folly’ (l. 151).18 The sense that his bodily interior is in severe distress continues throughout the scene: ‘How I am gall’d’ (l. 316), he exclaims to Camillo, adding that he feels as if he has been ‘stab[bed]’ (l. 138), pierced by ‘goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps’ (l. 329). Nor is the idea confined to Leontes’ mind: practically all the characters refer to his condition as a ‘sickness’ or ‘distemper’ (1.2.384–5), a ‘disease’ (1.2.207, 297) or ‘infection’ (1.2.145). Paulina, in her role as ‘physician’ (2.3.54) to Leontes, attempts to cure him of his ‘needless heavings’ by her words, ‘as medicinal as true’, that are meant ‘to purge him of that humour / That presses him from sleep’ (ll. 35–9). The pressure on Leontes’ innards, the fear of ‘splitting’ or ‘crack[ing] his gorge, his sides’, the ‘violent hefts’ and ‘heavings’, the vomiting imagery and increased pulse rate (‘my heart dances’) – taken together, these may be understood to evoke the idea of a body that is pregnant, even perhaps the notion of birth contractions; almost as if he is simulating his wife’s condition.19 There are hints throughout that there is in Leontes’ mind an unconscious fantasy which appears to fuse or confuse his interior with that of his wife. We are repeatedly led to believe that there is a close link between her fullness, her ‘swell[ing]’ (2.1.62) body, and Leontes’ ‘heavings’, brought on by his dread about the overfullness of his own interior. The physical presence of her ‘goodly bulk’ (2.1.20) is underscored in the opening scene, her own words playfully emphasising her somatic plenitude (‘cram’s with praise, and make’s / As fat as tame things’ – 1.2.91), seconded by Polixenes’ ‘fill’d up [    ]standing in rich place’ (ll. 4–7). Similarly, the perception of a ‘crack’ (l. 323) in his wife precedes (and perhaps rouses) Leontes’ fear that he may ‘crack’ his own ‘sides’ (2.1.44). Most strikingly of all, Leontes’ ‘Whiles she lives, / My heart will be a burden to me’ (2.3.205–6) rewrites the ‘burden’ (1.2.3) of Hermione’s pregnancy as his own, as if her very existence (as a pregnant body?) impregnates his own body.20 The impression is strengthened at the beginning of the trial scene, when he declares that ‘This sessions [    ] / Even pushes ’gainst our heart’ (3.2.1–2) – as, perhaps, a foetus might

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158 Shakespeare’s Entrails

be imagined to push against its mother’s heart. (Indeed, Leontes’ comment about the potential outcome of the trial ‘which shall have due course, / Even to the guilt or the purgation’ (3.2.6–7) carries the implication that innocence is tied to an emptying of Hermione’s body – its purgation – and hence that her body’s very fullness – her pregnancy – is proof of her guilt.) So, when Hermione collapses at her trial, he reads this, with absolute confidence about his ability to diagnose the interior condition of his wife’s ‘infected’ (1.2.304) body, as a mirroring of his own interior affliction: ‘Her heart is but o’ercharged: she will recover’ (3.2.150). This idea gives a quite localised inflection to the notoriously difficult line, ‘Affection! thy intention stabs the centre’ (1.2.138). For Montaigne, the ‘fervent [    ] affection’ he and his friend felt for each other leads to their sounding one another ‘even to the very bottome of each others heart and entrails’; here (however we are to understand the problematic ‘Affection’ – as passion, or desire, or lust, or natural propensity) it seems clear that the relation to the other which the word describes is felt by Leontes as menacing, in its intensity (‘intention’), the innermost recesses – the very ‘centre’ – of his body.21 (One could even take the proximity of ‘intention’ and ‘affection’ as amounting to a suggestion of ’infection’ for Leontes’ feverish mind.) ‘Centre’, though, can be glossed as ‘the centre of the universe’, and there is a sense in which Leontes feels his bodily interior to be precisely that. In pregnancy, claims D.W. Winnicott, ‘the direction of [the woman’s] interest turns from outwards to inwards’; the pregnant woman usually ‘comes to believe that the centre of the world is in her own body’22 – becomes, precisely, pre-occupied with her pregnancy; is emotionally as well as spatially or somatically taken over by it. Leontes seems similarly obsessed with his own somatic interior. If, as he later declares, he is mistaken about Hermione, then ‘The centre is not big enough to bear / A schoolboy’s top’ (2.1.102).23 Here, ‘centre’ is usually glossed as simply ‘earth’, but given everything we have noted so far about Leontes’ somatic fantasies, we might wonder whether again the referent is not at some level his corporeal ‘centre’, which is ‘not big’ (that is, with child)24 and is unable to ‘bear’ (that is, ‘be pregnant with’)25 so much as a child’s head (‘a schoolboy’s top’?) The conditional is no conditional, however: Leontes is certain that he is not mistaken, and that, therefore, the centre is ‘big enough to bear’: there may be a deeply-hidden implication in all this, that his own bodily discomfort, like those of ‘the big year, swollen with some other grief’, which ‘is thought with child’ (2Henry IV, Ind.13), are attributable to being more or less pregnant, or at least to having an other being within his body: ‘Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have / To be full like me’ (1.2.128–9). Perhaps this helps to direct us toward an explanation of the choice of the spider in Leontes’ earlier fantasy. Spiders are usually spoken of in the Renaissance as female, and there is a strong association throughout the period between the spider and the womb or belly: ‘We are all bellies’, writes

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 159

Samuel Purchas, ‘as if Arachnes Metamorphosis were common to all men, and our fall had transformed us into Spiders, which are little else but belly’.26 Popular lore held that the spider’s web emerged from its womb: ‘Wonder it is, how the matter of threads that come of the womb of the Spinner may endure so great a work, and weaving of so great a web’, writes Bartholomaeus Anglicus in his natural history. And although ‘the web that cometh out of the guts thereof is not so venomous, but is accounted full good and profitable to the use of medicine’, there still inheres in these beliefs a loose connection between the spider’s womb and its poisonousness.27 Presumably these notions, like the unsolicited appearance of Leontes’ spider, stemmed in part from the shape of the spider, reminiscent as it can be of a heavily pregnant body. So that we can imagine Leontes associating the venomous spider in the cup with his wife, and the drinking of the contents of the cup, obscurely, with something like a fantasy of incorporation of Hermione’s pregnant body. Since what Leontes ‘knows’ (in the epistemological sense of the term) is diametrically contrary to what he ‘knows’ (in its ontological sense), his refusal to acknowledge his wife’s fidelity is akin to a repudiation of his own interior, a visceral response that leaves him feeling that the ‘centre’ of his body is in need of protection from encroaching knowledge. Given this interpretation of Leontes’ bodily imagination, perhaps it would not be going too far to take his soliloquy about ‘Sir Smile’ sluicing his neighbour’s pond28 as inadvertently revealing at least as much about his relation to his own corporeal interior as to that of Hermione: nay, there’s comfort in’t, Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open’d, As mine, against their will  Physic for’t there’s none; It is a bawdy planet, that will strike Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis powerful, think it, From east, west, north, and south; be it concluded, No barricado for a belly. Know’t, It will let in and out the enemy, With bag and baggage. Many thousand on’s Have the disease, and feel’t not. (1.2.196–207) ‘Know’t, / It will let in and out the enemy’ – but to whom (or what) does ‘It’ refer? Ostensibly, of course, to his wife’s unchaste body, but the passage is so full of the anonymous pronoun that its referent gets lost somewhere along the way. Leontes’ distress is clearly at the openness of bodies, purportedly here that of Hermione; throughout the opening scenes of the play, though,

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160 Shakespeare’s Entrails

his urgent impulse is to cordon off not so much his wife’s as his own bodily interior, to make sure that ‘the enemy’ cannot get ‘in and out’ of his ‘centre’, so that his lament here might seem to be directed more aptly to the painfully necessary openness of his own body than to that of his wife. To say that ‘other men have gates, and those gates open’d, / As mine, against their will’ is an odd way to refer to one’s wife’s unfaithfulness (rather than one’s own openness); as is the notion of letting in and out one’s rival ‘With bag and baggage’. What exactly does this phrase mean? What, in his fantasy, are the contents of this luggage? Why is Leontes thinking of these containers entering and leaving another container? Following my train of thought above, is there perhaps some idea here of taking in, of incorporating, not only Hermione but the foetus within her, like the fantasy of drinking the womb-like spider? No doubt, there are obscurities as well as overdeterminations here (as there are, in abundance, in almost everything Leontes says). What we can say with far more certainty is that Leontes repeatedly over the course of the first half of the play harps on the dangers of one body being open to another. If ‘To mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods’ (l. 109) – if any kind of ‘affection’ can become, in his imagination, an unbearable bodily openness – then it is hard to imagine any form of relating that does not involve a material interpenetration. The idea of contagion permeates the opening scenes of the play; the word ‘infect’ (and its derivatives) is hammered on over and over.29 Anything that transgresses the ‘barricado’ between self and other is ‘false [    ] as wind, as waters; false / As dice are to be wish’d by one that fixes / No bourn twixt his and mine’ (1.2.132–4). In Leontes’ mind, it is the very absence of a bourn – a boundary – that makes the falsity. Hence, I think, Leontes’ stress on the opening of the posterns: the culmination of his speech portraying himself as having drunk of the spidersteeped cup is the demand to know ‘How came the posterns / So easily open?’ (2.1.52–3). Not merely ‘open’ but ‘So easily open’: it is the ease of entry to and egress from the interior that enrages Leontes. ‘Endangered by the hidden design he suspects before him’, writes Jean Starobinski, ‘the individual seeks to protect his own frontiers; he sees to it that the barriers under his control are closed – barriers within which his life remains safe.’30 Hence Leontes’ rage at the way boundaries are transgressed by seeming ‘nothings’: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career of laughter With a sigh (a note infallible Of breaking honesty)? (1.2.284–8) His disgust at the whispers, sighs and kisses of his wife and friend seems to be based on the notion that any physical contact constitutes an

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 161

interpenetration of their bodies: if it is not ‘nothing’, it is everything – a total abandonment of boundaries. A kiss, here, becomes an indubitable signifier of two bodies being open to one another. What Leontes calls, somewhat hilariously, ‘Kissing with inside lip’ might recall what Burton describes in The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘To kiss and be kissed [    is] a most forcible battery, as infectious, Xenophon thinks, as the poison of a spider.’31 ‘With the shock of many kisses’, adds Burton, ‘breaths are mixt breathlessly’. It is this way of thinking that leads to Leontes’ constant attention in the opening scenes to the various kinds of winds and airs that seem to cross barriers so easily – in particular, whispers, breaths and sighs32 – ‘note[s] infallible / Of breaking honesty’. ‘Breaking’ here can be understood in the double sense of ‘violating’ and ‘breaking forth’, crossing a boundary. Like Hamlet, Leontes seems to feel that all windy suspirations, all ‘sneaping winds’ (1.2.13), are transgressions of the border between inner and outer: ‘and then to sigh, as ’twere / The mort o’th’deer – O, that is entertainment / My bosom likes not’ (1.2.117–19). Is the ‘entertainment’ that of Hermione’s sighing breast, or of Leontes’ own chest? Either way, the problem is the sigh’s ‘entertainment’. ‘I am a feather for each wind that blows’ (2.3.154) is Leontes’ lament at his own openness to suggestion. (Here again, as at the close of King Lear, the near-homonymy between ‘feather’ and ‘father’ may come into play: Leontes is referring to his own willingness to be swayed from his intention to kill his newborn daughter.) Moreover it is the mutual whispering of Hermione and Mamillius that appears to be the immediate cause of Leontes’ ‘you / Have too much blood in him [    ] Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about her’ (2.1.57–9). ‘In Speech of Man, the Whispering, (which they call Susurrus in Latine,) whether it be louder or softer, is an Interiour Sound; But the Speaking out, is an Exteriour Sound’, wrote Sir Francis Bacon; ‘So Breathing, or Blowing by the Mouth, Bellows, or Wind, (though loud) is an Interiour Sound.’33 Whispering emerges from the somatic interior in a manner that is very different from that of speaking; it seems closer somehow to a direct emanation from the body, less prone to falsification perhaps. So it is for Leontes: ‘They’re here with me already; whisp’ring, rounding’ (1.2.217). ‘Rounding’ here is (in Shakespearean English, where it meant ‘whispering’) redundant, unless we understand it as denoting not just ‘whispering’ but also ‘growing big with child’ (an idea that, in the context of this scene, is hard to avoid) – as if the move from ‘whispering’ to pregnancy is instant, as if there is no gap between the earliest preliminaries of love (whispering) and the potential consequences (a pregnancy): the two become one in the word ‘rounding’ (compare the description of Hermione as ‘round[ing] apace’ – 2.1.16). Similarly, Leontes’ astonishing ‘inch thick, knee deep, o’er head and ears / A fork’d one’ may carry in it somewhere the idea that any penetration, even one inch deep, will result in something like a foetal position, whether it is his own, or that of his child, or that of his wife’s child.34 As in the Freudian

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id, there is in Leontes’ fantasy world a simultaneity of cause and effect, past, present and future. Leontes reads Hermione’s and Polixenes’ sighs and whispers as ‘note[s] infallible’ of their inner selves, but it takes no Wittgenstein come from the grave to tell us that in human affairs such ‘infallible’ criteria are illusory. Unable to bear any doubt, he leaps ‘o’er head and ears’ into certainty about the way ‘this her without-door form’ (2.1.69) is a sign of Hermione’s internal condition (does ‘without-door’ mean ‘exterior’ or ‘doorless’, so that she seems a sign of an inability ever to be closed?) Like Hamlet, both averring the fallibility of all external signs and at the same time believing that he can read the entrails of all those around him, Leontes wants to have it both ways: to keep inner and outer absolutely separate, and yet to be certain he can read what ‘come[s] between’ (l. 75) the two.35 Leontes’ refusal to accept Hermione’s integrity contrasts starkly with Polixenes’ response to Camillo’s plea: ‘If therefore you dare trust my honesty / That lies enclosed in this trunk [    ] Be not uncertain’ (about the truth of his words): ‘I do believe thee: / I saw his heart in ’s face’ (1.2.434–47). Polixenes’ rejection of uncertainty, unlike Leontes’ desire for epistemological assurance, is of a kind that emerges from a sense that the belief in the integrity of ‘without-door form’ and what ‘lies enclosed’ in the body (‘this trunk’) is a matter of choice (‘I do believe thee’) and acknowledgement. Perhaps we can derive from this a hint as to why the sceptic cannot abide his opposite number – the latter is an affront, a provocation, in that he (or she) not only lets in the other (with bag and baggage), but also reads the sceptic’s own exterior as connected to the interior, and hence can give the latter the (intolerable) idea that he has been penetrated: ‘He has discover’d my design, and I / Remain a pinch’d thing [    ] How came the posterns so open?’ (2.1.50–3). ‘Pinch’d’ perfectly encapsulates a dual sense of confinement and internal pain.36 It is, again, Donne’s warning in my epigraph that I take as a gloss on Leontes’ feelings of visceral too-muchness: ‘for there is an over-fulnesse of knowledge, which forces a vomit; a vomit of opprobrious and contumelious Speeches, a belching and spitting [    ] and from this vomiting comes emptinesse.’ Through the opening scenes of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ ‘opprobrious and contumelious Speeches’ act as a screen both to reveal and to hide his overwhelming urge to void the contents of his body. For, like Lear, a will-to-emptiness – the bodily concomitant of a will-to-ignorance – seems to be the end-point of his desire. Donne beautifully captures the irony of scepticism, the way its ‘over-fulnesse’ of knowledge ends up bringing about an ‘emptinesse’. The play’s opening scenes are suffused with images of fullness and swelling, coupled with those of emptiness.37 For the Sicilian king, as for Lear, these are the all-or-nothing stakes of scepticism: visceral plenitude or an internal void, all or ‘nothing i’th’middle’ (King Lear, 1.4.179). Leontes’ outburst: ‘Is this nothing? / Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, [    ] nor nothing have these

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 163

nothings, / If this be nothing’ (1.2.292–6) multiplies Lear’s ‘nothing will come of nothing’ (King Lear, 1.1.90) and evinces a sense of exposure, of the cosmos as physically unable to contain him; the very ‘covering’ of the sky becomes a void (compare ‘Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies’ – 3.4.99–100). It has become a world of either too much openness or too much closure, of agoraphobia or claustrophobia, with ‘no midway / ’Twixt these extremes at all’ (A&C, 3.4.19–20). The Leontes we see in the first two acts of The Winter’s Tale evinces all the symptoms of a man steeped in the culture of homo clausus and its ambivalent sense of somatic closure.

‘In the between’ It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other [    ] It is only ambivalently that the limit circumscribes in this space. It plays a double game. It does the opposite of what it says. It hands the place over to the foreigner that it gives the impression of throwing out [    ] Boundaries are transportable limits and transportations of limits: they are also metaphorai. (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life38 ) If the tragic movement of The Winter’s Tale is set in motion by Leontes’ terror of a joining of corporeal interior and exterior – by the fear that if he takes the other in, his centre will burst – the second half of the play offers a diametrically contrary fantasy. King Lear ends with a delicate balancing of doubt and hope; The Winter’s Tale stretches out this equipoise through the entire play, its two halves lurching toward (while never embracing) extreme scepticism and intense faith. And if in Lear the hope is held out and finally withdrawn, in the later play this unbalancing is not allowed to take place, though the hope at the end is heavily shadowed by the earlier losses. Here, in the seductiveness of the pastoral landscape, we are offered a kind of imaginative exercise in the overcoming of scepticism. It comes as no surprise that the heralding of the countermovement is explicitly figured as the breaking open of something closed, a deconstruction of the inner-outer bourn: when the Oracle (Thus by Apollo’s great divine seal’d up) Shall the contents discover, something rare Even then will rush to knowledge. (3.1.18–21) The breaking of the heavily emphasised seals (3.2.127, 129, 131)39 renders the scroll of the Oracle no longer an object with an inside and an outside: in the dis-covering of its contents, the ‘rush to knowledge’, everything

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164 Shakespeare’s Entrails

is revealed; the knowledge is of a kind that cannot be proved (by, say, comparing inner to outer) but that has, rather, to be taken on faith. In Leontes’ initial refusal of the Oracle’s message we can see a rejection of this transcendence of the dichotomy of the inside and the outside. Moreover, its origin in Delphi (from Delphos, womb) bespeaks a change of relation to the insides of the female body. Parturition in the tragic mode is rewritten now as childbirth in the comic key, as ‘Time’s news [is] known when ’tis brought forth’ (4.1.26–7); Hermione’s being ‘before her time, deliver’d’ (2.2.25) becomes the Oracle’s being ‘deliver’d / Of great Apollo’s priest’ (3.2.127–8) as well as, later, the First Gentleman’s ‘broken delivery of the business’ (5.2.9); indeed, the Gentleman speaks of the revelations of Act 5 as precipitated by ‘the opening of the fardel’ (5.2.2). Similarly, the horror of the ‘burden’ (1.2.3) in the bodily interior becomes the ‘delicate burden’ of and in Autolycus’ ballads (4.4.196, 265). The idea of pregnancy, which lies, as we have seen, somewhere near the root of Leontes’ original scepticism, becomes in the second half of the play the image not of falsity but of truth: ‘Most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance’.40 Initially the recuperative movement of the play opens with imagery similar to that of the tragic first acts – imagery of a horror of (in particular, female) openness, this time from the mouth of Polixenes, who warns Perdita: If ever henceforth thou These rural latches to his entrance open, Or hoop his body more with thy embraces, I will devise a death as cruel for thee As thou art tender to’t. (4.4.438–42) As Perdita is warned not to permit the other’s ‘entrance’ into her body, Leontes’ too-open ‘posterns’ become Polixenes’ ‘latches’; Florizel too is admonished by his suddenly Leontes-like, ‘discontenting’ (l. 533)41 father never again to ‘sigh’ (l. 428) for his beloved. But Florizel almost immediately undoes this language, directly reversing Leontes’ earlier sense of the ‘cracking’ of his ‘sides’ (2.1.44): It cannot fail, but by The violation of my faith; and then Let nature crush the sides o’th’earth together, And mar the seeds within! (4.4.477–80) The image, Lear-like in its sweeping condemnation of generative interiority – ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world! / Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once’ – (King Lear, 3.2.7–8)42 – is here in the conditional;

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166 Shakespeare’s Entrails

[Not] for all the sun sees, or The close earth wombs, or the profound seas hides In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath (4.4.490–2) We might, however, at this point already note the fact that Florizel’s hyperbolic declarations of his faith partake of the same all-or-nothing attitude we saw earlier in Leontes’ vehement scepticism. Perhaps there is an element of overcompensation here. The revisiting enacted in the play’s second movement extends, with astonishing consistency, to nearly every word that has been tainted earlier, in Leontes’ ferocious speeches; the words recur, but in a different key.44 So, for example, the ‘affection’ with which he was afflicted now becomes Florizel’s ‘I / Am heir to my affection’ (ll. 481–2; compare 5.1.219); so too, ‘knowledge’ itself, so ‘infected’ (2.1.41) by Leontes’ scepticism, is revised in Florizel’s ‘force and knowledge’ (4.4.375). The marked outdoorness of the language of the opening scenes, the winds and waters that transgress all bourns and the ponds that are so easily sluiced – images that Leontes turns to signs of the openness and hence ‘nothingness’ of the world – all these are transformed into the concrete outdoorness of the pastoral of the fourth act. Thus, for example, Leontes’ ‘angling’ (1.2.180) for proof that ‘his pond [has been] fish’d’ (1.2.195) becomes the Third Gentleman’s amusing description of the scene of reconciliation ‘which angled for mine eyes (caught the water though not the fish)’ (5.2.82–3). Leontes’ angry self-characterisation as ‘a feather for each wind that blows’ (2.3.154) is rewritten almost verbatim in Florizel’s faith that ‘every wind that blows’ (4.4.541) will guide them to the right place. Leontes’ threat, ‘you’ll be found, / Be you beneath the sky’ (1.2.179–80) can be set beside the Clown’s statement that ‘I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky, betwixt the sky and it you cannot thrust a bodkin’s point’ (3.3.84–6) – as if no bourn can any longer be drawn between the elements themselves.45 Act 4 is far removed from the scenes of cramped, claustrophobic insideness of the opening of the play (or of Hamlet); nor indeed is it a landscape of painful exile or tragic exteriority such as that found in King Lear: what it offers us is a fantasy of escape from these regions, a dream of being at home in the world – and in the body.46 Above all, what seems to be emphatically redeemed in this dream is the hope of overcoming the boundary between corporeal inner and outer through the most basic of human activities, so devalued by Leontes in his scepticism: breathing and eating. The imagined recuperation of these is signalled at the turning point of the play by the messenger to the Delphic

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what stops it from being tragic is Florizel’s reliance upon his ‘faith’.43 His words explicitly connect faith to an idea of the interior of the body (in this case, the male body) as fertile. A few lines later Florizel’s revaluation of the generative interior (here more female than male) is again made clear:

Oracle, Cleomenes, who says of the island that ‘The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet’ (3.1.1). Leontes himself echoes these words in his welcome to Florizel: ‘The blessed gods / Purge all infection from our air whilst you / Do climate here!’ (5.1.167–9), as well as in his description of Florizel as having his father’s ‘very air’ (5.1.123). It is, however, above all in the repeated emphasis on the way the statue of Hermione seems positively to breathe that the last movement of the play seems to recuperate the act of respiration. Paulina has earlier elicited a promise from Leontes not to remarry until ‘your first queen’s again in breath’ (5.1.83); and the Third Gentleman prepares us for the idea of a breathing statue by suggesting that had the sculptor ‘had [    ] eternity [he] could put breath into his work’ (5.2.96–7). But it is Leontes himself who drives the point home: ‘Would you not deem it breath’d? and that those veins / Did verily bear blood?’ (5.3.64–5); ‘Still methinks / There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?’ (ll. 77–9).47 ‘In breathing’, writes the psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, ‘the insides of the body are continuously fed by the outside world, a continuous interpenetration of bodily depths and open expanse.’48 Hermione’s breath, while crossing the border between inner and outer, is simultaneously a transcending of the bourn between selves; as Janet Adelman writes, ‘The Hermione who awakens is [    ] both the creation of Leontes’s renewed desire and independent of that desire; she exists at the boundary between inner and outer, self and other.’49 For Eigen, breathing figures a ‘basic, sustaining interpenetration [which] provides a bodily form for communion and relatedness in life’.50 And indeed, something comparable might be said about eating, which is subject to a similar trajectory – from denigration to recuperation – through the course of the play. The reversal of Leontes’ ‘Affection! thy intention stabs the centre’ (1.2.138) in the Third Gentleman’s ‘Thither with all greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup’ (5.2.101–3) extends not only to the recuperation of the word ‘affection’ and to the now-positive notions of greed and eating, but even to the detail of ‘intention’ (intensity), here tamed into the harmless ‘intend’. Both Leontes’ ‘affliction’ (3.2.223) and the ‘cordial’ (1.2.318) which, as he says, Polixenes’ poisoning would be to him become ‘this affliction [which] has a taste as sweet / As any cordial comfort’ (5.3.76–7). Incorporation, so intolerable in the sceptic’s dyspeptic mood, has earlier already been redefined and recuperated in the sheep-shearing feast around which the second half of the play revolves, presided over as it is by Perdita, ’the queen of curds and cream’ (4.4.161). Now even ‘folly’ (compare 1.2.151) is digestible, as Perdita expresses it: our feasts In every mess have folly, and the feeders Digest it with a custom. (4.4.10–12)

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 167

The language of the last two acts is suffused with imagery of nourishment and appetite, culminating in the gathering at Paulina’s house, where all ‘intend to sup’.51 And the communal nature of this proposed meal is inherent to the fantasy of recovery (‘He who eats is no longer alone’, wrote Guillaume Apollinaire).52 What I have been describing as the seductive dream of a possibility of recuperation from scepticism is imagined, in The Winter’s Tale, as a recovery or rediscovery of the rightness and pleasure of eating. If in the earlier part of the play feeding has been poisoned by a version of Donne’s spider ‘which transubstantiates all, / And can convert manna to gall’,53 there is here a reverse movement – an antidote or ‘unspidering’: O, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. (5.3.109–11) ‘How hard it is to digest one’s fellow men!’ exclaimed Nietzsche.54 Leontes’ path – from his nausea at ‘Th’abhorr’d ingredient’ of the spider-steeped cup to his embrace of communal supping at the end of the play – parallels the trajectory we have been tracing through the course of this book, from the oral disgust in Troilus and Cressida (epitomised in the greasy leftovers, the ‘orts, scraps and fragments’ and the ‘o’er-eaten faith’ of the play’s heroine), through the (predominantly sexualised) disgust of Hamlet (harping on the ‘funeral bak’d meats’ and the ‘loathsome crust’) and King Lear (‘Pah! Pah!’) to this lawful eating at the ending of The Winter’s Tale. It is an alimentary progression which mirrors the trajectory of the plays’ relation to scepticism; from the disbelief of Troilus when faced with the apparent ‘bifold’ nature of his love (‘This is and is not Cressida’ – 5.2.153), to Leontes’ faith in the unity of the statue and his once-dead wife (‘there is such unity in the proofs’ – 5.2.32). It is striking that not only The Winter’s Tale but also Hamlet and King Lear, as we have seen, end with such an emphasis on breathing. In the context of a world I have been describing as growing increasingly somatically closed, breathing appears to offer a last remaining hope – an opening – for bodily interanimation with the environment, a last path to overcoming a sense of the exterior as inevitably threatening a contamination of the interior. And while the earlier tragedies hold out and ultimately withdraw a desperate hope connected to breath, The Winter’s Tale keeps the hope alive. Leontes’ first inkling – his wild surmise – of this hope is figured in the air apparently emerging from a statue, as if to say: if even a statue can breathe, then all hope is not lost, even for the most clausi of homini. The Winter’s Tale’s first half, as we have seen, linked a refusal of incorporation to a loss of faith; and the final scene has frequently been read

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168 Shakespeare’s Entrails

in the framework of a reinstatement of a near-religious form of belief. The Catholic overtones of the scene have been understood in terms of a recollection of the rite of communion; as Marion O’Connor argues, ‘for ears attuned to Reformation debate, Leontes’ comparison [‘Lawful as eating’] carries an echo of that argument’s abiding and overriding issue – the nature of the Eucharist’.55 On the other hand, C.L. Barber has suggested that the climactic scene of The Winter’s Tale should be understood in the context of Protestantism’s rejection of the cult of the Virgin Mary: ‘Hermione’s return to life’, he writes, ‘is like a medieval miracle when a statue of the Holy Mother moves in response to prayer.’56 Barber argues that the analogies between religious and familial structures of feeling undergird the compensatory possibilities of human relations in Shakespeare’s plays (thus offering ‘a full expression of Christian love without a Christian supernatural’). But, of course, The Winter’s Tale is not a religious artefact, nor are the compensatory possibilities of drama the same as those of religion. What the play’s latter half offers is a dream of what ‘a full expression’ of the overcoming of scepticism might look like, set in a world where full redemption is no longer possible. For the recuperations of this play’s denouement, moving though they are, take place under the sign of irrecoverable loss. Using Freud’s theory of dream-pairs, ‘where one represents a terror ineluctably realized and the other a restitutive wish-fulfillment’, Ruth Nevo has argued that The Winter’s Tale’s ‘structure of duplications’ makes the second half of the play both recuperative and ‘obsessively repetitive of the first, as if it were haunted by the same ghosts and goblins’.57 The haunting of the play’s latter parts by its earlier irreversible horrors is visible in the obsessive repetition of words, motifs, even actions from its earlier parts. And while there is a sense in which this reiteration acts to redeem the ‘scepticallyinfected’ elements in ‘a world ransom’d’ (5.2.15), it is also the case that it works as a constant reminder of the earlier tragedies. The after-effects of Leontes’ scepticism ripple through the pastoral landscape of Bohemia and the culminating scenes back in Sicilia; we are never allowed to forget the death of Mamillius, or of Antigonus, or indeed the loss, as it were, of sixteen years for all concerned, ‘never to be found again’ (5.3.134). It is, of course, in the figure of Hermione that these losses are most clearly acknowledged. And the risks of scepticism seem to coalesce in the final scene with those of magic or wonder, as we are reminded not only of the effects of scepticism but also of the potential costs of embracing a fantasy of overcoming doubt in mutual corporeality. If, as Cavell has written, ‘Leontes recognizes the fate of stone to be the consequence of his particular scepticism’,58 the culminating scene of The Winter’s Tale suggests that ‘the fate of stone’ is a standing possibility, one that will not just go away. For the scene repeatedly imagines the potential of human beings, not entirely metaphorically, to be transformed into stone not just by scepticism but also by wonder: ‘does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 169

than it?’ (5.3.37–8), asks Leontes. The statue of Hermione, he adds, ‘From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, / Standing like stone with thee’ (5.3.41–2): Perdita is almost literally petrified like her mother, as if she would ‘exchange flesh with one that loved her’ (4.4.280). The pleasure of the magic of the scene, associated as it is with eating and breathing, is embedded in the costs – both past and potential – of this imagination of magic. In his speech on the spider, Leontes had come close to an admission that the spider’s venom only works if one’s ‘knowledge / Is [    ] infected’ – that scepticism is not an inevitable way of taking the world but dependent on the sceptic’s seeing the world from a particular perspective. So it is with the audience of a play: as Sir Richard Baker put it in his seventeenth-century defence of the stage, Theatrum Redivivium: It is not so much the Player, that makes the Obscenity, as the Spectatour himself: as it is not so much the Juyce of the Herb, that makes the Honey, or Poyson, as the Bee, or Spider, that sucks the Juyce. Let this man therefore bring a modest heart to a Play, and he shall never take hurt by immodest Speeches: but, if he come as a Spider to it, what marvel, if he suck Poyson[?]59 The spider is in the drinker, not in the cup; in the audience, not the play. All that is required is ‘a modest heart’ – rather than (presumably) one fraught with what Donne called ‘an over-fulnesse of knowledge’. Paulina’s command to the statue to ‘be stone no more’ (5.3.99) could just as well be directed to the onlookers, both onstage and off. In this scene, surely the biggest risk of Shakespeare’s entire career, we are shown what theatre can do, but we are also reminded of its dangers. So perhaps we should think of the final temptation of The Winter’s Tale as lying in the overcoming of the apparent boundary between the audience and the action onstage: in this scene, as Cavell has written, ‘a transformation is being asked of our conception of the audience of a play, perhaps a claim that we are no longer spectators, but something else, more, say participants’.60 The difference between being inside and outside the action is made to appear to dissolve, as we are apparently offered ‘the benefit of access’ (5.2.110) to the very conditions of theatricality. The culminating scene of The Winter’s Tale offers an apparent choice to the spectator: to suck from it either poison or honey, either a sceptical dismissal or a pleasure ‘as sweet / As any cordial comfort’ (5.3.76–7). But the scene never lets us forget the single source of both ‘Juyces’. For this final scene seems to me to be about the ways in which fantasies of the overcoming of scepticism can be as powerful as the sceptical imagination itself. The statue scene is a kind of lure, tempting us, the audience, to buy into these fantasies – of the possibility of joining inner and outer, self and other – of participating, in a quasi-religious sense, in a scene of communion. Or perhaps we could say that in this scene Shakespeare’s theatre may be feeling its way towards a reformulation of the whole problem of scepticism.

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170 Shakespeare’s Entrails

In Del corpo humano, the seventeenth-century Italian humanist and poet Giovanni Ciampoli wrote that ‘Sculpture imitates only the outside and then only its simple features. I know that it cannot be hoped to portray in stone the movements of the heart, the distribution of the blood, the agility of the spirits, and nutrition of the whole.’61 Statues have no entrails. They can be neither open nor closed; they seem to transcend the whole notion of inner and outer – there is nothing but unity. ‘Man’, wrote Donne, ‘who is the noblest part of the Earth, melts so away, as if he were a statue, not of Earth, but of Snowe.’62 From this perspective, we might think of Shakespeare’s choice to make Hermione return as a statue as reaching towards a reconceptualisation of the whole question of inner and outer. For if the first half of The Winter’s Tale can give its spectators ‘tremor cordis, but not for joy – not joy’, watching the ending of the play might put one in mind of Wittgenstein: ‘I feel great joy.’ – Where? – That sounds like nonsense. And yet one does say ‘I feel a joyful agitation in my breast.’ – But why is joy not localised? Is it because it is distributed over the whole body? [    ] ‘But ‘joy’ surely designates an inward thing.’ No. ‘Joy’ designates nothing at all. Neither any inward nor any outward thing.63 Perhaps ‘joy’ is precisely that: the transcendence of the whole apparent dichotomy between the outward and the inward.

Coda That’s the way to live: to stick your hand into the infinite outside Of the world, turn the outside inside out, The world into a little room and God into a little soul Inside the infinite body. (Yehuda Amichai, ‘My Children Grew’64 ) Over and over in the Shakespearean corpus, problems of otherness keep returning to the difficulties of inhabiting bodies. These, I have been arguing, cannot be detached from the set of historically-conditioned issues which accompanied the growing separation between embodied and disembodied emotions and, concomitantly, the increasing divide between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ in human affairs – the emergence of homo clausus as a central figure of modernity. I have described this turn as the world’s saturation in sceptical modes of thought. In various ways, the plays discussed in this book show how these ways of conceptualising a relation to the world lead to impasses, aporias, forms of stasis or sterility. One could say that they are all in some measure about a search for certainty, for something further, inside the body: say, roughly, a search for origins in Troilus and Cressida, for truth

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No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale 171

in Hamlet, for love in King Lear, for faith in The Winter’s Tale. In all these cases, the problem turns out to lie in, precisely, the fantasy of access; the search fails in so far as the ruling notion remains that of an inner realm that is incommensurate with the outer. In the end, it is a notion that is in the service of an attempt to stave off knowledge, a refusal to recognise something about the necessary sufficiency, in human matters, of the external. ‘When we speak of man and space’, writes Martin Heidegger, ‘it sounds as though man stood on one side and space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience.’65 The idea that space and the human stand over against one another owes a great deal to the new episteme that emerged in Shakespeare’s time. His drama, as I have been arguing throughout this book, can be seen both to have participated in this sense of spatial confinement and to have illustrated its costs. Here, at the moment of the emergence of the new episteme, we are already being shown a way to engage with it without necessarily submitting to its constraints. In both showing and diagnosing the conditions underlying the various forms of scepticism, Shakespeare’s plays open up the possibility of a different relation to the boundedness of the body, to the apparently growing gulf between its entrails and the world outside – an understanding of its borders not so much as permeable as, in a sense, irrelevant.

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172 Shakespeare’s Entrails

Notes Visceral knowledge

1. Quotations from Shakespeare throughout this chapter are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974). When I speak of ‘Shakespeare’s plays’, I refer mainly – though not exclusively – to plays primarily from the period spanning the late 1590s to around 1605 (from, say, 1Henry IV and The Merchant of Venice to Othello and King Lear); these share a particularly intense engagement with viscerality, as well as, in relation to this matter, a profound attentiveness to problems of knowing and acknowledging the other. 2. For earlier cultures, this suffusion would, it seems, have been taken literally; the idea that ‘words and thoughts might naturally be believed to come from the lungs’ appears to have been almost natural: see Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 67. As Onians has shown, for much of recorded human history, language was thought to reside in and emerge from the interior of the body – the torso was the storehouse of words (compare the Anglo-Saxon breosthord). There is abundant evidence of the residual persistence of this idea in early modern England. To take just two well-known examples among many: Coriolanus’ ‘As for my country I have shed my blood, [    ] so shall my lungs / Coin words’ (Cor. 3.1.77–8); and Ben Jonson’s ‘Language most shewes a man [    ] It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us    ’ (Timber, Or Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy & Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), VIII: 625). The passage from Jonson continues with a powerfully corporeal description of language (‘Juyce in language is somewhat lesse than blood [    ] There be some styles, againe, that have not lesse blood, but lesse flesh, and corpulence. They are bony, and sinnewy: Ossa habent, et nervos’ (626–7)). We still speak of getting something off our chests, of unburdening our bosoms, of learning things by heart. 3. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999), 75. 4. The quote is from Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), 173; Robert Burton writes that spirit is ‘a common tie or medium betwixt the body and the soul’ (Anatomy, I.i.2.2, p. 129). On the early modern meanings of spirit, see Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 71–3 (below), and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 129–30. On monism and the medical understanding of the relation between soul and body, see for example John Henry, ‘The Matter of Souls: Medical Theory and Theology in Seventeenth-Century England’, in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87–113. 5. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 12; emphasis added. ‘The men and women of early modern Europe understood their mortality, described 173

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1

6.

7.

8.

9.

their sensations and bodily events, and often experienced physical and psychological benefit in humoral terms’, writes Paster (7). See also Paster, ‘Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body’, 106–25 in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997), 111; and Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 159–60. On ‘the linkage of self, body and persona in the word “person” ’ in the period, see Anthony Dawson, ‘Performance and Participation’, in Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14–18. Some of the more influential recent works on the Renaissance body include Paster, The Body Embarrassed; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves; Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned (London: Routledge, 1995); Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); the work of Peter Stallybrass – in particular his ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123– 44; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearian Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Katherine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84. See especially Harry Berger, Jr, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Cynthia Marshall (ed.), Forum on Psychoanalysis and Early Modernity, Shakespeare Studies 2006; Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (eds), Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and the Making of Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 1990) and The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Jean Laplanche’s comments on Freud’s writing come to mind: ‘We never know whether we are dealing with the biological register proper, i.e., with the image of a living being in its totality, or with the psyche (the “psychical apparatus”), or even with the “ego.” Nor can we decide whether each of these registers is considered simply as the image of the other, in a series of successive dovetails, or whether there exists between these images an internal continuity which would be simultaneously temporal, genetic, and spatial.’ Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 135. The full sentence reads: ‘It is man with whom we have alwayes to doe, whose condition is marvellously corporall’: Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, translated by John Florio, 3 vols (London, 1603; rpt. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1910), 3:167 (‘Of the Art of conferring’).

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174 Notes

10. Yves Bonnefoy, Shakespeare & the French Poet, ed. John Naughton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 12. 11. See, for example, Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester, 1983); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985); Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: the Structure of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); and Maus, Inwardness and Theater. Hugh Grady, in ‘On the Need for a Differentiated Theory of (Early) Modern Subjects’ (Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John J. Joughin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 34–50), speaks of ‘the subtle critique of disembodied, “modern” subjectivity which is [    ] a feature of [Shakespeare’s] plays’ (47). 12. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1530 as the last entry for the former meaning, 1605 as the first for the latter. 13. Dawson, ‘Performance and Participation’, 18. See also Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 8–12; Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 156–8; and Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 38. 14. It seems hardly necessary to detail work in this area; numerous scholars have pointed to different aspects of the crises of early modernity; a representative sample might include Thomas Docherty, On Modern Authority: the Theory and Conditioning of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987) and Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern England, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), both of which have extended discussions of the period’s ‘crisis of authority’; Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), on a ‘crisis of representation’ in the early modern period (97); Richard Popkin, on ‘the epistemological crisis brought on by the growth and spread of scepticism’ in the period (‘Theories of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)); Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), emphasises the deep ‘crises of knowledge’ (424) associated with ‘the religious and scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’. 15. The term is taken from Mullaney’s talk, ‘Affective Irony’, at a conference entitled ‘Inhabiting the Body/Inhabiting the World’, at the University of North Carolina, April 2004. 16. On religious doubt and embodiment, see Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 16–18. 17. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14. Compare Mary Douglas’s suggestion that ‘cultures which frankly develop bodily symbolism may be seen to use it to confront experience with its inevitable pains and losses’. Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; rpt. London: Ark, 1984), 120. 18. OED records its first use in English in 1543 – the year of the publication of Vesalius’ Fabrica – in the medical sense; its first use in the latter sense as 1627. 19. Jean Starobinski describes something like this process in relation to the individual faced with a deceptive enemy: ‘Endangered by the hidden design he suspects

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Notes to Chapter 1 175

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

before him, the individual seeks to protect his own frontiers; he sees to it that the barriers under his control are closed – barriers within which his life remains safe.’ Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, or the Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 201. Rosenfeld’s insights have been helpful to me in thinking about issues of culturallyconditioned corporeal openness and closure and the transitional points between them. See Rosenfeld, Impasse and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1987); and Ronald Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1998), 41–58. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 176; see also Thomas Healy, ‘Sound Physic: Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island and the Poetry of Purgation’, Renaissance Studies 5 (1991), 341–52. See also Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: a Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 120–3. Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Ferguson et al., 65–87; 66. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 13. See also Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. Chapter 7; Michael Neill, Issues of Death, esp. Chapter 3; Howard Marchitello, Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne’s Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Harvey, ‘The Touching Organ’, in Sensible Flesh; Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). As Hanson puts it, ‘inwardness was in fact a cultural obsession in this period’ (151n.10). John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41. See Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 161: ‘bodily permeability involves not only penetration of the body by environmental substances such as air, food, and liquids, but also the physical interpenetration of mind and body’. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, Vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 257–8. Elias’s work is heavily indebted to that of Bakhtin, who describes the process of classicisation of the body as culminating in ‘the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade’. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 320. For a more extended discussion of the idea of homo clausus, see my ‘Homo Clausus at the Theatre’, in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 161–85; and see also Neill, Issues of Death, 156–8. Elias, The History of Manners, 1: 257. Peter Stallybrass’s seminal analysis of ‘the body enclosed’ and Gail Kern Paster’s detailed work on the mobile thresholds of embarrassment in early modern England emphasise the fact that it was first and foremost the female body that was constructed as needing greater closure; but the perception of the dangers of somatic openness gradually came to encompass everybody: Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories’, 123–44; Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 16. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 2.9.21.3; The Major Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 107.

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176 Notes

30. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 21–2. For a psychoanalytic perspective on skin, see Didier Anzieu, A Skin for Thought, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac, 1990), esp. 61–80; and Anzieu, ‘Formal Signifiers and the Ego-Skin’, in Anzieu (ed.), Psychic Envelopes, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac, 1990), 1–25; and Esther Bick, ‘The Experience of the Skin in Early Object-Relations’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968): 484–6. 31. Claudia Benthien, Skin: on the Cultural Border between the Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 38–9. See also Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin, esp. 120–3. 32. Connor, The Book of Skin, 22. 33. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 31, 13. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 343. Margaret Healy has more recently argued that ‘by the late sixteenth century [    ] the body’s fleshy envelope was imagined to be so fragile and permeable that it seemed to provide very little protection against incursion by a panoply of “evil” enemy agents’ (Healy, ‘Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch’, in Sensible Flesh, ed. Harvey, 22). Perhaps one should attribute this lack of confidence in the somatic container not so much to a sense of its fragility as such as to a greater sense of urgency regarding the desirability of inner and outer being strictly demarcated. 34. Tobias Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam. Or, A Treatise wherein the right way and best manner of living for attaining a long and healthfull life, is clearly demonstrated (London, 1623; 1650), 321–2, cited in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 14. Andrew Wear, whose compendious Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) lays great emphasis on the unchanging ‘histoire immobile’ (155) of medical practice through the course of the Renaissance, emphasises that in terms of the conceptualisation of disease, the increasing distance between subjective sensations and objective diagnoses made it more and more ‘difficult to see disease as being caused by an imbalance of the four qualities, as now they were merely subjective, and it was easier to conceive disease as coming from the outside, objective world’ (452). 35. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 121; Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: a Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), 60; my emphasis. 36. Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30. See also Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 37. Montaigne, The Essayes, 3: 300. 38. Girolamo Fracastoro, De contagione et contagionis morbis et eorum curatione (1546), ed. William Cave Wright (New York: Putman’s Sons, 1930). 39. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 23. On the idea of the body as partaking in a series of nested enclosures, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 125–59. Jorge Arditi describes a relative ‘absence of corporeal boundaries in medieval societies’, and characterises ‘the collective self of ecclesias’ during the Middle Ages as existing in ‘a fundamental condition of fusion’. Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 45; 53; 40. Compare Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (eds), A History of Private Life, vol. 2: Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies

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Notes to Chapter 1 177

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 82–109, which traces a similar transition even farther back in history. On land enclosure, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 96–107, 136–41; Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Elizabeth Sauer and Lisa M. Smith, ‘Noli me tangere: Colonialist Imperatives and Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England’, in Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 7. For a reading of ‘the specific role of the closet in the social and architectural schema of the early modern house’, see Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 161–87 (the quotation is on p. 166). See also Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 47; and Orest Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy’, in A History of Private Life, Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 217–29. On these new notions of privacy, see, for example, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 169–72, 223–4, 245–6, and Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy’, 207–63. Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 167, summarising her own Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 72–6. Margaret Healy, ‘Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch’, in Sensible Flesh, ed. Harvey, 26. Lady Macbeth’s plea to ‘Unsex me here’ (1.5.41) speaks to the differences in openness and ‘flow’ in relation to gender in the early modern world, as well as to the relation of scepticism and gendered embodiment – an issue I return to in my reading of The Winter’s Tale. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), quoted from the Standard Edition, XIX: 26. In a footnote later (1927) added to this passage, Freud explained that ‘the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body.’ On this text, see especially Elizabeth Grosz’s discussion in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 33–9. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 25. Freud, ‘Negation’ (1925), Standard Edition, XIX: 237. Ibid.; emphases in the original. Mary Douglas has written from an anthropological perspective about the way bodily apertures are ‘specially invested with power and danger’ in practically all cultures. ‘Each culture’, she adds, ‘has its own special risks and problems. To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring’ (Purity and Danger, 121). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 134. Recent theorists of the body and its acculturation have repeatedly underlined the precarious nature of the inner-outer boundary. Elizabeth Grosz speaks of the need for ‘a way of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside of the subject’. Using the analogy of a Möbius strip, she describes the way the inner and the outer fold around each other, ‘the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable

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178 Notes

52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside’. For Grosz, the body has historically been understood as ‘the symptom and mode of expression and communication of a hidden interior or depth’; what we find in the search for the interior, however, is no more than ‘the illusion or effects of’ depth (Volatile Bodies, xii, 116). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 7. Kristeva’s conceptualisation of the ‘abject’ relies on precisely this perviousness and uncertainty of the inner/ outer binary, describing the construction of the subject – and indeed of his or her boundaries – as a matter of the exclusion of elements originally of the self, rendered, through the fact of being expelled, unmitigatedly other. The term is André Green’s: see On Private Madness (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 87. Physiologically as well as psychologically, in-and-out distinctions are deeply uncertain. As the psychoanalyst Michael Balint points out, ‘both the intestines and the lungs are lined with a special kind of epithelium which is contiguous with the skin that covers our body; moreover, though it is morphologically different, embryologically it is a derivative of it. So here too we have a kind of mix-up between inside and outside; at any rate, the boundaries are so uncertain and vague that it is hardly possible to say where inside ends and outside begins’ (Michael Balint, Thrills and Regressions (London: Maresfield Library, 1959), 66). Donne, Verse Epistle To Sir Henry Wotton (‘Sir, more than kisses    ’), l. 37, in John Donne: the Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 47. Compare André Green’s statement regarding projection: ‘only what has been incorporated can be excorporated’ (On Private Madness, 88). Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 148. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton & Co., 1977), 4. Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’, 4. Compare Hal Foster’s comments on the complementarity of the Freudian notions of binding and unbinding in relation to the Lacanian mirror stage: Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 115. I thank Catherine Belsey for this suggestion in relation to Lacan. Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, ed. F.S. Boas, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908–09), I: 34. On the uncanniness of the interior of the body, see Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 141–82. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 670a 10–16; cited in Jean-Louis Durand, ‘Greek Animals: Towards a Topology of Edible Bodies’, in The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, ed. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 87–118; 100. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 86; cf. 23–8, 48–63, 72, 84–6, 103. See also Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1982), 1–22; Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Sheila Murnaghan, ‘Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy’, Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (Spring 1988), 23–43, esp. 23–4; Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Dim Body, Dazzling Body’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 18–47, esp. 29–30; and Gerhard Kittel (ed.), Theological Dictionary of

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Notes to Chapter 1 179

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

the New Testament, trans. G.W. Bromiley, 10 vols (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964–76), 3: 605–14, s.v. oí; ´ í ´ ; ´  . ´ Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 76. See also Richard Kearney, The Wake of the Imagination (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 47–8, according to which in ancient Hebraic tradition, ‘it was thought that the “grain of imagination” is situated in between the two valves of the heart: one sending life energy out from its source and the other returning to its source’. Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: a New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 83. Psalms 51:6. Biblical references throughout refer to the Authorized (King James) Version. Compare also Psalms 74:8 (‘Truth is in the inward being’); Psalms 44:21; Psalms 40:9; Proverbs 20:27 (‘The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly’); Jeremiah 4:19 (‘My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace’); Jeremiah 31:20; and Revelations 2:23. St Augustine, Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques Paul Migne (1844–65; rep. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995), xxxv, 1643CD, cited in E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 137n.18. On haruspices, see, for example, Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 4–6. Caroline Thomas Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 13, 84, 88; Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. T. Croft-Murray and H. Elsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Compare Eric Jager, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum 71 (1996), 1–26. Christian Duverger, ‘The Meaning of Sacrifice’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, 3 vols (New York: Zone, 1989), 3: 367–85, esp. 379: ‘In the Aztec universe, the quintessential form of human sacrifice was excision of the heart’; Durand, ‘Greek Animals’: ‘the liver is seen as the preeminent organ, the one in which meaning is inscribed’ (98). Durand, ‘Greek Animals’, 98. Recent medical research on the enteric nervous system – the human digestive system’s independent ‘brain’ – shows that it contains almost all the neurons, neurotransmitters, and proteins that are in the central nervous system. According to this research, this ‘brain in the gut [    ] functions like an intelligent terminal in a computer-based system’; it ‘sends and receives impulses, records experiences and responds to emotions’ and apparently ‘plays a major role in human happiness and misery’. See Marcello Costa, John B. Furness and Ida J. Llewellyn-Smith, ‘Histochemistry of the Enteric Nervous System’, in Leonard R. Johnson (ed.in-chief), Physiology of the Gastrointestinal Tract (New York: Raven Press, 1987), 1–40; J.D. Wood, ‘Physiology of the Enteric Nervous System’, in ibid., 67–109; and Sandra Blakeslee, ‘There’s a Brain Behind Gut Feelings’, International Herald Tribune, 25 January 1996. The first quotation is from Wood’s article (68); the rest are from the Blakeslee piece. Louis MacNeice, ‘Postscript to Iceland for W.H. Auden’, in Collected Poems, 1925– 1948 (London: Faber & Faber, 1949). Delmore Schwartz, ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’, in Selected Poems (New York: Norton, 1967).

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180 Notes

74. The citation from Richard III is taken from the Folio; modern editions usually amend to ‘intestate joys’. 75. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night or, A discourse of apparitions (London, 1594), Sig. Eiii˘ ; Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W.A. Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 132 (Book II.ix.3). The sentiment is common enough in the Renaissance. 76. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 320. See also Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, Vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), esp. 53–84; Jean Starobinski, ‘The Body’s Moment’, in Montaigne: Essays in Reading, ed. Gérard Defaux, Yale French Studies 64 (1983), 273–305 (esp. 274–7) and Starobinski, ‘The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, II: 350–405 (esp. 353–5); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. 77. Connor (Skin, 65), paraphrasing Susan Buck-Morss: ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October 62 (1992), 3–41. 78. Piero Camporesi, The Anatomy of the Senses: Natural Symbols in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 99. 79. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 22. 80. Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1576) f. 45. 81. Montaigne, The Essayes, 3: 254 (‘How one ought to governe his will’). 82. Montaigne, The Essayes, 2: 60 (‘Of exercise or practice’). 83. The quotation is taken from the description of the Red Cross Knight’s sin, in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (I.x, 25–7). The moralisation of the body’s interior realms is especially evident in such works as The Faerie Queene (especially in the House of Alma, II.ix) and Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man (Books I and II). Physical and moral health are intimately related in these works. 84. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87; emphasis unchanged from the original. Donne repeatedly associates the body’s innards with precious metals hidden in the earth: see, for example, his ‘Ecclogue (Unseasonable man, statue of ice)’, from Poems (1633). ‘The earth doth in her inner bowels hold / Stuffe well dispos’d; and which would fain be gold’ (Dec 26, 1613). These images draw on the contemporary analogies between physiological and alchemical processes. On Donne’s combining an anatomist’s view of the body’s inanimate structures with an exquisite sense of the body as ‘a sensitive envelope you walk around in’, see John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 158. 85. Giovanni Ciampoli, ‘Del corpo humano. Discorso primo’, in Prose di Monsignor G.C. (Venice, 1676), 44, cited in Camporesi, The Anatomy of the Senses, 96. 86. Quoted in Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I: a Study in Power and Intellect (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 320. The phrases ‘heart and stomach’ and ‘heart and bowels’ are extraordinarily common in the period, in a wide variety of contexts. 87. Andreas Vesalius, De humanis corporis fabrica libri septem (Basileae: Per Joannem Oporinum, 1555), Book 1, Chapter 28; cited in Neill, Issues, 124n.45. 88. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), I: 41, I: 24. 89. See Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), esp. 201–76; and Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 136-8. 90. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, ix; I, v.

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Notes to Chapter 1 181

91. Anthony Munday, Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing, Or, Honour of Fishmongers (London, 1616), sig. A4. 92. See Scott Manning Stevens, ‘Sacred Heart and Secular Brain’, in The Body in Parts, ed. Hillman and Mazzio, 263–84. 93. More detailed understandings of particular organs were similarly often derived from Greek and Roman systems. See Onians, The Origins of European Thought, esp. 23–43, 62–70, 84–9, 505–6; and Park, ‘The Organic Soul’. 94. Thomas Vicary’s description of the thoracic cavity; in The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (London, 1548; rptd. by the Early English Text Society, London, 1888), 54. 95. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrim: Microcosmus, OR The Historie of Man (London: Printed by W.S. for Henry Featherstone, 1619), 18. 96. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 195. 97. See, for example, F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), esp. 131–78. 98. Freud himself, influenced by Ferenczi and Klein, eventually began to refer to the ‘internal world’. Richard Wollheim depicts Freud’s progress towards the notion: ‘As he came to recognise the frequency of introjection in an individual life, Freud was led to believe in a wide variety of internal figures, and in the late Outline of Psychoanalysis he posits an “internal world” which is populated by such figures [    ] What Freud did discern was that there are certain phantasies such that the only way of describing their content is to say that they are of an object that is located inside and persists within the subject’s body.’ Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 75–6. Compare Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940; Standard Edition, XXIII), 205. 99. See Sàndor Ferenczi, ‘Introjection and Transference’ [1909], in First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, trans. Ernest Jones (London: The Hogarth Press, 1952), 35– 93. On the relation between introjection and Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, see Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. I, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9n.6. Ferenczi, ‘Childish Ideas of Digestion’, in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Pycho-Analysis, trans. Jane Isabel Suttie (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 325. 100. Melanie Klein, ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume I: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 345. As Melzer comments: ‘Klein’s work leapt forward the the moment she discovered that children were preoccupied with the inside of their mothers’ bodies and the inside of their own bodies and that it really was a place, a world in which life was going on’; Klein realised that ‘there really is an inner world, and that it is not just allegorical or metaphorical, but has a concrete existence’ (Donald Meltzer, The Kleinian Development: Part I (Reading: Clunie Press, 1978), 97–8). 101. D.W. Winnicott, ‘Appetite and Emotional Disorder’ [1936], in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1958/1992), 34. Contemporary artists such as Ana Mendieta, Anthony Gormley and Mona Hatoum may be thought of as drawing upon a long history of artists who depicted the inner realms of the body. Foremost among these in the Renaissance are artists such as Peter Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Diego Rivera’s description of Frida Kahlo’s art – ‘Frida is the only example in the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings’ – needs to be taken

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182 Notes

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119.

with a pinch of salt. ‘Frida Kahlo y el Arte Mexicano’, Bolitin del Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, no. 2 (Oct. 1943), 101; cited in Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo: the Paintings (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 191–2; emphasis in the original. Donald Meltzer, The Kleinian Development. Part I (Reading: Clunie Press, 1978), 16. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 55, 35–6. Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, Sig. Eiiii˘ . Ibid., Sig. Ciiii. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 70–1. Ibid., 252–3. Ibid., 454; emphasis in the original Ibid., 36; emphasis in the original. (The reference is to P. Tissié, Les rêves (1896; though cited by Freud as 1898), 23.) Ibid., 143n.2. In Desire, 12; in Lacanian terms, we could say that the navel is where the Imaginary and the Symbolic touch the Real; the tangle of raw material of dreams is analogous to the Real – unreachable, unsayable, uninterpretable – in the Lacanian structure. Compare Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Routledge, 1987), 134 and 158. The term ‘proto-belief’ is Richard Wollheim’s, from his illuminating discussion of Freud’s ‘Negation’ in The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 69–75. Freud, ‘Negation’, Standard Edition, XIX: 238. D.W. Winnicott, Collected Papers, 40. Freud, ‘Negation,’ 238; emphases in the original. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 238–9. In the case history, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis [The Wolf-Man], Freud relates the following: ‘We know how important doubt is to the physician who is analysing an obsessional neurosis. It is the patient’s strongest weapon, the favorite expedient of his resistance. This same doubt enabled our patient to lie entrenched behind a respectful indifference and to allow the efforts of the treatment to slip past him for years together. Nothing changed, and there was no way of convincing him. At last I recognized the importance of the intestinal trouble for my purposes; it represented the small trait of hysteria which is regularly to be found at the root of an obsessional neurosis. I promised the patient a complete recovery of his intestinal activity, and by means of this promise made his incredulity manifest. I then had the satisfaction of seeing his doubts dwindle away, as in the course of the work his bowel began, like a hysterically affected organ, to “join in the conversation” and in a few weeks’ time recovered its normal functions after their long impairment.’ (Standard Edition, XVII: 73.) This is where my thinking on the topic parts company significantly from Katherine Maus. Maus dismisses psychoanalytic methodologies as essentially ‘irrelevant’ to her investigation, for, as she puts it: ‘Whereas my considerations are primarily epistemological (how can one person know another?), the primary concerns of psychoanalysis are developmental (how does a person construct him or herself, or find him or herself configured by family dynamics and the processes of maturation)’ (Inwardness and Theater, 31). In my view, as will be

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Notes to Chapter 1 183

120.

121.

122. 123.

124.

125. 126.

127.

128.

129.

obvious by now, these two considerations are intimately (and interestingly) linked. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Experience’, in Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 256. For an interesting discussion of the question of whether belief is voluntary or not, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), Chapter Six, and esp. pp. 173–4, where there is an extended discussion comparing ‘the involuntary nature of the heart muscles’ to the nature of belief. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 554–5; the statement is italicised in the original. Freud added a later footnote moderating the imperiousness of this declaration. Ibid., 555. Though nurtured upon the ideals of scientific objectivity and empirical proof, Freud is constantly being pulled away from this epistemic tradition; and it is worth considering the relation between this current in his thought and the fact that he can be credited as being – along with Nietzsche and Joyce – one of the major figures to dismantle the mechanistic conception of the body that was the other central legacy of Bacon and Descartes. When I speak of ‘scepticism’, I mean both doubt regarding the existence of the outer world (‘external world scepticism’) and doubt about the possibility of knowing the other (which we might call ‘internal world scepticism’). On the relation between the two forms of scepticism, see esp. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, ed. G.E.M Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), and Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 400ff; on one major difference between them, see 451– 3. My understanding of these issues is indebted to Cavell’s work, especially to The Claim of Reason and to Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 7. Here I am using the terms ‘introjection’ and ‘incorporation’ more or less interchangeably and somewhat loosely; for a ‘weak’ view of the differences between the two, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 229–31; for a much ‘stronger’ view, see Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, 125–38. See also Roy Schafer, Aspects of Internalization (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1968), 7–23. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. and introd. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), IX: 248 (Sermon 10). See also Dawson’s discussion of the word ‘participation’ in Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing, 23–4. Henceforth in this chapter I use the masculine pronoun when referring to ‘the sceptic’; in Shakespeare as elsewhere in the philosophical context, the sceptic is, with remarkable consistency, gendered male. This has everything to do, I argue, with his attachment to a particular idea of the body. See Chapter 5 – on The Winter’s Tale – and Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 9–10 and 34–7, esp. n. 3. The states I am describing here have a good deal in common with splitting processes, as well as with processes of projective identification; André Green describes the latter as ‘creating in the subject an absolute split between the inner and outer world’ (On Private Madness, 89), and links such processes with paranoid states (90–100).

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184 Notes

130. The inner is of course unknowable from a certain (sceptical) perspective – in so far, that is, as one equates knowability with epistemological certainty. 131. Jean Starobinski, ‘The Inside and the Outside’, The Hudson Review 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 336; emphasis in the original. On untruth and/as concealment see Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Routledge, 1993), 132–3. 132. On the importance of sceptical modes of thought in the Renaissance, see, above all, Richard H. Popkin’s monumental study, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). See also Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 133. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 125. 134. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 329. My understanding of these issues is indebted to Cavell’s work, in which ‘the problem of knowledge’ is inextricable from the embodied condition of humanity (482). 135. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 178. See also Cavell, The Claim of Reason, esp. 511. 136. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 153e (§580); P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein on Human Nature (London: Phoenix, 1997), 43. Nor, indeed, could we describe the internal save through the external: as Jacques Derrida has put it – alluding to metaphysical appeals to inner or intrinsic meaning – ‘the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority’. Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 33. 137. Starobinski, ‘The Inside and the Outside’, 340. Psychoanalysis, it should be said, has done more than any other discipline to problematise the distinction between the inside and the outside, based primarily on the notion that the unconscious is an intersubjective rather than internal structure: this means both that the other is always internal to the self, and that the subject is always ex-centric. 138. Ted Hughes, ‘The Machine’, in Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998). 139. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 13. 140. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, trans. F.E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 155. 141. D.W. Winnicott, Collected Papers, 35. Compare Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 88: ‘The inwardly directed gaze traversed not simply regions of doubt, but transformed the body into the locus of all doubt.’ 142. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 215, 202. It is a telling fact that ‘proof’ refers both to empirical verification or confirmation and to a body’s impenetrable covering: Compare ‘lapp’d in proof’ (Macbeth, 1.2.54), ‘armour forg’d for proof eterne’ (Hamlet, 2.2.490), ‘proof and bulwark against sense’ (Hamlet, 3.4.38), ‘through proof of harness to my heart’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.8.15). 143. It is worth noting the congruence of such ideas both with early modern notions of the ‘hardening’ effect of melancholy on the body of the sufferer, as well as with psychoanalytic ideas of the alienating armour or shell donned by depressive patients. See my discussion of melancholy in Chapter 3. 144. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 190, 137 145. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 205.

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Notes to Chapter 1 185

146. See Scarry, The Body in Pain, 214–15, for a reading of this passage in terms of the different forms of verification in the Old and New Testaments. Spolsky devotes a chapter of Satisfying Skepticism to the story of Doubting Thomas and the way in which it reveals that ‘the contingencies of the body fail to produce ideal knowledge’ (44). Michael Schoenfeldt too discusses the image of Thomas poking Christ’s wound in Bodies and Selves, 101–2 and 170–1. See also Richard Rambuss, ‘Pleasure and Devotion: the Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 253–79, 260–1. 147. St Augustine, commenting on the literality of the phrase ‘living in Christ’, speaks of the wound in Christ’s side as ‘the way by which those who come to him enter, because from this opening flowed the sacraments with which believers are initiated’ (City of God, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), Vol. IV, 567 (xv: 26)). Like many early modern writers and preachers, Donne speaks repeatedly of ‘bathing’ in Christ’s blood (see the conclusion to the sermon known as ‘Death’s Duel’ – I thank Peter Stallybrass for pointing this out to me). In his Latin poem ‘In Thomam Dydymum’, George Herbert writes: ‘The servant puts his fingers into you. / Do you, Redeemer, permit this sign? / For sure you are all love, and the pith of it. / You make a shelter and a sweet rest / For a grudging faith and a narrow mind, / In which, luxuriating, they may conceal / And wrap themselves / As in a good inn or a strong fort’ (The Latin Poetry of George Herbert, trans. Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy (Ohio University Press, 1965), 107, as cited in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 101). 148. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 45e (sec. 99); Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, in Three Jacobean Tragedies, ed. G¯amini Salg¯ado (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). (Now often attributed to Middleton.) 149. Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism, 37. 150. Devon L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 69 (emphasis added). There is always a contradiction between the display of, and the idea of, the inside: the very avowal of a privileged interiority inevitably betrays itself in the act of its avowal, in its deictic referral to the inner. Hence there is, for instance, a publicness about early modern representations of secret spaces that undoes any true notion of secrecy: as Alan Stewart puts it, ‘far from rendering relationships and transactions secret, the closet paradoxically draws attention to those relationships and transactions, and marks them off as socially and ethically problematic’ (Close Readers, 184); Patricia Fumerton argues that ‘even the most private rooms in Elizabethan houses    were sites where privacy could never be achieved’; ‘the private could be sensed only through the public’ (Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76–7, 109). Compare Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s more general comment about the early modern period: ‘the supposedly “private” sphere [    ] can be imagined only through its similarities and dissimilarities to the public world’ (‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella’, Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), 53–68, 54). 151. ‘Anatomy is that branch of learning which teaches [    ] through ocular inspection and dissection’ (William Harvey, The Anatomical Lectures of William Harvey, trans. Gweneth Whitteridge (Edinburgh: Livingston for the Royal College of Physicians, 1964), 1); cited in Neill, Issues of Death, 141. Walter Ong calls vision ‘the dissecting sense’: Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 72.

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186 Notes

152. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, viii. See also Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy. 153. John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos. The Discovery of the Little World, with the government thereof (Oxford, 1603), 88; emphases in original. 154. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 232. 155. On the centrality of the interior of the body to spectacles of royal power – the public display of heart and bowels as ‘proof’ of guilt – see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Dismemberments and Re-memberments: Rewriting the Decameron, 4.1, in the English Renaissance’, Studi sul Boccaccio 20 (1991), 299–324, esp. 318–21. 156. Jean Starobinski, ‘The Body’s Moment’, 276; emphasis in the original. 157. Starobinski, ‘The Body’s Moment’, 277. 158. Timothy Murray, ‘Philosophical Antibodies: Grotesque Fantasy in a French Stoic Fiction’, in Corps Mystique, Corps Sacré, ed. Françoise Jaou’n and Benjamin Semple, Yale French Studies 86 (1994), 143–63, 145. Andrew Wear notes that ‘The anatomists elevated observation into a form of certain knowledge’: ‘Medicine in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700’, in Lawrence I. Conrad et al., The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 285. 159. Andreas Vesalius, Tabulae anatomicae (1538), cited in Roberts and Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Human Body, 49. 160. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 14; emphasis added. Compare Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W.A. Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 133 (Book II.ix.3): ‘of the concordances between the mind and the body, that part of inquiry is most necessary, which considereth of the sects and domiciles which the several faculties of the mind do take and occupate in the organs of the body; which knowledge hath been attempted, and is controverted, and deserveth to be much better inquired.’ Compare Robert Burton’s comment, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1927), 41): ‘I do anatomize and cut up these poor beasts, to see these distempers, vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made on man’s body’. 161. William Harvey, ‘The Second Anatomical Essay to Jean Riolan’, in The Circulation of the Blood: Two Anatomical Essays by William Harvey, ed. and trans. Kenneth J. Franklin (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1958), 39; cited in Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 73. 162. See Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 28–9. 163. Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 67. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 36e (sec. 275): ‘Now one might say that it is experience again that leads us to give credence to others. But what experience makes me believe that the anatomy and physiology books don’t contain what is false?’ 164. Lacan, Écrits, 11. 165. On the popularity of the figure of Marsyas in the period, see Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 185–7. 166. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 9. 167. Nietzsche, ‘On the Pale Criminal’, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 151. 168. See Neill, Issues of Death, 102–40. 169. William Hunter, introductory letter to students, c. 1780, St Thomas’s Hospital Manuscript 55: 182; cited in Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge, 1987), 30–1.

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Notes to Chapter 1 187

170. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 233. 171. Though as Cavell points out, ‘nearest the merchant’s heart’ (4.1.233) is ambiguous, referring either to Antonio or to Shylock. 172. I thank Anita Sokolsky for coming up with this last phrase. 173. Rambuss, ‘Pleasure and Devotion’, 260. ‘Renaissance sermons’, Caroline Bynum points out, ‘often emphasized the bleeding of Christ’s penis at the circumcision as a special proof of his true – that is, his fleshly – humanity’ (Caroline Thomas Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 84). 174. George Herbert, ‘Longing’, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), l. 19; John Donne, ‘Death’s Duell’, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), vol. 10: 247. The idea derives from John 3:17: ‘But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ On ‘the growing distrust of the visceral notion of compassion’ in the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, see Staines, ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere’, 100–1. 175. John Davies, ‘Of Gods unutterable Being’, in The Muses Sacrifice (London, 1612), lines 221–3. 176. Francis Quarles, ‘A Feast for Wormes’, from Divine Poems (London, 1632), lines 118–22. 177. John Wells, The Anchor of Hope [    ] Or Gods Bowels Let Out, Opened, [and] Proclaimed to Afflicted Saints (London, 1645) (cit. Richard A. Barney, ‘Intestinal Anatomy and Pope’s Visceral Sublime’, MLA Paper, 2000); Richard Sibbes, Bowels Opened: Or, A Discovery of the Near and Dear Love, Union and Communion Betwixt Christ and the Church (London, 1648). Sibbes writes: ‘A Christian is what his heart and inward man is. It is a true speech of Divines, God and nature begin there. Art begins with the face, and outward lineaments, as hypocrisie, outward painting, and expressions: But grace at the Center, and from thence goes to the Circumference’ (101) (Fourth Sermon). 178. Thomas Goodwin, Of the Object and Acts of Justifying Faith, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin (London, 1697), IV: 88 (referencing Psalms 103.13). The precise location in the body most closely associated with God was, it seems, an ongoing theological debate. Donne, for instance, contra Goodwin, says that ‘there is never braine, nor liver, nor spleene, nor any other inward part ascribed to God, but onely the heart. God is all heart, and that whole heart, that inexhaustible fountaine of love, is directed wholly upon man’ (The Sermons, ed. Simpson and Potter, vol. 9: 135 (sermon 5)). 179. Donne, The Sermons, ed. Potter and Simpson, vol. 10: 245; emphasis in the original. 180. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), ed. Montague Summers (1930; rpt. New York: Dover Books,1972), 109. 181. Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.3.66–7. 182. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 10. The idea is based on several passages from the Bible: ‘The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly’ (proverbs, 20:27); ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom’ (Psalms, 51:6). See Johannes Behm, ‘Koilia’ and ‘Kardia’, in Theological Dictionary of the New

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188 Notes

183. 184. 185. 186.

187.

188.

189. 190. 191.

192.

Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley, 10 vols (Grand Rapids, Mich.: 1964–76) 3: 605–14. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 22v; cited in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 105. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 105. Du Bartas, I: 282, cited in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 98. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 27; cited in Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 10. John Staines has argued that Protestant translators of the Bible were ‘uncomfortable’ with the physicality of visceral imagery, often omitting phrases such as ‘the bowels of compassion’ and ‘the bowels of mercy’. See ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and Charles’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 89–110, 100–1. See Anthony Dawson, ‘Performance and Participation’, in Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing, 21; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. 38, on the demystification of the identity between material sign and invisible signified; Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 8–12, and Neill, Issues of Death, 156–8. C.L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: the Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 125. D.W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ [1951], in his Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). On the ‘strikingly somatic’ nature of ‘the “in-between” period of purgation’, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 281. Many of these breaks with tradition were institutionalised in the second Edwardian Book of Common Prayer, authorised in 1552. On the move away from the Catholic Mass, see especially Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 91–130. On the abolishment of unction between the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which includes anointing as part of the ceremony of Baptism, and the 1552 version, see especially Steven Connor’s commentary (The Book of Skin, 203–5). As Connor argues, unctuary actions work to soften the skin, the boundary between the inside and the outside ( Jean-Paul Sartre, writes Connor, was repulsed by what he called the ‘epidermal in-betweenness’ signified by unguents (205)). ‘Liturgical forms for anointing in the Christian church often stress the symbolism and enactment of a partaking in the divine nature, parallel to the assimilation of the host’ (Connor, 182). On the importance of seals in Protestant theology of the covenant, see for instance the Westminster Confession, Article XXVII.i (in The Confession of Faith and Catechisms (London, 1649)): ‘Sacraments are holy Signes, and Seales of the Covenant of Grace’; compare E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). On stigmata, note in particular Luther’s dismissal of St Francis’ stigmata as nothing more than ‘a pure fiction and a joke’ (Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, 55 vols (Saint Louis: Concordia publishing, 1955–86), vol. 27, 142); cited in Lowell Gallagher, ‘The Place of the Stigmata in Christological Poetics’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora

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Notes to Chapter 1 189

193.

194. 195.

196. 197.

198. 199. 200. 201. 202.

203.

Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 99; even Paul’s stigmata, as Gallagher shows, are treated by Luther ‘not as literal, or even metonymic, marks but as metaphorical ones’ (‘The Place of the Stigmata’, 101). One way of reading this dismissal is through the new Protestant sensibility which partakes of the idealisation of the closed body. Interesting in this context is the emphasis placed by English recusants on the cult of the five wounds. Winnicott himself made the connection between transitional phenomena and ‘the eternal controversy over transubstantiation’ in the Preface to Playing and Reality (xi). On early modern notions of the stomach as ‘the chamber where God is welcomed into the self’, see Schoenfeldt, ‘Fables of the Belly’, in The Body in Parts, 243–61, 253. See also Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The absorption of Christ’s body into the human, and vice versa – human access to the interior of the Corpus Christi – together obviate the problem of the other, pre-empting any sceptical doubt about the possibility of access to the interior: there is literally no room, no space within, for doubt. Cavell, in The Claim of Reason, proposes ‘understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God’ (470, and compare, 482–3). Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 2. Hartmann Grisar, Luther, trans. E.M. Lamond, ed. Luigi Cappadelta, 6 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1913–17), VI: 506; cited in Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: the Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 202. As Luther’s biographer Grisar explains, ‘In olden times it was very usual to establish this adjunct on the city walls and its towers, the sewage having egress outside the town boundaries’ (Luther, I: 396). This location of the privy is symbolically as well as practically overdetermined, its relation to transitional spaces evident. On the Catholic Mass, somatic openness and scatology, compare Milton: ‘[T]he Mass brings down Christ’s body from its supreme exaltation at the right hand of God. It drags it back to the earth, though it has suffered every pain and hardship already, to a state of humiliation even more wretched and degrading than before: to be broken once more and crushed and ground, even by the fangs of brutes. Then, when it has been driven through all the stomach’s filthy channels it shoots it out – one shudders even to mention it – into the latrine’ (On Christian Doctrine, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. William Alfred et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 6.560). Brown, Life against Death, 209. The citations are from Wear, ‘Medicine in Early Modern Europe’, 288–9; compare Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci communes 1555, trans. and ed. Clyde L. Manschreck, introd. Hans Engelland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), xxvi–xxviii. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, I.i.2.3 (p. 128; emphasis in original). See Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 176. Neill, Issues of Death, 158n.30. Compare Eric Jager, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum 71 (1996), 1–26. Dawson, in Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing, 22. See, for example, Measure, 3.2.23; T&C, 2.2.49; Twelfth Night, 1.5.122; Tempest, 2.1.106. See also Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 223 and 351 n. 74 on digestion and cramming in the prologues to Henry V and Troilus and Cressida. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, The Fury of Men’s Gullets: Ben Jonson and the Digestive Canal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 3. See also Bruce Boehrer ‘The Privy and its Double: Scatology and Attire in Shakespeare’s Theatre’,

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190 Notes

in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 69–88. On comic catharsis, see especially the Prologue to Ben Jonson’s Volpone. 204. The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Leo Kirschbaum (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1962). 205. John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London: A.C. Black, 1985). 206. John Ford: Three Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). The visceral preoccupation can be found to be still going strong a good deal later in the century, in William Cartwright’s comedy, The Ordinary: ’Twould be a Policy worth hatching, to Have him dissected, if ’twere not too cruell. All states would lye as open as his bowels. Turkey in’s bloody Liver; Italy Be found in’s reines; Spaine busie in his Stomack; Venice would float in’s Bladder; Holland saile Up and down all his veines; Bavaria lie Close in some little gut, and Ragioni Di Stato generally reek in all.

207. 208.

209. 210.

211.

212. 213.

William Cartwright, The Ordinary, A Comedy (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1651), 1.4.410–18; my thanks to Carla Mazzio for calling my attention to this play. Barber and Wheeler speak of ‘Othello’s isolation inside his majestic body’ (The Whole Journey, 280). See Hanson, Discovering the Subject; Marchitello, Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England; Maus, Inwardness and Theater; Neill, Issues of Death; and Janet Adelman, ‘Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 no. 2 (1997), 125–44. Othello has become the centrepiece of this debate partly because of the induction of its hero into the new regime of interiority, but also partly because this induction overlaps with powerfully sexualised and ethnically problematic versions of the epistemological problem of the other. C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: a Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 135. As Dawson and Yachnin point out, there is also a kind of closure taking place at the presentational level – through, especially, the actor’s control of his passions and his body. On the ‘dual consciousness’ of theatricality, see Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing, 16–23. See, for example, Jane Tylus, ‘ “Par Accident”: the Public World of Early Modern Theater’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Paster, Rowe and Floyd-Wilson, 253–71, on this theatre’s agenda of exposure. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, The Players Scovrge, or Actors Tragœdie (London, 1633), 11. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 139. Stephen Greenblatt has similarly described early modern theatre as a form of exorcism: ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128. In more psychoanalytic terms, we might say that playgoing involves a heightening of projective and introjective processes.

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Notes to Chapter 1 191

214. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 291–2. 215. The association of actors and healers (whether charlatans or doctors) is not uncommon in the period. See, for example, Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh, on ‘the dual function of traveling actors and healers’: ‘Actor and purger in one – two sides of the same mask. All workers in the industry of dissimulation and of its opposite: simulation’ (125). On Jonson and purging, see, for example, James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poet’s War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 33–5. On catharsis and the body, see Andrew Ford, ‘Katharsis: the Ancient Problem’, in Performance & Performativity, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 109–32. 216. Thomas Dekker, The Gull’s Hornbook (London, 1609), in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV, 367; my emphasis. 217. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), 27. 218. Anthony Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theatres (London, 1580), in Chambers,The Elizabethan Stage, IV, 211, 209. 219. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 2b (‘To the Christian Reader’), 2. See also J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 220. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge 1997), v, iii; and compare Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 148–50. 221. My thanks (again) to Anita Sokolsky for helping me with this formulation. 222. We might here add that the location of the theatres in the late sixteenth century in the transitional space of the Liberties of London – ‘an ambiguous territory that was at once internal and external to the city’ – must have contributed to its equivocal relation to increasingly authoritarian ideas of embodiment; it was a position that allowed the taking of certain liberties with the enclosed body – a position which, as Stephen Mullaney has argued, encouraged ‘commentary upon and even contradiction of [    ] the body politic itself’. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: Licence, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 21, ix. 223. The former, as Weimann points out, ‘dominated by a symbolic use of theatrical space as, for example, a house, a court, a chamber, and so forth’, the latter associated with the stage itself, ‘an open stage gestus’. Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169. See also his Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 224. Weimann, Author’s Pen, 124. 225. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Prologue, 1, in The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Leo Kirschbaum (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1962). 226. John Marston, Histriomastix, Or The Player Whip’t (London, 1598/99), D4r. 227. For a more extended discussion of this move towards closed theatrical spaces, see my ‘Homo Clausus at the Theatre’, 174–6. On the way Shakespeare’s company’s move to the interior spaces of the Blackfriars Theatre mirrored an interest in claustrophobia in, especially, The Tempest, see Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 202–9. 228. Weimann, Author’s Pen, 132–3, 52.

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192 Notes

229. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armaggedon (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997), 197. 230. Valerie Traub writes: ‘Prince Hal’s subjectivity is constituted, first, in his relation to Falstaff, whose somatic iconography metonymically positions him as the fantasized pre-oedipal maternal, against whom Hal must differentiate’ (Desire and Anxiety, 53); she goes on to call Hal’s disavowal of Falstaff an ‘exorcism’ of the maternal (58). 231. Shakespeare uses the word twice elsewhere: ‘the schools, / Embowel’d of their doctrine    ’ (All’s Well, 1.3.236); and ‘makes his trough in your emboweled bosoms’ (Richard III, 5.2.10). 232. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 49. 233. Berger, Making Trifles, 142. Compare Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 47, on Henry’s ‘displacing the origins of disease from inside to outside the English body politic’, and, more generally, on the complicity between ‘the elaboration of an external threat’ and ‘the erasure of domestic conflict’ resulting in ‘the locus of social conflict [being] symbolically (if not actually) displaced from inside the body to its boundaries and vulnerable apertures’ (13). 234. Hal’s words at the end of 2Henry IV, upon banishing Falstaff, are telling with regard to the kinds of things power needs to repress: ‘I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane, / But, being awak’d, I do despise my dream’ (5.5.50). As we have seen, dreams and entrails are often linked in the imagination. 235. Montaigne, Essayes, 3:386. 236. See Berger, Making Trifles, 300–21; Hanson, Discovering the Subject, 66–72; Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (London: Routledge, 1992), 86–102; and Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 156–77, on bodily and other (im)permeabilities in Measure for Measure. 237. Neill, Issues of Death, 156. 238. See Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 182–97; on Prospero’s subjugation-through-pain, see 185; on the sense of Prospero’s being ‘inescapably trapped in his own body’, and the way the play ‘draws an analogy between the island and the human body as material spaces within which human subjects are confined’, see 197. 239. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 368. 240. Any such chronology must necessarily be conjectural. Current scholarship dates Troilus and Cressida at 1601–02, Hamlet at 1600 (or 1601). 241. On the way the ‘potential space’ of the theatre can overcome the inside–outside divide, see especially André Green, ‘The Psycho-analytical Reading of Tragedy’, in Maud Ellmann (ed.), Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 39–55, esp. 44. 242. See Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 190–201, on the interaction of these two different ideas of the landscape in The Tempest. 243. Gaston Bachelard’s, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994) can be conceived of as an extended argument against a Lear-like metaphysics of being ‘cast out into the world’ – one that emphasises, even values, ‘the far horizon before the resting-place’ (5); Bachelard goes on to catalogue the nearly endless variations of interior, inhabitable space grasped by the human imagination. 244. My understanding of the ‘irreligiousness’ of Shakespeare’s plays is indebted to C.L. Barber’s interpretation of their ‘post-Christian’ nature (see especially his ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness’, in

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Notes to Chapter 1 193

Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 188–202), and to Stanley Cavell’s view that ‘religion is Shakespeare’s pervasive, hence invisible, business’ (Disowning Knowledge, 218, see also 126–7 and 218). Huston Diehl (in Staging Reform), Stephen Greenblatt (in ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128, and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)), among others, have taken up the question of Shakespeare’s theatre’s engagement with Reformation and CounterReformation theological issues. 245. Donne, The Sermons, III: 236–7. 246. See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 3, on his ‘intuition that the advent of skepticism as manifested in Descartes’ Meditations is already in full existence in Shakespeare’; Cavell’s book is in good part a following-up of this intuition. On Descartes’ relation to early modern embodiment, see also Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 52–69. 247. Meditations, iii, 113. All further references to Descartes are taken from the Sutcliffe translation and will be referred to in parentheses in the text.

2

The gastric epic: Troilus and Cressida 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1967), 241. 2. The phrase is taken from the Prefatory Epistle attached to the play’s Quarto in the so-called second ‘state’. All quotations from Troilus and Cressida are from the Arden edition of the play, ed. David Bevington (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998). 3. J.S.P. Tatlock, ‘The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood’, PMLA 30 (December 1915), 676–8; cited in Robert Kimbrough, Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and its Setting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 27. Kimbrough (25–46) and Geoffrey Bullough (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), VI: 83–221) give a good sense of how many competing versions of the legend were in circulation at the time. James P. Bednarz has interestingly re-evaluated Troilus and Cressida in the context of the Poet’s War of 1599–1601, showing how the play worked in relation to the ongoing stage-quarrel between Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston and Dekker: see Shakespeare and the Poet’s War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 4. The notion of staging these heroes, in the inescapably embodied medium of the theatre, must have brought into sharp focus the disjunction between the rhetorical (and disembodied) and the mimetic (and corporeal). ‘I am half inclined’, wrote Coleridge about the play, ‘to believe that Shakespeare’s main object, or shall I rather say, that his ruling impulse, was [    ] to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama.’ Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), 248–9. On this topic, see especially Harry Berger’s ‘Text vs. Performance’, Genre 15 (1982), 49–79; and his Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also Anthony B. Dawson’s comment in his introduction to his

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194 Notes

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

recent edition of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): ‘The theatrical presence of the characters offsets their rhetorical, spectral unreality. The actor, as in any play, gives flesh to the role; but here the emphasis on the literary and belated lends special significance to the actorly’ (35). Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 326. Elizabeth Freund, ‘ “Ariachne’s Broken Woof”: the Rhetoric of Citationality in Troilus and Cressida’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartmann (New York: Methuen, 1985), 19–36, 21. Linda Charnes’s ‘ “So Unsecret to Ourselves”: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 4 (Winter 1989), 413–40 similarly stresses issues of citationality in the play. On ‘matter’ as bodily substance – and, more specifically, pus – see Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, 3rd edn (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), I: 700–1; Elaine Scarry, Introduction to Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), xxii; and Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–4, 88–106. See Christopher Pye, The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 128 and n.50. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 514 (III.ix.33.1). Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 83. Compare Elaine Scarry’s description of Donne’s efforts as a ‘restoration of voice to the site of origin’ in the ‘physical interior’ (‘But yet the Body is his Book’, in Literature and the Body, ed. Scarry, 83). S.L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London: Staples Press, 1944), 98; L.C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and an Approach to Hamlet (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 58. Compare R.J. Kaufmann’s comments, in ‘Ceremonies for Chaos: the Status of Troilus and Cressida’, ELH 32, no. 2 ( June, 1965), 139–59, 145. Dawson, Introduction to the Cambridge edn. of Troilus and Cressida, 22. The phrase ‘physiologist of morals’ is taken from Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, Nietzsche’s Dance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 17. Nietzsche himself refers to his ‘physiological turn of mind’ in a letter to Franz Overbeck (received 11 February 1883): Nietzsche: a Self-Portrait from His Letters, ed. and trans. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 70–1. On Nietzsche’s physiological brand of philosophy, see especially Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: the Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 201–38; Daniel R. Ahern, Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995), 1–50; Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Nietzsche and the Stomach for Knowledge’, in Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (London: Routledge, 1993), 49–70, and her Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 115–37; and Martin Heidegger’s comments on ‘Nietzsche’s “Biological” Interpretation of Knowledge’, in Nietzsche, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Joan Stambaugh, D.F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982–87), III: 101–10. On Nietzsche’s foregrounding of physiology in interpreting psychology, see especially Timothy Hampton, ‘Strange Alteration: Physiology and Psychology from

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Notes to Chapter 2 195

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

Galen to Rabelais’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 272–93, esp. 274–5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 289 (sec. 532); emphasis in the original. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 347–8 (sec. 659). Ibid. See Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 126–63. Bradshaw’s excellent chapter on the play addresses primarily questions of the construction of principles of value; my project shares with his several basic assumptions about the play. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 235. Ibid., 234. This idealised, closed, opaque corporeal model has been described by Mikhail Bakhtin as the ‘classical’ body, in contrast with the open, flowing, ‘grotesque’ body which foregrounds its orifices and protuberances; perhaps we could add a third model to this binary – an abject body whose interior organs and physiology are represented. For while the bodies in Troilus and Cressida are grotesque, it is not so much their orificial or protuberant status that makes them so, as their ongoing internal ebb and flow, the diseased status of their visceral interiors. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), esp. 18–30. Blondel, Nietzsche, 220. Nietzsche, Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), VII: 2, 25 (8), emphasis in the original; cited in Blondel, Nietzsche, 220. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: a Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 47–8. Georges Bataille, Essential Writings, ed. M. Richardson (London: Sage Publications, 1988), 15 (from ‘Le gros orteil’, Oeuvres Complètes, I: 203). Nietzsche, Will to Power, sec. 619. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (in The Portable Nietzsche, 465); emphasis in the original. ‘By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they [philosophers] betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man.’ The passage relates to Socrates, whom Nietzsche describes as ‘the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the “noble”.’ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 137–9 (section 212). Walter Ong, the Presence of the Word, 117–18; see also his Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982). Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense’, The Portable Nietzsche, 44. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 74–6 (sec. 119). Blondel brilliantly elucidates this doubleness, through the use of the concept of metaphor, in Nietzsche, 201–38. See also Lynn Enterline, ‘Afterword’, in

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196 Notes

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

Elizabeth D. Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 250. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 224. Parker stresses the association of bodily swelling with rhetorical tumidity in the play (220–8). Eric Mallin, ‘Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida’, Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 145–79, 168. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 82. Traub points out the way in which bawdy exchange works as a ‘consistent materialization of the body’ (ibid.). Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 230. Compare Matthew Greenfield’s comment, in ‘Undoing National Identity: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’ (unpublished paper presented at the Shakespeare Association of America, March 1995), 5: ‘The work of Troilus and Cressida is not to provide England or Elizabeth with a genealogy but rather to undo the genealogies created by other myth-makers.’ See also Greenfield’s essay, ‘Fragments of Nationalism in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 no. 2 (Summer 2000), 181–200. In Troilus and Cressida, wrote Tucker Brooke, Shakespeare was ‘however subconsciously, anatomizing the England of the dying Elizabeth’: Yale Review, n.s. xvii (1928), 576–7; cited in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 85. The play is deeply interested in origins of various kinds – of Britain, of ideals, of mythological heroes, of desire as such. Sir Francis Bacon draws a parallel between cannibalism and an antagonistic relation between past and present: ‘It seemeth the children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other; while antiquity envieth there should be new additions.’ Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W.A. Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 38. Parker describes Troilus and Cressida’s continually frustrated promise of an ending or issue, instead of which the play offers ‘a protracted dilation that is finally only a bloated middle’ (Shakespeare from the Margins, 226). Raymond Carver’s description of The Iliad, from ‘My Crow’ (see the London Review of Books, 25: 23). These quotations are from Simone Weil’s description of Homer’s epic in The Iliad or, The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill, n.d.), 6, 33. Compare Sheila Murnaghan, ‘Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy’, Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (Spring 1988), 23–43: ‘No reader of the Iliad fails to be impressed by the poem’s vivid accounts of the body materializing as it is severed from the animating psyche, or spirit’ (24). For the etymology, see the OED, s.v. ‘Ileum’, ‘Ilion’, and ‘Ilium’, and A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 1959), 308; for the anatomical data, see for example Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (London, 1548; rptd. by the Early English Text Society, London, 1888), 65. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert David, 14 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939), 1: 109. Compare Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 351n.74: ‘the prologue to Troilus is clearly punning on both meanings of digested, as rhetorically “arranged, disposed, distributed” and as digested in the alimentary sense’. Compare Pericles, 1.3.91–2: ‘like the Trojan horse was stuffed within / With bloody veins expecting overthrow’.

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Notes to Chapter 2 197

45. On the symbolic significance of the Trojan horse, see Robert Durling, ‘Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell’, in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 61–93, especially 74. Compare the following heavily ironic lines from John Taylor’s poem ‘Iniurious death’ (from All the Workes (London, 1630)): ‘Heere lyes the Horse, whose four foote Progeny / Did trot in blood before the walls of Troy: / Yea in the bowels of the Greekes perdye, /And on his brest this Motto, Par ma foy’ (lines 60–3). 46. Troy and the belly are linked in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island (ed. Henry Headley (London: Burton and Briggs, 1816), 20), where the ‘vale’ of the belly is described as ‘A work more curious than which poets feign / Neptune and Phoebus built, and pulled down again [that is, Troy].’ 47. Lucian of Samosata, Hermotimus, or Concerning the Sects, trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press/Heinemann, 1959), 297–9. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Thersites is likely to have been influenced by Homeric descriptions of Hephaestus. 48. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. William Aldis Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), Book II, Part xxiii, §14, 228–9; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 56. Burton elsewhere speaks of Democritus as a kind of anatomist, seeking ‘the seat of this black bile, or melancholy, whence it proceeds, and how it was engendered in men’s bodies’ (15). See also Thomas Lodge’s A Fig for Momus (1595), and Thomas Tomkis’s academic drama Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (London, 1607; ed. John Farmer (Amersham: Tudor Facsimile Reprints, 1913)), in which a character (Tactus) is transformed to glass: ‘my Breast was like a window, / Through which I plainely did perceive my heart: / In whose two Concaves I discernd my thoughts, / Confus’dly lodged in great multitudes’ (sig. B3), cited in Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 159–86, 175. 49. On the familiarity of Lucian to Elizabethan readers, see Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. 82–96. On Troilus and Cressida as a Pyrrhonist play, see especially Robert B. Pierce, ‘Shakespeare and the Ten Modes of Scepticism’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), 145–58, 151–2. 50. At 1.2.110 (‘she’s a merry Greek indeed’) and 4.4.55 (‘A woeful Cressid’ mongst the merry Greeks’). Compare Troilus’ comment, ‘Were it a casque compos’d by Vulcan’s [that is, Hephaestus’] skill, / My sword should bite it’ (5.2.169–70). 51. On an anal form of the corporeal impulse of satire, see Bruce Boehrer ‘The Privy and its Double: Scatology and Satire in Shakespeare’s Theatre’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’ Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 69–88. 52. Compare Thersites’ (typically somatising) answer to Patroclus’ ‘Who keeps the tent now?’: ‘The surgeon’s box or the patient’s wound’ (5.1.10–11). 53. Jean Starobinski, ‘The Inside and the Outside’, The Hudson Review 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 336; the quotation from the Iliad is from Book IX, 312–13, in the A.T. Murray translation (Loeb Classical Library), slightly modified by Starobinski. 54. Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 86; Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1982), 1–22. Ruth Padel, In and Out of the

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198 Notes

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also Murnaghan, ‘Body and Voice’, esp. 23–4, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Dim Body, Dazzling Body’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 18–47, esp. 29–30. Throughout this brief discussion of satire, I generalise about a wide field of material. The specific examples, which I take to be representative of the genre, can no more than gesture towards this field. For more on early modern English satire, see especially Mary Claire Randolph, ‘The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory’, Studies in Philology 38, no. 2 (1941), 125–57; O.J. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (London, 1943); and Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). On Troilus and Cressida as a condemnation of a diseased national community, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Greenfield, ‘Fragments of Nationalism’. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 41 and 104. The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 83. John Marston, Proemium in librum primum, in The Works of John Marston, ed. A.H. Bullen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887). John Marston, The Scourge of Villanie (1598), in The Works, ed. Bullen, Satyre II (sig. C3); Marston, Antonio and Mellida, Part One (3.2.13–14), in Bullen, ed., 1: 50. Compare Marston’s description of the satirist as a kind of barber-surgeon, lancing the sores of the world: ‘Infectious blood, yee gouty humours quake, / Whilst my sharp razor doth incision make’ (in Bullen, ed., 3: 339). ‘The satyrical body is disguised or deceptive’, writes Colin Forshaw; ‘the Satyrist purging “this Augean oxstale from foule sin” declares himself the last remaining exemplar of bodily integrity’. Colin Forshaw, ‘ “All protean forms in venery”: the Textual and Apparitional Body in John Marston’s Verse Satires’, in The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Darryll Grantly and Nina Taunton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 176. Bednarz argues that Troilus and Cressida was meant to be ‘Shakespeare’s purge of Jonson’ – see Chapter 1 of Shakespeare and the Poet’s War, esp. 32–35. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 68. Direct injury is usually figured either as biting or as scourging; but even in the latter case, the aim, as often as not, is to get beneath the skin: ‘Each blow doth leave / A lasting scar, that with a poison eats / Into the marrow’ (Thomas Randolph, The Muses’ Looking Glass, cited in Randolph, ‘Renaissance Satiric Theory’, 150). Kernan writes that ‘gross, sodden, rotting matter is the substance of the satiric scene’ (The Cankered Muse, 11). Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I: 337–8. Randolph, ‘Renaissance Satiric Theory’, 153. The combination of impulses delineated here hints at what we might think of as a strongly pre-Oedipal component to the satirist’s aggression; Melanie Klein describes the first year of an infant’s life as full of ‘sadistic impulses directed, not only against its mother’s breast, but also against the inside of her body: scooping it out, devouring the contents, destroying it by every means which sadism can suggest’; so, too, the projective mechanisms so crucial to this stage of life are central to the operation of satire. The satirist’s oral sadism can be thought of, from this perspective, as an exacerbated version of this primary infantile position. (The quotation is from Klein’s ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume I: Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 282.)

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Notes to Chapter 2 199

64. Marston, The Scourge of Villanie, Satyre II (‘Difficile est Satyram non scribere’); Satyre VIII ; Burton, Anatomy, 339 (emphasis in the original.) 65. The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), III: 329. ‘Byting’ comes from the title of Joseph Hall’s first collection, ‘Of Byting Satyrs’. 66. Swift’s A Modest Proposal is English literature’s most obvious example of the satiric urge to eat people. 67. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 260–1. Despite the popular Elizabethan notion that the word ‘satire’ came from the Greek ‘Satyr’, the (correct) Latin etymology (satura) was not unknown at the time. See, for example, Thomas Drant, A Medecinable Morall (London, 1566), sig. A2r (cited in Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: a Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 217), where the etymology of ‘satire’ is traced to both the Greek and the Latin sources, as well as to the Arabic for a glaive (that is, a lance or spear). See also The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C.T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 790. 68. Petronius Arbiter, The Satyricon, trans. William Arrowsmith (New York: Meridian Classics, 1959), 164. On this work’s ‘intestinal view of reality’, see Victoria Rimmel, Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Rimmel argues that Petronius’ work is centrally about the relations between corporeal insides and outsides, and that he uses the metaphor of the literary text as body throughout. 69. See in particular Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 320–4. 70. There are, of course, images which don’t fit into this trajectory (for example, 2.2.70–1), which is impressionistic rather than rigorous. 71. The purge here is not a healthful cathartic one, but one closer to that imagined in Jonson’s Poetaster – of a vomiting-forth. 72. On the way Troilus and Cressida ‘work[s] to extend the logic of the play from the relations among characters to the relations between characters and audience’, see Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Troilus and Cressida: the Observer as Basilisk’, in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 130–46, 141. See also Michael Neill, Issues of Death, 27–8, on the play’s degradation of theatre as contaminating pestilence. 73. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Works of Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), I: 48. 74. Kenneth Palmer calls this an ‘image [    ] of cannibalism as the last consequence of disorder’ (Arden2, 130 n.); Traub speaks of the play’s imagery of ‘oral selfdestruction’ (Desire and Anxiety, 85). 75. Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art, 343–4. Kimbrough (Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus’, 39) adds that ‘an Elizabethan audience would have recognized [Thersites] as a walking, talking figure of speech’. Shakespeare seems to have associated Thersites less with language than with the body: ‘Thersites’ body is as good as Ajax’ / When neither are alive’ (Cymbeline, 4.2.252–3). Compare Burton’s comment (in The Anatomy of Melancholy, 39) that all men ‘are in brief, as disordered in their minds, as Thersites was in his body’. 76. George Chapman, Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (1598), 2.206. 77. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987), 89.

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200 Notes

78. James O’Rourke, ‘Love and Sex in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 142–3. The phrase, according to the Arden editor, originally comes from Cornelius Agrippa. Interestingly (in light of the following), it is used by Burton side by side with a reference to cannibalism: ‘To see a man weare his breines in his belly, his guts in his head, [    ] or, as those Anthropophagi, to eat one another’ (Anatomy, 53). Nietzsche, in a different vein, speaks of ‘lov[ing] him who has a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the entrails of his heart, but his heart drives him to go under’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 16). 79. On ‘fusty’ as participating in both the rhetorical/bombastic and the alimentary registers, see Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 351 n.74. 80. Is, for instance, ‘the open ulcer of [Troilus’] heart’ (1.1.53) the source or the result of his love for Cressida? 81. Catherine Belsey, ‘Desire’s Excess: Edward II, Troilus and Cressida, Othello’, in Susan Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 1992), 84–102, 93. Carol Cook’s ‘Unbodied Figures of Desire’ (Theatre Journal 38, no. 1 (March 1986), 34–52) relates desire not so much to the subject’s body in the play as to its objects’ corporeality. 82. Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, VIII: 1, 2 (151); cited in Blondel, Nietzsche, 219. Even more than usual in Shakespeare, the word ‘spirit’ in Troilus and Cressida is used with markedly corporeal overtones – that is, referring to the vital substance that, according to Renaissance medical theory, inhabits the body’s vessels. See especially the Prologue’s ‘expectation, tickling skittish spirits’ (20); Troilus’ ‘spirit of sense’ (1.1.58), echoed by Achilles’ ‘most pure spirit of sense’ (3.3.106); Ulysses’ ‘her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive in her body’ (4.5.56–7); and Achilles’ ‘That I may give the local wound a name, / And make distinct the very breach whereout / Hector’s great spirit flew’ (4.5.244–6). Bradshaw calls spirit ‘a word to watch in this play’; the play, he says, ‘release[s] the pejorative senses the word spirit may have. These are many, and include the clinical senses in humors psychology’ (Shakespeare’s Scepticism, 130). On the role of the ‘spirits’ in humoral theory, see especially Gail Kern Paster, ‘Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997). On premodern conceptions of ‘spirit’ as a vapour or liquid inhabiting the body (and as ‘seed’), see Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 480–5. 83. The Will to Power, I: 266; cited in Blondel, Nietzsche, 218. 84. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 123 (III: 14). 85. Charnes’s account of these complex circulations in the play is ingenious: ‘We might posit the circuit thus: possession of Helen generates desire for war, desire for war generates desire for Helen, desire for Helen generates mimetic desire, mimetic desire generates competitive identification between Greek and Trojan men, competitive identification generates homoerotic aggression, homoerotic aggression generates desire for more war, and finally, desire for more war reproduces desire for Helen’ (‘Notorious Identity’, 437). 86. Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 84. 87. Joel Fineman, ‘Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 70–109, 100. 88. See p. 63 above. 89. Cook, ‘Unbodied Figures’, 40.

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Notes to Chapter 2 201

90. Though Cressida has been sometimes taken to have tragic aspects in the latter part of the play (see note 112). 91. Charnes, ‘Notorious Identity’, 417. See Colie’s comment (Shakespeare’s Living Art, 326) about the characters ‘refusing altogether to conform to the conventions of psychological illusionism’; and compare Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, 102. 92. Repeatedly throughout the play, characters ask each other for definitions of their selves: ‘Tell me [    ] What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we’ (1.1.94–5); ‘Then tell me, I pray thee, what’s thyself?’ (2.3.45); ‘Do you know a man if you see him?’ (1.2.63); 93. Greenfield, ‘Undoing National Identity’, 10; the reference is to Girard’s ‘The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, 188–209. 94. Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, 15. 95. Jonson’s and Chapman’s ‘humours’ comedies attribute particular traits to characters in ostensible relation to an imbalance of their internal humours, the apparent aim being a correction of the audience’s humoral condition. Shakespeare satirises the entire fashion for humours comedy, both in, for example, Corporal Nym’s mechanical refrain ‘That’s the humour of it’ and in Troilus and Cressida. Here, it is not Shakespeare’s aim to re-balance the humours of his audience; instead, this aspiration is attributed to the Greeks – especially Ulysses, who wants to ‘physic the great Myrmidon’ (1.3.379), and Ajax, who promises to ‘let his [Achilles’] humorous blood’ (2.3.209). Purgation or bloodletting is (more or less) what the Greek plot amounts to. 96. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862–1871, vol. 1, ed. H. Mondor and L.J. Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 207, cited in Yves Bonnefoy, Shakespeare and the French Poet, ed. John Naughton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 173. 97. Karl Kraus, In These Great Times (Montreal, Quebec: Engendra Press, 1976), 71. 98. Whetstone, Rocke of Regard (1576), cited in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, VI: 97; Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, translated by John Florio, 3 vols (London, 1603; rpt. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1910), 2: 485 (‘Of the worthiest and most excellent men’); Burton, Anatomy, 11. Emphasis added in all three quotations. 99. Burton, Anatomy, 339. Emphasis added except for the last phrase, which is italicised in the original. Perhaps we should think here of Shakespeare as attempting to displace his own anxieties about assimilating or digesting these ‘massively overdetermined’ characters onto his audience; compare Freund, ‘Ariachne’, 21: ‘Homer and Chaucer are sufficiently rich fare to daunt the digestion of even as voracious a literary imagination as Shakespeare’s; and one cannot overlook the rancid flavor of o’ereaten fragments, scraps and greasy relics dominating a text which abounds in food imagery.’ 100. One way of understanding this turn is as a return to a pre-verbal state – to infantia (speechlessness) – as a concomitant of the infantile oral sadism and projective mechanisms described above in relation to satire. Compare Melanie Klein’s view of infantile sadism (note 62 above). 101. Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Sir Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. (New York: Garrett Press, 1968), 283. 102. Gary Shapiro’s characterisation of Montaigne, in ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Corpus of Philosophy’, in Thinking Bodies, ed. Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 52–62, 60. On

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202 Notes

103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

111.

112.

113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118.

Montaigne’s scepticism, see esp. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 115–51. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 72. Further citations are bracketed in the text. My understanding of Montaigne’s essay is indebted to de Certeau’s powerful reading of it. Montaigne, Essayes, 1: 224 (‘Of the Caniballes’). Montaigne, Essayes, 2: 341 (‘Of Glory’). C.C. Barfoot, ‘Troilus and Cressida: “Praise us as we are tasted”’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no.1 (Spring, 1988), 45–57, 55. Montaigne, Essayes, I: 227 (‘Of the Caniballes’). A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Graham Storey (London and New York: Longman, 1961), 151. The Iliad, III: 148; Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, VI: 194. It is perhaps not surprising to find that the only character to escape his predetermined citational identity is Antenor, the figure of pure mimesis. I thank Jeff Masten for this suggestion. Troilus and Cressida, as we have seen, includes several such denominative jokes – ‘Ilium’ and ‘Ilion’, ‘the Matter of Troy’, ‘Greece’ and ‘grease’, the scatological play with the name ‘Ajax’ (= a jakes or privy), and the byplay with the names of Troilus, Cressida, and especially Pandarus, all come to mind. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essaies de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey, 3 vols (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1923), 3: 398. (Florio’s slight mistranslation reads: ‘trusty and assured silence’, The Essayes, 3: 553.) Silence is not, however, invariably an honourable way out of the degradation of language in Troilus and Cressida. Ajax’s silent treatment of his compatriots in Act III is held up to merciless ridicule by Thersites: ‘Why, a stalks up and down like a peacock, a stride and a stand; ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to set down her reckoning; bites his lip with a politic regard [    ] He’s grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster. [    ] Why, he’ll answer nobody: he professes not answering; speaking is for beggars’ (3.3.250–68): clearly, not all ‘languagelessness’ stems from an ethic of silence. Cressida too attempts to make a virtue of silence; but the play, I think, differentiates between a silence that reveals the failure of words and a silence that comes from a failure of character. Charnes, ‘Notorious Identity’, 429. Silence in Shakespeare is both the ultimate sceptical position (as in Iago’s vow of silence at the end of Othello) and the ultimate anti-sceptical one. Traub portrays Cressida as ‘too open’ (Desire and Anxiety, 81). See Dawson, Introduction to Cambridge edn., 31. Dawson adds: ‘[Cressida] is unfaithful, and in being so, she both exemplifies the crisis of fidelity that the play constantly exposes and establishes herself as something of a tragic figure’. Montaigne, Essayes, 2: 145 (‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’). The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding (London, 1861), 5:31. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 311 (‘silence’ is emphasised in the original). The quote is from Twilight of the Idols, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’ (The Portable Nietzsche, 556).

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204 Notes

The inward man: Hamlet

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 200 (§167). 2. Nietzsche, Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), VII: 2, 25 (8), emphasis in the original; cited in Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: the Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 220. 3. Thomas Lodge, Wit’s Misery (London, 1596), 56; cited in the Introduction to the Arden edition of Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1982). All quotations from the play are from this edition. 4. The proverbial oyster-wife (or oyster-wench) is effectively the precise inverse of that Renaissance feminine ideal – chaste, silent, at home – incisively discussed by Peter Stallybrass in ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); one could say of the oyster-wife that what she stereotypically does is ‘like a whore, unpack [the] heart with words’ (2.2.581). On oysters and sexuality in the Renaissance, see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespeare and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1994), sv. ‘oyster’ (vol. 2, 982–3). On ‘fishmonger’, see the long note in Jenkins (ed.), 464–6. The citation from Richard II is from 1.4.31. 5. This chapter differs significantly from earlier versions published as ‘Hamlet, Nietzsche, and Visceral Knowledge’, in The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment, ed. Michael O’Donovan-Anderson (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 93-110 and ‘Hamlet’s Entrails’, in Strands Afar Remote: Israeli Perspectives on Shakespeare, ed. Avraham Oz (Delaware: Associated University Presses, 1998), 177–203. Several critics have recently discussed Hamlet in terms of the play’s preoccupation with insides and outsides. Prominent amongst these are Janet Adelman, who reads the play in terms of ideas of gendered/sexualised contamination (Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (London: Routledge, 1992)); Katharine Eisaman Maus, (Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)), who opens her book with a meditation on Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’ speech in terms of the early modern obsession with an ‘inwardness topos’; and Michael Neill, who interprets the anatomising impulses of the play as a kind of moralisation of death (Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)). Perhaps closest to the particular matters I discuss in this chapter is Mary Thomas Crane (Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 116–55), who discusses the play’s ‘organization around poles of inside and outside’, arguing that ‘Hamlet centers around two insistent questions: what do human subjects have within? And how is that inner self related to external action in the world?’ (124). Crane’s cognitive take on the play, however, using the issue of ‘external action’ as a fulcrum of interpretation, takes her in very different directions from my reading. Hamlet has been discussed often enough in terms of the play’s Montaignean scepticism, epitomised in Hamlet’s statement that ‘there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’. See in particular A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Graham Storey (Harlow: Longman, 1989), 171–88, and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). My interests lie less in this form of Pyrrhonist value-scepticism than in the issues discussed in Chapter 1 – centring on embodied fantasies of knowing and acknowledging both self and other.

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3

6. Cited in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean M. O’Meara (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 332. In That Shakespehearean Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Routledge, 2005), 43–4, Terence Hawkes relates A.C. Bradley’s attempts ‘to penetrate silent and unnameable dimensions thought to lie beyond the surfaces’ of Hamlet with the notion of a sea shell – a metaphor, as he takes it, for the process of interpreting through one’s own biased perspectives, in the process attempting to overcome the inevitable opacities of the text (Hawkes’s metaphor is derived from Bradley’s own poem, ‘The Sea Shell’ – Macmillan’s Magazine, 1868). 7. Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Tragic Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 88. 8. Stanley Cavell, ‘Hamlet’s Burden of Proof’, in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 179–91, 186 (emphasis in the original). 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, the latter trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 233 (emphasis in the original). On Hamlet’s Nietzschean self-overcoming, see Peter Holbrook, ‘Nietzsche’s Hamlet’, Shakespeare Survey 50 (ed. Stanley Wells; Cambridge University Press, 1997), 171–86. 10. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann, sect. 7. (p. 60). 11. Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), 140; emphasis in the original. 12. G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Embassy of Death: an Essay on Hamlet’, in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1949), 25. 13. ‘Hamlet’, in The Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 48. 14. The word ‘something’ is used more often in Hamlet than in any other Shakespeare play with the exception of The Winter’s Tale. It is set in relation to the many uses of ‘thing’ (‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’) and ‘nothing’ (‘nothing, my Lord’): ‘The King is a thing [    ] of nothing’ (4.2.27–9). 15. Neill, Issues of Death, 138. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 137–9 (section 212). 17. That the state can be more or less literally diseased is a truism of the period. Burton, for example, writes that ‘Kingdoms, provinces, and politick bodies are likewise sensible to this disease. [    ] As in human bodies there be divers alterations proceeding from humours, so there be many diseases in a commonwealth, which do as diversely happen from several distempers’ (Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1927), 65; emphasis in the original). Holinshed similarly writes of ‘the apostume of the realm, which when it breaketh inwardly, putteth the state in great danger of recovery’ (Chronicles, 1587. iii. 1054; cited in Arden, 528). Compare Hamlet’s extended disquisition on Danish drunkenness (1.4.20–36). Among the most prominent critics who have noted this strand of disease imagery are Caroline F.E. Spurgeon (Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 133–4, 316–19) and Wolfgang Clemen (The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (London: Methuen, 1977), 112–18). Claudius has spoken of himself as ‘the owner of a foul disease, [who,] / To keep it from divulging, let it feed / Even on the pith of life’ (4.1.21–3) and of the raging of ‘the hectic [= fever] in my blood’ (4.3.69); Hamlet calls his uncle ‘this canker of our nature’ (5.2.69). 18. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Routledge, 1987), 131.

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Notes to Chapter 3 205

19. ‘Within’, rather oddly, is capitalised in the Folio; the opacity here extends to the grammar – the context allows the word to be taken as either an adverb or a preposition. 20. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 1. 21. Compare Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 125. 22. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 36. 23. A ‘tent’ is an instrument for examining or cleansing a wound. ‘The quick’ is ‘the tender or sensitive flesh in any part of the body’ or ‘the tender part of a sore or wound’ (OED). 24. I cite the Folio’s ‘pith’ rather than the Second Quarto’s ‘pitch’: this is supported by the Players’ Quartos of 1676, 1683, 1695, and 1703; see G.R. Hibbard’s note in the Oxford edition. Compare also Claudius’ reference to ‘the pith of life’ (4.1.21–3). 25. Macbeth speaks of his wish ‘to cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff’ (Macbeth, 5.3.44); Hero describes her friend: ‘Nature never framed a woman’s heart / Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice’ (Ado, 3.1.49–50); Arcite cannot find ‘in / The circuit of my breast any gross stuff’ (TNK, 3.1.47–8). In Pericles the Trojan horse is spoken of as being ‘stuffed within / With bloody veins expecting overthrow’ (1.4.93-4). Falstaff, whose viscerality I discuss in Chapter 1, is described as ‘that stuff’d cloak-bag of guts’ (1Henry IV, 2.4.451), which, in this context, might provoke thoughts about the pronunciation of his name (‘Full-stuff’?). Speculations of an even less secure nature are provoked in relation to the connections between dreams and entrails in Prospero’s meditation upon our being made of ‘such stuff / as dreams are made on’ (Tempest, 4.1.156). 26. As in Troilus and Cressida – and as has been noticed many times – the word ‘matter’ is played with over and over in Hamlet; Margaret Ferguson comments: ‘the relation between matter and spirit, matter and art, matter and anything that is “no matter”, is altogether questionable for Hamlet’. ‘Hamlet: Letters and Spirits’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), 295. 27. Marsilius Ficinus, De vita triplici I (1482), 4 (Opera, Basilae, 1576, p. 496), cited in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 153 n.38; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 1, sec. 2, Memb. 5, Subs. 1; p. 319. On Hamlet’s engagement with a deeply materialist ecology of the passions, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearian Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 25–60. 28. Benjamin, Origin, 146. (Benjamin later (157–8) speaks of Hamlet as a supreme example of the baroque Trauerspiel.) 29. See, for example, Burton, Anatomy, 339. Gertrude sees within herself ‘such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct’ (3.4.90–1); Claudius speaks of his ‘bosom black as death’ (3.3.67). Hamlet’s black clothes are, of course, the standard melancholy apparel in the Renaissance; see, for example, Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London: Routledge, 1969), 35–7. 30. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 23. Compare Hamlet’s citation of the ‘dread and black complexion’ (2.2.451) of ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ – ‘complexion’ here mainly referring to colour, appearance, rather than, as often in the period, internal admixture of humours. 31. John Hunt, ‘A Thing of Nothing: the Catastrophic Body in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 27–44, 27. Though Hunt does see an eventual redemption for

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206 Notes

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

bodily experience in the play, in his view Hamlet’s overwhelming attitude is one of ‘disdainful, alienated contempt’ for the ‘corrupt and corrupting’ flesh (37). Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 250n.14. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 40. Compare Hunt’s characterisation of Hamlet as wishing ‘to remove himself from the compromising infection of corporeality’ (‘A Thing of Nothing’, 38). Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 243. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 250n.14. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, in Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990), 859; cited in Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between the Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 34. See Neill, Issues of Death, 151 on ‘purse’ in Othello; and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987), 95: ‘In the passage of those enigmatic “close dilations” of Othello’s great temptation scene, the description of Iago’s pausing to “contract and purse” his brow, as if he had “shut up” in his “brain / Some horrible conceit” (3.3.114–15) [    ] explicitly echoes the play’s opening figure of a “purse” which can be opened and closed at will, in the context there too of something secret and concealed.’ There are sexual and mercantile overtones to the term – and these too are of interest given the erotic and psycho-economic imagery I discuss below. Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Hawkes, 140; emphasis in the original. ‘Compelled’ here is interesting, implying, as it does, a preference to directing the attention away from the body. Joel Fineman, ‘Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 70–109, 88. Compare, for example, the dynamics of confinement and openness in Measure for Measure – written at around the same period as Hamlet – with its linking of too much liberty and excessively harsh law. Compare Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, or the Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 199: ‘The gates of Hades, the most detestable of all things, not only mark the entry to another world, a forbidden space, but also define a greedy power that forever keeps what it takes, the retentive power par excellence. The man who hides his secret desire, the man whose secret is the passion to possess by barring others from access to his heart, becomes an image of the other world: to the suspicious gaze hidden inwardness is a trope for the kingdom of the dead.’ Elaine Scarry’s description of the corporeal contours of ‘disbelief or doubt’, in The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 202. See for instance Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 3–4. Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, 118. The term ‘inurn’d’ has occasioned some comment – even speculations of textual corruption. An ‘urn’ is of course a container for ashes, and as such seems not to fit with the rest of the passage; it is also sometimes used, though, poetically for ‘grave’ (see Jenkins note in Arden, 452). Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s choice may have been partially influenced by the underlying idea of a sealed container. For example, Maurice Charney, ‘The Imagery of Skin Disease and Sealing’, in Hamlet’s Fictions (New York: Routledge, 1988), 120–30.

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Notes to Chapter 3 207

47. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 27. 48. Hamlet’s characterisation of Horatio as ‘not a pipe for Fortune’s finger / To sound what stop she please’ (3.2.70–1) can be taken as an image of bodily closure, made more explicit later in the same scene: ‘You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery’; ‘ ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?’ (3.2.355–61). 49. Ronald Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1998), 24. Compare Wilhelm Reich’s descriptions of the somatic ‘contactlessness’ that many depressive patients feel: Reich, Character Analysis, trans. Vincent R. Carfango (New York: Touchstone, 1945), 350. 50. W.R. Bion, for instance, depicts ‘the establishment internally of a projectiveidentification-rejecting-object’ as a result of environmental failure: ‘A Theory of Thinking’, in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London: Maresfield Library, 1967), 117. 51. Compare Claudius’ ‘heart with strings of steel, / Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe’ (3.3.70–1): an image of the corporeally split self. 52. Jenkins, Arden edn, 278. Perhaps we can even think of this as something wound round within us, as entrails are, keeping body and soul together. 53. D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1965), 186; Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 30. Compare Ronald Britton’s description of certain patients’ oscillation between ‘thick-skinned’ and ‘thin-skinned’ formations (Belief and Imagination, 24–5). 54. On this crux, see especially Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard’s chapter on Hamlet in After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 55. See John Dover Wilson, What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 309–20; Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 77–112; and 106–8 of Jenkins’s introduction to the Arden edition. 56. Citations (in parentheses in the text) are from Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy, Reprinted Facsimile Text Society edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940; orig. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586). 57. Robert Burton, similarly, speaks of the need ‘to batter the walls of melancholy’ in order to overcome the disease (Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 482). It is tempting, in this context, to say that the title of this famous work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, amounts to an attempt to open something closed. 58. Reich, Character Analysis, esp. 337–54. The quotations are from 346 and 350 respectively. Compare Herbert Rosenfeld’s descriptions of ‘thick-skinned’ and ‘thin-skinned’ types of patients, in Impasse and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1987) (see p. 6 above). 59. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton & Co., 1977), 4. 60. Lacan, ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, 11. 61. Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’, in Écrits, 4. Compare D.W. Winnicott’s use of the concept of mirroring to describe the way a baby gradually recognises elements of itself as they are mirrored in, primarily, the mother’s face; see especially ‘The Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development’ [1967], in Playing and

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208 Notes

62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). There may be a kind of critique in Hamlet of the limited access offered by mirrors (limited, that is, to the surface). ‘The glass of fashion’ is ‘quite, quite down’ (3.1.155–6), as Hamlet comes to terms with the fact that the ‘mirror’ held ‘up to nature’ (3.2.22) cannot reflect truths – such as the truth of the body’s interior – that are reflected by, for instance, the skull in the graveyard: ‘Now get you to my Lady’s chamber    ’. Compare The Tempest, 1.2.488–93, where Ferdinand describes how ‘My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up [    ] All corners else o’th’earth / Let liberty make use of; space enough / Have I in such a prison’. We might also guess at a relation between these ‘bad dreams’ and the ‘baser matter’ Hamlet wants to expel from ‘the book and volume of [his] brain’ (1.5.103– 4). Benjamin, Origin, 152. Compare Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night (in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 1:354): ‘From the fuming melancholy of our spleen mounteth that hot matter into the higher region of the brain, whereof many fearful visions are framed.’ Is there again a connection between dreams and the bodily interior in Hamlet’s ‘I, / A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak / Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause’ (2.2.561–3)? Neither ‘unpregnant’ nor ‘muddy-mettled’ are by any means unambiguously corporeal, but both have visceral undertones. Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Carcanet, 1986), 44. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, passim. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 2. Implicit here is my understanding of the socio-historical background to Donne’s famous words, which is to say that these words take on particular affective power in the context of a world moving towards homo clausus, man-as-island. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 232. See for example R.B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 254–91, esp. 279, 283–5. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 71. Compare Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 48–58, esp. 50: ‘The most widespread element in funerals – so obvious it may seem hardly worth mentioning – is the role played by eating, i.e., the funerary meal [    ] The ritualization of hunting made possible a twofold transferral: the dead could take the place of the quarry [    ] but in the subsequent feast, his place could in turn be taken by the sacrificial animal.’ See also W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), which supports these ideas, showing that while actual instances of cannibalism are (and apparently always have been) rare, the idea of cannibalism – whether used as a marker of otherness or rendered permissible through symbolisation in a ritual setting (as in the Eucharist) – is ubiquitous (see esp. 131–5 and 159–61). For a slightly different take on the psychological uses of the funerary meal (as designed precisely to avoid incorporative fixation), see Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, in The Shell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125–38, esp. 128–30. Abraham and Torok also provide another way of thinking about the closing-off of the body: they suggest that when the

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Notes to Chapter 3 209

73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

acknowledgement of loss is for some reason debarred, the result is the erection of an intrapsychic ‘crypt’: ‘Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject’ (130). See also Jacques Derrida’s extended meditation on this ‘crypt’ in the Foreword to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917], trans. Joan Riviere, in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 164–79. References to this paper are in parentheses in the text. The essay has repeatedly been juxtaposed with Hamlet; see especially Stephen A. Reid, ‘Hamlet’s Melancholia’, American Imago 31:4 (Winter 1974), 378–400; Arthur Kirsch, ‘Hamlet’s Grief’, English Literary History 48:1 (1981), 17–36, esp. 22–4; and Steven Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600–1607’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 139–162. Paul Ricoeur’s comments on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ are useful in this context: in Freud and Philosophy: an Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 129–34 and 216–17. Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, trans. James Hulbert, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: the Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 11–52, 39–40. Compare Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 247, on ‘the disruption or poisoning of virtually all rituals for managing grief, allaying personal and collective anxiety, and restoring order’ in Hamlet. The word has both meanings in Titus Andronicus (1.1.35 and 5.2.188); see Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, 3rd edn (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), vol. 1, 212. Adelman speaks of ‘the slight frisson of horror’ accompanying Hamlet’s ‘bak’d meats’ comment (Suffocating Mothers, 27). John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (London, 1686–87), ed. James Britten (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 35, see also 19, 23–4, 36, 99. The pun is pointed out by Heather Hirschfeld in ‘Hamlet’s “first corse”: Repetition, Trauma, and the Displacement of Redemptive Typology’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54:4 (2003), 424–48. On ‘season’d’, see Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon, vol. 2, 1017. There seems to be a fairly specific culinary fantasy in Hamlet’s mind, of a dead body being prepared for eating by being ‘season’d’, perhaps stuffed (‘full of bread’), then ‘bak’d’ (2.2.456) till a crust has formed around it. The specific ‘womb-tomb’ rhyme is extremely common in the Renaissance, as is the idea that the body is its own tomb. The link between soma and sema goes back at least as far as ancient Greece (compare Plato, Phaedrus, 250c). Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon, vol. 1, 181. Compare Titus, 5.2.190–1. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, in The First Part of Hieronimo and The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 3.12.71–2. Michael Neill, ‘Hamlet: a Modern Perspective’, in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s edition of Hamlet, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 319. Onstage, Jonathan Pryce’s 1980 Hamlet summoned the Ghost from his intestines, the father’s words seeming to emanate from Pryce’s own innards. J. Hillis Miller’s excursus on the relation between ‘ghost’, ‘guest’, and the Eucharistic ‘host’ is interesting in this connection: ‘The Critic as Host’, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1988), 217–53.

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210 Notes

83. Nietzsche, Letter to Franz Overbeck, 31 March 1885; cited in Blondel, Nietzsche, 221. 84. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 246. Compare Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 150: ‘Hamlet is caught between cannibalism and anorexia, spewing forth in language what he cannot swallow.’ 85. Compare also the ‘dram of evil’ which ‘Doth all the noble substance of a doubt’ of 1.4.36–7: ‘dram’ is (as well as a small drop of liquid) a small coin, a drachma (the sense is extant in sixteenth-century England, according to the OED); a ‘noble’ is a coin of much more substantial value. This fits with ‘the stamp of one defect’ (line 31), ‘tax’d’ (l. 18) and ‘corruption’ (l. 35) to form an imagistic pattern of monetary worth/devaluation. 86. Note Fortinbras’ arrival onstage in Act 5 even though the doors are ostensibly closed; and compare my discussion in Chapter 1 of Jesus’s entry in the story of Doubting Thomas. 87. Sharon Olds, ‘Possessed (for my parents)’, in The Dead and the Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). 88. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 28; the following quotation is from 27. 89. Adelman remarks upon ‘[t]he extraordinary oral valence of both sex and killing in Hamlet – the extent to which both are registered in the language of eating and boundary diffusion’ (Suffocating Mothers, 247n.4). The play’s inner-bodily imagery tends to split loosely upon gender lines – the paternal somatic interior being mainly gastro-intestinal, the maternal mainly in the region of the heart. 90. Cavell sees ‘Hamlet’s question whether to be or not, as asking first of all not why he stays alive, but first of all how he or anyone lets himself be born as the one he is’ (Disowning Knowledge, 187). Both he and Adelman (in her concern with the ‘devouring maternal womb’ and the ‘fantasy of spoiling at the site of origin’ [23]) are primarily interested in the question of the origin of the individual. The distinction between the problem of death and the problem of being born is, I think, important in the play, though it is hardly a simple binary: as Adelman says, in Hamlet ‘birth itself [    ] immerses the body in death’ (Suffocating Mothers, 27). 91. Bataille, Erotism, 56. The body’s decomposition is intimately connected to the idea of the contagiousness of death, an idea whch recurs in Hamlet’s imagery (see ibid., 46–7; and compare the uses of ‘pestilence’ and ‘contagion’ in the play: ‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ (2.2.302); ‘pestilent speeches of his father’s death’ (4.5.91; compare 5.1.173); ‘hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world’ (3.2.380–1); ‘I’ll touch my point / With this contagion, that if I gall him slightly, / It may be death’ (4.7.145–7; compare 1.3.42).) 92. The Second Quarto’s reading at 2.2.146; the Folio has ‘repulsed’. 93. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 263–6; Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Doubleday, 1954). 94. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: an Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock Press, 1960), 57. 95. The citation is from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). That Nero was on Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote Hamlet is indicated by his choice of the name Claudius – the Roman emperor who married Nero’s mother Agrippina. Chaucer portrays Nero’s relation with his mother not in incestuous but in violent, epistemophilic terms: ‘His mooder made he in pitous array, / For he hire wombe slitte to biholde / Where he conceyved was – so weilaway / That he so litel of his mooder tolde!’ ‘The Monk’s Tale’, ll. 2483–6, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). On Nero’s (Hamlet-like) transformation of theatre into an anxious

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Notes to Chapter 3 211

96.

97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

site for the reversal of actor-audience relations, see Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Double Speak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). The Queen’s closet was, as the Oxford editor remarks, ‘her own private apartment. A closet was not, it seems worth emphasising, a bedroom’ (276). John Dover Wilson’s influential book was, I think, the first to call this ‘The Bedroom Scene’ (246, chapter heading). Twentieth-century interpretations have more often than not gone along with this and used a bed as central prop, following (perhaps) Freud’s reading of the scene as portraying Hamlet’s incestuous impulses. On the commonness in the period of the metaphorical comparison of closets, chambers and cabinets to physiological interiors, see Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 46–7; Ferry cites, for instance, Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604), 212, speaking of examining what ‘lyeth secretly closed up within the closet of the heart’. See also Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 161–87. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 34. Hamlet seems to take some pleasure in playing with the idea of Polonius’ guts: ‘I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room’ is followed by ‘Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you’: ‘draw’ here may well be a joke about evisceration (as in ‘drawn and quartered’; compare, for example, All’s Well, 1.3.93: ‘a man may draw his heart out, ere ’a pluck one’). Perhaps Shakespeare is having some fun at Polonius’ expense too: the Folio’s scene-closing stage direction, ‘Exit Hamlet tugging in Polonius’ is almost a joke in itself, ‘tugging’ reversing ‘gutting’; ‘in’ acknowledging metatheatrically that the closet has further layers of architectural innerness. Compare also: ‘not a mouse stirring’ (1.1.11); ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ (3.2.370); and ‘call you his mouse’ (3.4.185). See John Doebler, ‘The Play within the Play: the Muscipula Diaboli in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 23, no.2 (1972), 161: ‘The connection between mice and overindulgence is nicely captured by an emblem from Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes and Other Devices (1586) with the motto “Captiuus, ob gulam” (“Captive by Gluttony”), which shows a mouse whose head is caught in an oyster (itself emblematically associated in numerous early modern paintings with sexual excess).’ The emblem may also refer to the dangers of intruding into the closed body of the other. For a psychoanalytic treatment of the image of the rat, see Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: the Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), 86–137: ‘The rat is one of the principal mental images (imagos) of cannibalism’ (86). Maud Ellmann, ‘Writing like a Rat’, Critical Quarterly 2004, 33. One impetus for these observations has been Ruth Nevo’s paper, ‘Mousetrap and Rat Man: an Uncanny Resemblance’ (in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: the Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 350–63), in which Nevo brings out the affinities between Freud’s case of the ‘Rat Man’ (‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’) and Hamlet. On the matter of rodents, there are some highly suggestive parallels between the two texts. Most striking among these is the isomorphism of Hamlet’s ‘How now? A rat! Dead for a ducat, dead’ and the Rat Man’s ‘So many rats, so many florins’ (in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers

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212 Notes

103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

(New York, Basic Books, 1959), III: 350.) The connection between rodent-like animals and coins recurs when Hamlet addresses the Ghost, in rapid succession, as ‘old mole’ and ‘truepenny’. The rodent-money juxtaposition is hardly unique to Hamlet. Most notorious, perhaps, is T.S. Eliot’s ‘The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs    ’ (‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Blistein with a Cigar’, in The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 43). The rodent-coin connection is surely via the idea of corporeal openness (‘thou wretched rash intruding fool’). The Rat Man’s statement about ‘So many rats, so many florins’ would thus be a lament about the permeability of his body – ‘so much can enter it, so much can leave it’. Freud interprets the phrase as an expression of forbidden anal-erotic desire; in the next paragraph he adds other possible meanings of the idea of the rat: ‘Once when the patient was visiting his father’s grave he had seen a big beast, which he had taken to be a rat, gliding along over the grave. He assumed that it had actually come out of his father’s grave, and had just been having a meal off his corpse’ (352). And he adds in a footnote: ‘In legends generally the rat appears not so much as a disgusting creature but as something uncanny – as a chthonic animal, one might almost say; and it is used to represent the souls of the dead.’ Compare Dr Rat’s attempt to sneak through the ‘black hole’ of ‘privy way’ into Dame Chat’s house, in Gamer Gurton’s Needle, 5.2.187–9, cited in Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 116. See for example Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 203. Penetrative instruments are ubiquitous in Hamlet – a non-exhaustive list includes: Marcellus’ ‘partisan’ (1.1.143), Pyrrhus’ ‘antique sword’ (2.2.465), Hamlet’s ‘handsaw’ (2.2.375), ‘slings and arrows’ (3.1.58), and ‘bare bodkin’ (3.1.76), Laertes’ ‘arrow’ (5.2.239), poisoned ‘knife’ (4.7.141) and ‘sword unbated’ (4.7.137; the play’s other references to swords are: 1.5.154, 156, 162, 166, 167, 169; 2.2.469, 473, 487, 510; 3.1.153; 3.3.88; 4.3.64; 4.5.211; 4.7.139), Gertrude’s ‘words like daggers’ (3.4.95; compare 3.2.387), and Claudius’ ‘great axe’ (4.5.215; compare 5.2.24). To the final trial by ‘rapier and dagger’ (5.2.142) or ‘foils’ (4.7.135; 5.2.250) the play is full of sharp weapons; there are, too, images of pins (1.4.65), thorns (1.3.48; 1.5.88), a ‘tent’ (an instrument for examining or cleansing a wound) (2.2.593), a ‘worthy pioneer’ (a foot soldier who preceded the main army with spade or pickaxe) (1.5.171), and ‘a sexton’s spade’ (5.1.88). The ‘bare bodkin’ (3.1.76) which is Hamlet’s imagined method of suicide is of particular interest here, since a ‘bodkin’ meant not only a dagger but also a ‘body’ (as it does 150 lines earlier, at 2.2.524: ‘God’s bodkin, man’); ‘bare’ then takes on the sense not only of ‘mere’ but also of ‘uncovered’: suicide can be effected by a mere dagger – or, in this world, by an uncovered body. Compare Britton, Belief and Imagination, 25: ‘The belief that they are dealing with an impermeable object [    ] drives some personalities to violence.’ Benjamin, Origin, 133. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Circles’, in Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 175. Benjamin, Origin, 146.

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Notes to Chapter 3 213

110. Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, translated by John Florio, 3 vols (London, 1603; rpt. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1910), 3: 262–3 (‘How one ought to governe his will’). 111. Compare Donne’s admonition: ‘It were a strange ambitious patience in any man, to be content to be racked every day, in hope to be an inch or two taller at last: so is it for me, to think to be a dram or two wiser, by hearkening to all jealousies, and doubts, and distractions, and perplexities, that arise in my Bosom.’ John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. and intr. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 9: 179 (sermon 7). 112. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 116. 113. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 44e (sec. 342). 114. Montaigne, Essayes, 3: 316 (‘Of Physiognomy’). It is sometimes forgotten that Montaigne’s motto – ‘Que sais-je?’ – is a question, not an answer (‘rien’). 115. Compare Hamlet’s ‘Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, / Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all’ (3.4.78–9); ‘Before my God, I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes’ (1.1.59–61), says Horatio after meeting the Ghost. 116. ‘The Sceptic’, in The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1829), 553. 117. Debra B. Bergoffen, ‘Oedipal Dramas’, in Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections of Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan D. Schrift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 25. 118. Note Hamlet’s move from the dismissal of his ‘inky cloak’ to his newfound embrace of his ‘sea-gown scarf’d around’ him (5.2.13). 119. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 264. 120. See OED, s.v. aporia; on poroi in Greek medicine and thought, see Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 58: ‘Poroi begin Western medical portraiture of the infinitely penetrable body.’ 121. Bright, Treatise, 127; 100; my emphasis. 122. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1967), 246. In what is one of the most famous cruces in Shakespeare, Hamlet speaks of (as the Second Quarto has it) ‘the noble substance of a doubt’ (1.4.37). 123. The references are toTroilus and Cressida, 1.1.96 and 2Henry IV, 2.4.47; compare Othello’s ‘pearl [    ] Richer than all his tribe’ (5.2.356–7), associated as it is with somatic closure – the ‘monumental alablaster’ of Desdemona’s body; and The Tempest’s ‘those are pearls that were his eyes’ (1.2.399), associated with somatic dissolution. Compare Gordon Williams, Dictionary of Sexual Language in Shakespeare, s.v. ‘pearl’. 124. Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 151. 125. From the Latin unio, for a genus of freshwater bivalve, especially one yielding pearls. According to the Arden edn, ‘apparently so called from the uniqueness of each one’: so combining singleness/separateness with conjunction/fusion. 126. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 241. 127. Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 159–86, 184.

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214 Notes

128. Benjamin, Origin, 137. Is there then a further pun in Hamlet’s earlier ‘We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart’ (1.2.175)? Does the play teach us to drink deep air/ere we depart? 129. D.W. Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (London: Tavistock, 1965), 9. See also Michael Eigen’s thoughts on breathing in The Electrified Tightrope, ed. Adam Phillips (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 45, and my comments on this at the end of chapters 4 and 5. 130. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 493. Compare Walter Benjamin’s work on the stone as a symbol of melancholy – an emblem of ‘acedia, dullness of heart’ (Origin, 154–5). On the collision of a Stoic ethos of indifference and a revenge ethos of passionate action in Hamlet, see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 219. Hamlet, he argues, shows that ‘stoicism is the natural alternative to revenge because it is a twin endeavor, a complementary strategy for establishing the self’s belief in its own dignity and power’. And compare William Kerrigan, Hamlet’s Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 51. 131. Yves Bonnefoy, Shakespeare & the French Poet, ed. John Naughton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 14. 132. Charney, Hamlet’s Fictions, 1.

4

The body possessed: King Lear 1. Adrian Stokes, ‘Colour and Form’, in The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes, ed. Richard Wollheim (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), 88. 2. All citations from the play are from R.A. Foakes’s Arden edition (London: Routledge, 1997), which conflates (while studiously differentiating) the two main texts of the play. Here I intend to skirt the difficulties arising from the use of a single unified edition, since the differences between the Quarto and Folio texts do not impinge significantly on my argument; where especially relevant, however, I make reference to the problem. 3. Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 338–9. 4. Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (London: Methuen, 1951; 1977), 152. The notion that Lear first feels the feelings and then transforms them into bodily terms is, of course, a post-Cartesian one; we might more accurately think of a Renaissance Lear as feeling things directly in bodily terms. 5. Cavell’s wonderful, unavoidable essay, ‘The Avoidance of Love: a Reading of King Lear’, has been published several times, most recently in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 39–123. 6. ‘If you are entheos God “inside”, you are ekphr¯on. Your mind is “out” ’. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 129. 7. See Muir’s discussion of the dating in the Arden2, xvii–xxiv, and Foakes’s in Arden3, 89–91. 8. On this controversy, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 483–92, and Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 198–217. A canon enacted in 1604 forbade ministers from attempting to exorcise the ostensibly possessed.

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Notes to Chapter 4 215

9. Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother    Wherin is declared that divers strange actions and passions of the body of man, which in the common opinion, are imputed to the Divell, have their true naturall causes, entered in the Stationers’ Register 14 March 1603; Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Maiesties Subjects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out deuils, entered in the Register 16 March 1603. On the relation of Jorden’s treatise to the exorcism controversy, see Michael MacDonald’s Introduction to Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case, ed. MacDonald (London: Routledge, 1991), vii–lxiv. 10. Jorden, Discourse, 5, and sig. C. 11. Jorden, sig. C1. Note the connection, in Harsnett’s title, between the pretended aim of exorcism – the ‘casting out’ of devils – and the goal alleged to be the true underlying one by Harsnett – the ‘with-draw[al]’ of the people’s ‘harts’ from the Queen: as if one kind of bodily voiding acts as a cover story for another. Harsnett’s text is heavily laced with references to the insides of the body that have nothing to do with possession; in his Preface, for instance, he writes, ‘I beseech you all in the bowels of our blessed Saviour to let open your eares and eyes to this short declaration [    ] who can but bleede in hart to see you as farre bewitched?’ (cited from F. W. Brownlow’s edition, in Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 196–7). 12. See, in particular, Kenneth Muir, ‘Samuel Harsnett and King Lear’, Review of English Studies 2 (1951), 11–21; William R. Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 89–92; John L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and ‘King Lear’ (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984); Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128 (reprinted in various versions elsewhere); and Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham, 107–31. 13. See especially Janet Adelman’s ‘Suffocating Mothers in King Lear’, in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Routledge, 1992), 103–29; Coppélia Kahn’s ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 33–49; and Juliet Mitchell’s ‘From King Lear to Anna O and Beyond: Some Speculative Theses on Hysteria and the Traditionless Self’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 5:2 (1992), 91–107. 14. John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 182. 15. D.W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1992), 34. 16. Anonymous, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, ed. Tiffany Stern (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002). 17. For ‘possess’, see Leir, 1.1.3; 3.1.7; 4.7.338; 5.1.37; 5.11.14; for ‘dispossess’, 1.3.124; 2.3.84; 3.1.1; 3.3.75; 3.3.96; for ‘repossess’, 5.4.252; 5.11.16. 18. The phrase ‘while we / Unburdened crawl toward death’ appears only in the Folio. The addition emphasises Lear’s motivation in relation to the physical acts of unburdening and crawling. Compare also the immediately following ‘that future strife / May be prevented now’ (43–4; also only in the Folio): ‘pre-venting’ has its own somatic etymology, of course.

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216 Notes

19. See OED, s.v., ‘burden’; for Shakespearean uses in this sense, see, for example, The Comedy of Errors, 1.1.55, 5.1.344 and 403; The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.3; Sonnets, 59.4. Citations from Shakespeare’s works other than King Lear are from G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 20. Compare Hamlet, 3.4.35–8, where the word is also used in the context of a sealing off of the body’s interior: ‘let me wring your heart, for so I shall / If it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damned custom have not braz’d it so / That it be proof and bulwark against sense’. Compare also the term ‘brazen-faced’ (Lear, 2.2.27), again in the context of the refusal to acknowledge someone (‘What a brazen-faced varlet art thou to deny thou knowest me?’). 21. That Lear is a play intricately involved with the idea of shame has been shown most powerfully by Cavell; see especially Disowning Knowledge, 48–9. 22. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 105. My reading of this passage is indebted to Adelman’s (who otherwise barely discusses the entire abdication scene). 23. See, for example, All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.1.167–8: ‘What is infirm of your sound parts shall fly, / Health shall live free, and sickness freely die’. 24. Lear has a propensity for this kind of dramatic gestus: compare, for example, his later ‘She hath tied / Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here [Lays his hand on his heart]’ (2.2.323–4), and ‘this tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else, / Save what beats there’ (3.4.12–14). Foakes suggests that the final phrase may be ‘a stage direction within the text for the actor to point to his head or his heart’. Indeed, half-buried stage directions indicating the actors’ own bodies seem to be particularly marked throughout King Lear: note especially Poor Tom’s ‘There could I have him now, and there, and there again, and there’ (3.4.60–1). On the frequency with which Lear’s hand goes ‘to his heart, to his failing breast’ (as well as, we might add, to his head), see Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 66. 25. Attempts have been made to explain ‘generation’ as ‘parents’, in order to make the figure more obviously relevant to Lear’s anger at Cordelia; but nowhere else does Shakespeare use the word in this sense. The word clearly means ‘progeny, offspring’ in The Winter’s Tale, 2.1.148; Richard II, 5.5.8; and Troilus and Cressida 3.1.146. There may be discernible (here and elsewhere), however, a subconscious acknowledgment by Lear of his own sins (on which, see Harry Berger, Jr; Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 33–4); to understand, for instance, his allusion to the ‘Pelican daughters’ (3.4.74), it should be remembered that contemporary myths held that the pelican-mother first kills her children, then ‘smiteth herself in the breast, and springeth blood upon them, and reareth them from death to life’. H.W. Seager (ed.), Natural History in Shakespeare’s Time (Chicheley: Minet, 1972), 239–40, citing Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew), Liber de proprietatibus rerum, trans. J. Trevisa (London: T. Bertheletti, 1535), bk. 12. 26. The only other instance of the locution ‘give [    ] from’ that I have been able to find in Shakespeare is in Sonnets 122.11; see Stephen Booth (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 414–15. The entire thought is, in fact, a little odd; the implication is that Lear feels that he must empty his body, or get rid of his burdensome heart, prior to death (on ideas of purgation before death, see Chapter 3 on Hamlet). (The association between the grave and the emptying of the body repeats his earlier ‘Unburthen’d crawl toward death’, as if the emptying of his own body and the reinhabiting of an interior space are linked in his mind.) But is it really death he’s thinking of, or is this grave simply a fine and private place, the simulacrum of the interior space he wishes to inhabit?

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Notes to Chapter 4 217

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

Compare his later ‘Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies’ (3.4.99–100) and ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave’ (4.7.45). Many critics have noticed the Latin root of the name; see, for example, Tom McAlindon, ‘Tragedy, King Lear, and the Politics of the Heart’, Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992), 87; Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 127; and Arthur Kirsch, The Passions of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 8–9. On the heart imagery in Lear, see especially McAlindon, ‘Tragedy, King Lear, and the Politics of the Heart’, 85–90, and Drew Milne, ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted: King Lear and the Dissociation of Sensibility’, Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): issue entitled ‘King Lear’ and its Afterlife, ed. Peter Holland, 53–66. Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, ed. Adam Phillips (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 46. In ‘deed’, does Regan refer to an act or a legal document? Matter or word? Note, for example, Cordelia’s own ‘But yet, alas! stood I within his grace’ – 1.1.272; ‘Grace’ is capitalised in the Folio, implying that the referent may be Lear himself rather than, as is usually understood, Lear’s good favour. Richard Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England’, in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 327–61, 340; emphasis added. The close association of land and body is implicit in Lear’s own words later in this scene (for example, ‘wide-skirted meads’ – 1.1.64; ‘digest the third’ – 127). The phrase is taken from John Speed’s The Theatre and Empire of Great Britain (London: Iohn Sudbury and George Humble, 1611), sig. EIr; cited in Caterina Albano, ‘Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy’, 93, in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 89–106. Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports (London, 1816), 212a & 242a, cited in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 7 & 12; compare Richard II’s famous declaration, ‘Laws are in the King’s mouth, or sometimes in his breast’ [‘leges suae erant in ore suo, et aliquotiens in pectore suo’], in E.C. Lodge and G.A.Thornton, English Constitutional Documents 1307–1485 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 28; cited in Kantorowicz, 12. See also Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). The citations are from Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, 1548; rptd. by the Early English Text Society, London, 1888), 56, and Burton, Anatomy, I:i:2:iv. For example, Tobias Venner (Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, London, 1650, 314; cited in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999), 32) speaks of ‘the due and daily avoiding of [excrements]’. Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 16. Cited in Horace Howard Furness’s variorum edition of King Lear (New York: Dover, 1963), 78. Lear’s reference to the game of ‘handy-dandy’ (described in Jones, Shakespeare at Work, 222–3), the children’s game of holding out one’s clenched fists and having the other guess which hand conceals the object, may also be an allusion to emptiness within.

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218 Notes

39. Note in particular the repeated conjunction between ‘fool’ and ‘nothing’ (for example, ‘This is nothing, fool’, 1.4.128; ‘I am a fool, thou art nothing’, 1.4.194) and the closeness of ‘fool’, and ‘full’ in ‘I have full cause of weeping [    ] O fool, I shall go mad!’ (2.2.473–5). 40. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. ‘fool’. Compare Perdita’s ‘our feasts / In every mess have folly, and the feeders / Digest it with a custom’ (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.10–12). 41. ‘Lear’s shadow’ is given to Lear himself in the Quarto. 42. In the map to which Lear refers in practically his first words on stage – ‘Give me the map there’ – we might again discern an image of the flattening of the royal body – it is rendered two-dimensional and hence disabled from a containing function. We should recall, however, that early modern maps tended to conflate two- and three-dimensionality: topographical and constructed features are undifferentiated from flat spatial relations. 43. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford University Press, 1993), 206. (From an essay entitled ‘Corpus’, translated by Claudette Sartiliot.) 44. Ben Jonson’s well-known description of language as ‘spring[ing] out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us [    ]’ is relevant here (Timber, Or Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), VIII: 625). The sentiment is common enough in the Renaissance. The passage continues with an extraordinarily corporeal description of linguistic styles (‘Juyce in language is somewhat lesse than blood [    ] There be some styles, againe, that have not lesse blood, but lesse flesh, and corpulence. They are bony, and sinnewy: Ossa habent, et nervos’ (626–7).) 45. On the ‘organic embodiments’ of the word ‘nothing’, and in particular its womblike connotations, see David Willbern, ‘Shakespeare’s Nothing’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 244–63, 245–7 and 253. On the metaphysical dimensions of the word nothing, see Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 164; Jones, Shakespeare at Work, 201; and Benjamin Bertram, The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 62–64 and 148. 46. Donne, The Sermons, I: 184; Terry Hawkes, ‘ “Love” in King Lear’, Review of English Studies X (1959), 178–81. 47. There are parallels between this and the overcoming of scepticism; as the psychoanalyst Ronald Britton puts it, ‘belief, as an act, is in the realm of knowledge what attachment is in the realm of love’. Ronald Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1998), 12. 48. On the ‘tenderness’ of woman’s flesh in early modern medical theory, see Katharine Rowe, ‘Minds in Company: Shakespearean Tragic Emotions’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 47–72, 62–3. Compare Polonius’ play with the word ‘tender’ in Hamlet 1.3.99–109, and the use of ‘tenderness’ as ‘a pastime / To harder bosoms’ in The Winter’s Tale (1.2.152–3; note the comments on this passage in the concluding chapter to this book). 49. Foakes’s note; Nicholas Rowe’s emendation, ‘tender-hearted’, makes equally good sense. 50. It would not be surprising were we to discover that there has been a minim error here, and that Lear is wondering what kind of stone such a hard heart may be made of.

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Notes to Chapter 4 219

51. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 110. 52. It is unclear whether the ‘child of spleen’ here means that Lear is cursing Goneril with a constitutionally angry child or that he is thinking of her spleen rather than her womb as the place of gestation. 53. ‘Untented’ wounds are ‘wounds too deep to be cleaned with a roll of lint, or tent’ (Arden); but perhaps we should imagine Lear cursing his daughter with wounds that will remain untreated. 54. There is some discussion about whether these ‘young bones’ are Goneril’s own or her unborn child’s; see Foakes’s note in the Arden edition and Furness’s in the Variorum. Either way, the object of attack lies within Goneril’s body; if it is indeed her foetus, the curse gains poignancy – in Lear’s fantasy, the unborn child supplants his own place within her body. 55. On Goneril and Regan as ‘conspicuously divided versions of a single whole’, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 123; on doubling in the play more generally, see Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 78–9. 56. ‘Pelican’ derives from the Greek pelekan, axe. Lear is brought to this reflection by the apparition of Poor Tom, whose flesh is likened to that of the ‘Bedlam beggars’, riddled with ‘Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary’ (2.2.187). Compare Gloucester’s comment that he ‘would not see / [Regan’s] cruel nails pluck out his poor old eyes; / Nor thy fierce sister in his anointed flesh / Rash [that is, strike with a tusk] boarish fangs’ (3.7.54–7). 57. Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Ierusalem, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 2: 57–8. 58. ‘Gall’ may have referred either to the gall-bladder, or to the secretion of (yellow) bile from the liver, or to any kind of painful swelling (or the associated passion) such as the one Lear describes at 2.2.412–14. Compare Lear’s comment that the Fool’s words are ‘a pestilent gall to me’ (1.4.127). 59. See note 54 (on ‘young bones’). Compare Measure for Measure, where the Duke refers to one’s descendants as one’s ‘bowels’. On the relation between Goneril and gonorrhea, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 298 n.18. 60. A great deal has been made of the phrase ‘hysterica passio’, much of it on the basis of assuming it is a predominantly female ailment. Though this is surely the case, it should also be noted that the phrase comes from Harsnett’s description of Richard Meiny in The Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, and that ‘the common people [    ] do call this Iliaca the mother in men’ (Wirsung (1598) in Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 126). 61. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 114; compare Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, 43. As should be clear from my comments below, my interpretation of these lines is meant as complementary rather than contradictory to these powerful readings of the play. 62. One might think in a similar way about Lear’s ‘up to the girdle do the Gods inherit    ’ – on the one hand, there is an undeniable attack in this passage on female sexuality; but at the same time, there is a more general attempt to differentiate or categorise the interior of the body as such. Compare Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into Commonly Presumed Truths (London, 1646; Menston, Yorks: The Scolar Press, 1972), 267: ‘Moreover by the girdle the heart and parts which God requires devided from the inferiour and epithumeticall organs, implying thereby a memento unto purification and steadfastnesse of heart,which is commonly defiled from the concupiscence and affectation of those parts [below]’.

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220 Notes

63. Foakes, in the Arden, suggests that ‘wrath’ refers to the ‘object of anger’ – that is, to Cordelia. Muir, however, in Arden2, cites J.C. Maxwell: ‘the notion conveyed appears to be that of Lear’s wrath as an extension of his personality’. This latter construction of the line may be the stronger one, but it is the uncertainty that is telling, the confusion between what is within Lear and what is without. (Compare Lear’s later ‘To come betwixt our sentence and our power’ – 1.1.171.) 64. For example, Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 113–14; Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother’, 46; McAlindon, ‘The Politics of the Heart’, 86. Compare A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1974), 221. 65. There is a triple pun here, for flaw also, of course, means ‘imperfection’ – compare Edgar’s reference to Gloucester’s ‘flaw’d heart’ (5.3.195). 66. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 114. 67. Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander Grosart, 7 vols (Edinburgh: The Banner of Birth Trust, 1973–83), VI: 64. 68. Cited (without reference) in Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: a Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (New York: Norton, 1989), 139. Compare The True Chronicle History of King Leir, l. 2235: ‘’Twould make a heart of Adamant to weepe’ (Bullough, Sources of Shakespeare, 392), and again: LEIR: ‘To utter grief doth ease a heart o’ercharg’d’ (2.4.57). Compare also The Winter’s Tale (3.3.51–2): ‘Weep I cannot, / But my heart bleeds’; Macbeth, 4.3.209–10: ‘The grief that does not speak / Whispers th’oerfraught heart and bids it break’. This is essentially standard medical opinion of the time, as well as one of the bases for the widespread faith placed in bloodletting. See, for example, Johannes de Mediolano, The Salerne Schoole, OR the Regiment of Health, trans. Sir John Harington (London: William Jaggard, 1607): ‘One veine cut in the hand doth helpe exceeding, / Unto the spleen, voyce, brest, and intrailes lend, / And swages griefes that in the heart are bleeding’ (99 Praeceptum [n.p.]). It is interesting to compare this belief to some psychoanalytic opinion, for example that of Wilhelm Reich, who wrote about the way that ‘certain muscle groups jointly serve the function of suppressing the impulse to cry’ (The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux: Noonday Press, 1961), 269–71). 69. William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 135, and Maynard Mack in ‘King Lear’ in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 88, both notice this pattern and read it as a sign of the play’s contentiousness. Compare ‘outface’ (2.2.182) and ‘out-frown’ (5.3.6). 70. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 122, 129. 71. John Gillies, ‘The Scene of Cartography in King Lear’, in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 125. 72. As Spurgeon points out, ‘the fury of the elements’ here is described ‘wholly in terms of the human body’ (Shakespeare’s Imagery, 342). 73. Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother’, 46. 74. ‘A continent is what contains or bounds something in’ (Arden3, 266). Compare Hamlet, 4.4.56 (Second Quarto). 75. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 240. 76. This, of course, is often the case in Shakespeare; particularly striking is Valentine’s speech near the end of The Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘O thou that dost inhabit in

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Notes to Chapter 4 221

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

my breast, / Leave not the mansion so long tenantless, / Lest growing ruinous, the building fall / And leave no memory of what it was! / Repair me with thy presence, Silvia’ (5.4.7–11). Compare Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 175ff. For example, ‘Of all these bounds, even from this line to this’ (1.1.62); ‘Beat at this gate that let thy folly in’ (1.4.268–9); ‘All ports I’ll bar’ (2.1.79); ‘at their chamberdoor I’ll beat the drum’ (2.2.307); ‘to oppose the bolt /Against my coming in’ (2.2.365–6); compare the later ‘Come o’er the bourn, Bessy, to me’ (3.6.25). Abodes in the play include Lear’s daughters’ homes, the ‘safe house’ proffered by Edmund to his brother (1.2.164), ‘the happy hollow of a tree’ in which Edgar hides himself (2.2.173), the hovel in Act 3, Cordelia’s tent, the ‘walled prison’ (5.3.17) to which she and Lear are eventually led off, and even perhaps ‘the shadow of this tree’ which plays ‘good host’ to Gloucester (5.2.1–2). Of the numerous instances of clothing offered by the play I cite three salient ones: Poor Tom’s ‘blanket’ (2.2.181), Lear’s ‘lendings’ (3.4.106), and the ‘robes and furr’d gowns’ that ‘hide all’ (4.6.161). For an overview of the play’s clothing imagery, see Robert B. Heilman’s This Great Stage: Image and Structure in ‘King Lear’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 67–87, and Maurice Charney, ‘ “We Put Fresh Garments on Him”: Nakedness and Clothes in King Lear’, in Rosalie L. Colie (ed.), Some Facets of ‘King Lear’: Essays in Prismatic Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 77–88. Charney writes that ‘there is an element of dream-like terror in nakedness, because one’s clothes are familiar, warm, and protecting. To be naked is immediately to be in peril, to be adrift in the world of an unknown id’ (87–8). This is one meaning of the Fool’s ‘She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab’ (1.5.18): Regan’s shell, the implication seems to be, will be as hard to break, as hard in its refusal of access, as Goneril’s. Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–42, 23; it should be said, however, that Shakespeare does not elsewhere use the word to refer to lodgings; see Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, 3rd edn (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), I: 10, and esp. Henry IV, Part 2, 3.2.69–79 (‘ “Accommodated” – it comes of “accommodo”; very good, a good phrase’, as Shallow says, indicating the novelty of the term). According to the OED, the word was first used with reference to lodgings in 1604. Arden2 points out (citing D.G. James, The Life of Reason, 147) that the word ‘house’ had ‘in its second and little known meaning the sense of “textile covering” ’; the play, writes James, fuses the ideas of ‘the body as the house of the soul and the house as protection for the body’ (108). They are ‘shameful’ and ‘cruel’ because they do not in fact offer lodging or covering – quite the contrary, they force exposure upon whomever they imprison. Presumably this idea contributes to Lear’s outrage at the stocking of Kent – it is the particular form of the insult in relation to ‘accommodation’ that enrages him, and not just the insult to his status as the king’s messenger. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 212. Even in relation to the map at the play’s opening – where we might most obviously expect some place-names – we are given no specifics (‘Of all these bounds, even from this line to this    ’ – 1.1.63). Compare Gillies, ‘The Scene of Cartography’, 116, on the ‘pointedly vague and unforthcoming’ geography of the opening scene in both Folio and Quarto versions.

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85. Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 176. It is worth noting, too, that Dover is in Kent. 86. Gillies notes that no ‘heath’ is referred to in either Folio or Quarto – the place, he writes, is simply ‘emphatically outside’ (‘The Scene of Cartography’, 124–5). 87. Compare note 26 above. 88. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 289–320, 316. See also Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 203–4. 89. De Grazia, ‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things’, 22; she adds: ‘Tom’s and Lear’s superfluous things have more in common than might at first appear. Loincloth and retainers encase the body, like clothes generally.’ 90. This is literally, of course, Gloucester’s seat, but Regan and Cornwall seem to have appropriated it even before their arrival. 91. Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1910), 2: 147 (‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’). 92. ‘Borrowing’ is Montaigne’s word – see Essayes, 2: 181, and the note to 3.4.101–3 in Arden3. On crab-apples, oysters and the inessence of man-made coverings, see Stephen Booth, ‘King Lear,’ ‘Macbeth,’ Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 159n.21. 93. Various editors have tried – unnecessarily, in light of the play’s concern with ‘lendings’ – to emend ‘self-covered’ (to, for example, ‘self-converted’ (Theobald) or ‘false-cover’d’ (Singer)). 94. Compare Scarry, The Body in Pain, 38: ‘The walls of a room act like a body so that the body can act less like a wall’. 95. Kenneth Burke, ‘Othello: an Essay to Illustrate a Method’, The Hudson Review 4 (1951), 166–7. ‘The single mine-own-ness’, adds Burke, ‘is thus dramatically split into the three principles of possession, possessor and estrangement (threat of loss)’. 96. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 24. 97. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xxxii. 98. Compare Edmund’s ‘I hope his heart is not in the contents’ (1.2.67) and ‘a continent forbearance’ (1.2.164), and the (already quoted) lines from Leir (5.4.249–50): ‘If e’er my heart do harbour any joy, / Or true content repose within my breast’. Note also Menenius’ punning reference to the hungry citizens of Rome as ‘th’discontented members’ of the body (Coriolanus, 1.1.111). And see below in Chapter 5 on The Winter’s Tale my comments on the description of Polixenes as ‘discontenting’. 99. There is some debate about whether ‘break’ here is used transitively or intransitively – whether what Lear says is ‘Wilt break my heart?’ or ‘Wilt break, my heart?’ (see Muir’s note in Arden2). I think Kent’s answer (‘I had rather break mine own’) suggests the former option. Either way, the powerful effect of Kent’s offer of an interior on Lear’s own interior is clear. 100. Note, for example, that, in 1Henry IV, ‘the thirsty entrance of this soil’ (1.1.5) becomes in one version (the fourth Folio), ‘the thirsty entrails of this soil’. 101. ‘For some spirits’, as Cavell writes of Lear, ‘to be loved knowing you cannot return that love is the most radical of psychic tortures’ (Disowning Knowledge, 61). 102. On the fact that Lear never does enter the hovel, see Stephen Booth, Indefinition and Tragedy, 157n.7.

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103. The poor, of course, are not in fact (and presumably were not in the Renaissance) generally completely naked: the idea may have been suggested to Lear (this is before the meeting with Poor Tom) because nakedness is so powerful a symbol of a lack of all protective encasement. The superfluity of Lear’s phrasing here (‘loop’d and ragged’) may indicate something about his sense of being unprotected or penetrated himself. 104. Several critics read these lines as implying a specifically excremental purgation: see Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear, 204, and James L. Calderwood, Shakespeare and the Denial of Death (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 138–9: ‘following the command to “take physic”, the word [superflux] inevitably calls attention to its component flux – i.e., the excremental product of a cathartic or purge’. To this we might add that between the two words, Lear has called upon Pomp to ‘expose thyself’. At the same time, ‘superflux’ may be understood either as referring to what is inside the body (as in Calderwood’s reading) or as pointing to what encases the body, as in Lear’s speech on ‘need’ (‘Our basest beggars /Are in the poorest thing superfluous’ – 2.2.453–4). ‘Shake’ is similarly ambiguous; compare Lear’s earlier use of the word – (1.1.38: ‘To shake all cares and business from our age’). 105. Perhaps we should think of Lear as feeling pangs of hunger himself; as Empson points out, even before the storm ‘apparently the old man has ridden all night after a day’s hunting, and without the dinner he was calling for’ (The Structure of Complex Words, 133). The idea of hunger has been percolating through the third act, from the Knight’s references to ‘the cub-drawn bear’ (that is, as per Arden3, ‘sucked dry by her cubs, and so ravenous’) and ‘the belly-pinched wolf’ (3.1.12–13) to Lear’s own reference to ‘Those Pelican daughters’ (3.4.73–4) – those daughters who have been fed with blood from Lear’s own chest. See pp. 149–50 on hunger in Act 5. 106. Montaigne, Essayes, 1: 344 (‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’). 107. Cited from Brownlow’s edn (Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham, 197). 108. C.L. Barber, ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness’, in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, 188– 202, 200. Compare Elton’s judicious reading (in ‘King Lear’ and the Gods) of the ‘syncretically pagan’ (338) character of the play and its reliance on the idea of a Deus Absconditus. My grasp of the implications of the ‘post-Christian’ condition of the Lear universe is indebted to Barber’s reading of the human investment in the Christian supernatural even in its absence; to Cavell’s understanding of ‘the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God’ (The Claim of Reason, 470); and to Greenblatt’s take on King Lear as ‘haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out’ (Shakespearean Negotiations, 119; emphasis in the original). 109. See, for example, 1.5.30 (‘leave his horns without a case’). 110. Rosalie Colie suggests that the passage parallels Act 3 of Lear – but quotes it without the last verse: Colie, ‘The Energies of Endurance: Biblical Echo in King Lear’, in Colie (ed.), Some Facets of ‘King Lear’, 117–44, 130. Compare Lear’s later ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.152). 111. ‘Caius’ (the pseudonym Kent takes on) may have some connection with John Caius, one of the most famous physician-anatomists in sixteenth-century England. This turn to medical discourse can be construed as a somewhat desperate attempt to ground one’s scepticism in a scientific discourse whose rise over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be linked with the advent of this other kind of scepticism: see my Introduction, as well as

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224 Notes

112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

120.

121.

122. 123.

124. 125.

126. 127.

Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. 468–75. Compare Douglas Trevor, ‘Love and King Lear’ (Paper for SAA annual meeting, April 2004), 4: ‘the play explores the limitations of a humoral reading of its protagonist even as it substantiates this reading by giving voice to it repeatedly. King Lear emanates out of a slowly-emerging, post-humoral world in which no other diagnostic system is yet available to understand the passions except that which inexorably discredits itself’. Winnicott, Collected Papers, 35. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 119. Compare Elton’s comments on Lear’s question about anatomy (‘King Lear’ and the Gods, 219–24). Gillies, ‘The Scene of Cartography’, 123. Valerie Traub, paper delivered at the 2005 Shakespeare Association of America (Bermuda, March 2005). In Lear, as in Hamlet, the opening crisis has much to do with the definition of borders – the division of the kingdom is a boundary redefinition. On anatomy and King Lear, see Devon L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 71–2. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 202. Benjamin, Illuminations, 240. This could be said to be equally true of the individual: at the turning points of life the security and comfort offered by habits – in all of their meanings (including addictions) – are usually what one clings to most desperately. Edgar is similarly ‘re-covered’, first by his father, who requests his servant to ‘bring some covering for this naked soul’ (4.1.44), then with armour, in which ‘fair and warlike [    ] outside’ (5.3.141) he reveals himself to Edmund and recovers his name and position. Note also Lear’s odd use of ‘wear out’ in ‘And we’ll wear out / In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones’ (3.7.17–18) – usually glossed as ‘outlive’, there is an obscure underlying implication, I think, that Lear and Cordelia will remain clothed for longer than these ‘great ones’; compare Henry V, 5.2.132 (‘if you urge me farther [    ] I wear out my suit’) and Henry VIII, 1.3.15 (‘their clothes are after such a pagan cut, that sure they’ve worn out Christendom’). See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 89–91. This is underscored by a piquant textual oddity: when Goneril’s and Regan’s dead bodies are produced onstage at the end of Act 5, the Quarto text has ‘brought in’, the Folio, ‘brought out’ (5.3.229s.d.). Perhaps we should make nothing of this detail, but one ignores such oddities in Shakespeare at one’s peril. The line is given – less convincingly, to my mind – to Lear in the Quarto. In ‘A Note on the Death of Lear’ (Modern Language Notes, LXX (1955), 403–4), Gerald Smith gives some contemporary examples of dying of joy. Citing The Problems of Aristotle (‘joy doth coole the very inward guts’) and Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (‘his large sudden joyes / Opened his pores so wide, that’s native heate / So prodigally flow’d to t’exterior parts, / That th’inner Citadell was left unmand, / And so surpriz’d on sudden by colde death’), Smith proposes that the internal coldness associated with an excess of joy is the cause of Lear’s death. On the causes of Lear’s death, see also Milne, ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted’, 53–66. Compare Harry Berger’s comment, in Making Trifles of Terrors, 48: ‘[Lear] can exorcise her [Cordelia], consign her to oblivion, only by dying.’ Montaigne, Essayes, 2: 147 (‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’).

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128. Montaigne, Essayes, 2: 60 (‘Of exercise or practice’). Of Lear’s language in the final act, Anne Barton has written: ‘One comes to feel that these words are being broken on the anvil in an effort to determine whether or not there is anything inside’ (Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62). 129. According to Helge Kökeritz (Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953)), ‘Shakespeare’s vowel in father is [    ] difficult to ascertain’; he apparently used ‘at least two pronunciations of father, one with either [æ:] or [a:], the other with [e:]’ (169). The ‘polite’ vowel sound in feather was apparently [e:] (194–5). Compare Hal’s words, in Henry IV, Part 2, upon finding his father apparently dead: By his gates of breath There lies a downy feather which stirs not. Did he suspire, that light and weightless down Perforce must move. My gracious lord! my father! (4.5.30–3)

5

No barricado for a belly: The Winter’s Tale 1. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. and intr. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 3: 240 (Sermon 10). 2. The play is full of terms denoting plenitude: for ‘full’, see 1.2.4, 129; 4.4.346, 433, 765; for ‘filled’, see 1.2.5; 3.2.166; 3.3.22; ‘stuffed’, 2.1.185; ‘cram’, 1.2.91; ‘swell’, 2.1.62; ‘replenished’, 2.1.79. Citations from The Winter’s Tale are from the Arden edition, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (London: Routledge, 1963); all other Shakespeare citations in this chapter are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 3. That the play depicts ‘a masculinity that can read in the full maternal body only the signs of its own loss’ is the main thrust of Janet Adelman’s reading of the play (Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Routledge, 1992), 222). Compare Valerie Traub (Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 50) on ‘That “dark continent” traversed by every infant, where we are conceived and from which we are delivered, the maternal figure exists in our pre-natal memories – before culture, language, law, before knowledge of the father, before the Law of the Father.’ 4. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 299. All this, of course, pertains to a pre-DNA-testing world. 5. For the phrase ‘Bowels of pitie’, see, for instance, George Herbert, ‘Longing’ (in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941)), l. 19; for ‘bowels of commiseration and compassion’ see Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration, from F. W. Brownlow’s edition, in Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 227–8; on the commonly-used phrase ‘the bowels of Christ’, see my Introduction. 6. Thomas Goodwin, Of the Object and Acts of Justifying Faith, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin (London, 1697), 4: 87; emphasis in the original. 7. Ibid.: ‘that word [merciful] ( Racham) here used is a Metaphor taken from Bowels’. Compare Edgar’s description of himself as ‘pregnant to good pity’( Lear, 4.6.223).

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226 Notes

8. On the womb as the place of woman’s knowledge, see, for example, Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing, foreword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1988), 175–7; and Stanley Cavell’s comments on this passage in A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 169. See also Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. Chapter 6. 9. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 206. Cavell comments upon the suddenness of the onset of scepticism, as exemplified in Leontes (and Othello, and Descartes and Hume). In this it is akin to Burton’s description of melancholy: ‘the Scene alters upon a sudden, Fear and Sorrow supplant those pleasing thoughts, suspicion, discontent, and perpetual anxiety succeed in their places’ (Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1927), 346); Mamillius, similarly, ‘straight declin’d, droop’d, took it deeply / Fasten’d and fix’d the shame on’t in himself, / Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep / And downright languish’d’ (2.3.14–17). See also Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), on ‘the similarity between Pyrrhonist skepticism and pastoral’ (18); ‘pastorals’, she argues, ‘expressed the anti-intellectualism of Pyrrhonism’ (17). 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 130 (sec. 208); Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), VII: 2, 25 (8); the latter cited from Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: the Body and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 223. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 235. 12. Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, translated by John Florio, 3 vols (London, 1603; rpt. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1910), 1: 203 (‘Of Friendship’). 13. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night or, A discourse of apparitions (London, 1594), Sig. Eii˘. 14. On ‘burden’ as ‘child in the womb’, see Chapter 4 above. 15. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 148. 16. Adelman is foremost among the critics who read the passage as Leontes’ attempt ‘to heave out the internalized mother, the contaminated origin within, like a child spitting up infected – or soured – milk’ (Suffocating Mothers, 226). 17. All’s Well, 2.3.4–5. 18. On the derivation of ‘folly’ from ‘follis’, ‘belly’, see above, pp. 128 and 219n.40. 19. On both the psychoanalytic and the ethnographic aspects of male simulation of pregnancy symptoms in general and the ritual ‘couvade’ in particular, see especially Joan Raphael-Leff, Psychological Processes of Childbearing, 4th edn (London: The Anna Freud Centre, 2005), 153–6. 20. On the isomorphic association of heart and womb in the early modern period, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 311n.63. 21. The Arden editor, Pafford, interprets the line as ‘your intensity penetrates to the very heart and soul of man’, and adds a Ben Jonson description of ‘Affection [    ] in her hand a flaming heart’ (166); ‘th’Affections from the hart proceede’, writes John Davies of Hereford (Microcosmos. The Discovery of the Little World, with

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Notes to Chapter 5 227

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

the government thereof (Oxford, 1603), 48). For ‘centre‘ = ‘centre of the body’, see Romeo and Juliet 2.1.1–2 and Hamlet 2.2.159; compare also, Richard Sibbes’s use of the word (in Bowels Opened (London, 1648), 101): ‘Art begins with the face, and outward lineaments [    ] But grace at the Center, and from thence goes to the Circumference’. D.W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (London: Pelican, 1964), 19. Similarly, the insistence on the ‘Posterns’ and the ‘gates’ (see below) may possibly be taken as a closing of the self to being impregnated. Several critics have commented upon the homoerotic undertone (and its suppression) in Leontes’ relations with Polixenes; see especially J.I.M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 31–6. Compare Leontes’ ‘let her sport herself / With that she’s big with’, 40 lines earlier, at 2.1.60–1. On the central significance of the terms ‘bear’, ‘born’, ‘bairn’, and their cognates in The Winter’s Tale, see Margreta de Grazia, ‘Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization’, Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990), 143–56; Stephen Booth, ‘Exit, Pursued by a Gentleman Born’, in Shakespeare’s Art from a Comparative Perspective, ed. Wendell. M. Aycock, Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, Texas Tech University, vol. 12 (1981), 51–66; and Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 126; 143; 324n.83. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrim: Microcosmus, OR The Historie of Man (London: Printed by W.S. for Henry Featherstone, 1619), 327. Donne too associates spiders with the interior of the body, though not with the belly but rather with the heart: ‘As a spider builds always where he knows there is most access and haunt of flies, so the Devil that hath cast these light cobwebs into thy heart, knows that the heart is made of vanities and levities.’ Donne, Sermons, 24 March 1617, in John Donne: the Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 267–8. Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew), Liber de proprietatibus rerum, trans. J. Trevisa (London: T. Bertheletti, 1535), book xvii, §11; cited from H.W. Seager, Natural History in Shakespeare’s Time (Chicheley: Minet, 1972), 294–5. The imagery of sluicing and fishing in ponds (1.2.195), of ‘angling’ and ‘giv[ing] line’ (ll. 180–1), of ‘cast[ing] out’ the ‘anchor’ (ll. 212–13) all have, among other things, a connotation of a relation to the other’s interior and to one’s means of access to this interior (compare also the ‘paddling palms’ of l. 115 and the ‘waters’ of l. 132); the amazing ‘Inch-thick, knee-deep; o’er head and ears a fork’d one’ (l. 186) may partake of this ‘watery’ structure: for Leontes, wetting one’s feet seems equivalent to drowning. See 1.2.145, 262, 305–6, 418, 423; 2.1.42; 3.2.98; 5.1.169. Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, Or The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 201. We might imagine a submerged association between the ‘posterns’ and the ‘posterior’ here. Burton, Anatomy, 701 (Dell, ed.); the following quotation is from 702. Compare Iago’s description of Desdemona and Cassio: ‘They met so near with their lips that their breaths embrac’d together’ (Othello, 2.1.259–60). The Arden editor notes (150) ‘the belief [in the period] that sighs did cost the heart blood’ (5.2.87–8n.). Sir Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: Or A Naturall Historie (London: William Lee, 1626), 288, cited in Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 100.

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228 Notes

34. Compare Hamlet’s ‘Let her paint an inch think, to this favour she must come’ (5.1.187–8). 35. Hermione has of course no adequate way to respond to Leontes’ accusations; whether she avers the truth-value of her outward self or insists that external signs cannot be taken as notes infallible of that within (‘I am not prone to – weeping [    ] but I have / That honourable grief lodg’d here which burns / Worse than tears drown’ – 2.1.108–12); Wittgenstein-like, Hermione knows that Leontes’ scepticism is (in its own terms) irrefutable: ‘it shall scarce boot me / To say “not guilty”: mine integrity, / Being counted falsehood, shall, as I express it, / Be so receiv’d’ (3.2.25–8). 36. For the former sense, see, for example, ‘inward pinches’ (The Tempest, 5.1.77); ‘gall and pinch’ (1Henry IV, 1.3.229), ‘with a colic pinch’d [    ] / Within her womb’ (1Henry IV, 3.1.28–30); ‘pinch’d with a colic’ (Coriolanus, 2.1.74); ‘belly-pinched’ (Lear, 3.1.13) and ‘necessity’s sharp pinch’ (Lear, 2.4.211). For the latter: ‘thou dost pinch thy bearer’ (2Henry IV, 4.5.29); ‘pinch me like a pasty’ (All’s Well, 4.3.123); ‘in this our pinching cave’ (Cymbeline, 3.3.38). See also Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 188–9, for a comment on the way ‘Caliban associates pinching, as Prospero also does, with the vulnerability of the human body to penetration by sharp objects.’ 37. Hermione herself stresses the notion of such plenitude with her plea to her husband to ‘cram’s with praise, and make’s / As fat as tame things’ (1.2.91–2). 38. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 129–30. 39. On Protestantism’s investment in the importance of the seal of the covenant as one indicator of its connection to homo clausus, see my Introduction. 40. Though ‘pregnant’ in early modern English more usually referred to intellectual or semiotic fullness, it was also used to mean ‘with child’ during the sixteenth century. It is one of the very few words in this period (and indeed more generally) the trajectory of which is not away from but towards a greater degree of embodiment. See Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 159–61. 41. Shakespeare’s only use of the word. Here, as throughout Act 3 of King Lear, there may well be a play on ‘content’ as ‘contents of the body’, and hence on the idea that Polixenes – ‘Your discontenting father’ – is attacking or emptying these contents. Compare the discovery of the Oracle’s ‘contents’ (3.1.19–20), and Leontes’ repetition of ‘I am content [    ] I am content’ (5.3.92–3) in the final scene. 42. As I argued in Chapter 5, Lear’s cursing of interiority might be understood as a reaction to the perception of the ‘nothingness’ at the heart of his daughters. On Leontes’ nihilism – his ‘wish for there to be nothing’, see especially Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 206–8; compare D.W. Winnicott’s speculations on the relation between hunger, pregnancy and emptiness in ‘Nothing at the Centre’, Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 49–52. 43. Florizel thus reverses Leontes’ ‘crisis of faith’ (Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 230). That the only way for Leontes to know that (for example) Mamillius is his son is through faith is underlined by Shakespeare’s only use of the expression ‘i’fecks’ [that is, ‘in faith’]: Leontes: ‘Art thou my boy?’ Mamillius: ‘Ay, my good lord’. Leontes: ‘I’fecks’ (1.2.120). Recent critics have emphasised that what is called for in the play’s final scenes is something akin to religious faith; here, Paulina’s ‘It is requir’d / You do awake your faith’ (5.3.94–5) has been heavily relied upon.

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Notes to Chapter 5 229

44. I have not made an exhaustive search, but I believe there to be few if any words used (or abused) in the first half of the play which are not repeated in the second. Shakespeare habitually reuses words in his plays to subtle and powerful effect; but surely never to this extent and with this precision. Remarkably often a word or phrase appears exactly twice in the play, once before and once after the turning point. A far from exhaustive list includes (apart from ‘affection’, ‘affliction’, ‘burden’, ‘cordial’, ‘deliver’, ‘intention’, and ‘open’ – discussed in the body of this chapter): ‘blossom’ (3.3.46 and 5.2.125); ‘build’ (2.1.101 and 4.3.23); ‘displeasures’ (2.3.45 and 4.4.433); ‘distraction’ (1.2.149 and 5.2.48); ‘fix’d’ (2.3.15 and 5.3.47); ‘low(er)’ (1.2.227 and 4.4.9 / 5.1.207); ‘nearest’ (1.2.236 and 4.4.522); ‘necessity’ (1.2.22 and 4.4.634) and ‘necessities’ (1.1.25 and 4.4.38); ‘several’ (1.2.438 and 4.4.184); ‘shake’ (1.2.428 and 4.4.569); ‘win’ (1.2.21) and ‘winners’ (5.3.131); ‘wink’ (1.2.317 and 3.3.104 / 5.2.110); ‘wisdom’ (2.1.21 and 4.4.150); ‘wisest’ (1.2.262 and 5.2.16); ‘wit’ (2.2.50 and 4.4.772); ‘witch’ (2.3.68) and ‘witchcraft’ (4.4.423). Numerous apparently insignificant details are revisited in the final movement; to take just one example: Leontes’ anger at the diseased ‘eyes, / Blind with the pin and web’ (1.2.291) – which becomes Paulina’s ‘one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated [    ] as if she would pin her to her heart’ (5.2.74–7). This reuse of language is itself a kind of recapitulation of Leontes’ repeated strategy in the first part of the play, where he again and again appropriates the words and actions of those around him (for example: Hermione: ‘What is this? sport?’ Leontes: ‘let her sport herself / With that she’s big with’ – 2.1.58–61; Hermione: ‘you, my lord, do much mistake’. Leontes: ‘You have mistook, my lady’ – ll. 80–1). 45. In this context, it may be worth noting the play’s numerous uses of ‘betwixt’ and ‘twixt’ (eleven uses in The Winter’s Tale, more than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays). 46. Spolsky claims that Renaissance pastoral provided ‘bodily knowledge’, and hence ‘a bodily consolation for mortality – a physical comfort’ (Satisfying Skepticism, 16, 5). 47. For the association between statues and breathing, see, for example, the description in Antony and Cleopatra of Octavia as being ‘a body rather than a life, / A statue, than a breather’ (3.3.21), and, in Richard III, Buckingham’s description of the people as ‘like dumb statues, or breathing stones’ (3.7.25). 48. Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, ed. Adam Phillips (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 45. See also D.W. Winnicott’s remarks on breathing in The Family and Individual Development (London: Tavistock, 1965), 9, and my comments on the topic at the end of Chapter 3. 49. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 234. 50. Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 45. 51. Note especially Florizel’s portrayal as having had ‘a worthy feeding’ (4.4.171); the servant’s description of Autolycus as speaking ‘as he had eaten ballads’ (l. 187); the latter’s ‘Fortune [    ] drops booties in my mouth’ (ll. 832–3); and Camillo’s ‘I much thirst to see [Leontes]’ (l. 513). 52. Guillaume Apollinaire, L’Enchanteur pourrissant (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 49, cited in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses 1955– 1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 323. On eating and its relation to ethics in the early modern period, see Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999), in which he argues that ‘behaviour towards food will determine the ethical success of the subject’ (19).

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230 Notes

53. John Donne, ‘Twickenham Gardens’, ll. 6–7, in John Donne: the Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 105. 54. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 320 (sec. 364). 55. Marion O’Connor, ‘ “Imagine Me, Gentle Spectators”: Iconomachy and The Winter’s Tale’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, vol. IV (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 365–88, 380. On the play’s incarnational/Catholic aesthetic, see Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140–1. On the post-Reformation resonances of this scene and especially the relation of Hermione’s revivification to religious concepts of bodily resurrection, see Cynthia Marshall, ‘Dualism and the Hope of Reunion in The Winter’s Tale’, Soundings 69:3 (Fall 1986), 294–309. For a reading of the play as drawing upon specifically Protestant theology, see Huston Diehl, ‘ “Strike All that Look Upon With Marvel”: Theatrical and Theological Wonder in The Winter’s Tale’, in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 19–34. 56. C.L. Barber, ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 188–202, 198; and C.L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 333. Compare Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety, 58: ‘I would argue [    ] that the fantasy represented by the non-sexualized maternity of a Virgin Mary further manages anxieties about female reproductive corporeality. With the Reformation’s institutionalized occlusion of Matriolatry, the social and psychic functions the Virgin performed were left with little institutional accommodation.’ 57. Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 119, 98. On dream-pairs, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Revision of the Theory of Dreams’, in New Introductory Lectures (1933), 56. On structural doubling in the play, see James Edward Siemon, ‘ “But it appears she lives”: Iteration in The Winter’s Tale’, PMLA 89 (1974), 10–16. 58. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 125–6; compare 137–8. Leontes’ ‘monumentalisation’ of Hermione is, as various critics have pointed out, simultaneously a depersonalisation, a refusal of her otherness: hence, for instance, his addressing her as ‘O thou thing’ (2.1.82), and his constant recourse to the indefinite pronoun ‘it’. On ‘monumentalisation’, see Abbe Blum, ‘ “Strike all that look upon with mar[b]le”: Monumentalizing Women in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press, 1990), 99–118, and Leonard Barkan, ‘ “Living Sculptures”: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale’, English Literary History 48 (1981), 63–7. 59. Sir Richard Baker, Theatrum Redivivium, Or the Theatre Vindicated (London, 1662), ed. Arthur Freeman (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1973), 31. 60. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 218. 61. Giovanni Ciampoli, ‘Del corpo humano’, in Prose di Monsignor G.C. (Venice, Per il Pezzana, 1676), 40–1; cited in Piero Camporesi, The Anatomy of the Senses: Natural Symbols in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 98. Galen wrote that sculpture embellishes the outside only, while nature touches every part of the body: On the Natural Faculties (De naturalibus

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Notes to Chapter 5 231

62. 63.

64. 65.

facultatibus), trans. Arthur John Brock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 2.3. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11 (Second Meditation). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), paragraphs 486–7. Yehuda Amichai, ‘My Children Grew’, New Yorker, 27 September 1999. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Thinking Dwelling’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Routledge, 1993), 334.

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232 Notes

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, trans. Nicholas T. Rand, foreword by Jacques Derrida (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Adelman, Janet, ‘Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 no. 2 (1997), 125–44. Adelman, Janet, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (London: Routledge, 1992). Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia (London: New Left Books, 1974). Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Ahern, Daniel R., Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995). Albano, Caterina, ‘Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy’, in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 89–106. Amichai, Yehuda, ‘My Children Grew’, The New Yorker, 27 September 1999. Anglicus, Bartholomaeus (Bartholomew), Liber de proprietatibus rerum, trans. J. Trevisa (London: T. Bertheletti, 1535). Anon., The True Chronicle History of King Leir, ed. Tiffany Stern (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002). Anon., A Warning for Fair Women [London, 1599], ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). Anzieu, Didier, A Skin for Thought, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac, 1990). Anzieu, Didier, ed., Psychic Envelopes, trans. Daphne Briggs (London: Karnac, 1990). Anzieu, Didier, The Skin Ego: a Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Apollinaire, Guillaume, L’Enchanteur pourrissant (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Arditi, Jorge, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Arens, W., The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981). Ariès, Philippe and Georges Duby (eds), A History of Private Life, vol. 2: Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Aubrey, John, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (London, 1686–87), ed. James Britten (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967). Auden, W.H., ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, in Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (London: Faber & Faber, 1949). St Augustine, Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques Paul Migne [1844–65] (rep. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995). 233

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Tomkis, Thomas, Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority [London, 1607], ed. John Farmer (Amersham: Tudor Facsimile Reprints, 1913). Tourneur, Cyril, The Revenger’s Tragedy, in Three Jacobean Tragedies, ed. G¯amini Salg¯ado (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965). Traub, Valerie, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Traub, Valerie, paper delivered at the 2005 Shakespeare Association of America (Bermuda, March 2005). Trevor, Douglas, ‘Love and King Lear ’ (paper for SAA annual meeting, April 2004). Tylus, Jane, ‘ “Par Accident”: the Public World of Early Modern Theater’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions, ed. Paster, Rowe and Floyd-Wilson (2004), 253–71. Venner, Tobias, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam. Or, A Treatise wherein the right way and best manner of living for attaining a long and healthfull life, is clearly demonstrated (London, 1623; 1650). Vernant, Jean-Pierre, ‘Dim Body, Dazzling Body’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part I, ed. Michel Feher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 18–47. Vesalius, Andreas, De humanis corporis fabrica libri septem (Basileae: Per Joannem Oporinum, 1555). Vesalius, Andreas, Tabulae anatomicae (Venice, 1538). Vicary, Thomas, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, 1548; rptd. by the Early English Text Society, London, 1888). Wear, Andrew, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wear, Andrew, ‘Medicine in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700’, in Lawrence I. Conrad et al., The European Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Webster, John, The White Devil, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London: A.C. Black, 1985). Weil, Simone, The Iliad or, The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill, n.d.). Weimann, Robert, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Weimann, Robert, Authority and Representation in Early Modern England, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Wells, John, The Anchor of Hope    Or Gods Bowels Let Out, Opened, [and] Proclaimed to Afflicted Saints (London, 1645). Whitney, Geffrey, A Choice of Emblemes and Other Devises (Leyden: In the house of Christopher Plantyn, by Francis Raphelengius, 1586). Willbern, David, ‘Shakespeare’s Nothing’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 244-63. Williams, Gordon, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1994). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Wilson, John Dover, What Happens in ‘Hamlet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

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Winnicott, D.W., Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). Winnicott, D.W., The Family and Individual Development (London: Tavistock, 1965). Winnicott, D.W., The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1965). Winnicott, D.W., The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (London: Pelican, 1964). Winnicott, D.W., Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1958/1992). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953). Wollheim, Richard, The Mind and its Depths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Wood, D., ‘Physiology of the Enteric Nervous System’, in Leonard R. Johnson (ed.-in-chief), Physiology of the Gastrointestinal Tract (New York: Raven Press, 1987), 67–109. Wright, Thomas, The Passions of the Minde in generall (London, 1604), ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

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252 Bibliography

Abraham, Nicolas, 182n.99, 184n.126, 209n.72 abject, 15, 96, 108, 179n.52, 196n.20 acknowledgement, 3, 11, 27, 49, 51, 52, 64, 97, 111, 116, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 134, 135, 143, 145, 147, 148, 151, 154–5, 157, 160, 163, 173n.1, 217n.20 Adelman, Janet, 102, 103, 105–6, 167, 204n.5, 211nn.89, 90, 217n.22, 220nn.55, 59, 226n.3, 227nn.16, 20, 229n.43 agency, 2, 17, 20, 75 aggressivity, 14, 22–3, 32, 35–6, 68–9, 75–6, 103–5, 108, 128, 199n.63 see also violence Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 175n.14 agoraphobia, 119, 164 Amichai, Yehuda, 171 anatomy, 6, 9–10, 18, 19, 20, 24, 32–6, 39–40, 43, 44, 51, 53, 57, 63, 68–9, 76, 84, 127, 131, 145–7, 186nn.150, 151, 187nn.160, 163, 197n.36, 224n.111, 225n.115 theatres, 43–4 Anglicus, Bartholomaeus (Bartholomew), 160 animals, 15, 16, 57, 63–7, 68, 75, 100–1, 107–8, 132, 140, 170 see also oyster; pelican; rat; spider anthropomancy, see haruspices Antony and Cleopatra, 17, 99, 164 Anzieu, Didier, 170n.30 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 168 appetite, 55, 64, 66, 70, 72–4, 87, 99, 101, 125, 168, 227n.9 Arditi, Jorge, 177n.39 Arens, William, 209n.71 Ariès, Philippe, 9 Aristotle, 15 As You Like It, 69 Auden, W.H., vi Augustine, St, 16, 186n.147

Bachelard, Gaston, 142, 193n.243 Bacon, Sir Francis, 17, 67, 76, 79, 162, 184n.123, 187n.160, 197n.38 Baker, Sir Richard, 170 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17, 50, 176n.27, 196n.20 Balint, Michael, 179n.54 Barber, C.L., 44, 145, 169, 191n.207, 193n.244, 224n.108 Barfoot, C.C., 77 Barkan, Leonard, 181n.89, 231n.58 Barker, Francis, 85, 87, 175n.11, 194n.246 Barroll, J. Leeds, 192n.219 Barton, Anne, 226n.128 Bartsch, Shadi, 211n.95 Bataille, Georges, 62, 97, 103, 211n.91 Bednarz, James, 192n.215, 194n.3, 199n.59 belief, 1, 4, 5, 23–32, 36–40, 41, 45, 51, 53, 54, 61, 95, 115–16, 122, 153, 155–6, 163–6, 168–9, 178n.50, 183n.113, 184n.120, 215n.130, 219n.47, 224n.108, 229n.43 Bell, Millicent, 219n.45 belly, 1, 9, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 42, 52, 53, 66, 73, 95, 100, 101–2, 127, 128, 136, 149–50, 155, 159–60, 180n.66, 188n.182, 198n.46, 201n.78, 224n.105, 227n.18, 228n.26 Belsey, Catherine, 73, 175n.11, 179n.60 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 69, 86, 108, 109, 115, 137, 147, 206n.28, 215n.130 Benthien, Claudia, 8 Berger, Harry, Jr, 3, 49, 50, 174n.7, 193n.236, 194n.4, 200n.72, 217n.25, 225n.126 Bergoffen, Debra B., 113 Bertram, Benjamin, 219n.45 Bethell, S.L., 195n.11, 202n.91

253

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Index

Bible, The, 15–16, 20, 30–2, 37–8, 145, 186n.146, 188nn.174, 182, 189n.187 Bick, Esther, 177n.30 Bion, Wilfred, 208n.50 Blondel, Eric, 62, 195n.13 blood, 7, 11, 19, 20, 21, 30, 34, 36, 37, 42, 44, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 62–5, 67, 73, 74, 78, 82, 89, 92, 105, 106, 125, 132, 133, 146, 149, 161, 162, 167, 171, 173n.2, 186n.147, 191n.206, 197n.44, 198n.45, 199n.59, 202n.95, 219n.44 Blum, Abbe, 231n.58 body, the armoured, 6, 14, 35, 60, 81–2, 93–4, 160–4, 185nn.142, 143 body-ideal, 8, 28, 46 body–mind relationship, 1–3, 4–5, 17, 61–4, 83, 85–6, 105–7, 116, 119, 174n.8, 187n.160 body–soul relationship, 4–5, 15–16, 18, 29, 34, 36–7, 38, 40, 57, 61–2, 85–6, 106–7, 173n.4 inside/outside of, 1, 4–11, 12–14, 18, 25–6, 28–32, 35, 38–9, 62, 66–8, 81–2, 85–7, 88–90, 95, 108, 109–15, 119, 121–2, 128, 130–7 passim, 141, 148–50, 153, 156, 161–3, 164–8, 171–2, 178n.51, 179nn.52, 54, 200n.68, 204n.5 maternal, 21–3, 52, 74, 102–7, 120, 122–3, 124, 131–3, 153–5, 157, 158–62, 182n.100, 226n.3 open/closed, 7–11, 32–6, 37, 38–40, 41, 44, 45–6, 47, 52, 54–5, 78, 81–3, 85, 87, 88–90, 91–4, 95, 99, 102–5, 112–14, 115, 125, 156, 160–4, 167, 171, 176n.26, 177nn.33, 39, 193n.236, 196n.20, 208n.57 opened, 43–4, 47, 51, 67–9, 78, 91, 101, 102, 104 paternal, 43, 52, 88–90, 91–2, 95–6, 98–101, 102–4, 107, 108, 120, 124–8, 129–50 passim, 153–64 see also human relations, embodied; bones; bowels; brain; entrails; heart; liver; skin

body politic, 9, 10, 19, 21, 49–50, 52, 127–8, 143–4, 149, 153, 193n.233, 205n.17 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 190n.203, 198n.51 bones, 1, 17, 38, 62, 64, 72, 90–1, 106, 109, 111, 114, 120, 131, 133, 155, 219n.44, 220n.54 Bonnefoy, Yves, 4 Booth, Stephen, 217n.26, 223nn.92, 102, 228n.25 Bosch, Hieronymous, 14, 35, 94, 182n.101 bowels, 11, 15–16, 17, 19, 20, 36–8, 48–50, 69, 72, 96, 100, 102, 132, 136, 143, 154–6, 180n.66, 181n.84, 187n.155, 188n.174, 189n.187, 191n.206, 198n.45, 216n.11, 220n.59, 226n.5 Braden, Gordon, 215n.130 Bradley, A.C., 138, 146, 205n.6, 221n.64, 222n.84 Bradshaw, Graham, 173n.4, 185n.132, 196n.17, 201n.82, 204n.5 brain, 16, 17, 20, 21, 30, 42, 48, 72, 74, 106, 107, 131, 135, 146, 158, 182n.92, 209nn.63, 64 breath/breathing, 17, 64, 77, 85, 101, 115, 150, 162, 166–7, 168, 170, 211n.91, 215nn.128, 129, 226n.129, 228n.31, 230nn.47, 48 Bright, Timothy, 93, 113 Britton, Ronald, 176n.20, 208n.53, 213n.105, 219n.47 Brown, Norman O., 39 Browne, Sir Thomas, 8, 19, 70, 220n.62 buildings/architecture, 10, 19, 31, 39, 46, 82, 93, 107, 119, 121, 130, 136–44, 148–9, 178n.41, 192n.223, 193nn.241, 243, 212nn.96, 98, 222nn.78, 82 burden/burthen, 48, 123, 125, 156, 158, 165, 216n.18, 217n.19, 227n.14 Burke, Kenneth, 141, 223n.95 Burkert, Walter, 180n.68, 209n.71 Burton, Robert, 39, 67, 68–9, 75–6, 86, 162, 173n.4, 187n.160, 198n.48, 200n.75, 201n.78, 202n.99, 205n.17, 206n.29, 208n.57, 227n.9

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254 Index

Butler, Judith, 13, 178n.51 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 177n.39, 180n.68, 188n.173, 189n.191 Calderwood, James L., 224n.104 Calvin, John, 39 Camporesi, Piero, 18, 180n.68, 192n.215 cannibalism, 49, 66, 69–71, 73, 75, 76–8, 81, 97–102, 108, 109, 125–6, 197n.38, 200n.74, 201n.78, 209n.71, 211n.84, 212n.100 Carey, John, 181n.84 cartesianism, see Descartes cartography, 10, 19, 126, 138, 146–7 Cartwright, William, 191n.206 catharsis, 45, 70, 128, 190n.203, 192n.215 Catholicism, 38–40, 95, 114–15, 116, 121–2, 168–9, 188n.174, 189n.192, 190n.195, 231n.55 Cavell, Stanley, 27–9, 35, 51, 82–3, 90, 116, 120, 133, 149, 154–5, 157, 169–70 certainty/(uncertainty), 5, 27, 30, 33–4, 36, 51, 55–6, 79, 111, 114, 133, 146, 154, 155, 159, 161, 163, 171, 175n.14, 184nn.124, 128, 185nn.134, 135, 188n.171, 190n.193, 193n.244, 194n.246, 211n.90, 215n.5, 217n.21, 220n.55, 223n.101, 224n.108, 227nn.8, 9, 229n.42 character, concept of, 7, 74–5, 94, 98 Charnes, Linda, 74, 195n.6, 201n.85 Charney, Maurice, 116, 207n.46, 222n.79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 211n.95 Ciampoli, Giovanni, 171 claustrophobia/(claustrophilia), 7, 8, 10, 21, 35, 82, 119, 148, 164, 166, 192n.227, 193n.238 Clemen, Wolfgang, 120, 205n.17 Clément, Catherine, 227n.8 clothing, 31, 60, 85, 87, 110, 121, 137–50 passim, 214n.118, 222n.79, 225nn.120, 121 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 83, 88, 194n.4, 207n.38

Colie, Rosalie, 200n.75, 202n.91, 224n.110 comedy, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 74, 165, 202n.95 communion, see Eucharist ‘complexion’, 2, 20, 206n.30 Connor, Steven, 8, 18, 189n.192 content/discontent, 123, 132, 142, 165, 221n.74, 223n.98, 227n.9, 229n.41 Cook, Carol, 74, 201n.81 Coriolanus, 20–2, 50, 54, 103, 173n.2, 223n.98, 229n.36 cosmetics, 8, 78, 113 Crane, Mary Thomas, 174n.6, 176n.26, 178n.43, 192n.227, 193nn.236, 238, 242, 204n.5, 229nn.36, 40 crisis, 5–6, 41, 76, 87–8, 93, 147, 175n.14, 203n.14, 225n.115, 229n.43 Crooke, Helkiah, 9, 34 Cymbeline, 20, 23, 200n.75, 229n.36 Davies of Hereford, John, 33, 36, 37, 227n.21 Dawson, Anthony, 4, 173n.5, 184n.127, 189n.188, 191n.210, 194n.4, 203n.114 death, 9, 15–16, 34, 35, 42, 44, 82, 88–90, 90–1, 95–8, 100–1, 103, 108, 109–12, 114, 116, 128, 169, 209n.71, 211n.91, 217n.26, 225n.125 see also mourning de Certeau, Michel, 33, 76, 77, 78, 164, 203n.103 de Grazia, Margreta, 137, 139, 222n.81, 223n.89, 228n.25 Dekker, Thomas, 45, 194n.3 Derrida, Jacques, 185n.136, 209n.72 Descartes, René, 2, 4, 7, 29, 30, 34, 54–7, 184n.123, 194n.246, 227n.9 desire, 4, 6, 16, 22–3, 29, 32–7, 43–4, 47, 53–4, 67–77, 81, 84, 87, 92, 94, 97, 103–5, 108–14, 122, 126, 129, 133, 139, 144, 146, 154, 155, 159, 163, 167, 188n.182, 197n.137, 201n.85, 207n.41 Diamond, Elin, 45 Diehl, Huston, 175n.13, 189n.188, 193n.244, 231n.55

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Index 255

digestion, 17, 19, 23, 28, 41, 42, 66, 69–70, 73–4, 81, 95, 97–8, 103, 113, 125–6, 167–8, 190n.202, 202n.99 disease, 5, 7, 8–9, 45, 49, 60, 64–5, 66, 70, 72, 76, 78, 84, 106, 114, 121, 132–3, 158, 160, 177n.34, 193n.233, 196n.20, 199n.55, 205n.17, 208n.57, 220n.60 disembodiment, 3–5, 7, 38–40, 52, 59–64, 65, 71, 77–8, 85–6, 87, 116, 120, 171, 175n.11, 194n.4, 207n.38, 215n.4 see also excarnation disembowelment, 33, 35, 49, 57, 94, 96, 128, 187n.155, 193n.231 see also purgation disgust, 15, 62–3, 65, 75–6, 81, 87, 103, 114, 161, 168 see also nausea displacement, 16–17, 49–50, 71, 97 Docherty, Thomas, 175n.14 Doebler, John, 212n.100 Donne, John, 14, 19, 28, 37, 53, 129, 153, 156, 163, 168, 170, 171, 181n.84, 186n.147, 188n.178, 195n.10, 209n.68, 214n.11, 228n.26 doubt, 1, 5, 23–32, 54–7, 68, 84, 90, 110–15, 145, 154, 163, 164, 169, 175n.16, 183n.118, 184n.124, 185n.141, 186n.146, 190n.193, 207n.42, 214n.111 Douglas, Mary, 15, 175n.17, 178n.50 dreams, 23–7, 56, 94, 102, 169, 183n.112, 193n,234, 206n.25, 209nn.62, 63, 64, 222n.79, 231n.57 Duden, Barbara, 176n.22, 177n.31 Durand, Jean-Louis, 180n.69 earth, 100, 109–10, 111–12, 136, 147–8, 159, 165, 166, 171, 218n.32, 223n.100 eating/hunger, 25, 66, 69–71, 72–4, 81–2, 95–102, 108, 125–6, 144, 149–50, 157, 167–70, 224n.105, 230nn.51, 52 see also digestion; Eucharist; food; incorporation ego, 7, 12–14, 26, 97, 98, 174n.8, 178n.46 Eigen, Michael, 167, 215n.129

Elias, Norbert, 7, 14, 17, 176n.27, 181n.76 Eliot, T.S., 83, 86, 212n.102 Elizabeth I, Queen, 19, 59, 65, 71, 181n.86, 197n.36 Ellmann, Maud, 108, 212n.101 Elton, William R., 216n.12, 224n.108, 225n.113 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 26, 109 empiricism, 32–6, 41, 53, 63–4, 114, 116, 146–7, 163 Empson, William, 221n.69, 224n.105 emptiness, 48, 49, 53, 71–2, 77, 78, 87, 96–7, 101–2, 120, 126–8, 129, 133, 143–6, 148, 153, 159, 163–4, 217n.26, 218n.38, 224n.108, 229nn.41, 42 entrails, and belief, 1, 15–6, 36–40, 61 and dreams, 23–5, 94, 206n.25 and obscurity, 24–5, 27–9, 61–3, 83–4, 94 and the sacred, 15–16, 36–8, 41, 53, 180n.66 and scepticism, 24, 32–6, 81–2 and truth, 4, 15–16, 24, 28, 60–4, 78, 82, 86, 87, 107, 109–10, 180nn. 66, 69, 181n.84 epistemology, 5, 26–30, 33–4, 41, 83, 113, 146–7, 175n.14 and limitation, 24, 27, 28, 38, 83–5, 111, 112–16, 175n.14 and the problem of other minds/bodies, 27, 51, 82, 109, 190n.193, 191n.208 epistemophilia, 23, 103, 113 etymology 61, 66, 113, 123, 126, 128, 143, 155, 197n.41, 200n.67, 216n.18 Eucharist, 25, 28, 38–40, 114–15, 167–70, 190n.193, 209n.71, 210n.82 Eustachius, xiv, 35 excarnation, 4, 39–40, 52, 60, 115–16, 171 see also disembodiment exorcism, 11, 38, 45, 121–2, 145, 191n.213, 193n.230, 216nn.9, 11 see also possession/dispossession expulsion/evacuation, 12–14, 22, 52, 120–2, 123–9, 133–5, 153, 155, 159 see also projection; purgation

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256 Index

Felman, Shoshana, 60 Ferenczi, Sàndor, 22, 182nn.98, 99 Ferguson, Margaret W., 206n.26 Ferry, Anne, 178n.41, 212n.96 Ficinus (Ficino), Marsilius, 86 Fineman, Joel, 74, 88, 175n.11 Fletcher, Phineas, 6, 40, 181n.83, 198n.46 food, 25, 63, 69–70, 73–4, 95–102, 144, 149–50, 157, 167–70, 210n.78, 230nn.51, 52 see also digestion; eating; Eucharist; incorporation Ford, John, 35, 42, 43 Forshaw, Colin, 199n.59 Foster, Hal, 179n.59 Foucault, Michel, 10, 178n.40, 187n.155 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 12–14, 22–7, 30, 54–6, 94, 97–8, 102–4, 154, 162, 169, 174n.8, 178n.46, 179n.59, 182n.98, 183nn.113, 118, 184nn.122, 123, 210n.73, 212nn.96, 102, 231n.57 Freund, Elizabeth, 60, 202n.99 Fumerton, Patricia, 186n.150 Galen, 2, 7, 231n.61 Gallagher, Lowell, 189n.192 Garber, Marjorie, 84, 183n.112, 211n.84 gender, 21–3, 52, 74, 78–9, 82, 102–4, 120, 122, 124, 131–4, 136, 153–61, 178n.45, 184n.128, 211n89 genealogy, 61–4, 65–6, 197n.36 Gillies, John, 135, 146, 222n.84, 223n.86 Girard, René, 75 Goodwin, Thomas, 37, 154–5, 188n.178 Grady, Hugh, 175n.11 Green, André, 179nn.53, 55, 184n.129, 193n.241 Greenblatt, Stephen, 87, 95, 96, 114, 146, 191n.213, 193n.244, 210n.74, 216n.12, 224n.108 Greenfield, Matthew, 75, 197n.36, 199n.55 Grosz, Elizabeth, 178nn.46, 51, 195n.13 Halbertal, Moshe, 184n.120 Hamlet, 2, 8, 14, 20, 42, 43, 44, 48, 51–2, 54, 55, 60, 67, 74, 79, 81–116, 119–20, 126–7, 148, 162, 163, 166,

168, 172, 185n.142, 193n.240, 204–15, 217nn.20, 26, 219n.48, 221n.74, 225n.115, 227n.21, 229n.34 Hall, Joseph, 68, 69, 200n.65 Hampton, Timothy, 195n.13 Hanson, Elizabeth, 176n.24, 191n.208, 193n.236 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 9, 177n.36, 193n.233, 199n.55 Harsnett, Samuel, 121, 122, 144, 145, 216nn.9, 11, 12, 220n.60, 226n.5 haruspices, 16, 180n.68 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 176n.24 Harvey, William, 7, 19, 34, 186n.151 Hawkes, Terence, 130, 205n.6 Healy, Margaret, 11, 177n.33 hearing/listening, 7–8, 62–3 heart, 1, 2, 5, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 67, 68, 71, 72, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 92, 104, 105–6, 110, 113, 115–16, 119–50 passim, 173n.2, 180nn.64, 66, 69, 181n.86, 182nn.92, 101, 184n.120, 185n.142, 187n.155, 188nn.171, 177, 178, 196n.27, 198n.48, 201nn.78, 80, 204n.4, 206n.25, 207n.41, 208nn.48, 51, 211n.89, 212nn.96, 98, 215n.130, 217nn.20, 24, 26, 218nn.27, 28, 219n.50, 220n.62, 221n.65, 68, 223nn.98, 99, 227nn.20, 21, 228nn.26, 32, 230n.44 Heidegger, Martin, 53, 172, 185n.131, 195n.13 Heilman, Robert B., 222n.79 Helgerson, Richard, 218n.32 Henry IV, Part 1, 19, 40, 48–50, 206n.25, 223n.100, 229n.36 Henry IV, Part 2, 2, 20, 48–50, 159, 194n.234, 214n.143, 222n.81, 226n.129, 229n.36 Henry V, 41, 50, 75, 190n.202, 193n.233, 225n.121 Henry VI, Part 3, 48 Henry, John, 173n.4 Herbert, George, 30, 186n.147, 226n.5 Hirschfeld, Heather, 210n.77 historicism, 3, 14–15, 21, 65–6, 94, 116

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Index 257

Hobbes, Thomas, 19 Hodges, Devon L., 32–3, 186n.150, 187n.152, 225n.115 Hoeniger, F.David, 182n.97 Holbrook, Peter, 205n.9 Holifield, E. Brooks, 189n.192 Holinshed, Raphael, 205n.17 Homer, 60, 64, 66, 68, 69, 75, 76, 78, 194n.4, 197n.40, 198n.47, 202n.99 homo clausus, 6–11, 14, 15, 29, 35, 38–9, 40, 43, 46–7, 52, 55, 60, 65, 89–90, 92, 94, 103, 109, 112, 116, 119, 122, 140, 141, 153, 155, 156, 164, 171, 176n.27, 192n.227, 209n.68, 229n.39 houses, see buildings Hughes, Ted, 30 human relations, embodied, 2–4, 10–11, 13–14, 22, 28, 47–8, 50–3, 77, 82–4, 91–3, 97–9, 102–9, 119–50 passim, 153–64 passim, 169–71, 172 humours/humoralism, 2, 4, 7–8, 9, 20, 24, 41, 45, 47, 49–50, 53, 61, 74–5, 86–7, 93, 94, 96, 113, 125, 158, 173n.5, 199n.59, 201n.82, 202n.95, 206n.30, 224n.111 Hunt, John, 206n.31, 207n.33 hysteria, 100, 122, 183n.118 idealism, 30, 52, 61–4, 65, 72–3, 92, 110, 114, 131, 144, 149 incorporation, 12–13, 22, 26, 28, 37, 39, 62, 96–102, 106, 108, 120, 125–6, 157–61, 166–70 see also digestion; eating; food, inhabitation, bodily, see possession/dispossession inside/outside, see the body, inside/outside of integument, 6–8, 29, 31, 39, 82, 90, 108–9, 110, 111, 113 see also skin interiority, see inwardness introjection, 11, 12–13, 22, 26, 28, 97–8, 120, 182nn.98, 99, 184n.126, 191n.213, 209n.72 see also incorporation inwardness, 1–3, 4–5, 6, 15–17, 18–20, 34, 38, 41, 54, 83, 89

Jager, Eric, 180n.68, 190n.200 James I, King, 9, 16 Jesus Christ, 19, 28, 31–2, 36–40, 145, 186nn.146, 147, 188nn.173, 177, 189n.192, 190nn.193, 195, 211n.86, 224n.108, 226n.5 Johnson, Samuel, 128 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 186n.150, 223n.88 Jones, Ernest, 103–4 Jones, John, 122, 218n.38, 219n.45 Jonson, Ben, 41, 45, 75, 173n.2, 190n.203, 192n.215, 194n.3, 199n.59, 200n.71, 202n.94, 219n.44, 227n.21 Jorden, Edward, 121, 122, 216nn.9, 10, 11 Julius Caesar, 16, 32 Kafka, Franz, 87 Kahn, Coppélia, 136, 216n.13, 220n.61, 221n.64 Kahn, Victoria, 185n.132, 202n.102 Kaufmann, R.J., 195n.11 Kearney, Richard, 180n.64 Kernan, Alvin, 199nn.55, 61 Kerrigan, John, 47 Kerrigan, William, 215n.130 Kimbrough, Robert, 194n.3, 200n.75 King John, 17, 35, 48, 105, 108 King Lear, 35, 43, 46, 48, 51–2, 57, 119–50, 153, 156–8, 162, 163–4, 165–6, 168, 172, 193n.243, 215–26, 226n.7, 229nn.36, 41, 42 King Leir, 123, 221n.68 Kirsch, Arthur, 210n.73, 218n.27 Klein, Melanie, 21–2, 182nn.98, 100, 199n.63, 202n.100 Knight, G. Wilson, 83, 206n.30 Knights, L.C., 195n.11 knowledge, 23, 27, 32–6, 37–8, 50–1, 54–6, 61–4, 68, 82–3, 91, 103–4, 110–11, 113, 147, 153–7, 160, 163–5, 166, 170, 175n.14, 230n.46 anatomical, 9, 32–6, 53, 110 see also empiricism; epistemology; epistemophilia Kökeritz, Helge, 226n.129 Kraus, Karl, 69, 75, 95 Kristeva, Julia, 13–14, 22, 108, 157, 179n.52 Kyd, Thomas, 43, 100

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258 Index

Lacan, Jacques, 14, 25, 35, 93–4, 98, 179nn.57, 58, 59, 60, 183n.112, 208nn.59, 60, 61, 210n.74 Laing, R.D., 104 land enclosure, 10, 44, 178n.40 language, 1–2, 40, 42, 51, 52, 59–60, 63, 64, 65, 71, 75–9, 106, 127, 150, 173n.2, 230n.44 see also silence Laplanche, Jean, 174n.8, 184n.126, 206n.21 Lemnius, Levinus, 9, 18, 38 Levin, Harry, 138 liver, 2, 16, 17, 20, 36, 42, 48, 64, 72, 105, 180n.69, 188n.178, 191n.206, 220n.58 Locke, John, 7 Lodge, Thomas, 81, 198n.48 love, 25, 30, 53, 64–6, 73, 76–7, 81, 97, 99, 102, 104, 109, 119–50 passim, 162, 169–70, 172, 188nn.174, 178, 201n.80, 219n.47, 223n.101 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 10, 36 Lucian of Samosata, 67, 198n.49 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 3, 174n.7, 193n.244, 208n.54 Luther, Martin, 39, 189n.192, 190n.195 Lyons, Bridget Gellert, 208n.55 Macbeth, 11, 29, 46–7, 154, 178n.45, 185n.142, 206n.25, 221n.68 MacDonald, Michael, 213n.103, 215n.8, 216n.9 MacNeice, Louis, 17 Mack, Maynard, 221n.69 macrocosm/microcosm, 9–10, 19, 125 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 202n.96 Mallin, Eric, 64 Marchitello, Howard, 176n.24, 191n.208 Margalit, Avishai, 184n.20 Marlowe, Christopher, 11, 42, 46 Marshall, Cynthia, 3, 174n.7, 231n.55 Marston, John, 46, 68–9, 194n.3, 199n.59, 225n.125 Marsyas, 35, 45, 187n.165 maternity, see the body, maternal matter, 52, 60, 62, 65–6, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76–7, 84, 116, 132, 135, 195n.7, 199n.61, 203n.110, 206n.26, 209nn.63, 64, 212n.102

Maudsley, Henry, 135 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 7, 20, 38, 85, 174n.6, 175nn.11, 13, 183n.119, 188n.182, 191n.208, 204n.5, 227n.8 Mazzio, Carla, 3, 115, 173n.5, 174n.7, 191n.206, 198n.48 McAlindon, Tom, 218nn.27, 28, 221n.64 Measure for Measure, 29, 47, 48, 50, 190n.202, 193n.236, 207n.40, 220n.59 medicine, 8–9, 18, 20, 121–2, 144, 145–6, 157, 177n.34, 214n.120, 224n.111 Mediolano, Johannes de, 221n.68 Melanchthon, Phillip, 39, 190n.197 Meltzer, Donald, 23 Menippus, 69, 74 The Merchant of Venice, 2, 26, 36 metaphor/metaphorisation, 1–2, 5, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 35, 72, 73, 74, 75, 83, 86, 98, 106–7, 108, 116, 120, 125, 126, 131, 137, 164, 169, 196n.31, 200n.68, 205n.6, 226n.7, 212n.96 Middleton, Thomas, 32, 96 Miller, J.Hillis, 210n.82 Milne, Drew, 218n.28, 225n.125 Milton, John, 69, 190n.195 mirror/glass, 14, 91, 105, 150, 208n.61 mirror stage, 14, 35, 93, 179n.59, 208n.61 Mitchell, Juliet, 216n.13 modernity, 2–3, 4–5, 7, 15, 18, 23, 36, 41, 43, 85, 89–90, 94, 116, 155, 171, 175n.14 Momus, 66–9 Montaigne, Michel de, 4, 9, 18, 50, 53, 75–9, 110, 113, 140, 144, 150, 156, 159, 174n.9, 202n.102, 203nn.103, 111, 204n.5, 214n.114, 223nn.91, 92 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 6 mourning, 82, 95–100, 102, 209n.72 Much Ado About Nothing, 15 Muir, Kenneth, 215n.7, 216n.12, 221n.63, 223n.99 Mullaney, Steven, 5, 175n.15, 192n.222, 210n.73 Munday, Anthony, 45

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Index 259

Murnaghan, Sheila, 179n.63, 197n.40, 198n.54 Murphy, John L., 216n.12 Murray, Timothy, 33 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 22, 129 Nashe, Thomas, 17, 24, 132, 156, 209n.64 nation, 6, 7, 10, 19, 65–6, 119–20, 205n.17 see also body politic nausea, 70, 75–6, 78, 79, 83, 111, 125, 168 see also disgust necrophagy, see cannibalism Neill, Michael, 40, 50, 84, 100, 175n.13, 176nn.24, 27, 189n.188, 191n.208, 200n.72, 204n.5, 207n.37, 221n.76 Nero, 34, 102, 104–7, 211n.95 Nevo, Ruth, 82, 169, 212n.102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 35, 49, 59, 61–6, 72–4, 79, 81–4, 98, 101, 104, 109, 111, 113–14, 155, 168, 182n.99, 184n.123, 195n.13, 196n.27, 201n.78, 205n.9 nostalgia, 6, 35, 43, 52–3, 66, 89–90, 92, 95, 141–2, 145, 156 O’Connell, Michael, 231n.55 O’Connor, Marion, 169 O’Rourke, James, 201n.78 Oedipus complex, 103–5, 113, 193n.230, 199n.63 Olds, Sharon, 117 Ong, Walter J., 63, 146, 186n.151 Onians, Richard Broxton, 15, 68, 173n.2, 182n.93, 201n.82, 209n.70 Othello, 1, 28, 29, 31, 43, 46, 48, 50, 57, 65, 128, 130, 153, 158, 191nn.207, 208, 203n.112, 207n.37, 214n.123, 223n.95, 227n.9, 228n.31 other, the, 1–4, 11–14, 22, 27–30, 32–40, 43, 47, 49–57, 68, 69, 77, 82–3, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97, 101, 103, 108–9, 111, 113, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129–30, 133–4, 138–41, 144, 145, 148, 150–1, 153–6, 159, 161–2, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169,

170–2, 173n.1, 179n.52, 184n.124, 185n.137, 190n.193, 191n.208, 204n.5, 207n.41, 209n.71, 212n.100, 224n.108, 228n.28, 231n.58 see also epistemology, and the problem of other minds/bodies oyster, 81, 109, 113, 114, 137, 140, 204n.4, 212n.100, 223n.92 Padel, Ruth, 68, 135, 179n.63, 214n.120, 215n.6 pain, 16, 30, 42, 51, 55, 69, 88, 108, 114, 115, 120, 126, 132–3, 134, 149, 155, 157, 158, 163, 190n.195, 193n.238 paranoia, 47, 65, 135, 184n.129 Park, Katharine, 174n.6, 182n.93 Parker, Patricia, 64, 71, 176n.24, 190n.202, 195n.7, 197nn.32, 38, 43, 201n.79, 207n.37, 228n.25 ‘participation’, 28, 115, 169–70, 184n.127 see also communion Paster, Gail Kern, 2, 173nn.4, 5, 6, 176n.28, 181n.76, 201n.82, 206n.27 paternity, see the body, paternal pelican, 19, 132, 217n.25, 220n.56, 224n.105 Pessoa, Fernando, vi Petronius Arbiter, 69, 200n.68 Phelan, Peggy, 192n.220 Phillips, Adam, 92 Pierce, Robert B., 198n.49 Plowden, Edmund, 218n.34 poison, 43, 45, 89–90, 92, 93, 96, 101, 114, 148, 149, 160, 162, 167, 168, 170, 199n.61, 210n.74, 213n.104 Popkin, Richard H., 175n.14, 185n.132 possession/dispossession, 3, 11, 38, 45, 100, 102, 108, 120–4, 129–34, 136–50 passim, 154, 215n.8, 216nn.11, 17, 223n.95 Pouchelle, Marie–Christine, 177n.39 pregnancy, 52, 101, 153–4, 158–9, 160, 162, 165, 227n.19, 229n.42 privacy, 10, 46, 178n.42, 186n.150, 190n.195, 212n.96, 217n.26 projection, 11, 12–14, 22, 25, 26, 51, 68–9, 120, 134, 153, 157, 179n.55 see also expulsion; purgation

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260 Index

Index 261

Quarles, Francis, 37 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 113 Rambuss, Richard, 186n.146, 188n.173 Randolph, Mary Claire, 69, 199nn.55, 61, 63 Randolph, Thomas, 199n.61 Ranum, Orest, 178nn.41, 42 Raphael–Leff, Joan, 227n.19 rat, 107–8, 151, 212nn.100, 101, 102 Reformation, see Protestantism Reich, Wilhelm, 93, 208n.49, 221n.68 Reid, Stephen A., 210n.73 Reinhard, Kenneth, 208n.54 relics, 38, 64, 114 repressed, return of, 50–1, 66, 128, 132–5 repression, 17–18, 26, 46, 50, 61–2, 66, 124, 128, 133, 135, 193n.234 revenge, 43, 50, 51, 81, 94, 96, 100, 101, 114, 131, 144, 145, 154, 215n.130 Richard II, 7, 204n.4, 217n.25, 218n.34 Richard III, 17, 181n.74, 193n.231, 230n.47 Ricoeur, Paul, 210n.73 Rimmel, Victoria, 200n.68 Romeo and Juliet, 20, 100, 149, 227n.21

Rosenberg, Marvin, 217n.24, 224n.104 Rosenfeld, Herbert, 176n.20, 208n.58 Rossiter, A.P., 203n.108, 204n.5 Rowe, Katherine, 219n.48 Rubin, Miri, 190n.193 sacrifice, 16, 57, 64, 179n.62, 180n.69 satire, 42, 51, 64–5, 66–70, 76, 77, 199nn.55, 59, 61, 63 Sauer, Elizabeth, 178n.40 Sawday, Jonathan, 19, 33, 174n.6, 179n.61, 185n.141, 187n.165 Scarry, Elaine, 5, 30–2, 54, 108, 185nn.139, 142–5, 186n.146, 195nn.7, 10, 207n.42, 223n.94 scepticism, 10, 20, 23–32, 45, 50, 51–2, 54–7, 64, 65, 67–8, 74, 77, 81–3, 84, 89–90, 93, 109, 113, 115, 119–20, 121, 127, 129, 146, 150, 153–5, 157–8, 163, 184nn.124, 128, 204n.5, 227n.9, 229n.35 overcoming of, 27, 52–3, 79, 109, 111, 113, 148, 164, 166, 169–71 Schafer, Roy, 184n.126 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 2, 9, 18, 38, 174n.6, 186n.146, 190n.193, 230n.52 Schwartz, Delmore, 17 science, 6, 9, 10, 17, 18, 19, 33–6, 40, 113, 121, 146 Scot, Reginald, 188n.180 senses, unreliabililty of, 55, 113, 146–7 see also hearing; smell; taste; touch; vision separateness, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12–14, 28–31, 38, 44, 47, 55, 91, 109, 113, 124, 133, 156, 163 see also solitude sexuality, 9, 70, 72–4, 81–2, 87, 102–6, 136, 168, 211n.89 Shakespeare, William, see individual plays Shapiro, Gary, 202n.102 Shengold, Leonard, 212n.100 Sibbes, Richard, 37, 135, 188n.177, 227n.21 Sidney, Sir Philip, 45 Siemon, James Edward, 231n.57 silence, 29, 62, 68, 75, 78–9, 127, 129, 203n111

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proof, 27, 31–2, 33, 57, 105, 154, 159, 166, 168, 184n.123, 185n.142, 187nn.155, 160, 188n.173, 217n.20 Protestantism, 8, 38–40, 95, 115, 116, 121–2, 169, 188n.174, 193n.244, 229n.39, 231nn.55, 56 Prynne, William, 45 psychoanalysis, 3, 11–15, 21–3, 38–9, 56, 91, 92, 93–4, 97–8, 103–4, 105, 122, 174n.8, 176n.20, 177n.30, 179nn.54, 59, 182nn. 98, 99, 100, 183nn.112, 118, 119, 185nn.137, 143, 191n213, 212n.100, 219n.47, 221n.68, 227n.19 Purchas, Samuel, 160 Purgatory, 38, 91, 93, 95 purgation, 9, 38, 41, 42, 45, 49, 68–9, 95–101, 128, 144, 158–9, 167, 189n.191, 192n.215, 202n.95, 217n.26, 224n.104 see also expulsion; projection Puttenham, George, 68 Pye, Christopher, 3, 174n.7, 195n.8

262 Index subjectivity, 1–3, 4–5, 6, 7, 10, 12–15, 18, 21, 25, 27–9, 34, 43, 45, 53, 65, 74–5, 83, 85–6, 89, 94, 111, 121, 139, 157, 167, 175n.11, 179n.52, 193n.230, 204n.5 Sutton, John, 7 taste, sense of, 167, 222n.80 Tatlock, J.S.P., 194n.3 Taylor, John, 198n.45 The Tempest, 2, 17, 190n.202, 192n.227, 193n.242, 206n.25, 209n.62, 214n.123, 229n.36 theatricality, 40–6, 51, 59–60, 70–1, 79, 122, 149, 170, 191n.210, 194n.4, 200n.72 anti-theatricality, 45, 46, 51 Thomas, Doubting, 31–2, 36, 186n.146, 211n.86 Thomas, Keith, 215n.8 Timon of Athens, 9, 48 Titus Andronicus, 47, 48, 210nn.75, 80 Tomkis, Thomas, 198n.48 Torok, Maria, 182n.99, 184n.126, 209n.72 touch, sense of, 32, 97, 137, 139 Tourneur, Cyril, 186n.148, 188n.181 tragedy, 42, 44, 45, 49, 52–3, 74, 78, 79, 83, 109, 128, 135, 140, 146, 148, 153, 164–6, 168–9, 202n.90, 203n.114 transitionality (transitional spaces), 6, 31, 38–9, 45, 95–6, 100, 102, 166, 176n.20, 190nn.193, 195 Traub, Valerie, 146, 193n.230, 197n.34, 200n.74, 203n.113, 225n.115, 226n.3, 231n.56 Trevor, Douglas, 3, 174n.7, 224n.111 Troilus and Cressida, 51, 52, 59–79, 114, 122, 127, 168, 171, 190n.202, 193n.240, 194–203, 206n.26, 214n.123, 217n.25 Turner, Bryan S., 195n.13 Twelfth Night, 11, 47, 190n.202 Tylus, Jane, 191n.211 uncanny, 15, 83, 212n.102 Venus and Adonis, 48 Venner, Tobias, 9, 218n.36

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skin, 8, 18, 38–9, 62, 68, 84, 85, 91, 105, 110, 112, 137, 140–1, 177n.30, 179n.54, 189n.192, 199n.61 thick/thin-skinned, 6, 29, 35, 36, 38–9, 84, 85, 91, 113, 134, 137 see also integument sleep, 23–4, 56, 89, 94, 95, 96, 116, 143, 145, 147, 158, 227n.9 smell, sense of, 42, 62, 83, 111, 147, 149 Smith, Gerald, 225n.125 Smith, Lisa M., 178n.40 Snell, Bruno, 68, 179n.63 solitude, 43, 52, 54, 89, 90, 91, 92–3, 104, 113, 143, 191n.207 see also separateness Sonnets, The, 3–4, 175n.11, 178n.41, 212n.96, 217nn.19, 26 Speed, John, 218n.33 Spenser, Edmund, 8, 19, 60, 181n.83 spider, 99, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 170, 228n.26 spirit, 2, 11, 34, 41, 73–4, 121, 147, 170, 171, 173n.4, 180n.66, 188n.182, 197n.40, 201nn.78, 82, 206n.26, 227n.9 Spolsky, Ellen, 32, 175n.16, 185n.132, 186n.146, 227n.9, 230n.46 Spurgeon, Caroline, 120, 200n.69, 205n.17, 221n.72 Staines, John, 188n.174, 189n.187 Stallybrass, Peter, 139, 174n.6, 176n.28, 186nn.147, 150, 187n.155, 204n.4, 223n.88 Starobinski, Jean, 17, 29–30, 33, 68, 161, 175n.19, 181n.76, 198n.53, 207n.41 statues, 43, 50, 167–71, 181n.84, 230n.47 Stauth, George, 195n.13 Stevens, Scott Manning, 182n.92 Stewart, Alan, 178n.41, 186n.150, 212n.96 Stewart, J.I.M., 228n.23 stoicism, 101, 215n.130 Stokes, Adrian, 119 stomach, see belly Stone, Lawrence, 178n.42 Stoppard, Tom, 34 Strong, Roy, 206n.29 ‘stuff’, 11, 48, 66, 83, 86, 91, 94, 105, 181n.84, 206n.25, 217n.20

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 179nn.62, 63, 198n.54 Vesalius, Andreas, 9, 19, 33 Vicary, Thomas, 182n.94, 197n.41, 218n.35 violence, 32, 35, 63, 78, 101, 103, 104–5, 129, 157 and knowledge, 35, 63, 91, 157 and theatricality, 42–3, 45 see also weapons visceral unconscious, 17–18, 23 vision/visuality, 7–8, 14, 16, 28, 31–2, 33–4, 37–8, 63, 84, 131, 135, 137, 146–7, 157, 166, 186n.151, 214n.115, 230n.44 weapons, 35, 68, 91, 100, 104–5, 107, 110, 142, 149, 213n.104 Wear, Andrew, 177n.34, 187n.158, 190n.197, 220n.60 Webster, John, 42 Weil, Simone, 75, 197n.40 Weimann, Robert, 46, 175n.14, 192nn.223, 224, 228 Wells, John, 37 Wheeler, Richard, 191n.207, 231n.56 Whitney, Geoffrey, 212n.100

Willbern, David, 219n.45 Williams, Gordon, 204n.4, 214n.123 Williams, Raymond, 178n.40 Wilson, John Dover, 208n.55, 212n.96 wind, 46, 48, 112, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 161–2, 166 see also breath Winnicott, D.W., 22, 25, 30, 38, 39, 92, 95, 115, 159, 190nn.193, 194, 208n.61, 229n.42, 230n.48 The Winter’s Tale, 46, 51, 52, 153–72, 178n.45, 184n.128, 205n.14, 217nn.19, 25, 219nn.40, 48, 221n.68, 226–32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, vi, 3, 28–30, 32, 110, 111, 114, 123, 145, 163, 171, 184n.124, 185n.136, 187n.163, 229n.35 Wollheim, Richard, 182n.98, 183n.113 womb, 20–2, 100, 105, 123–4, 131–3, 155–6, 159–60, 161, 165, 166, 210n.79, 211nn.90, 95, 219n.45, 220n.52, 227nn.8, 14, 20, 229n.36 Wright, Thomas, 38, 212n.96 Yachnin, Paul, 191n.210

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Index 263