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

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.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))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') Contents List of Illustrations ix List of Illustrations 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 Shakespeare's Entrails explores the connections between embodiment, knowledge and acknowledgement in Shakespeare's plays. Drawing on psychoanalytic, philosophical, historicist and literary-critical methodologies, the introduction sets out a theory of the emergence of modern subjectivity in relation to the changing attitudes to the interior of the human body in the Renaissance. In the context of a world that was increasingly coming to see the body as a closed system, previously dominant notions of human relatedness based on entering the other's body or of having one's own inhabited by the other became deeply problematised. The book examines four plays - Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale - in detail, interrogating the ways in which each intersects with the historical and epistemological faultlines set out in the introduction and outlining a trajectory of the relation between embodiment, scepticism and belief in Shakespeare's plays Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Visceral Knowledge....Pages 1-58 The Gastric Epic: Troilus and Cressida....Pages 59-80 The Inward Man: Hamlet....Pages 81-118 The Body Possessed: King Lear....Pages 119-152 No Barricado for a Belly: The Winter’s Tale....Pages 153-172 Back Matter....Pages 173-263 Shakespeare's Entrails explores the connections between embodiment, knowledge and acknowledgement in Shakespeare's plays. Hillman sets out a theory of the emergence of modern subjectivity in the context of a world that was increasingly coming to see the human body as a closed system.