Let me behold thy face: Physiognomik und Gesischtslektüren in Shakespeares Tragödien (review)

Since arguments about the early modern body’s interiority and material wholeness (as well as signifying potential) have been exhausted, scholarship on early modern corporeality is now more interested in exploring in depth only parts of that body. Sibylle Baumbach provides sample analyses of parts of the face. Her densely researched and finely argued book on the physiognomy and the face in Shakespeare’s tragedies, and on the ways the face becomes the book and script of a character to be read, misread, and interpreted on the stage and in the early modern writing about the theater and the body, points to new directions in the study of the material and signifying potential of body parts. The gist of this book’s argument is that the physiognomy is both a vehicle for an understanding of the character and character interactions, as well as an indicator of Shakespeare’s technique of individualization. The book concerns with Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. In its closing pages, references are also made, and sample analyses offered, to Titus Andronicus, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens. To those interested in the revival of character studies in Shakespeare, this book should be of great use because of its methodical sweep through the corpus of tragedies.

The book is divided into six long chapters, the opening three laying down the critical context and methodological framework for the book. The catalogue of names and a survey of critical arguments in this part are a reminder of the book’s origin as a doctoral thesis. Each of the subsequent three major chapters addresses a specific topic related to the use of the face and physiognomy for shaping meaning in tragedies and illustrating the points in close analyses of a play, or cluster of plays.

The opening chapter lays down the methodology by developing the concept of the staging of the rhetoric of the face (“der Inszenierung der Gesichtsrhetorik,” [11]), a process in which the reader and the read, and the writing and the written (and faces that can and cannot be read), work together in the process of generating meaning on the stage, meaning that stems out of an interaction between the onlooker and the looked, between the two faces that meet as characters on the stage. It locates the discussion of this new stage semiology of the face in the context of the theories about the face in antiquity, Continental humanism, and in the eighteenth century. This chapter is a compact survey of the problem, but the problem (both for the reader of the book and for the proposed methodology) is how this eclectic web of historical sources — from Platonic dialogues, to Ovid, to Della Porta, to Montaigne — helps a discussion of Shakespeare, when no contemporary English source is discussed in detail; a sweep of them is mentioned by name and title only. George Puttenham, brought in in chapter 4, could have been discussed in dialogue with the non-English authors, for comparison sake, but more importantly, in order to situate the theoretical context more solidly in the English context.

The book is organized topically, not by plays, which is methodologically more complex and offers a more rewarding reading experience. It is also more refreshing compared to many monographs on early modern English literature, especially Shakespeare, in which a topic is discussed in separate chapters, each devoted to an individual play.

Chapter 2 maps out isolated examples of the concept of physiognomy in plays not addressed in detail in this book, and in The Rape of Lucrece. It discusses the relationship between the body and the stage from the point of physiognomy, by exploring (briefly by resorting also to Charles Darwin) the notion that emotions are read in the face. This chapter is very useful because it addresses the topic in plays other than...