Performing the Material Body: Enacting Passion, Madness, and Death on the Shakespearean Stage

Shigehisa Kuriyama writes, "the history of the body is ultimately a history of ways of inhabiting the world" (237; qtd. in Paster, Humoring 134). Recovering that ontological and phenomenological history, though, is no easy task. Humans, regardless of the time or culture into which they are born, perceive through their senses, move through time and space, and die. The way we inhabit the world and the meaning we make of our experiences in it feel natural. Our tendency to assume certain human experiences to be universal and natural, to assume a pre-discursive essentialism, has produced innumerable flawed readings of other cultures. Many studies of the body's history recapitulate the flaw in Lévi-Strauss's theorization of the incest taboo. Lévi-Strauss's sex-is-to-gender-as-nature-is-to-culture analogy imagines sexual difference as a biological fact, a pre-discursive truth, but as Judith Butler has contended, any gesture to the originary, pre-symbolic body disregards the cultural construction inherent in the terms "sex," "body," and even "materiality" itself (Gender Trouble 37; Bodies 1–12).

One recent reiteration of this fallacy occurs in Michael Schoenfeldt's Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Schoenfeldt argues that the self-regulation of the humoral body allowed early modern subjects to "produce the parameters of individual subjectivity" (15) and claims that within this "discourse of self-regulation . . . [we] may begin to make a space for something recognizably modern" (39). Schoenfeldt also takes issue with Gail Kern Paster's reading of the humoral body in The Body Embarrassed, stating that Paster "tends to pathologize the leaky body" (15), rather than read it as a site of self-fashioning: "humoral theory encouraged not carnivalesque liquefaction but rather the careful maintenance of constitutional solubility" (15). Schoenfeldt's reading of humoral theory, though, ignores the inscription of class, race, and especially gender on the early modern body. As Paster points out in Humoring the Body, his reading "mistakenly presumes an unmarked "'individual' prior to biological—that is to say hierarchical—classification" (21).

Our attempts to see ourselves, to inscribe our own ontological "realities" onto other cultures, also reveal themselves in the very foci of our studies. Since Burckhardt, numerous scholars have identified the Renaissance as the midwife to modern subjectivity, the moment when the concept of individuality was born. Even with our acknowledgment of the early modern period as pre-Cartesian, prior to the mind-body split, our studies tend to reproduce this rift: Paster's The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England and Katharine Maus's Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance are two of several such studies. Most recently, we have been obsessed with objects, reaching our hands into the past to finger fabrics, taste the exotic, and marvel at the technologies. The movement from new historicism to cultural materialism has ushered in a variety of deliberations on the materiality of the body and the cultural nexus of bodily discourses. How do religious and scientific explanations of the body affect the subject's lived experience in the world? This narcissistic scholarship is not in itself a bad thing, provided we are aware of our predilection to see ourselves in others and provided we resist the urge to view our "nature" and "natural" constructions as normative or pre-discursive. The critical writings of Burckhardt, Paster, and Maus offer us many insights into the culture of another time, but they also provide us with insight into ourselves. And though this scholarship sometimes rehearses modern dichotomous classifications, gifted scholars such as Paster and Maus always remind us of our own cultural constructions even as...