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

The Renaissance stage liked to turn its protagonists inside out. In the bloody conclusion of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo bites out his own tongue before killing himself. John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore ends with Annabella’s heart skewered by her brother’s dagger at a banquet. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Lavinia appears with her hands cut off and her tongue ripped out. Many writers compared the very experience of playgoing to unsealing the body, either through the catharsis of tragedy or through the purging effect of comedy. At the same time, however, they explored the body’s ineluctably closed nature and its obstinate concealment of the self inside. In Shakespeare’s Entrails, David Hillman argues that the body’s boundaries were of central concern to dramatists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although Shakespeare and his contemporaries were writing at a time when a modern sense of the body as an enclosed, private system was just emerging, they remained attached to the idea that corporeal substance involved a transactional relationship with the world.

Our entrails may be biologically unchanged since the sixteenth century, but the cultural meanings attached to them have radically altered. Before the gradual “civilizing” and “disciplining” of the body over the last few hundred years, the viscera were regarded as inviolable and yet vulnerable, disgusting and sacred, inscrutable and shamefully open to the gaze of others. Perhaps the only part of oneself securely one’s own, they were understood also as the locus of authentic feeling, especially of pity, sympathy, and compassion. Most importantly, therefore, they were central to the sphere of human relations. Men and women desired to corporeally inhabit one another, or to get under one anothers’ skin, by bestowing, withholding, imagining, or enjoying access to their interiors. The expression of the Song of Songs 5:4, literally “my entrails welled up for him,” or, as in the 1611 King James version, “my bowels were moved for him,” is sanitized in one modern translation to “my heart beat wild” (p. 16): this reveals a modern habit of thought tending to obscure the felt nature of emotion. Our careful repression of our own interiority has led to what Hillman calls “a powerfully visceral unconscious” (p. 18), and his discussion brings brightly back to life the embodied intensity of the early modern world previously hidden beneath metaphor.

Critics such as Gail Kern Paster, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Jonathan Gil Harris have recently argued that early modern bodies remained perilously vulnerable to external agents. Following Norbert Elias, Hillman argues rather that the turn of the seventeenth century was already witnessing the beginnings of homo clausus, or thick-skinnedness. As the body’s interior separated itself from the surrounding cosmos, the bounded, disembodied subject was born. Attending to the relationship between matter and consciousness at this transitional moment, Hillman suggests that the gradual shutting of the body accounts for the emergence of skeptical modes of thought. Freud proposed that a child’s first experience of acceptance or rejection takes place through bodily retention or expulsion. Hillman’s suggestive readings of Freud and Winnicott reveal Renaissance faith and doubt as not only intellectual or philosophical experiences but somatic ones as well.

The chapters on Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale) show convincingly that bodily openness was already a nostalgic fantasy by the turn of the seventeenth century. Hamlet is everywhere preoccupied with borders and boundaries—such as those surrounding the state of Denmark, or the vulnerable body of Old Hamlet—and links access to interior regions with access to the truth. Hamlet himself begins by longing for his body to dissolve and for its boundaries to shatter but ends up counting the cost of this fantasy. Shakespeare figures the relationship between parents and children in...