The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (review)

With this book, the cultural study of the heart has come of age. Focus on the heart as cultural and literary artifact began in 1997 with Milad Doueihi's Perverse History of the Human Heart and my own The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750. Doueihi's chief theoretical concern is "the intersection of cannibalism and the heart,"¹ ranging through a variety of texts (St. Augustine, Dante, Pascal) and focusing on the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist. The Language of the Heart explores the gendered "heroic" heart, moving from Plato and Galen through Hobbes, to extensive chapters on the Biblical heart, William Harvey, Milton's Paradise Lost, Aphra Behn, and Richardson's Clarissa. In 2000, Eric Jager's scrupulously researched Book of the Heart offered an illuminating look at the "book of the heart" as an image of the self in medieval culture, with forays into Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, and our own computer age. In 2007, The Heart, edited by James Peto, was published to accompany the Wellcome Trust's magnificent exhibition tracing the historical understanding of the heart and its anatomical and symbolic significance; in the same year, Ole M. Høystad's ambitious, idiosyncratic History of the Heart appeared, with chapters on the heart in Gilgamesh, Islam, Shakespeare, and Rousseau, among others.

It is William Slights's distinction to be the first to provide a book-length examination of the heart as symbol and dramatic agent in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is rather astonishing that it has taken so long for this to happen, but the result is a book of profound and wide-ranging scholarship and interpretation. Slights has absorbed and deployed nearly all of the recent criticism on the body, as well as virtually everything available in English in recent heart studies, forging this book out of the fabrica of the heart embedded in English Renaissance culture.

The book is neatly divided into six chapters: (1) an introduction to the pre- and early modern heart; (2) a survey of graphic representations of the heart; (3) the heart as "Organ of Affection and Motion, Truth and Conflict," with fresh readings of "Herbert's heavily heart-inflected poems" (119); (4) "The Narrative Heart of the Renaissance"; (5) the dark heart of "Interiority, Anatomy, and Villainy"; and (6) a final attempt to answer the question about whether there is a "Shakespearean" heart. There is a concluding meditation, "The Heart of Hearts," on the importance (among other things) of the gendered heart in Shakespeare.

In his first chapter, Slights reviews the metaphor of the "Window on the Heart" that reveals one's hidden secrets, wishes, desires, and prevarications. That, for me, is the real subject lurking under the astonishingly diverse appearances of the heart in this book. Slights's argument is that "our habit of scholarly compartmentalization obscures the subtle permeability of intellectual, bodily, and spiritual life in the age of Shakespeare, and, specifically, that we can best understand the early modern heart as the primary point of connection between felt interiority and the systems that helped to make sense of the social and physical universe" (4). He distinguishes the two main sources of early modern ideas about the heart in relation to the soul in ancient natural philosophy (primarily Plato, Aristotle, and Galen) and the Bible. Too often, contemporary cultural historians of the body neglect the enormous influence of scripture on conceptions of the body and spirit, especially in relation to the heart. Slights is also well aware of the necessity "to reintegrate the early modern heart back into the systems that made it intelligible at the time" (4), especially the Galenic theory of the humoral body, in which Galen posits an "opifex" (or maker) of all things (32) who works through the agency of an artistic, feminized Nature. Slights writes, "by the start of the early modern period, the heart is far more than a bodily organ that generates heat...