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

David Hillman's Shakespeare's Entrails is a new addition to the ever expanding corpus of criticism interrogating the early modern language of physiology embedded in literary texts. The book offers an extensive and at times fascinating introduction to this field followed by analyses of Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale. The chosen plays are suitable to the book's subtheme of skepticism and belief, but the inclusion of a history and a comedy would have filled out the argument more comprehensively. The familiar idea of Shakespeare's cultural moment as a transitional one in which modern subjectivity emerges is presented by Hillman as a process of "excarnation of the world" (Yves Bonnefoy) and establishment of homo clausus (Norbert Elias) (1, 4, 7). It is a period of "somatic precariousness" (1) in which the inherited cosmic openness of the body gives way to a new "claustrophilia" (7), or walling-in of the psychophysical body. He argues for the intrinsic relevance of the homo clausus paradigm to many (perhaps too many) key discourses within early modern literary studies including the rise of Cartesian subjectivity and modern interiority, empirical science and anatomy books, and Protestantism and skepticism.

Hillman then explores the plays' obsession "with the contents of the human body, both literal and imagined" (1) and charts how homo clausus comes to grips with new anxieties arising from the reification of "outside" and "inside." Hillman's view of Troilus and Cressida, via Nietzschean analogy, is that Shakespeare has taken the "endlessly reiterated and textualised heroes" (59) of the Troy story and recorporealized them, thereby reemphasising the disturbing bodiedness of the human. Hamlet —with its focus on obscure inwardness, bodies, doubt, and belief —is a play especially amenable to Hillman's thesis, and the crusty transformation of Old Hamlet's poisoned body becomes an icon for the dawn of homo clausus. Hamlet is said to possess "an ambivalent attitude to corporeality": he "lurches between a rejection of the body and a desperate need to find meaning in it" (87). The transitional position of Hamlet is epitomized in the famous crux of "sallied" (Q1, Q2) and "solid" (F), which reveals Hamlet's simultaneous fear "of the body being too vulnerable or open" and lamentation at the "hardness, the confined or over-circumscribed nature, of the flesh" (93). Hillman refers to King Lear as "the most painfully corporealised play among Shakespeare's works" (120) and conducts a detailed argument about Lear's vexed relationship to his own and his daughters' psychophysical interiority and exteriority. The ultimately "uncontainable" (150) skepticism of Lear is counterpoised, in the final chapter, by the affirmations of faith found in second half of The Winter's Tale, and all the plays are said to be about the "search for certainty" in the face of a skeptical response to the world (171). The readings are distinguished by Hillman's evocative use of Nietzschean theory and a psychoanalytic inflection via the work of Freud, Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, and Janet Adelman. The mélange of asserted historicism, Nietzsche-informed presentism, and psychoanalytic close reading is often refreshing, but also suggests some unresolved tensions in methodology. Hillman sometimes admits his own interpretations and playful responses to the physiology of words may seem "far-fetched" and "speculative" (108, 124, 138), thereby showing he is just as concerned about the critical reader's belief and skepticism as he is about Shakespeare's.

A recent roundtable discussion of this book at my university revealed its potential to evoke disparate responses depending on one's discipline. At one extreme, the medievalists were unconvinced by many of the large historical claims in the introduction, about the "newness" of certain ideas in the sixteenth century, and reaffirmed the need for early modernists to familiarize themselves adequately with medieval texts and concepts particularly in regard to representations of selfhood...