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

by David Hillman

Shakespeare's Entrails explores the connections between embodiment, knowledge and acknowledgement in Shakespeare's plays. Drawing on psychoanalytic, philosophical, historicist and literary-critical methodologies, the introduction sets out a theory of the emergence of modern subjectivity in relation to the changing attitudes to the interior of the human body in the Renaissance. In the context of a world that was increasingly coming to see the body as a closed system, previously dominant notions of human relatedness based on entering the other's body or of having one's own inhabited by the other became deeply problematised. The book examines four plays - Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale - in detail, interrogating the ways in which each intersects with the historical and epistemological faultlines set out in the introduction and outlining a trajectory of the relation between embodiment, scepticism and belief in Shakespeare's plays.

280 pages, ebook

First published December 14, 2006

Reviews

[Tom Langham · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Chapters read:
-Visceral knowledge
-The Gastric Epic

Want to read: The Body Possessed (King Lear)