Abstract
Among the many far-reaching changes European culture underwent in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most fundamental was the shift in the way in which the human body was understood: one predominant notion of human embodiment, in which the body was thought of as open in a positive manner, was gradually being displaced by a radically different one, which involved a significantly more closed ideal of the body — more bounded, more deeply separated from its surroundings and from other people. In conceptualising this shift it may be difficult for us fully to imagine the first view, since our post-Enlightenment assumptions are so dominated by the second: we tend to take for granted the notion that the human body constitutes a more or less sealed unit (orifices notwithstanding). After Harvey and Descartes and Locke, we tend to treat the body, in the words of the philosopher John Sutton, as ‘a solid container, only rarely breached, in principle autonomous from culture and environment, tampered with only by diseases and experts.’1 I want to point out, first, some places where this shift from the first to the second construction of embodiment can be seen; I then want to suggest that this collision, and the emergence of what Norbert Elias has termed homo clausus, were essential to the rise of early modern drama.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: New Left Books, 1974).
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Anon., A Warning for Fair Women (London, 1599), ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).
Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981).
Phillipe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds. A History of Private Life, vol. 2: Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Sir Richard Baker, Theatrum Redivivium, Or the Theatre Vindicated (London, 1662), ed. Arthur Freeman (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1973).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
James Balmford, A Short Dialogue Concerning the Plague’s Infection (London, 1603).
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).
Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poet’s War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Ronald Britton, Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1998).
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. 2, ed. A.R. Shilleto (London: George Bell, 1893).
Caroline Thomas Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutilation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).
Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615).
Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Thomas Dekker, The Gull’s Hornbook (London, 1609).
Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge 1997).
Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Thomas Docherty, On Modern Authority: The Theory and Conditioning of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; rpt. London: Ark, 1984).
Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, Vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Girolamo Fracastoro, De contagione et contagionis morbis et eorum curatione (1546), éd. William Cave Wright (New York: Putman’s Sons, 1930).
Lowell Gallagher, ‘The place of the stigmata in Christological poetics,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, Containing a pleasant inuective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Iesters and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth (London, 1579).
Hartmann Grisar, Luther, trans. E.M. Lamond, ed. Luigi Cappadelta, 6 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1913–17).
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Margaret Healy, ‘Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch.’ in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923).
David Hillman, ‘The Inside Story,’ in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000).
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
Samuel Johnson, Dr Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W.K. Wimsatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658).
Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis, 1964).
John Marston, Histriomastix, Or The Player Whip’t (London, 1598/99).
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance,’ in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 159–86.
Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65–87.
Stephen Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: Licence, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blastoff Retrait from Plaies and Theatres (London, 1580).
Sheila Murnaghan, ‘Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy,’ Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (Spring 1988).
Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Morality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
A.D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).
Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993).
Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theatre in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).
William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, The Players Scovrge, or Actors Tragœdie (London, 1633).
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), intr. Baxter Hathaway (Kent State University Press, 1970).
Orest Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy,’ in A History of Private Life, Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Herbert Rosenfeld, Impasse and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1987).
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999).
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004).
Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover, 1982), 1–22.
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,’ in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise, Or The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Jean Starobinski, ‘The Body’s Moment,’ in Montaigne: Essays in Reading, ed. Gérard Defaux, Yale French Studies 64 (1983).
Jean Starobinski, ‘The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation,’ in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. II, ed. Michel Feher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977).
John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Tobias Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam. Or, A Treatise wherein the right way and best manner of living for attaining a long and healthfull life, is clearly demonstrated (London, 1623; 1650).
Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Dim Body, Dazzling Body,’ in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimmsion of Dramatic Torrn and Tunction, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern England, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hillman, D. (2005). Homo Clausus at the Theatre. In: Reynolds, B., West, W.N. (eds) Rematerializing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505032_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505032_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54264-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50503-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)