The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment 9781474234276, 9781474234269, 9781474234306, 9781474234290

Table of contents :
FC
Half title
Related Titles
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world
2 Manners and beauty: The social hand
3 ‘Lively action’: Gesture in early modern performance
4 Gesture in Shakespeare’s narrative art
5 ‘Let lips do what hands do’: Shakespeare’s sense of touch
6 Amputation: The spectacle of dismemberment in Shakespeare’s theatres
Epilogue: Fingers
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage

RELATED TITLES Shakespeare in London, Hannah Crawforth, Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage, Bridget Escolme Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare’s London, Siobhan Keenan

The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment Farah Karim-Cooper Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Farah Karim-Cooper, 2016 Farah Karim-Cooper has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-3427-6 978-1-4742-3426-9 978-1-4742-3429-0 978-1-4742-3428-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For Jerry and Sabreena and Mom and Dad

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  viii List of Illustrations  xi



Introduction  1

1 The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world  11 2 Manners and beauty: The social hand  41 3 ‘Lively action’: Gesture in early modern performance  69 4 Gesture in Shakespeare’s narrative art  117 5 ‘Let lips do what hands do’: Shakespeare’s sense of touch  157 6 Amputation: The spectacle of dismemberment in Shakespeare’s theatres  197

Epilogue: Fingers  241 Notes  247 Bibliography  281 Index  297

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I tried to avoid punning in this book, but I do have to say that without a few helping ‘hands’, I honestly could not have written it. I am utterly grateful to Margaret Bartley, whose friendship, constructive criticism and sharp editorial eye have been invaluable. Thanks to Emily Hockley and the copy-editing and marketing team at Arden/Bloomsbury. I am indebted to Grace Ioppolo for her enthusiastic support in the early stages of this project and to Evelyn Tribble for her support and generosity at the later stages. I am grateful to Jonathan Hope, who read chapters and gave me such helpful advice; he is a true friend and forever my language guru. I am also thankful for the advice and encouragement of Paul Shuter and the incomparable Lucy Munro who also generously read and commented on chapters. Without the support and friendship of Patrick Spottiswoode (Director, Globe Education), Neil Constable (CEO, Shakespeare’s Globe) and my colleagues in Globe Education, I would not have been able to take time away from the Wooden O and the Wooden U to complete this book. In particular, I want to acknowledge Joanne Luck, Will Tosh, Laura Kennard, Jenna Stevens, Fiona Banks, Georghia Ellinas, Jo Philpotts, Chloe Brown, Ruth Frendo, Shauna Barrett, Mathilde Blum, Adam Sibbald, Rebecca Casey, Jennifer Edwards and all of our Research Interns in Globe Education. At King’s College London, I am grateful to Gordon McMullan, Sonia Massai and John Lavagnino for their support and friendship. Thanks are also due to the students of the 2014–15 King’s/Globe MA in Shakespeare Studies, the 2014–15 BFA and MFA Acting students of the Rutgers Conservatory at Shakespeare’s Globe and my

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doctoral students, Neil Vallelly and Miranda Fay Thomas, for tolerating my absence. I began my research on the hand in 2009 and since then have given papers at various conferences, run a ‘Gesture Lab’, a symposium on the Five Senses and co-organized (with Laurie Maguire) the Oxford-Globe Forum for Drama and Medicine in practice. At these events and in daily conversations, I have had helpful advice and support from friends and colleagues, many of whom will not be aware of how much they have encouraged me. Here especially I want to thank Claire van Kampen and Dominic Dromgoole. I am grateful also to Danni Powell, Jessica Lusk, Claire Godden, Lucy Bailey, Jonathan Munby, Bryan Paterson, Sian Williams, Tiffany Stern, Laurie Maguire, Paul Menzer, Tom Healy, Andrew Gurr, Charlotte Scott, Andrew Hartley, Andrew Hadfield, Penelope Woods, Mike Witmore, Katherine Craik, Christie Carson, Rob Conkie, Sarah Stanton, Peter Holland, Bridget Escolme, James Shapiro, Martin White, Simon Smith, Clare McManus, Tanya Pollard, Subha Mukherjee, Andy Kesson, Peter Holbrook, Ayanna Thompson, Marcus Nordlund, Ewan Fernie, David McNeill, P. A. Skantze, Eric Langley, Bruce Smith, Terri Bourus, Amy Kenny, Kiernan Ryan, Michael Dobson, Gary Taylor, Ann Thompson, Peter Kirwan, Mario Weick and John Astington. Thanks also to my friend Mark Sullivan and to the Communications department at Shakespeare’s Globe for its support with illustrations. I am eternally grateful for the love, compassion and understanding I received from my family every day: Jerry and Sabreena (and, of course, Timmy); my parents, Captain Fazal and Fawzia Karim; my brothers and sisters and their families, Yasmin, Meher, Shammy, Javaid and Reshad; and my other parents, Charles and Barbara Cooper. Thank you to my talented niece Kesandra Karim for contributing artistically to this project. Thanks to fairy godmothers, Jan Leath and Deborah Langley, for swooping in so many times to save me.

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Note on texts For the ease of reading, I have modernized most early modern spellings in the primary texts cited here. All citations of Shakespeare are from either the Arden Complete Works or Arden 3 editions.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 Right Hand (1588), Hendrick Goltzius (Teylers Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands) 11 Figure 2 Andreas Vesalius (1543) De Humani Corporis fabrica libri septum (courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine, Bethseda, MD) 16 Figure 3 Mother and Child (detail, 1624), Cornelis de Vos, oil on wood panel, 123.4 x 92.8 cm (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia). Purchased with funds donated by Alan and Mavourneen Cowen, Andrew Sisson, an anonymous donor and donors to the Cornelis de Vos Appeal, 2009) 59 Figure 4 Old Woman Cutting Her Nails (1655–60), Unknown/Rembrandt? (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, used under Open Access for Scholarly Content agreement) 65 Figure 5 Ear Pick and Nail Parer, (England 1400–1500) (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 66 Figure 6 Sketch of the Swan Theatre, c. 1596, by Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641) after the sketch by Johannes de Witt 70 Figure 7 Titus Andronicus, drawing by Henry Peacham. © Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, Great Britain 71

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 8 ‘Gestures’, Chirologia, or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644), John Bulwer (© The British Library Board) 77 Figure 9 Globe Theatre (stage), Shakespeare’s Globe, 2014. Photographer Pete Le May 89 Figure 10  Falstaff (Roger Allam) in 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Dominic Dromgoole (2010), photographer John Haynes 91 Figure 11  Olivia (Mark Rylance) in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Tim Carroll (2012), photographer John Tramper 95 Figure 12  ‘Nec metuas nec optes’, Minerva Britanna (1612), Henry Peacham (used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License) 98 Figure 13 The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Shakespeare’s Globe, London), photographer Pete Le May 99 Figure 14 Family Portrait (1598–1600), Lavinia Fontana, (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Fondo Edifici di Culto-Ministero dell’Interno Italiano) 117 Figure 15 Roman art: Ariadne Sleeping. Vatican, Museo Pio-Clementino. © 13 x 18 2015. Photo Scala, Florence 131 Figure 16 Dream of St Ursula (detail, 1495), Vittore Carpaccio 133 Figure 17 ‘The Old Man’, Danse Macabre (1526), Hans Holbein (British Museum) 150 Figure 18  Harrowing of Hell (1240), Arundel, © The British Library Board 157f11 151



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Figure 19  Christ’s Descent into Limbo (?), Martin Schongauer (Musee d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France) 152 Figure 20 Emblem XVI (?), Andrea Alciato (Glasgow University) 164 Figure 21 Tactus (1615–25), William van de Passe (after Crispijn de Passe the Elder) (British Museum) 169 Figure 22  Touch (1595), Jan Saenredam (British Museum) 170 Figure 23  Romeo and Juliet (James Alexandrou and Lorraine Burroughs) in Romeo and Juliet, Globe Education, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank, Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Bill Buckhurst, (2009) photographer Manuel Harlan 179 Figure 24 Handkerchief (c. 1600, English), Linen embroidered with silk (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 191 Figure 25 ‘Vera amicitia’, Les emblemes (1567), Joannes Sambucus (courtesy of the University of Glasgow) 207 Figure 26 Dismembering knife (1634), Ambroise Paré (Huntington Library, CA) 215 Figure 27 Bow Frame Amputation Saw (c. 1600–1700), Science Museum, London 217 Figure 28 Prosthetic Hands (1634), Ambroise Paré (used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License) 230 Figure 29 Dummy hand, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s Globe (Farah Karim-Cooper) 239 Figure 30  The Incredulity of St Thomas (1601–2), Caravaggio (Sanssouci, Potsdam) 242

Introduction

But now I see our lances are but straws, Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare, That seeming to be most which we indeed least are. Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, And place your hands below your husband’s foot. In token of which duty, if he please, My hand is ready, may it do him ease. (The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.174–80)1 In the last act of The Taming of the Shrew, Katherina admonishes all wives to submit to the wills of their husbands. In this moment, Shakespeare directs the audience’s gaze towards the orator’s hand as she is about to place it under Petruchio’s foot. Curiously though, it is left in a gestural pre-stroke phase, suspended there for 400 years, allowing actors and directors to decide whether it will go under the shoe or, alternatively, into Petruchio’s hand. Where a woman placed her hands in early modern society was of great concern to artists, poets and writers of treatises on manners, but here Shakespeare leaves us guessing. Lynda E. Boose reads this moment of The Shrew in light of the pre-Reformation marriage ceremony, in which the bride kneels before the husband and kisses his foot: ‘while Kate offers to place her hands below her husband’s foot rather than kiss it, the stage action seems clearly enough to allude to a ritual that probably had a number of national and local variants’.2 Boose sees this exchange alongside instruments such as cucking-stools and scold’s bridles as, historically, evoking ‘women’s socialization into shame’.3 However, in 5.2 we are at Bianca’s wedding

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feast, not Katherina’s, and what Katherina appears to be proposing is a voluntary gesture. Gestures in Shakespeare can be psychologically complex, transmitting meanings beyond those codified in medieval and Renaissance courtesy manuals and art. Katherina’s hand is stretched out as she kneels, resembling the pose of a medieval vassal, but instead of placing her hand into the hands of her lord, as a vassal would have done to pledge his service, she offers to place it beneath his foot. In early modern England, the hand, particularly the palm, was viewed as a microcosm of the self and could indicate the moral character and physical health of the person to whom it was attached. The suggestion of Katherina’s hand ready to receive Petruchio’s shoe demonstrates one way in which women were expected to be entirely subsumed by their husbands. However, it can be argued that hers is not a typical ritualistic marriage gesture, but rather a voluntary, emotionally-compelled one that denotes willing devotion (or a deliberate performance of it); it can be contrasted with, for example, the tactile gesture Hamlet imposes on an unwilling Ophelia in her description of their encounter in her closet: ‘He took me by the wrist and held me hard’ (2.1.84). The wrist-grasp is authoritative, aggressive and, in some contexts, construed as a gesture of rape, as we will see. How do we compare this gesture, then, with the one in Shrew; which one of these gestures is more subjugating? Such gestural ambiguity characterizes much of Shakespeare’s attention to the language of the hands as we will see in what follows. The reason the gesture from Shrew is important is because the hand conveyed a multiplicity of meanings in this period, and perhaps our hands still do. When I first noticed my daughter’s hands were shaped like mine, I remembered mine are like my mother’s and hers like my grandmother’s. I wondered to what extent our personalities might be encoded in our hands. Are my grandmother’s and mother’s rich histories embedded somewhere in mine or my daughter’s hands? Is the similarity of our hands somehow suggestive of the personality traits we share? As Paulina indicates in The Winter’s Tale, ‘The very

Introduction

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mould and frame of hand, nail, finger’ (2.3.101) could be a ‘copy’ of a parent and thus evidence of paternity. It begs the question: do we still think of hands (as Shakespeare’s contemporaries did) as registers of identity, ancestry, the future, and as suggestive of our inner lives? How much is written there that we have forgotten how to read? Our hands do as we bid them, instinctively, and they provide us with the ability to communicate; with them we reach, grasp, hold, express emotion and assert our wills. Our hands carry our thoughts and hang them in the air as we gesticulate and they are the principal organs of the sense of touch. Therefore, the hand is the instrument with which we engage with the physical world and it is the part of our body, apart from the face, with which we communicate most expressively and passionately. To understand what anthropologists for centuries have uncovered to be the human hand’s most distinctive qualities – that is, its ability to manipulate small objects, point with intentionality and move with precision and perfection – is to understand what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The hand is and always has been a symbol of our dignity as human, as civilized beings. Perhaps that is why when we see a severed hand we feel revulsion and horror. I recall ‘Thing’, the dismembered hand in The Addams Family (a 1960s television sitcom about a family of monsters) and how ghoulish yet oddly hilarious this lone, disembodied hand emerging out of boxes was to my young mind; it had a personality and identity of its own. The spectacle of dismemberment produces a strange and uncomfortable cocktail of emotions: horror, fear but humour too; why this happens in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is just one of the questions this book will address. Shakespeare understood the mixed emotions with which humans could respond to dismemberment. When Titus tells the clown to deliver a letter (another version of his own hand) to his enemies, he says he will reward him, but does so by remarking, ‘I’ll be at hand’ (4.3.111); the fact that Titus’s hand has been violently amputated does more than make

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this moment ironic, it provides a bit of macabre comic relief. Invoking despair, Lavinia’s traumatized body, with hands chopped off, is a material emblem of disempowerment in this context of confused emotions, but it also raises questions about the early modern social investment in hands, particularly female hands, where they are placed, what they look like, how often they gesticulate and to what extent they embody virtue and instrumentality. Raymond Tallis observes that the hand ‘gives us an explicitly instrumental relationship to our own body, a sense that we are agents and that our bodies are the means by which we bring things about’.4 Shakespeare’s texts demonstrate how the hand was perceived as a powerful instrument of human exchange, emotional expression, selfscrutiny, character and identity, whether it was attached or dismembered, on stage or in narrative poetry. The hand has been the subject of scholarly enquiry in recent years, and this study will build upon these and the broader critical discourses on the body in early modern culture, texts and performance. Since Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (1995), a seminal study of the Renaissance culture of dissection, an exciting cluster of works has emerged in recent years that have focused on the body and, more narrowly, upon its systems and parts. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio’s collection of essays The Body in Parts (1997)5 and William Slights’s The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (2008) have brought to light that not only were Renaissance anatomists and thinkers eager to come to an understanding of humanity and the self through their search of bodies, but that they could do so more effectively through individual parts. In particular, Hillman and Mazzio argue that the ‘part’ is ‘increasingly marked and elaborated upon in a range of visual and textual spaces, and in the sense that it is frequently imagined to take on attributes of agency and subjectivity’.6 They suggest that in early modern Europe, ‘the multiple traditions of medical and anatomical description, of Petrarchism, of religious and cultural iconography, converged to give individual parts of

Introduction

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the body more semiotic complexity than they had ever had before’.7 A body part, such as the hand, then, is an appropriate site for an exploration of identity since early modern culture was preoccupied with corporeal fragments as representative of broader concepts. In fact, as Hillman and Mazzio testify, the ‘early modern period could be conceptualized as an age of synecdoche’.8 This present study explores how the hand signifies the self through its dramatic and poetic representations and suggests that an analysis of this body part in Shakespeare might lead us to a more in-depth understanding of the nature of selfhood and identity in his works. Re-envisioning the hand as more than a tool or instrument, Katherine Rowe argues that the ‘dead hand’, a hand that is not attached to the body, but that is morbidly severed or ‘disembodied’, ‘represents a specific set of intellectual concerns: the relationship between human intentions or will—collective and individual—and meaningful action in the world’.9 This book is less concerned with the hand as symbol of agency as it is with the hand as a sign of character and identity; moreover, this book contends that hands are never really dead: whether attached or amputated, hands on the Shakespearean stage are, as seventeenth-century physician and gestural theorist John Bulwer argued in 1644, ‘most talkative’.10 Although the title of this book suggests the focus will be on the hand in performance, it will also consider the representation of the hand in Shakespeare’s narrative poems and, briefly, in artistic contexts as well. What follows is an analysis of the hand as it gestures, touches and is amputated in the works of Shakespeare; equally, this study aims to draw attention to the emotional expressivity and the signifying function of the hand on Shakespeare’s stage, in poetry and in the social world of early modern England. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a cultural context for a study of the hand in Shakespeare. It identifies early modern conceptions of the hand drawn from a variety of texts and visual sources, including anatomical descriptions, emblem books, artistry manuals, conduct and courtesy books and beauty treatises.

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Collectively, texts and illustrations of the period show a cultural preoccupation with the hand as evidence of divine workmanship, a dignifying feature of humanity, a map of the mind and character, an expressive tool, as indicative of refined or civilized manners and as a register of physiological health and virtue. While the code of manners established for the hand in polite society was in continuous flux, there was a distinctive set of rules advising men, women, children and servants about their hand behaviour, such as when it is appropriate to kiss the hand of a social superior. Shakespeare dramatizes and sometimes parodies hand-kissing either comically or within a political setting, as in Julius Caesar, when moments before the assassination, Brutus says: I kiss thy hand, but not in flattery, Caesar, Desiring thee that Publius Cimber may Have an immediate freedom of repeal. (3.1.52–4) Hand-kissing in this moment has a decisively political end. It is not an empty ritual that attends upon monarchical or despotic regimes, but functions as a symbol of Brutus’s determined course towards a democratic ideal. An analysis of the period’s discourses about the hand reveals that within the palm of the hand was encoded a person’s character and identity, upon it, their social status and gender. It was a highly scrutinized part of the body, an object of aesthetic and erotic contemplation, and its beauty could produce sexual desire and love. This introduction to the hand in Shakespeare’s world sets the scene for a more concentrated analysis of how the cultural meaning and valuation of the hand are exhibited as well as deconstructed in early modern performance and in Shakespearean poetry and drama. Chapter 3, the first of two chapters on gesture, argues that the hand was an expressive and versatile agent of performance in early modern playhouses, outdoors and indoors. In The

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Dignitie of Man (1612), Antony Nixon praises the hand for its ability to imitate God: ‘Man doth counterfeit the works of God by the agility and virtue of the hands’.11 Nixon differentiates between the divine capacity to fashion something out of nothing and the ‘agility’ or skill of the human hand in the act of mimesis. Gestures are units of bodily meaning that express the agility of the human hand in performance. They are produced by a given set of social conditions and their meanings tend to depend upon the contexts within which they occur. It is difficult to argue, as some scholars have, that there was a single system of gestures deployed uniformly by early modern actors. In the early to mid-twentieth century, assumptions were made about gestures being over-large and highly codified because of the presumed performance conditions of the outdoor and large-scale Elizabethan amphitheatres. It is important to address this question in light of twenty years of performances at the reconstructed Globe Theatre and the addition of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (the smaller indoor Jacobean theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe). While gestures, in Francis Bacon’s words, are ‘transitory Hieroglyphics’,12 how actors gesticulated in early modern performance might be traceable. However, it is more productive to take into account examples of gestures that characters describe or annotate in Shakespearean and early modern drama. If we consider these alongside contemporary accounts of gestures of the hand, satirical and anti-theatrical as well as dramatic, we will see a distinct lack of uniformity. While the fast pace of the early modern repertorial system and the range of skills required of actors suggest that there was probably very little variation in gestures between companies (though boy companies may have had a more artificial, taxonomic system of gesturing), the way actors’ hands moved or were accounted for on stage form a polysemous system incorporating a combination of instinctive, everyday and more formal or iconic gestures. What this suggests is the hand’s versatility and its capacity to reflect character and identity in performance in a rich variety of ways.

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Chapter 4 carries on the discussion of gesture, but this time within the context of Shakespearean narrative. For Shakespeare, gestures of the hand were crucial to emotional expressions and exchanges between characters. His work not only requires actors to perform them in a multitude of ways on stage, but his characters talk about them too. Having considered the early modern understanding of the meaning of the hand and the way hands might have performed in the playhouses, here I assess how gestures are described and understood (both by narrators/characters and readers/ audience) in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and in narrative accounts in a few select plays. Some of the questions this chapter will address include: how do the elaborately delineated gestures in Shakespeare’s poems lend to the dynamic sense of movement and emotional rhythm in those works? And how do the multiple references to the hand mediate the identities of the protagonists or frame their experiences? Why does Shakespeare have characters narrate gestures in the plays, rather than perform them? For example, Ophelia’s account of Hamlet intruding into her closet is replete with hand gestures, but it is also an emotionally pivotal moment for the two characters; why does Shakespeare choose not to stage this exchange? How can it be that some of Shakespeare’s most emotionally affecting moments are not actually meant to be performed, but instead are described through a report, I call ‘gestural narratio’? In this chapter, I consider what might be at stake when we interpret the meaning of gestures and emotionally-charged gestural exchanges, not as they are played, but rather as they are described in instances of poetic narrative and dramatic reporting. To address some of these questions, I examine medieval and Renaissance iconographic representations of hand movements and question to what extent Shakespeare may have relied upon his reader/audience’s visual and ‘kinesic’ memory of gestures as he depicts them verbally. Chapter 5 is concerned with the sense of touch, the hand being the chief sign and performer in the active sense. Tactility

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is an important mode through which the dangerous but thrilling effects of theatrical performance are felt and described in this period, as anti-theatrical and anti-tactile discourses emphasize. Here, I provide some context for early modern ideas about touch and the arguments that stressed its essential, human properties as well as those that reveal an anxiety about the threatening dangers it posed. Shakespeare’s assertion of tactility as a primary medium of human connection and mutual affection challenges the medieval and early modern hierarchy of the senses, which traditionally placed touch at the lowest end of the spectrum with sight or hearing at the highest. Focusing on Romeo and Juliet and Othello, it is important to consider Bruce Smith’s notion that Shakespearean drama articulates a variety of ‘fantasies of touch’,13 an idea that is at work in dramatic language and in the experience and interpretation of physical touching in these two plays. Hands and their touches become the focus as symbols of desire, female sexuality and its misrepresentation. What we find is that the sense of touch provides Shakespeare with a complex metaphorical vocabulary through which to explore the physiological and emotional effects of love at first sight in Romeo and Juliet and the anguish of sexual and social deception in Othello. The final chapter of this book turns to the performance of dismemberment. After exploring the graphic and textual context for the appearance of severed hands in the playhouse and some of the techniques actors might have used to perform onstage amputation, it narrows in upon Titus Andronicus to examine both the spectacle of Lavinia’s mutilation and Titus’s amputation. Lavinia’s body as spectacle is not merely a sign representing the mutilations of Rome; she is a woman who demonstrates how the body can transcend dismemberment through a variety of prosthetic means. Titus’s own amputation materializes his declaration that his hands which have fought for Rome have been ‘effectless’. More theoretically, it is important to consider how, once amputated, the hand continues to express identity, character and the self in

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performance. What does it mean to lose the ability to gesture and touch actively? What will become clear is that although hands have been lopped off, they remain ‘talkative’, ‘busy instruments’ and continue to signify character and identity each time they are held, grasped, alluded to and referenced. Taking into account the effects of traumatic dismemberment, I show how symptomatic conditions such as phantom limb syndrome can provide insight into Shakespeare’s concentration of power into the body’s extremities. The play is, in many ways, a meditation upon the simultaneous absence and presence of hands, which appear in the second half as trafficked material props and verbal remembrances. To focus on Shakespeare’s representation of hands is not to suggest he was the only playwright preoccupied with this part of the body. In fact, references to hands appear throughout the plays and poems of early modern writers. Shakespeare’s distinctiveness resides not so much in the volume of references to the hand and its actions, but rather in his preoccupation with it as a place where identity could be read (and mis-read), as a symbol of authority and interpersonal exchange and as an expressive transmitter of emotion. His plays and poems are preoccupied with the movement, language and meaning of the hand. Therefore, this study is as much about how Shakespeare draws attention to the word ‘hand’ and describes its activities, as it is about the role it plays on stage as part of the actor’s body and as a morbid stage-prop that provokes emotions ranging from horror and fear to jubilation and aesthetic pleasure. The son of a glover, whether consciously or not, would have viewed the hand and its accessories as crucial symbols of identity and character but also understood how the meaning of human life is simultaneously elusive in these documents of the self.

1 The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world

Hendrick Goltzius was an admired and significant Dutch engraver in his time (1558–1617). This drawing of a hand is perhaps one of his most important and revealing works. It is a self-portrait, an image of his own hand that shows the

FIGURE 1 Right Hand (1588), Hendrick Goltzius (Teylers Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands)

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anatomical consequences of an accident he had in infancy when he fell into a fire and burned both of his hands. This image captures his inability to open his hand fully after the accident. Upon first glance, it looks as if it is gesturing in some way, but in actual fact, it is an accurate illustration of his manual deformity.1 This pen and ink drawing is so compelling because of the precise anatomical detail rendered by the very hand that had been damaged, demonstrating the technical skill and the self-reflection prompted by and through the hand of the artist. Emblematic images from the period sometimes show a saint or person placing their hand into a flame, which almost always represents constancy.2 In some ways, Goltizus’s hand signals this tradition positioning him as the constant artist, who, in spite of a potentially debilitating accident, gloriously transcends his deformity. Goltzius’s drawing reminds us to what extent the hand was a symbol of the self in this period; it signified one’s character as well as their social and intellectual identity. In this present chapter I consider the idea of the hand, what Shakespeare’s contemporaries understood it to mean in intellectual and religious contexts and how it was understood as a part of the body that could be read. We will see that whether it was for an anatomist performing dissections, an artist creating a portrait, or a diligent reader attempting to learn and understand religious and secular ideas, the hand was a potent symbol of human thought, of progress and development, of God’s relationship to human beings and of an individual’s identity.

‘A well proportioned thing’ Early modern theories about the body and its systems were derived largely from the teachings of Aristotle and the Greek physician Galen (129–c. 201). Aristotle ‘consistently describes the parts of the [an] organism as “instruments” or organs (organa) distinguished by their “works” or “functions”



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 13

(erga)’.3 He seemed to have regarded the hand as perhaps the single most important asset to humankind. Linked inextricably with the erect stature of the human body, the hands were free to grasp instruments, forming the basis for action and creativity. Aristotle acknowledges the hand’s incredible versatility when he describes how its form and structure enable its multiple uses: For the hand becomes a talon, claw, horn, spear, sword, and any other weapon or instrument—it will be all these thanks to its ability to grasp and hold them all. And for this the form of the hand has been adapted by nature. For it is divided and has many digits, and it is possible for something in a divided state also to be composite, while it is impossible for something in a composite state to be divided. And it is possible to use the hand as one, two, or many. (IV)4 For Aristotle, the unique structure of the hand is its crucial defining feature. Galen, whose writing on parts of the anatomy and the humours had an enduring influence upon medieval and early modern medical theory, also refers to the hand as an instrument. His examinations are explained in his works On the Use of the Parts (De usu partium) and On the Natural Faculties (De naturalibus facultatibus) where he details the features of the parts of the body in relation to their usefulness (chreia) and function. Praising Aristotle for suggesting humans were intelligent because they had hands, Galen judged that the hand was a sign of human dignity and intelligent design for its ability to grasp, hold on to objects and manipulate the environment. But he also identified the hand’s instrumentality and its relationship to reason as uniquely human: For though the hand is no one particular instrument, it is the instrument of instruments because it is formed by Nature to receive them all, and similarly, although reason is not one of the arts in particular, it would be an art for the

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arts because it is naturally disposed to take them all unto itself. Hence man, the only one of all the animals having an art for arts in his soul, should logically have an instrument in his body.5 For Galen, Rebecca Flemming notes, everything about the human hand plays its part […] Their multitudinous bones with a myriad of attachments for all the muscles involved, the plentiful supply of nerves and blood vessels, the arrangement of the whole package in a particular pattern of flesh that produces the critical configuration of fingers and thumb (with their flexibility and sensitivity), all the way down to the fingernails themselves— it all works absolutely ideally.6 This notion of the perfectly constructed and ideal hand is something we see often in texts that describe them. The ancient philosophy and descriptions of the hand had a shaping influence on the work of early modern anatomists, who also praised this extreme part of the body. Being able to put their hands inside human cadavers gave anatomists a revelatory and very tangible sense of the hand’s double significance: its ability to perform actions and its perfect design. Andreas Vesalius’s (1514–64) De humani Corporis fabrica libri septem (1543), published in several editions, provides a detailed and comprehensive anatomy of the human body; its extraordinary illustrations were reportedly produced by artists from Italian master Titian’s workshop.7 Vesalius builds on and challenges ancient anatomical theory, editing, in particular, the work of Galen.8 He corrected outdated theories wherever he could; he ‘saw the body as an articulate and finite composition’, arguing that the ‘bones perform the analogous function in the architecture of the body’ to a ‘supporting structure’ of a building.9 Jonathan Goldberg sees Vesalius’s revision of Galen as ‘the founding gesture of anatomy, founded, that is, in a true knowledge of the hand and arm – true knowledge of the



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 15

human’.10 Like Galen, Vesalius paid particular attention to the hand, marvelling at its design and describing the muscles and bones to assess their function: I believe it is no secret that we require the bones of the fingers for strength of action in grasping things, and we need many of them because of the various motions which the hands perform and the diversity of things which are grasped by them.11 His preoccupation with the hand underlines its centrality to the act of dissection. Vesalius revolutionized anatomical practice by conducting dissections himself, an intervention that Hillary Nunn suggests ‘made him the center of attention in the anatomy theatre, and when he, rather than an aloof figure on high, explained the body’s structures, Vesalius became the physical vehicle for the voice of authority’.12 In his study of the bones of the fingers, he notes the appropriateness of their construction: ‘[i]t is not difficult to discover why five digits were fashioned if we consider for what functions the fingers are useful. If they were fewer, they would undertake a great many actions less perfectly, while there is no reason we would require more’.13 The hand is designed to perfection, form defining function. Vesalius asserted the significance of the hand as an agent (‘doing’) and as a subject/object (‘being’) to be examined and interpreted. Consequently, anatomical dissection was a process that transferred easily to poetic and dramatic contexts, in what Sawday referred to as the ‘culture of dissection’.14 Shakespeare demonstrates his own interest in the ways in which bodies are taken apart through language such as that used when Katherine and Alice simultaneously dissect and translate Katherine’s arm, elbow, hands, fingers and nails in Henry V: ‘d’hand, de fingres, de nails, de arm, de bilbow’ (3.4.25–6). Shakespeare highlights here the relationship between bodies of text and real bodies and does so by parodying the Petrarchan blazons that regularly took apart women’s bodies in poetic acts of courtship.

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FIGURE 2  Andreas Vesalius (1543) De Humani Corporis fabrica libri septum (courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine, Bethseda, MD)



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 17

The seventeenth-century physician Helkiah Crooke describes the hand in his anatomical treatise Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615): ‘The true office of the Hand is to apprehend or hold, and his proper action is apprehension (for Hand and Hold are Conjugates, as we term them in Schooles)’.15 In their dissections, anatomists were conscious of their own tactile agency as they made their somatic discoveries. According to Katherine Rowe, ‘[t]he dissection of the hand in particular, from Galen to the seventeenth century, persists as one of the central moral topoi of anatomy demonstrations: celebrated for its difficulty and beauty, it reveals God’s intentions as no other part can’.16 In fact, many anatomical texts praise and invoke God as supreme designer. Crooke emphasizes the action of the hand and its links to understanding and intelligence, the word ‘apprehension’ meaning ‘the action of seizing upon, seizure, grasp’, a sense which is and always has been applied to cognitive as well as physical ability.17 Even at the most mechanical level, early modern theorists were making semantic links between the hand and thought. Theorized as inextricable from knowledge, the hand was and still is a metaphor: when we comprehend, we grasp something; when we think of two options, we weigh each one on figurative hands: the line, to ‘Weigh oath with oath, and you will nothing weigh’ implies a gesture using both hands (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.131). In early modern writing, such physical metaphors are frequently deployed because of the connections we instinctively make between our hands and thought. By the early seventeenth century, physicians, surgeons and anatomists had begun to understand the intricacy of the structural design of the hand. John Banister tells us what should come to mind when we hear the word: this word hand, compriseth all the space between the inferior head of Radius, and the extremities of the fingers: which, by the order of Anatomical description, is compounded of iii parts: that is to say, Brachial, which we call the wrest

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of the hand: Post brachial, which is the space between the wrist and the first joint of the fingers: the third part then is Digiti, or the fingers.18 Anatomical texts like Banister’s provide vivid detail in their explanations and descriptions of the parts of the body, though perhaps not as we understand them today; for example, the wrist was considered to be a part of the hand, not merely a structure to which it attached and depended upon for movement. Puns on ‘wrist/wrest’ in Titus Andronicus (as we will see in Chapter 6) make this an important consideration. There are fascinating similarities between the descriptions of hands in medical texts and in some of the art manuals of the time. They both emphasize the relationship between construction and motion; we can also detect a type of authorial marvel at divine workmanship or the genius of nature, and they both insist on the importance of proportion and symmetry as contributing factors toward the beauty of the parts, particularly the hand. Just before describing the arm, the wrist, the hand, palm and fingers, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo states in his artistry manual that, ‘when we behold a well proportioned thing, we call it beautiful’.19 Like anatomists, artists were busy observing and creating detailed studies of the human body and its parts, suggesting that both somatic enquiry and artistic representation required a sophisticated level of anatomical knowledge. Leon Battista Alberti instructs artists that, when depicting the muscles and skin, ‘the zealous painter will find great profit from investigating them in Nature for himself’.20 In his drawings of the body, its bones, muscles and nerves, Leonardo da Vinci also reveals his fascination with the careful design of the hand: ‘Have you seen here the diligence of nature, in having situated the nerves, arteries and veins on the sides of the fingers and not in the middle, so that in the operation of the fingers they do not in some way become pierced or cut?’.21 Although Leonardo was not an anatomist, he had ‘become intimately concerned with minutiae of anatomical form’, argues Martin Kemp, as the notes he took



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 19

while performing anatomical dissections indicate.22 As Martin Clayton and Ron Philo report: ‘the structural, mechanical perfection of the body was the guiding principle for Leonardo in this campaign of investigation’.23 Thus, art historians have debated about whether or not Leonardo’s precise rendering of hands is largely due to his focused attention on the anatomical detail of not only the structure and texture of hands, but also their gestures. His mural The Last Supper (1495) in the Santa Maria delle Grazie (Milan) is a striking intervention into the representation of gesture in visual art, as the many hands in the piece appear animated, lifelike and emotionally expressive, rather than merely iconic; Leonardo’s gestures are painted to reflect an emotional discourse rather than merely represent a set of emotions. Moshe Barasch’s study of the gestures in the murals of Giotto, for example, shows that the gestures depicted are highly emblematic, symbolizing different emotions presented in biblical stories, rather than reflecting the spontaneous and lively passions of the figures. The Last Supper seems a curious advancement in the way the hands are represented. There are over twenty hands portrayed in the painting, either touching shoulders, gesturing towards the table or pointing. Although it is unclear whether or not the depiction of their movement resulted from the artist’s careful study of the anatomical structure and mechanics of the hands, Leonardo was methodical in his process of drawing and painting them. There is evidence of this type of process elsewhere in Leonardo’s sketches. Ross King notes that among his ‘studies for his unfinished Adoration of the Magi [1481] are two sheets of paper covered with drawings of hands in various poses sketched from every conceivable angle’.24 In his drawings held in Windsor Castle library, Leonardo himself points out, ‘you will note the part of each that is connected to the surrounding bones, and likewise the part of each that is not connected to those surrounding, and that must move to effect each and every action of the hand’.25 Marvelling as he did in the complex ordering of the bones of the hand, Leonardo exhibited the same appreciation and pleasure at ‘the

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diligence of Nature’ in its intelligent construction of the hand as the anatomists. Whether for an artist or an anatomist, then, the hand epitomized the dignity and versatility of the human form, its superiority over ‘beasts’ as designated by divine creation or nature, its unique capacity to reflect cognition and emotion and to interact instinctively with dexterity in its ever changing environment.

Reading the hand The hand is the part of the body we most clearly identify with gesticulation. This association is partly rooted in the classical oratorical teachings that claimed vocal delivery (pronuntiatio) should be accompanied and supplemented by action (actio), meaning the voice should be assisted by the persuasive gestures of the hand. One treatise in particular has much to teach us about the early modern hand and gestural theory. Although it was published several years after Shakespeare’s death, it nevertheless collates a vast and comprehensive range of hand gestures gathered from ancient, medieval and early modern theory, shedding light on the meaning of gestures in the earlier periods and the continuity of their meanings: Chirologia: Or, The Natvrall Langvage of the Hand is bound and published with another, which focuses more specifically on a taxonomy of gesture, called Chironomia: or, The art of Manuall Rhetorique. Both texts, published in 1644 by English Physician John Bulwer, present the argument that the hand is the most important agent of communication on the human body.26 Bulwer’s manual, despite its over-emphasis on gesture’s universality, is the richest and the most thorough source of gestural theory we have from the early modern period. Explaining and illustrating the multiple gestures of the hand and their ‘universal’ meanings across both texts are 5 plates containing 132 labelled illustrations of these gestures. Like classical theorists, and long before evolutionary



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 21

theorists and anthropologists would do, Bulwer ties the hand to Reason, conferring upon it an essential dignity and marking it out as the distinguishing feature of humanity.27 Bulwer’s primary goal is to assert the ‘language’ of the hand as fundamentally more efficient at conveying thought and more eloquent than the tongue regardless of the scenario in which those conveyances occur: although Speech and Gesture are conceived together in the mind, yet the Hand first appearing in the delivery, anticipates the Tongue, in so much as many times the Tongue perceiving herself forestalled, spares itself a labour.28 In Chirologia, Bulwer proposes that our hands are the primary organs of communication sometimes at the expense of the tongue.29 Carla Mazzio has shown how the tongue was distrusted in this period and seen as potentially mendacious: ‘the duplicities of language are imagined to emerge from the inherent slipperiness and duality of the tongue’.30 Bulwer does not suggest he shared this view, but he does imagine the tongue to be equal if not deferent to the hand. He calls the hand ‘another Tongue, which we may justly call the Spokesman of the Body, it speaks for all the members thereof, denoting their Suffrages, and including their Vote’.31 In his dedication to Edward Goldsmith of Gray’s Inn, he reveals how he offered up draughts of his book, which he analogously refers to as a hand to be ‘embraced and kissed by the more intelligent part of the world’. 32 He longs for his ‘hand’/book to be ‘kissed’ and to be read as all hands are. For Bulwer the hand is synonymous with the brain, equal to the tongue while standing for a book unto itself. In early modern vocabulary, referring to someone’s ‘hand’ also meant their handwriting, and ‘characters’ were the scripted letters. The metaphor of readable hands has a material basis in the case of a character reading a letter on stage and identifying it as the ‘hand’ of its author, such as when Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing compares the papers written by Beatrice

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and himself: ‘A miracle! Here’s our own hands against our hearts’ (5.4.91). In King Lear, Gloucester reads the letter Edmund forged, saying, ‘My son Edgar, had he a hand to write this?’. Edmund convinces his father it is his brother’s handwriting: ‘It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is not in the contents’ (1.2.56, 67). Jonathan Goldberg says of such examples that ‘the characteristic hand has been charactered, made by what has been made’.33 Gloucester finds the ‘characters’ he reads in the letter inconsistent with the good character he knows his son possesses. Edmund reinforces the forgery, however, by asserting a forged emotion: ‘I hope his heart is not in the contents’.34 While the nature of someone’s character could be read in someone’s handwriting or the contents of a letter, their character was also something that could be deciphered in the palm of the hand. In the seventeenth century, William Austin declared that nature gave man two things ‘wherein he is armed far more excellently, then any other creature; that is to say the mind and the hand. The one to advise, the other to execute. And indeed, if we curiously advise with the Palmisters, we shall find the Mind written in the Hand’.35 If read carefully, the hand, it was thought, could reveal one’s health or emotional state, and many believed it could be studied closely to discover someone’s past, present and future. In some intellectual circles throughout the early modern period, the art of palm-reading was considered legitimate. Caroll Camden observed that for centuries an academy of astrology, which included Parcelsus, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, had been developing methods to trace human nature in the hand. These ‘Chiromantic writers’ relied on astrology and found ‘an authoritative religious basis for their science’.36 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘Palmistry’ or ‘chiromancy’ was debated, some seeing it as a science or an art, while others thought of it as too easily susceptible to deception and trickery, this latter view implied in Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller, where we see a girl (probably a gypsy) pretending to read the palm



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 23

of a young gallant while slipping off his ring. The young man is not looking at his hand, but is charmed by the girl whose seductive gaze transfixes his as she slyly conducts her thievery. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the Soothsayer claims ‘In nature’s infinite book of secrecy/A little I can read’ (1.2.9–10), referring to his ability to prognosticate; we can infer from Alexas’s instruction to Charmian that follows – ‘Show him your hand’ (11) – that the ‘infinite book of secrecy’ is the hand itself: Charmian [Gives her hand to the Soothsayer.] Good sir, give me good fortune. Soothsayer I make not, but forsee. Charmian Pray then, forsee me one. Soothsayer You shall be yet far fairer than you are. Charmian He means in flesh. Iras  No, you shall paint when you are old. Charmian  Wrinkles forbid! … Iras [Holds out her hand.]  There’s a palm presages chastity, if nothing else. Charmian E’en as the o’erflowing Nilus presageth famine. Iras Go, you wild bedfellow, you cannot soothsay! Charmian  Nay, if an oily palm be not a fruitful prognostication, I cannot scratch mine ear. Prithee tell her but a workaday fortune. (1.2.15–21; 49–55) The exoticizing of palm reading is something we see again in Othello, but here in this scene, it reveals a skeptical attitude towards the ‘art’ itself, evident in the way Alexas and Charmian treat it lightly with jokes about cosmetics, ageing and sex (‘oily palm’). At the same time, however, the exchange highlights the perceived mysterious quality of the palm that generated the practice of chiromancy in the first

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place. While Shakespeare suggests the readability of hands, he simultaneously alludes to the elusiveness of the self upon the surface of the body when people misread hands and their gestures. What was it about hands that made them readable? A mid-seventeenth century palmistry manual attempts to explain that it was the lines of the palm and what they signify: I think meet to speak of those lines which take their denomination or name of the three principal members of man’s Body: that is, of the Heart, the Brain, and the Liver. For as in those parts, whatsoever is in man, is altered and changed: so by those three incisions and lines, a man may foresee and prognosticate whatsoever shall happen touching health or adversity, or any other thing [in] nature.37 The author, John Indagine, calls upon ancient authority to substantiate his claims, such as the sect of Pythagoras, ‘who chiefly […] did declare and prognosticate the manners, state and end of man’s life’.38 Indagine’s manual contains a separate section that spells out how to prognosticate, so he and other practitioners make a clear distinction between reading the lines of the hand to reveal character – such as when you find a circle with a dot inside on a woman’s thumb, it signifies: ‘a libidinous, evil mannered, and adulterous woman, willingly putting forth herself to whoredom and vice’ – and reading the obscurer lines to tell the future.39 For early modern chiromancers, reading the hand for signs of both character and future was equally important and inherently linked: ‘such a person, which hath the Table [palm] in the hand large, and the fingers slender and long, is judged to be subtle in a natural faculty, and apt or given to play on instruments’.40 Thomas Hill notes that if any woman who has ‘manly hands, such a creature hath a big midriff, and big belly port […] such a one may lightly conceive, yet bring forth no perfect child’. While one who has ‘hollow fingers, and these evil fashioned, and not well joining together: is judged to be a



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 25

person prone to poverty, and unconstant in his words: so that he performeth little, in his deeds’.41 Thus, according to early modern chiromantic theory, hands should, by their very appearance, speak volumes not only about the type of person you are but also the kind of life you will lead. The period’s astrology and palmistry texts tell us that the thumb contains the hill of Venus, the forefinger corresponds to Jupiter, the middle finger to Saturn, the ring finger to the sun and the ‘ear’ finger to Mercury.42 Thus, the hand, according to chiromancers, acts as a microcosm of the body and the cosmos, providing a type of astrological map to inner character and future lives. Such theories about the hand’s (and the body more broadly), and therefore mankind’s relation to astrology and the zodiac, date as far back as Ancient Greece, thrived through the Middle Ages and were revived in neo-Platonic discourses during the Renaissance in Europe.43 However, by the time Shakespeare was writing his plays and Caravaggio was painting The Fortune Teller, scepticism towards palmistry had intensified. In 1594 Thomas Nashe had already expressed his doubts about the arts of Physiognomy (reading the face) and palm reading: ‘[a]s absurd is it, by the external branched seams or furrowed wrinkles in a man’s face or hand, in particular or general to conjecture and foredoom of his fate’; he goes on to say that according to this practice, the palm of [the] … hand is writhen and platted, and every day alters as he alters his employments or pastimes: wherefore well may we collect, that he which hath a hand so brawned and enter-lined, useth such and such toils or recreations; but for the mind or disposition, we can no more look into through it, than we can into a looking Glass through the wooden case thereof.44 While his criticism is clear, Nashe does suggest that the hand and what it can indicate about a person’s physiological or emotional state is in continuous flux. The changeability of the body and what it registers upon the hands feeds the scepticism

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about the arts that practitioners used to read the palm, but it also illustrates again the belief in the mysterious properties of this part of the hand. Many years after Nashe, Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642) regards the lines in the hand as extremely mysterious and complex; for him, identity may not be read with the accuracy and confidence palm-readers declared. While defining Physiognomy, he notes that there are also, certain mystical figures in our hands, which I dare not call mere dash strokes, a Lavole, or at random, because delineated by a pencil, that never works in vain; and hereof I take the more particular notice, because I carry that in mine own hand, which I could never read of, nor discover in another.45 Browne acknowledges that although the body is readable, the unique variants in each hand are such that a single system or formula for determining character from the hand would be impossible to achieve. In a treatise on love melancholy, Jacques Ferrand was also sceptical about the ability of chiromancers to detect whether or not someone is naturally inclined towards love-melancholy. While Ferrand admits that large fingers are indicative of a large liver, hence the person might be a glutton, he warns that, [t]his art of Chiromancy, hath been so strangely infected with Superstition, Deceit, Cheating, and (if I durst say so) with Magic also; that the Canonists, and of late years, Pope Sixtus Quintus, have been constrained utterly to condemn it. So that now, no man professeth publicly this Cheating Art, but Thieves, Rogues and beggarly Rascals; which are now every [w]here known by the name of Bohemians, Egyptians, and Caramaras […]46 Clearly, in the seventeenth century, palm-reading was increasingly distrusted. However, what was not in dispute was



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 27

the very notion that the hand could contain and conceal inner lives and that hidden truths might be unlocked through an attempt to read it, either in social discourse or as it gestured in performance. By attempting to read hands, whether gestures or palms, many of Shakespeare’s characters seek to uncover what hands have to say about the identity and motives of the person to whom they belong: ‘What means that hand upon that breast of thine?’ (King John, 2.2.20)

Sacred instrument The hand was a bodily reminder of the omnipresence of God. It was, after all, God’s hand that created human beings, who in turn worshipped him through hands-on rituals and gestures of prayer. How early moderns used their hands in daily life was also a way of acknowledging their bond with heaven. Being left- or right-handed consequently had some religious significance in this period, but anxieties about left- or-right handedness were not as prevalent as we have traditionally assumed. People who were left-handed were encouraged to retrain themselves to work or write with their right hands. Curiously, Leonardo was openly left-handed, though most Renaissance artists who were born left-handed retrained. William Bercher explicitly attributes inferiority and diabolism to the left side of the body when he declares that ‘every man knoweth that a woman is formed in the left side / and man in the right side of the body […] the order of the Earth is for honors sake to put a man to the right hand and the Scripture sayeth / that at the last day / when every man shall be judged accordingly / the good shall go on the right side / and the evil on the left’.47 The demonization of the left hand was fundamentally rooted in the original sin, and was thereby presented, for the most part, in feminine terms. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle observes that in Michelangelo’s fresco of the Temptation and Fall, Eve ‘reaches back with her left hand, arm fully extended

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up, to take the fruit from the hand of the serpentine woman twined about the tree’.48 However, in the seventeenth-century translation of Artimedorus’s The Interpretation of Dreames, when dreaming, the right hand is said to symbolize ‘the father and the son: the left, the Wife, the Mother, Sister, and servant: the right, may signify such goods as are to get, the left, goods already gotten: if therefore one dream that he loseth his right hand, then he shall lose something which it signifieth. In general, the hands signify neither good nor bad […]’49 Thus, sometimes, the right hand is associated with good and with God and the left with evil; at other times, though, the left hand is simply seen as inferior. Whether left or right, the image of the hand encapsulated God’s agency. This theistic association with the hand is why some anatomists asserted the interventional nature of their profession through their explanations and accompanying illustrations. Katherine Rowe argues that ‘the hand becomes the prominent vehicle for integrating sacred mystery with corporeal mechanism’.50 The ‘sacred mystery’ of the hand lay in its ability to offer evidence of God’s existence because of the precise complexity of its design. But this idea of the sacred hand extends beyond the anatomy theatre. The hand is tied in religious writing and iconography to God as creator. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books, such as Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586), Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612) and George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), provide some insight into the presumed ‘sacred mystery’ of the hand, since many of the hands emerging from clouds in the emblems are meant to represent God’s hand and are depicted in a variety of scenarios as a disembodied, symbolic entity. In such depictions, God’s power and judiciousness are concentrated into the sole image of a hand thereby fashioning it into a metonym for divine authority, helpful in gesturing towards the moral mottos accompanying these emblems. Not confined to gestural postures in portraits or on stage, the power and signifying force of the hand in emblems show that



The idea of the hand in Shakespeare’s world 29

it was more often than not a metonym for God, and, at times, for humanity, conjuring the cluster of emotions associated with religious worship.51 In Chapter 6, we will see how these emblems demonstrate the ways in which the image of severed hands pervaded the visual world of early modern England. It seems that the most powerful way to depict the omnipotence of God was through illustration or visual art. Artists accordingly linked the creating hand to God; the ‘theology of the hand as God’s instrument of creation appealed to artists and their supporters, because it elevated art above the exigencies of a painter’s materials and manual production’.52 As such, painting itself, performed by the hand, might be endowed with a kind of divine significance. After all, in the anti-cosmetic writing of the period, women were compared to amateur artists who destroyed the worksmanship of God, the master painter.53 Painting and other creative professions, therefore, are reserved for the divinely appointed hands of men. The significance and sheer volume of images of the ‘divine hand’ in the medieval and Renaissance iconography of worship should not be underestimated. Renaissance artists were preoccupied with the spiritual significance of God’s hand and the representation of its tangible presence in human life. As Philip Sohm reminds us, ‘Albrecht Dürer centred his Christ-like Self Portrait (1500) on his divinae manus; and Nicolas Poussin depicted Christ as Deus Pictor in The Healing of the Blind (1650), where his healing touch cures the blind just as Poussin’s touch opens our eyes to divine acts’.54 In such depictions, the hand becomes a metonym for God and a site where God and humans connect. Too many to recount here, but the numerous images of worship, such as prayer (orans), benediction, oath-swearing, creation, last judgement, despair, the passion of Christ, the descent into limbo, painted on to frescos, ceilings and canvases, helped formulate the symbolic Christian vocabulary of hand gestures in religious art during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.55 What will become evident is a gestural inheritance in secular and non-religious iconography, poetry and drama in sixteenth- and

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seventeenth-century England of this imagery; for example, iconic gestures seen in religious painting are recycled in some contexts by actors on the early modern stage, as we will see in Chapter 3. Artists and anatomists were not the only ones who appropriated the divine agency of the hand. Malcolm Well, more anon. Comes the King forth, I pray you? Doctor Aye, Sir; there are a crew of wretched souls, That stay his cure: their malady convinces The great assay of art; but at his touch, Such sanctity, hath Heaven given his hand, They presently amend. Malcolm I thank you, Doctor. [Exit Doctor.] Macdonald What’s the disease he means? Malcolm ’Tis call’d the Evil: A most miraculous work in this good King, Which often, since my here-remain in  England, I have seen him do. How he solicits Heaven, Himself best knows; but strangely-visited  people, All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures; (Macbeth, 4.3.139–52) The ‘sacred mystery’ of the divine hand was literalized in the ritual of the royal touch. Popular in the Middle Ages and then revived in Tudor England, the monarchical practice of touching the diseased flesh or washing the feet of subjects suffering from scrofula – a skin disease caused by tuberculosis – was a powerful political strategy, a public demonstration of the healing power of the divinity inherent in royal sovereignty. In Macbeth, Malcolm highlights the ‘sacred mystery’ of this



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touching practice that places otherworldly power in the king’s hands and ensures a sovereign’s ongoing relationship with his subjects through the effective but mysterious power of tactility. By having Malcolm witness and recount the royal touch, Shakespeare draws attention to the stark contrast between the monarchies of the English king and Macbeth. Macbeth’s tyrannous brand of monarchy is evident in his ‘violent hands’ (5.9.36) which perpetrate the play’s murderous touches. It also alludes to the effect of rulers upon their people; what they do figuratively touches the realm and its individuals. Carole Levin observes that although Mary I revived the practice in England, Elizabeth I ‘was far more aware of how to use spectacle to enhance the prestige of the monarchy’.56 The most famous account of Elizabeth I’s touching ceremony comes from the Queen’s chaplain William Tooker, who observed that she would be ‘most serene […] prostrate on her knees, body and soul rapt in prayer’; he recounts how he would look upon her ‘exquisite hands, whiter than whitest snow, boldly and without disgust, pressing their sores and ulcers and handling them to health’.57 The language Tooker uses is flattering as he praises the Queen’s hands through the poetic tropes of sixteenth-century love poems, suggesting her hands represent the ideal beauty in their likeness to snow. Her white hands are a symbol of her virtue. The image of the Queen ‘rapt’ in prayer suggests she is engaged in a kind of ecstatic union with God, the effects of which are transmitted through her healing hands to the sick. Levin argues that the Queen took the ritual very seriously and that she would touch the actual ‘tumours and afflicted areas’ without hesitating and without flinching.58 Some scepticism in the Elizabethan period towards the royal touch as a cure for ‘the King’s evil’ or scrofula is detectable in medical manuals and recipe books which published internal and topical remedies for the disease, presented as ‘just in case’ secondary options. One of the Queen’s surgeons or ‘chyrurgion’, William Clowes, published such a manual to treat ‘the Evil’, which provides a combination of cordials, ointments and powders to relieve the symptoms of the skin

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disease and perhaps to eliminate it altogether. There may have been an element of risk in publishing such a treatise, hence the title page and prefatory material lauds the ability of the Queen to cure the disease; in the Epistle to the Reader, he states: ‘the Kings or Queens Evil: A disease repugnant to nature: which grievous malady is known to be miraculously cured & healed, by the sacred hands of the Queens’ most Royal Majesty, even by Divine inspiration and wonderful work and power of God, above mans skill, Art and expectation’. However, Clowes goes on to say that many sufferers ‘were not able to pay but a very little or nothing at all for their cure. And so I here conclude, that as God by his divine gifts, doth cure this […] Malady: so also of his great goodness, he doth give artificial gifts, for the curing of the said Infirmity’.59 God’s chief ‘gifts’ lie in the sovereign’s hands, but his ‘artificial gifts’ lie in those of the physician. The ‘sacred mystery’ of the hand is also evident in human posture. Aristotle had long before dignified the human hand when, in his explanation of the parts of animals, he singles out humans as able to stand erect: [a]nd being upright in nature, mankind has no use for forelimbs, and instead of these nature provides arms and hands. / Now Anaxagoras said it was because they have hands that humans are the most intelligent of animals; it is reasonable, however, that it is because they are most intelligent that human beings are given hands.60 Many commentators have discussed Aristotle’s diversion from Ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras’s view that humans are clever because they have hands. Aristotle’s sense was that humans were given hands because they are intelligent. In either case, bi-pedality meant humans could act and communicate with and through their hands. Although this concept has been acknowledged since classical antiquity, the hand as a distinguishing feature of the upright human was a significant principle of medieval and early modern



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Christianity. The physician Helkiah Crooke’s opening chapter to Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615) praises the excellence of the body and argues that human nature is mysteriously embedded within the soul, where there is ‘something Metaphysical’, governed by three faculties: memory, understanding and will.61 As the praise of the body continues, Crooke also extols bi-pedality: Now, if the figure of man had been made with his face downward, that Divine Creature should have gone groveling upon his hands, as well as upon his feet, and those worthy and noble actions of his Hand, had been forfeited; or at least disparaged. For, who can write, ride, live in a civil and socialable life, erect Altars unto God, build ships for war or traffic, throw all manner of Darts, and practice other infinite sorts of excellent Arts; either groveling with his face downward, or sprawling on his back with his face upward? Wherefore, only had the frame of his body erected upward towards heaven.62 The logic of human stature is due, according to this perspective, to the acquisition of hands from God. Therefore, the hand is that ‘Organ or Instrument before all organs, and indeed instead of all’.63 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle observes of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam that the pointing (or deictic) gesture could very well be a command to stand rather than to ‘be’. Human stature elevates the hands physically and spiritually, as Crooke suggests above. Bulwer emphasizes the significance of the sacred or divine hand and its many gestures of piety when he refers to ‘our Saviour’s Hands; whose gestures have given a sacred allowance to the natural significations of ours’. Moreover, Bulwer does not want his reader to forget that human beings communicate with God through their hands, ‘by the appeal of our Hands in admiration, attestation, and prayer’.64 It makes sense, conversely, that a popular way to depict God’s communication with human beings would be through images of the

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hand. While attempting to convince people to stay away from the public theatres, for instance, anti-theatrical writer, Stephen Gosson, refers to the ‘word of God, which is the finger that points you out the way’.65 The concept of the sacred hand, therefore, became a literary and dramatic trope that extended itself beyond the pictorial, and that increasingly came to signify the tension between human and divine agency.

Hand and mind The hand was not just a symbol of God’s ‘sacred mystery’, but it also emblematized the tactile pursuit of knowledge and was the part of the body inherently linked to the mind. When John Heminge and Henry Condell published Shakespeare’s First Folio, they told ‘the great Variety of Readers’ that Shakespeare’s ‘mind and hand went together’ (A3), suggesting he very rarely made mistakes or ‘blotted’ his papers. This type of characterization suggests an implicit awareness of the deep cognitive connections between hands, creativity and thought. A valuable didactic tool, the hand played an active, tactile part in the production and organization of ideas as well as in the development of manual skill. Coining the term ‘manicule’ to refer to the small hands with pointing fingers in the margins of medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books, William Sherman identifies the symbol that demonstrates how pre-modern readers read: Both literally and metaphorically […] reading used to be considered as much the province of the hand as of the other faculties (sight, intellect, and motion) associated with the taking in of texts.66 Sherman notes the variations in size, shape and elaboration of the sleeves accompanying these severed hands and argues that they are suggestive of the individuality of a reader. These



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manicules are extremely common amongst the range of symbols found in the margins of texts and they demonstrate the literal physicality that was associated with the language of learning and knowledge acquisition in this period: [e]arly modern readers were trained in schools, universities, Inns of Court, and even common households in what might be described as the manipulation of information – in selecting, ordering, and applying resources gleaned from a wide variety of texts. “Manipulate” is one of our many terms derived from Manus, the Latin word for “hand”.67 Readers in this period were very much aware of and alive to the ways in which their hands and symbols of them could pictorially or physically help structure, develop and clarify their thinking. Reading becomes a very physical act and the manicules serve as visual reminder of the nature of hands as liminal between body and environment and body and text. The act of reading for early modern Protestants was conceived as an embodied and ‘kinetic’ act. Arguing that acquiring knowledge was figured as a ‘hands on’ activity, Lori Anne Ferrell observes that ‘the skilled physicality required by the mere act of reading is the implied sub-text of’, what she refers to as, early modern ‘how-to books’.68 Touch, then, is a primary sense through which to guarantee or verify ‘the truths of observation’.69 The relationship between Protestant worship, the study of doctrine and the hand is evident in the ‘opinion of Puritan preacher Stephen Egerton’, who suggested that ‘proper attentiveness to the Word required “judgment, memory, and dexterity of hand,” all in order to hear, assess, and take notes on sermons for later perusal and reconsideration’.70 The involvement of the hand in reading scripture is represented in countless portraits of people with a book in one hand, using one finger to hold or mark their place in the text. This kind of tactile reading may have been encouraged more openly in Protestant England, but there are painted renditions of fingers holding places in books or fingers pointing to pages

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or actively touching a page of a book in pre-Reformation art and in continental portraits. But whether it was a Catholic or Protestant practice, the art of tactile reading shows how hands served as an instrument of thought and whether literal markers in books or drawn into the margins, hands were significant agents of learning. For musicians, the hand was the principal conduit and symbol for musical accomplishment and skill.71 The Guidonian hand, which saw many incarnations and versions from the eleventh century onwards such as those in Guido d’Arezzo’s Micrologus, enabled students to learn the musical notes within the hexachord system. Musical books and instrumentation lessons demonstrate the synaesthetic idea of fingers producing sounds; tactility and aurality are fused together in musical notation and in the ‘fingering’ or ‘fretting’ (to rub hard with fingers or gall the skin) of musical performance. In The Taming of the Shrew, Hortensio, after attempting to instruct Katherina at the lute, complains: I did but tell her she mistook her frets, And bow’d her hand to teach her fingering, When, with a most impatient devilish spirit, “Frets, call you these?” quoth she, “I’ll fume with them.” And with that word she struck me on the head (2.1.149–53) Here Shakespeare plays upon the word ‘fret’ meaning to finger an instrument and to ‘brawl’ with or ‘gall’ someone or something, both explicitly tactile activities.72 In A new Booke of Tabliture, Containing sundrie easie and familiar Instructions, shewing how to attaine to the knowledge, to guide and dispose the hand to play on sundry instruments, as the Lute, Orpharion, and Bandora (1596), the author suggests that both dexterous fingers and a good ear produce excellent music.73 Shakespeare often draws parallels or puns on the relationship between hands or fingers and musical



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instruments; for example, in Hamlet, he famously compares himself to a recorder and taunts his schoolmates-turned-spies about their feeble attempts to ‘pluck out’ his secrets: Hamlet  It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops. Guildenstern  But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill. Hamlet   Why, look you now how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would play upon me! You would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to my compass […] Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me you cannot play upon me. (3.2.349–63) The hand is synonymous with skill in early modern England and, here, Shakespeare draws upon this association to show how gravely serious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s blundering attempts at spying really are. The idea of one’s hands clumsily ‘fretting’, or ‘plucking’ at a musical instrument is a vivid image of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s unpolished questioning, a poignant reminder of the (lack of) skill and precision that the image of and many references to hands in Hamlet symbolize. The two characters, themselves, become clumsy hands to the King, figuratively un-adroit interpreters and musicians. A similar image is used in Richard II, but this time as a metaphor for Mowbray’s banishment and the enforced lack of verbal skill he will have to experience as a foreign exile: And now my tongue’s use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp,

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Or like a cunning instrument cased up – Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony. (1.3.161–5) Mowbray compares his tongue/ability to speak eloquently in a foreign country to an instrument that is out of tune and can no longer play melodically, or to an unskilled musician who has no idea what to do with the instrument in his hands. The hand was a systematic template in the development of musical skill but it was also linked to memory, most famously suggested in Girolamo Marafioti’s The Art of Memory (1602): ‘By using the joints of the fingers and other sites of the palms, Marafioti assigns each hand twenty-three individual places, corresponding to the number of letters in the Latin alphabet […] [he] recognizes the utility of the hands for the reader’s ready reference and reliability in constructing an ordered sequence of associations necessary for retrieving information required for speaking and preaching’.74 This early identification of the hand as a guide suggests the inherent relationship between acquiring knowledge, skill, memory and the hand. It is beyond the scope of this book to examine the vast number of disciplines in which the hand was utilized as a didactic resource or focus for the acquisition of learning, but it is worth noting the importance it held in early modern systems of thought and its active role in the attainment of knowledge and skill. Not only was it a symbol of human discovery for the Renaissance anatomists, but the hand was also a crucial, religious symbol, representing God’s relationship to and with humankind. Equally significant, however, was the hand’s meaning in social situations. Because it was symbolic of one’s character and identity, it was under frequent scrutiny and consequently obligated to gesture appropriately and look beautiful while doing so, an obligation upheld particularly for women. The following chapter considers the appeal of



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the hand as an aesthetic reminder of the self that in its grace and beauty had the power to produce love and desire in its onlooker. It also examines some of the texts that were concerned with the reformation of or attempt to codify social manners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

2 Manners and beauty: The social hand

A Daily Mail poll showed that British women spend £450 a year on their nails. It said that ‘The average woman goes to the salon at least twice a month’ and that 86 per cent of those polled said they would never attend a job interview unless they had had their manicure first. A strange revelation was that Londoners preferred red nails, while ‘Geordies love pale pink’.1 As dubious as Daily Mail polls are, what seems evident is that the appearance of the hands is still of concern for twenty-first-century British women. Having perfectly manicured nails might reveal that one has the time, money and sense of personal pride to ensure that her hands look their best in social situations, as well as a job interview. Although there were no nail salons in early modern England, hand hygiene and an elegant-looking hand was perhaps considered as important then as it is now, but for slightly different reasons. Clean, manicured hands in early modern England would indicate not only social class but moral identity as well. Having considered what hands might mean in intellectual contexts, it is helpful now to consider the hand as a social entity. The ideal hand was an extension of a mind that was clean, cultivated, civilized and virtuous. This chapter discusses how hands are not only incorporated into, but are also a focus of, a network of early modern social rituals.

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Gentle hands The movement of the hand in the social world was of great interest to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The hand as symbol of emotion, identity, character, agency and skill was well established by the late sixteenth century, and its significance was largely due to the fact that hands could be seen and therefore read in social situations. William Austin noted that with our hands ‘we give leave to depart; we command; we entreat; we threaten; we promise; we salute; we strike; we give; we receive; we make; we destroy; we defend; we offend’.2 Hands therefore perform an array of actions and take on various meanings depending on class, gender and age. A potential source of anxiety, hands were also a focus for the formation and reformation of social skill. Whether they were kissed, held, clasped, shaken or taken, hands touched each other in polite society and in circles of power in heavily codified ways: ‘Let him kiss your hand, /And what you do, do it unfeignedly’ (Richard III, 2.1.21–2). The rules of polite gesture are carefully delineated in the courtesy manuals of the period. These manuals can tell us what the expectations are, but, frustratingly, cannot tell us enough about the exact nature of social practices. Shakespeare staged social practices regularly, if only to challenge their meaning in different environments: Truly, madam, if God have lent a man any manners he may easily put it off at court: he that cannot make a leg, put off’s cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip nor cap; (All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.2.8–12) Shakespeare captures the tension between ideal and actual practice in the encounter between the Clown and Countess, where it is implied that the gestures of social decorum can be applied to the body and therefore easily removed.



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In As You Like It (1599), we witness the tensions between ideal court practices and what happens in the country when Corin and Touchstone discuss the viability of ‘manners’ in such a context: Corin   Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court. You told me you salute not at the court but you kiss your hands. That courtesy would be uncleanly if courtiers were shepherds. Touchstone   Instance, briefly. Come, instance. Corin   Why, we are still handling our ewes, and their fells, you know, are greasy. Touchstone   Why, do not your courtier’s hands sweat? And is not the grease of a mutton as wholesome as the sweat of a man? Shallow, shallow. A better instance, I say. Come. Corin   Besides, our hands are hard. Touchstone   Your lips will feel them the sooner— shallow again. A more sounder instance, come. Corin   And they are often tarred over with the surgery of our sheep, and would you have us kiss tar? The courtier’s hands are perfumed with civet. Touchstone   Most shallow man! Thou worm’s meat in respect of a good piece of flesh indeed! Learn of the wise and perpend. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very uncleanly flux of a cat. Mend the instance, shepherd. (3.2.43–66) The reference to the courtly practice of hand-kissing contains a joke about the filthy ingredients in cosmetics and perfumes that courtiers were known to put on their hands. John Taylor also mocks the use of such cosmetic and perfume recipes: ‘Their Civet [that affords such dainty scents] / Is but a poore

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Cats sweating excrements’.3 Shakespeare’s attention to the practice of hand-kissing here satirizes the kinds of kinetic acts that ideals of social hierarchy attempted to establish. In so doing, he highlights the prominence of the hand in the rituals of courtesy and its importance in books on manners and civility in this period, while demonstrating the instability of codes of manners. John Bulwer reminds us that the gesture of kissing the hand was still an ‘obsequious expression’ by those ‘who would adore & give repeat by the courtly solemnity of a salutation or valediction’. Of the gestures of the hand, he goes on to say, there ‘is no expression of the Hand more frequent in the formalities of civil conversation’.4 Shakespeare satirizes the emphasis in courtesy literature on avoiding the label of ‘rusticus’, a word ‘indicative’, as John Gillingham says, of the claims of courtesy books ‘to teach socially superior behaviour’.5 Touchstone implies that what should provoke disgust is the obsequiousness that had long attended hand-kissing; the reference to the civet cat’s anal secretion makes the jest that, at court, it is perhaps arses and not hands that are being kissed most of the time. Sixteenth-century satirist Edward Guilpin also pokes fun at courtly rituals, noting the stock gestures that framed and characterized the experience of courtesy, when his speaker decries ‘The Spanish shrug, kissed-hand, nor cheveral face …’6 Of course the court of Elizabeth I was notorious for its preoccupation with social decorum and the bodily displays of courtesy. The French Ambassador André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, told the Queen that he had been commanded by the King of France ‘to kiss her hands on his behalf’;7 and Paul Hentzner, while travelling in England, noted in his journal that whoever addresses the Queen would be expected to kneel. He observed: While we were there, W. Slawata, a Bohemian Baron, had letters to present to her; and she, after pulling off her glove, gave him her right hand to kiss, sparkling with rings and jewels, a mark of particular favour.8



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Kissing the monarch’s hand was not only a ritualistic gesture, but it was also a sign of the privilege and honour of the kisser. In Richard II, Bolingbroke refers to kissing the king’s hand more than once. In Act I, for example, the gesture is a form of ceremonial duty: ‘let me kiss my soverign’s hand/ And bow my knee before his majesty’ (1.3.46–7). In another Shakespeare play, Cleopatra demands acknowledgement of her sovereignty of the messenger when she offers, ‘My bluest veins to kiss, a hand that kings/ Have lipped, and trembled, kissing’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.5.29–30). In these examples, as in the court of Elizabeth I, kissing the hand of a monarch was, in essence, kissing the hand of God. But Shakespeare suggests the slipperiness of such courtly practices, representing but interrogating the ideal gestures of courtesy and royal ritual. After all, if Richard II can be deposed by the mortal Bolingbroke, God’s hand may not have ever been present there.

Hand behaviour The exchange between Touchstone and Corin humorously materializes the ‘fish out of water’ motif that is present throughout the forest scenes in As You Like It, but it also highlights the elite fixation on codified behaviour and contemporary anxieties about managing the social body, hands being central to such regulatory practices. Erasmus of Rotterdam’s On Good Manners (De Civilitate) provides instructions for young boys about the appropriate way to conduct one’s self and body in a range of public as well as private contexts. In a section entitled ‘On banquets’, he stresses the importance of bodily hygiene and its symbolic relationship to mental hygiene: ‘When wiping your hands, wipe away at the same time whatever troubles your mind …’. Erasmus goes further to insist that the good mannered diner should apply the appropriate gestures in the performance of social rituals: ‘If bidden

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to say grace, compose your expression and hands as befits the solemn office’.9 Later on when preparing for bed, young boys must remember that after going to the toilet, ‘immediately wash your face and hands’.10 Throughout the text, Erasmus constructs the need for hygiene and good hand behaviour. Robert Peterson’s translation of Galateo … a Treatise for the Manners and behaviours, it behoueth a Man to Vse, asks that a man ‘take heed, he do not begrease his fingers so deep, he defile the napkins too much; for it is an ill sight to see it’.11 He also says it is quite rude ‘for a man to claw and scratch himself, when he sitteth at the table’; nor should one ‘rub your teeth with your napkin, & much less with your fingers’. Finally, he insists, ‘I would have no man to comb his head, nor wash his hands before men. For such things would be done alone in your chamber, and not abroad.’12 The hand needs regulating and in turn regulates the rest of the body because of its active role in the network of social exchanges in this period. How hands conducted themselves at the table or anywhere in society spoke volumes about a person’s social identity, upbringing and their very character. For those in service, a person’s ‘manual’ behaviour reflected the moral and social status of the aristocratic household he or she served. Hugh Rhodes’ Boke of Nurture (1577) addresses servants in households as well as young children. Most of the treatise is in the form of a poem, providing instructions about the deployment of hands in the presence of social or familial superiors: Scratch not thy head with thy fingers when thou art at thy meat: Nor spit you over the table board, see thou dost not forget. Pick not thy teeth with thy knife, nor with thy fingers end: But take a stick or some clean thing, then do you not offend. If that your teeth be putrified,



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me think it is no right: To touch the meat other should eat, it is no cleanly sight. Pick not thy hands I thee require, nor play not with thy knife: Keep still thy hands and feet also, at meat time use no strife.13 It was important for serving men to demonstrate manners that would reflect those of their household and their guests. Norbert Elias observes of the civilizing process that ‘sixteenth-century writings on manners were embodiments of the new court aristocracy that was slowly coalescing from elements of diverse social origin. With it grew the distinguishing codes of behaviour’.14 Anna Bryson contends that Elias’s aim was to view the civilizing process as ‘expressions of levels of psychic constraint’ rather than perhaps a ‘discourse which creates, rather than simply regulates, the categories of bodily perception and experience’.15 Many of the precepts on manners circulated around the activities and accoutrements of the hands. Erasmus, for example, was aware that throughout the Middle Ages it was common to blow one’s nose into the fingers, clothing or elsewhere, and suggests that social propriety demands accessories for the hand that will enrich and regulate the social body: To blow your nose on your hat or clothing is rustic, and to do so with the arm or elbow befits a tradesman; nor is it much more polite to use the hand, if you immediately smear the snot on your garment. It is proper to wipe the nostrils with a handkerchief, and to do this while turning away, if more honourable people are present. If anything falls to the ground when blowing the nose with two fingers, it should immediately be trodden away.16 Even though the handkerchief was regarded as a love-token, it was also an important sign of social dignity and bodily

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hygiene. Gail Kern Paster has shown how the humoural body was one of unpredictability with its exhalations, vapours, spirits and fluids in constant flux and potentially uncontainable, arguing that the ‘emergent ideology of bodily refinement and exquisite self-mastery’ seemed to contradict with the medical ‘practice authorizing experiences of somatic uncontrol’.17 Will Fisher has argued that the handkerchief was ‘chiefly’ decorative, scented with perfumes and carried openly. While this is true, I would suggest that it more emphatically symbolized one’s knowledge of the correct codes of social and bodily behaviour and was linked to the regulation of humoural fluids: physiologically and emotionally produced. It was one of the many accessories that, according to Evelyn Welch, ‘protected the body’s extremities, areas which came into contact with dirt, dust, rain and mud’.18 The handkerchief was socialized into a symbol of status and wealth, a love-token and an object of exchange in courtly discourse, but at its most basic level, it was and remains a reminder that the body leaks and requires maintenance. This leakage extends to the emotional body too, since handkerchiefs wipe away tears as well as other fluids. In fact, the management of the humoural body was a practice that was equally invested in the regulation of excessive emotions and their bodily manifestations; as Bridget Escolme argues, for early moderns, ‘the passions are figured as both universally felt and always in danger of being in excess. Passion is sickness and we are all sick’.19 The key to propriety was containing that sickness in public. Etymologically and pragmatically, the handkerchief was associated for early moderns first and foremost with the hand. Fisher has observed ‘how a new morphological form of the hand was produced in the sixteenth century with the popularization of the handkerchief, and, more importantly, [explores] the complex gendering of that process’.20 The sheer number of portraits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of English nobles holding (often quite decoratively elaborate and large) handkerchiefs in their hands reveals the object’s part in



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signalling a dignified class that is concerned with projecting the ideals of civility and bodily propriety. The handkerchief articulates, in such contexts, both the ‘liquid expressiveness’ of the body and the social significance of the hand.21 We see this in Richard III when Queen Elizabeth tells Richard to send to her daughter, the princess, ‘A handkerchief, which say to her did drain/ The purple sap from her sweet brother’s body, / And bid her wipe her weeping eyes withal’ (4.4.276–8). The queen subverts the meaning of the handkerchief as a lovetoken by emphasizing its more pressing meaning as absorbent symbol of bodily fluids that represents, in this instance, the confluence of traumatic emotions Richard has generated within her family. Certainly, objects associated with women and linked to courtesy, such as the handkerchief or the glove, typify the ways in which hands worked to construct the social self. Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones have pointed out the ways in which gloves or objects worn upon the body can ‘become persons’.22 Perhaps Othello provides the most compelling example of the relationship between selves, hands and handkerchiefs in Shakespeare, though it is not the only play to be concerned with this set of relations. The fusion of self and clothing or object/accessory is materialized in the scenes in which Desdemona’s sexual status is refracted through the handkerchief. Its association with women’s hands and therefore the liquidity of their bodies encodes the handkerchief with meanings that incorporate the material and physiological. Desdemona’s hand is read as synonymous with her sexual status; its readability transfers to the item she holds within it, since the hand was seen to have the power to inscribe the objects and accessories it held with not only its bodily residue, but its status and meaning. Fatally, both the handkerchief and Desdemona’s hand are misread due to the intervention of other hands, literally, revealing the tension between the perception of the objects of social decorum and the reality of private selves, as explored in Chapter 5.

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The question to address at this point is whether or not there were different standards of ‘hand behaviour’ for men and women. In brief, the answer is yes. While both sexes were expected to wash their hands and maintain clean, manicured nails, the way they used their hands in everyday life, how they were expected to look and how often or how expressively they were meant to gesture was determined by a specifically gendered set of expectations. Renaissance courtesy books and conduct manuals are important when considering these gendered differences; however, as John Walter warns, conduct manuals ‘do not offer a complete taxonomy of early modern gestural codes, since formal discussion of gesture was often left infuriatingly implicit within a more general discussion of manners and demeanour’.23 Nevertheless, deciphering intended gestural etiquette within many of these entertaining manuals can tell us something about attitudes towards the hand in early modern Europe, as well as cultural expectations about their appearance. In the first book of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (a Renaissance Italian dialogue conveying the ideals of courtesy), translated into English in 1561 by Thomas Hoby, we learn that the perfect courtier is one who engages in activities that ‘befit a man of war’; he should be the best at ‘stick-throwing, bull-fighting and in casting spears and darts’ and he should, above all, be endowed with grace, none of his skills appearing to be affected (I.23).24 The absence of affectation is, in fact, a pivotal theme in Book I. Count Lodovico insists upon the grace of ‘nonchalant ease’ and suggests ‘showing by word or laugh or gesture that they have no care and are thinking more of everything else than of that, to make the onlooker think they can hardly go amiss’ (I.26).25 A man needs, a good voice, not too thin and soft like a woman’s nor yet so stern and rough … but sonorous, clear, sweet and well sounding, with distinct enunciation, and with proper bearing and gestures; which I think consist in certain movements of the whole body, not affected or violent, but



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tempered by a calm face and with a play of the eyes that shall give an effect of grace, accord with the words, and as far as possible express also, together with the gestures, the speaker’s intent and feeling. (I.33)26 Gestures should reflect the grace, intention and ‘feeling’ of the gesturer. Crucially, as it is suggested here, to convey the essential dignity of courtesy, men must keep their gestures subtle when speaking in public. The activities that should be undertaken by the ideal courtier versus the ideal court lady is also discussed. Some debate takes place, but the suggestion is fundamentally that women’s hands should act in accordance with her form, status and femininity as much as possible. Courtiers should excel in wrestling, martial skills and performing music, but what about the court lady? Such activities that men use their hands to engage in, it is suggested, are surely not appropriate for women. Cesare Gonzaga recalls how he has seen ‘women play tennis, handle weapons, ride, hunt and take part in nearly all the sports that a knight can enjoy’. But the Magnifico does not feel that this type of robust action is acceptable for women who are naturally more delicate than men. Thus he offers an alternative and delineates the perfect court lady’s behaviour as follows: And thus in dancing I would not see her use too active and violent movements, nor in singing or playing those abrupt and oft-repeated diminutions […] (III)27 What this book and others like it suggest is that a woman must ensure her movements are appropriate to her sex, namely, that her gestures are subtle and discrete. The activities she performs with her hands, including playing instruments, should be suited to a woman’s hands thereby producing very precise differences between male and female bodily grace and the kinds of instruments they should play. Thomas Wright insists in The Passions of the Minde that ‘too much

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gesticulation cometh of lightness’.28 The last thing any woman (or any woman’s family) wanted in this period was for her gestures to suggest she was anything other than virtuous, since a woman’s body, hands included, was trusted to convey not only her own but the honour of her family as well. In addition to courtly manuals that prescribe bodily etiquette within aristocratic circles, there were conduct books aimed at the middle classes. As many of these books that stipulated the correct wifely or maidenly duties suggest, the activities in which this class of woman should engage with her hands are rooted in the household. Thomas Becon argues that to avoid whoredom and sin, ‘it shall become honest and virtuous maids to give themselves to honest and virtuous exercises: to spinning, to carding, to weaving, to sowing, to washing, to wringing, to sweeping, to scouring, to brewing, to baking and to all kind of labours without exception that become maids of their vocation’.29 This passage unearths a wider and somewhat more anxious preoccupation with regulating women’s social and sexual behaviour, since it prescribes specific, laborious tasks for women with which to busy their hands and minds. Patrick Hannay’s A Happy Husband (1618) focuses on the duties of a Jacobean wife which are rooted primarily in the home: Solomon saith the good wife seeks for flax And wool, wherewith her hands glad travail take: She’s like a ship that bringeth bread from far, She rises ere appear the morning star; Vittals her household, gives her maidens food, Surveys and buys a field, plants vines with good Gain’d by her hands: what merchandise is best She can discern, nor doth she go to rest When Pheobus hides his head, and bars his sight, But by her lamp, her hands do take delight To touch the wheel and spindle; she doth stretch Her hands to help the poor and needy wretch: ............... Be thou careful goodwife, for to lend



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Thy helping hand, thy husband’s means to mend. (ll. 57–68, 73–4)30 Here we see that the good wife is very active in the home, producing, nurturing and demonstrating charity as well as virtue. Her hands are at work, not play; they touch the spinning wheel, are stretched out to the poor and needy, and, above all, her hands act in the service of her husband and children. The hand is a metaphor in the final line for the good wife herself; she is the aid or ‘helping hand’ to the husband. The Biblical Proverbs (31.13, 19 and 20) that instruct men about the conduct of their wives correspond to these conventional catalogues of women’s hand duties found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century household guides and conduct books: She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. (Prov. 31.20) In a tract anatomizing sin, the duties of a wife are clearly stated: ‘She must apply her hands to good huswifery, and her mind to the knowledge, & understanding of gods word’.31Another seventeenth-century guide to marriage advises a wife to work diligently with her hands: ‘the furniture of her house and table is the fruit of her hands, made, not bought’ and, again, we witness the proverbial recommended gesture to stretch out her hands to the poor and needy, providing care for the community.32 The activity and positioning of the hands of wives begins with the marriage ceremony itself. The joining of the hands was such an important part of a marriage, that Shakespeare’s Beatrice suggests the phrase ‘take hands’ is synonymous with nuptials: ‘What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour?’(Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1.302–4). The Book of Common Prayer placed hands and hand-fasting at the centre of

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the ritual. Shortly after the minister asks who gives the woman to be married to the man, ‘the Minister receiving the woman at her father or friends hands, shall cause the man to take the woman by the right hand’. Later in the ceremony, the woman takes again the man by the right hand before speaking her vows, and then the ring is placed on to the fourth finger of the woman; finally, the minister joins ‘their right hands together’.33 The placing of rings on the fourth finger is a tradition that dates back to the Anglo-Saxon era, the understanding being that this finger was linked directly to the heart. The ritual emblematizes the incorporation of the body into marriage. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia expresses displeasure and anxiety about Bassanio having given his wedding ring away because it threatens a physical rupture in the marital body: ‘To part so slightly with your wife’s first gift, / A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger, / And so riveted with faith unto your flesh’(5.1.167–9). The image of a wife’s hand in her husband’s throughout the Renaissance period represents this faith-flesh bond of marriage, made famous early on by Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife (1434). Arnolfini not only holds his wife’s hand, but presents her open palm towards the viewer, a gesture of courtesy, but one that demonstrates the ‘liberality’ or ‘bounty’ with which she places her body, life and identity into her husband’s hands.34 Hand fasting and placing rings on fingers are ritualistic initiations of marriage, but a woman’s gestures needed thereafter to continue to demonstrate her position within the marriage. In 1617, William Whately insisted that a wife ‘must express reverence towards her husband in her speeches and gestures before him and in his presence to others’.35 As we saw in the opening to this book, admonitions like this are illustrated or parodied in Katherina’s suggestion of placing her hand beneath Petruchio’s shoe in The Taming of the Shrew. How women used their hands in public, therefore, reflected their moral character, their virtue, their sense of duty as wives, their modesty and their inferiority to their male counterparts.



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‘As soft as dove’s and as white’ When the hands of women were not gloved or concealed beneath a cloak they were expected to be physically perfect, providing visual evidence of inner virtue. The accessories for the hand had important symbolic meaning as much as the hand itself in the early modern period. Rings, bracelets and handkerchiefs were popular among the upper classes, as many portraits show. Gloves were particularly potent status symbols and could, in some cases, enhance the beauty of the hand, as we will see in this study. Like her face, a woman’s hands have featured in poetic descriptions and catalogues of beauty since before the Middle Ages. Geoffrey of Vinsauf prescribed that the beauty of the hands should begin with the arm: ‘[l]et soft and slim loveliness, a form shapely and white, a line long and straight, flow into her slender fingers. Let her beautiful hands take pride in those fingers’.36 In the sixteenth century, John Lyly’s eponymous Euphues notes the ladies of England are simultaneously ‘devout and brave’, with ‘eyes piercing like the sun beams, yet chaste; their speech pleasant and sweet, yet modest and courteous; their gait comely, their bodies straight, their hands white’.37 William Austin says the hands of women are far more ‘delicate than in man: and hath qualities equal to all his, and some far above them [… she] expresseth all music, with as swift motion and performance (together with such arts and works of curiosity) by reason of the slender softness and nimbleness of her hand’.38 A striking number of poetic blazons that provide anatomical descriptions of the ideal beauty associate the ‘white hand’ of the mistress with virtue. In many of these poems, the hand has a turn as a principal object of scrutiny. One example is Christopher Marlowe’s account of Hero’s beauty in the epyllion Hero and Leander, where the narrator observes, She wore no gloves, for neither sun nor wind Would burn or parch her hand, but to her mind,

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Or warm or cool them, for they took delight To play upon those hands, they were so white. (I.27–30)39 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing about love and beauty, the face and the hands are consistently praised. Lovers swore oaths ‘by’ and with their hands; the hand-fasting ceremony was central to early modern marriage rituals and faithfulness was often emblematized as two right hands touching, usually in a clasp as the many images of faithful unions in contemporary emblem books show. Within the social sphere it played a crucial part in courtship because the desires of the lover are projected upon and concentrated into either the face or the ‘white’ hand of his mistress. In Sonnet V, ‘Love with her hair, my love by force hath tied’, of Giles Fletcher’s sonnet sequence Licia (1593), the lover fetishizes the hand of his beloved as well as the other parts of her that are visible or audible to him: Love with her hair my love by force hath tied, To serve her lips, her eyes, her voice, her hand; I smiled for joy, when I the boy espied To lie unchained, and live at her command. She if she look, or kiss, or sing, or smile, Cupid withal doth smile, doth sing, doth kiss, Lips, hands, voice, eyes, all hearts that may beguile, Because she scorns, all hearts but only this:40 We see how the hand is a crucial part of Fletcher’s catalogue of features that incite the erotic fantasy of the lover and instils his faithfulness to her. The three classical values associated with beauty early moderns inherited are chromatic harmony, proportion and symmetry.41 Florentine writer Agnolo Firenzuola, in his treatise on female beauty, illustrates this ideal: ‘when we say that a single part is beautiful we mean that it is well-proportioned



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and that it is as it ought to be and fulfils its purpose. A finger, for example, should be smooth and white. We call such a finger beautiful, not because of the universal beauty philosophers demand, but because of its appropriate and particular beauty’.42 The appropriateness refers to the design and proportion of a body part, in this instance, the finger. The art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo writes about the necessity of proportion, arguing that ‘whatsoever was made without measure and proportion, could never carry with it such congruity, as might represent either beauty or grace to the judicious beholder’.43 As we have already seen, Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by and praised the construction of the hand because of its magnificent proportions and the complexity of the mechanics that enabled motion. It would seem that the underlying proportions of the hand and the artists’ detailed attention to it ensured a more precise and aesthetically pleasurable depiction of them in painting and in sculpture, which would have conveyed this ideal of manual beauty. Firenzuola’s dialogue, On the Beauty of Women, paints a vivid portrait of the perfect beauty. Here he alludes to the Aristotelian and, later, Christian, virtue of bi-pedalism: The form of other animals, which were created for the benefit of humanity or for the beauty and adornment of the universe, the Almighty turned toward the earth so that with their eyes they should gaze upon it as their end and with their lowered forelegs they should always crawl upon it on all fours. To humanity however, He granted an upright carriage, the ability to turn his eyes to the sky and keep them forever fixed upon the virtues of those higher beauties.44 He soon makes his way through each part of the body, detailing the model qualities as they emerge from his definition of proportion. His meditation on the hands is intriguing, because, initially, he omits them, until Verdespina reminds

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him that ‘Why, your perfect woman has neither arms nor hands, so just imagine how she is!’ The speaker, Celso, then goes on to spend a great deal of time on the hands. The initial omission is crucial, as it places emphasis on the part through a narrative process which requires its absence and then its full and detailed disclosure. I cite this passage at length to illustrate the complexity of detail in his description and to show how the ideal features described here continue to dominate early modern beauty discourse thereafter: The hands […] ought to be white, especially on the upper side; large and somewhat full, the palm a little hollow and shadowed with roses. The lines must be clear and quite distinct, well marked, not tangled nor crossed. The mounds of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury must be quite distinct, but not too high. The line of the intellect must be deep and clear and not crossed by any other line. That hollow between the index finger and the thumb should be well set, without wrinkles, and of a lively color. Fingers are beautiful when they are long, straight, delicate, and slightly tapering toward the end, but so little as to be scarcely perceptible. Fingernails should be clear and like balas rubies tied with flesh-pink roses and pomegranate leaves; not long, not round, nor completely square, but with a fine shape and a very slight curve; bare, clean, well kept, so that that little white crescent at their base is always visible. At the top the nail should extend past the flesh of the finger the thickness of a small knife, without the least suspicious of a black rim at the tip. The hand as a whole ought to be delicately soft, as if we were touching fine silk or the softest cotton. And this is what we wanted to say about the arms and the hands.45 This account reveals an inordinate amount of detail in its precise prescriptions for the ideal hands, fingers and nails. The narrator even goes so far as to identify the perfect texture of the hand, giving the passage an erotic quality in



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FIGURE 3 Mother and Child (detail, 1624), Cornelis de Vos, (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia)

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its appeal to the sense of touch. Such descriptions position the female hand as a crucial part of the composite beauty of a woman. Kenneth Gouwens cites Agostino Nifo’s treatise On Beauty and Love, which was dedicated to Giovanna d’Aragona, whose hands he describes as ‘white as snow [with] … a tint of ivory on the palms, and her plump, rounded fingers are elongated, ending in delicate nails’.46 Moreover, portraits of women throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a visual parallel to Firenzuola’s and Nifo’s descriptions. Although many portraits show women’s hands at their sides, they are usually holding something, like gloves, an elaborate fan or a handkerchief; sometimes they are resting a luminous white hand on an expensive chair and occasionally seen wearing richly jewelled rings on their fingers. Other portraits show women’s hands folded one across the other, demurely placed at the level of the waist, resting on the stomach, an ideal posture of virtue. Evelyn Welch observes ‘lower down the body, [the hands] were an important locus for attention’.47 Irrespective of the position of the hands, the vast majority of portraits depict ladies with beautiful, slender white hands. The sleek, long fingers and pale, luminous skin of the hands portrayed in beauty treatises and portraits are referenced time and again in poetic descriptions of female beauty and we see them referred to in courtly exchanges in Shakespeare’s plays. A lady’s white hand offered a site upon which the vows of love could be exchanged, as Florizel exemplifies when he declares his love for Perdita in The Winter’s Tale: O, hear me breathe my life Before this ancient sir, whom, it should seem, Hath sometime loved. I take thy hand, this hand As soft as dove’s down and as white as it, Or Ethiopian’s tooth, or the fanned snow that’s bolted By th’northern blasts twice o’er. (4.4.365–70)



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Polixines, hearing this, mocks his son’s poetic exaggerations: ‘How prettily th’young swain seems to wash/ The hand was fair before!’ (371–2). Although such praise can be overly florid in poems such as Bartholomew Griffin’s Sonnet 39, where he describes the mistress’s ‘hand of ivory the purest white’ (6),48 we learn that the physical appearance of a woman’s hand was nevertheless considered essential to her beauty. It is clear from many recipes for fucus (foundation/cosmetic paint) that women tended to apply make-up to their hands to achieve the white, glistening pallor that characterized Renaissance beauty. In John Webster’s play The Devil’s Law-Case (c. 1620) the lawyer Crispiano in discussing the court practice of ‘wenching’ says: ‘Wenching? O fie, the disease follows it. / Beside, can the fingering taffetas, or lawns / Or a painted hand, or a breast, be like the pleasure / In taking clients’ fees […]’ (2.1.54–7)[emphasis mine]. Shakespeare, like many other early modern writers, draws upon the popular motif of invoking the mistress’s white hand, but does so to highlight the physiological impact upon the male lover. In The Rape of Lucrece the hand of Lucrece is objectified, fetishized and situated as a dangerous provocation to Tarquin’s lust when he sneaks into her chamber and gazes at her sleeping body, as we will see. But what is at stake in the descriptions of beauty is that like her face, the hands of a woman were tasked with manifesting her virtue and therefore stood as evidence for her chastity and honour.

‘Foul hand’ The opposite of beauty, ugliness is mocked in satirical epigrams and drama, and hands feature in the catalogue of body parts that are considered inferior to the ideal. Inferior hands include hands that are deformed, unmanicured, old and withered, mis-coloured or rough from manual labour. The cynical

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gallant, Truewit, in Ben Jonson’s Epicene (1609), insists that if a woman ‘have an ill foot, let her wear her gown the longer and her shoe the thinner. If a fat hand and scald nails, let her carve the less and act in gloves’ (4.1.39–41). Gloves would have likely been used to cover a multitude of sins. Hands that were ugly or unseemly were spotted, ‘rough’, ‘withered’, ‘dirty’, ‘choppy’, meaning withered, aged or boney, as Banquo suggests about the weird sisters: ‘You seem to understand me, / By each at once her choppy finger laying / Upon her skinny lips’ (Macbeth 1.3.43–5). An aged hand was also characterized as ‘dry’ as well as choppy. In Much Ado About Nothing, Ursula recognizes Antonio in the masque scene by his hand: ‘Here’s his dry hand up and down. You are he, you are he!’ (2.1.107–8). Shakespeare also demonstrates how the appearance of hands could be contrasted socially; for example, in As You Like It, he juxtaposes the many references to the ‘white hand of Rosalind’ (3.2.378) with the image of the ‘chopped hands’ (2.4.45) of Phoebe. ‘Chopped’ hands are those that are dry, split or rough because of years of manual labour, as Caska suggests in Julius Caesar when he tells the other conspirators about Caesar’s reported refusal of the crown: ‘he refused it the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands’ (1.2.144). When perusing the letter Phoebe wrote to ‘Ganymede’, Rosalind comments on this difference with a mocking tone of social condescension: I saw her hand—she has a leathern hand, A freestone-coloured hand—I verily did think That her old gloves were on, but ’twas her hands. She has a housewife’s hand—but that’s no matter. I say she never did invent this letter; This is a man’s invention and his hand. (4.3.23–30) The elision between the hand and script/‘hand’ in a letter is evident here: recognizing a man’s handwriting would be



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a skill a court lady would have. The ‘housewife’s hand’, however, is one that evidences the labour that marriage guides promoted. Phoebe’s upbringing in the country also means her hands would be darker, more weathered or ‘leathern’ than a sheltered courtly lady, whose hands would be protected from the elements, such as Rosalind. Rosalind potentially makes a further insulting joke on ‘housewife’ as a euphemism for ‘whore’. Fears about profane touches and the ugliness of spotted or deformed hands are embedded in the misogynistic writing about witchcraft, diabolism and in the xenophobic anxieties about foreigners in this period.49 Ugliness and deformity were associated with humankind’s fallen state in Christian doctrine. Witchcraft treatises demonstrate a fear of hands time and again. John Cotta’s The Triall of Witchcraft tries to dispel the myth that witches had healing powers in their touch, arguing that only God, not the devil, can heal through human hands.50 Boyle’s study of the sense of touch has shown how, through the centuries, women’s hands were demonized because of Eve’s sin, which was to ‘pluck’ before she ‘tasted’ the forbidden fruit.51 By the time Shakespeare was writing, the principle that ugly or misshapen hands could reflect moral corruption or even diabolism had long been established. The medieval dream vision of purgatory and hell, The Vision of Tundale (1149) by an Irish Benedictine monk, gives perhaps the most extreme and explicit account of the association between hideous, terrifying hands and evil. Describing Satan, he observes: On his body a thousand hand[s]. And on each a hand was there seven Twenty fingers with nails keen [sharp] And each a finger seemed than The length of a hundred span And ten span about of thickness, Each a finger was nails. His nails seemed of iron strong.

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Full sharp they were and full long, Longer than ever was spear of war, That armed man were wont to bear (X Passus, 1336–48)52 This passage highlights not only the foul appearance of Satan’s hands, but their terrifyingly violent potential. In 1620, Richard Brathwaite lamented this sensing hand of Eve: ‘O how many fall by this sense of life, making it their sense of death?’53 The ugly hand provokes further anxiety if the fingernails are not manicured. In The Problemes of Aristotle, we learn that the fingernails can ‘give witness of the goodness or badness of the heart’, humourally and morally.54 Long fingernails are, in this period, associated with beasts, witches (unruly women), female wrath, Satan and sometimes with foreign cultures or people. In Arden of Faversham (1592), the murderous wife Alice, when wanting to hide the evidence of her husband’s death, says: ‘But with my nails I’ll scrape away the blood’, followed by the stage direction for her to do so (14.257). King Lear threatens Goneril with Regan’s hands: ‘When she shall hear this of thee with her nails / She’ll flay thy wolvish visage’ (1.4.299–300). Hermia threatens Helena with hers amidst the confusion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘How low am I? I am not yet so low / But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes’ (3.2.298). Queen Elizabeth threatens Richard III: ‘My tongue should to thy ears not name my boys / Till that my nails were anchored in thine eyes’ (4.4.232–3). Italian novella writer, Giraldi Cinthio, tells the story of a courtesan who had sex with a foreigner: ‘he cut her body with his unkempt toenails and tore at her delicate flesh of her breast with his ungroomed fingernails’.55 In The Tempest, when Caliban offers his services to Trinculo, he says: ‘I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow, / And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts’ (2.2.164–5), which reinforces his alien nature and his characterization as a somewhat undetermined species. John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphoses (1650), a



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tract which discloses the beautifying practices of cultures around the world, reveals that ‘the Turks paint their long nails red, and our Merchants that live there conform to that custom’. Bulwer thinks it is offensive to paint the fingernails, since it obscures ‘the natural light and splendor of their nails’.

FIGURE 4  Old Woman Cutting Her Nails (1655–60), Unknown/ Rembrandt? (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, used under Open Access for Scholarly Content agreement)

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Suggesting that women in England had not yet started this practice, Bulwer reports that in some parts of the world ‘it is one of the points of bravery with the principal women, to wear long Nails, a dangerous fashion if taken up here with us.’56 Iras’s status as exotic Egyptian is highlighted in her reference to her own nails. In response to Cleopatra’s prophecy that her tragedy will be played for centuries to come, Iras says ‘I’ll never see’t, for I am sure my nails/ Are stronger than mine eyes!’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.222–3). Bulwer concludes his discussion of nails by insisting that ‘Long nails is a sin; to avoid which, Adam in the state of innocence in paradise, before instruments of iron were found, perchance bit his nails’. For Bulwer, those who do not ‘pare them’ are ‘unnatural slovens’.57 Fingernails, therefore, should be trimmed, which could have health benefits. Much earlier in the fifteenth century, neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino saw the trimming of nails as a form of purgation: ‘cutting your fingernails […] is removing worthless superfluities from yourself’.58 Nails could be manicured at home (see Fig. 4), or trimmed by a barber-surgeon, who would practise dentistry as well as hair-dressing and a range of other cosmetic/hygiene-related services.59 Nails were a part of the hand that were heavily regulated due not only to the aesthetic value of short, rounded ones, but also to the more insidious meanings long, dirty or unruly nails could project and contribute to the legibility of the hand in the social world (see Fig. 5). While anatomists were using their hands to discover the supremacy of the human hand and palmists were debating

FIGURE 5 Ear Pick and Nail Parer (England 1400–1500) (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)



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whether or not they could be read, courtesy books and conduct manuals attempted to regulate manual behaviour (which include gestures specific to social situations as well as activities performed by the hand) and the ideal physical appearance (particularly for women). From the prescriptive literature of the period, we see that gestures were regarded, specifically, as communicative signals, indicating emotional states as well as social status. Early modern acting companies would have their own gestural practices in performance. But there are no manuals surviving from the period to tell us if there was a formal system of gestures practised in the commercial theatres. The performance of gestures and their meanings are therefore contingent upon the specific conditions of the theatres. I have suggested that the hand was readable in a variety of contexts and their social gesticulations and physical appearance contributed to their signification of character and identity. In the following chapter I will consider the actor’s hand as it gesticulates in the theatres of early modern London.

3 ‘Lively action’: Gesture in early modern performance

Drawings of performers on stage in Shakespeare’s time are very rare. Just a few survive, including Johann de Witt’s 1596 drawing of the Swan Theatre (of which there is only a copy by de Witt’s student Aernout van Buchel) (see Fig. 6). This drawing is usually examined as a source for understanding theatre architecture rather than theatrical gesture, but the figures represented on stage are pictured as if in movement. The figure on stage left lunges forward with his right hand on his hip and the other stretched out holding, what looks like, a spear. It appears to be a gesture of obeisance or courtesy but it could also be read as a comic gesture. Perhaps this is the fool interacting with the audience. The other two figures are positioned centre stage; one is seated while the other stands behind with one hand on the sitter’s shoulder and the right hand stretched out to the side. The seated figure appears to have no gesture, though the right hand is slightly lifted; it is subtle. The figure in front is highly expressive with his body, and the figure standing behind the sitter gestures visibly but without exaggeration. While scholars have not confidently identified if these figures are mid-performance or in rehearsal, it is worth noting that the three performers are gesturing in three different ways. Another surviving image is useful in its clearer depiction of gestures: the drawing attributed to Henry Peacham illustrating

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FIGURE 6 Sketch of the Swan Theatre, c. 1596, by Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641) after the sketch by Johannes de Witt

a scene from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (see Fig. 7). Beneath the illustration are about forty lines of text from the play. The scene shown in the illustration appears to depict Act One, where Tamora (Queen of the Goths) begs Titus Andronicus to spare the life of her son. There are seven figures in the drawing, and the scene is split evenly in half by the spear



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FIGURE 7 Titus Andronicus, drawing by Henry Peacham. © Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire, Great Britain

held by the Titus figure to differentiate between the Romans and the Goths. On one side of the spear is Tamora kneeling with her hands held in the orans gesture (gesture of prayer), a gesture that also signalled supplication; behind her are her two sons on their knees with their hands bound. Standing over them is Aaron the Moor, but his gestures are perplexingly deliberate: his left hand is pointing a sword outwards and his other hand is fashioned into what appears to be a deictic gesture or indigitat gesture, as John Bulwer refers to it, it ‘upbraids: is a point of indignation, most demonstrative’,1 with index finger pointing slightly downwards. This gesture is common in art throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period but its meaning fluctuates depending on the context. A pointing finger, particularly index finger, is a speaking gesture suggesting an oration is accompanying it. And it is almost always a gesture of self-assertion and authority. Raymond Tallis says pointing is historically and anthropologically a very powerful gesture, as it demonstrates an ‘explicit sense of using

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one’s own body to achieve explicitly entertained ends, of the notion that the world can be operated on indirectly through manipulating causes of desired effects’.2 If we read this moment in the Peacham drawing as representative of the play as a whole and perhaps its characterizations, Aaron’s gesture signifies his declaration of self-assertion and his role as architect of some of the tragedy’s most horrifying events. It is in his first speech where his gesture in the Peacham drawing seems most fitting, characteristic of his identity in the play: ‘Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts / To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress’ (2.1.12–13). On the other side of the spear is Titus and presumably two of his sons dressed as Halberdiers in Elizabethan military regalia. Titus is signified as Roman by the toga and laurel wreath. His left hand grasps the spear while his right arm is stretched out to his side with his palm open. An open palm implies one is ‘freehearted, munificent, and liberal’, according to Bulwer, though in the supplication scene, Titus demonstrates the opposite attitude.3 Titus’s open palm and Aaron’s pointing index finger both suggest that the drawing is impressionistic or representational, rather than an accurate visual account of a specific moment in a scene. The gestures seem codified, formal and, therefore, readable, but this does not mean that they would have been performed as such all of the time. The drawing is unable to tell us everything about how actors deployed their hands in performance, but it is suggestive about the ways in which theatrical gestures might have been interpreted and represented by spectators. It provides one reading of the space between actors’ hands and the emotions that compel them to move. There is always a gulf (or a ‘breach’, as Ben Jonson refers to it in Epicene) between the physical gestures of the hand and how they are captured in pictorial representations, written accounts and even in descriptions of them in the play texts while they are happening. Before considering Shakespeare’s representation of the hand on stage and in his narrative verse, I want to suggest a few ways we can think about gesture in early modern performance: as an expression



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of emotion suggested by oratorical and philosophical writing about gesture; as defined by the architectural conditions and generic contexts in which they are performed; and how they might be witnessed or received. I will highlight two or three examples from productions at the reconstructed Globe Theatre and the archetypal indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to show how these architectural approximations help us to think more critically about early modern theatrical gesture.

‘Apt to make signs’: Gesture and emotion In ancient Rome, rhetorical training involved not only an emphasis on invention, structure and speech, but also on the performance of it – ‘actio or hupokrisis—delivery of the speech, including the appropriate gestures’.4 Classical theorists such as Cicero and Quintilian drew attention to hand gestures in their instructions about delivering an oratorical performance. In De Oratorio, Cicero insists that ‘[t]he hands should not be too lively, accompanying the words with the fingers, but not imitating them’ (3.220). Imitating the words with the finger would be to create what gestural theorist David McNeill calls ‘emblem’ gestures – such as the ‘OK’ sign.5 Cicero’s idea was to create the perfect balance between the speech and the gestures, not allowing the hands to distract listeners/spectators from the subject matter. Examining Cicero’s instructions about hand gestures, Jon Hall points out that Cicero was careful to make clear distinctions between stage actors and orators: ‘Cicero characterizes gestures that represent specific words or emotions as too theatrical, as too much like those used by stage actors’, when he says: ‘But all of these emotions ought to be accompanied by gestures—not those used on stage which depict individual words, but gestures that indicate the content as a whole, not through imitation, but by suggesting the general sense’ (De. Or. 3.220).6 Cicero’s criticism of

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speakers who use overly-theatrical gestures during orations, Hall suggests, is evidence that his own style may have been more subtle even though ‘he seems to endorse the use of gestures such as striking the forehead and slapping the thigh as ways of rousing emotion in the audience’.7 Generally, classical writers made clear distinctions between the performance techniques of orators and stage actors. Cicero may have studied the gestures of Roman actors, but ‘he positively warns against such influences, describing the over-explicit use of hand gestures disparagingly as scaenicus’.8 Recognizing that gestures revealed aspects of the self, Quintilian made a further differentiation between everyday gestures and those belonging to stylized performance. In doing so, Quintilian acknowledges the emotional truths that the hands can reveal: For other parts of the body merely assist the speaker, whereas the hands themselves virtually speak. Or is it not the case that we use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, entreat, show aversion and fear, question and deny? Do we not use them to express joy, sorrow, hesitation, guilt, regret, measure, quantity, number and time? (Inst. 11.2.85–6)9 This notion that the hands are powerfully effective and affective communicators characterizes oratorical and gestural literature of the early modern period too. In The Arte of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson echoes classical writers when he argues that oratorical performance should strive to teach, delight and persuade the audience. In a section entitled ‘Of Exhortation’, Wilson reminds his reader that ‘he that labours to exhort, doth stir affection’.10 Wilson’s concept of ideal delivery or ‘utterance’ requires ‘a framing of the voice, countenance, and gesture, after a comely manner’.11 He notes that the passions can have numerous effects on the body and suggests strategies for harnessing emotions as a way of embellishing an oratorical performance; orators must ‘fashion [… their] speech and



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gesturing’ to suit the subject matter. Drawing special focus to the hand is an important technique because of its expressive versatility, where audiences can witness ‘the hands sometimes opened, and sometimes holden together, the fingers pointing, the breast laid out, and the whole body stirring altogether with a seemly moderation’.12 Oratory manuals, such as Wilson’s, suggest that the relationship between speech, manual gestures and the passions underpinning them is fundamental to drawing out the desired emotional responses from audiences. Human emotions are expressible in both contexts: oratorical and theatrical. Susan James observes that, in this period, passions were understood to ‘have intrinsic physical manifestations which bridge emotion and action’.13 Noting the symbiotic relationship between emotion and the actions of the hand, sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne says that with it, we request, promise, summon, dismiss, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, question, show astonishment, count, confess, repent, fear, show shame, doubt, teach, command, incite, encourage, make oaths, bear witness, make accusations, condemn, give absolution, insult, despise, defy, provoke, flatter, applaud, bless, humiliate, mock, reconcile, advise, exalt, welcome, rejoice, lament; show sadness, grief, despair; astonish, cry out, keep silent and what not else, with a variety and multiplicity rivaling the tongue.14 Montaigne, like the anatomists, marvels at the versatility and expressivity of hands but is impressed more with the sheer variety of emotions and compulsions they can convey. John Bulwer also observes the readability of the passions through their ‘discoursing gestures’, arguing that with our hands we, [s]ue, entreat, beseech, solicit, call, allure, entice, dismiss, grant, deny, reprove, are suppliant, fear, threaten, abhor, repent, pray, instruct, witness, accuse, declare our silence, condemn, absolve, show our astonishment, profer, refute,

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respect, give honour, adore, worship, despise, prohibit, reject, challenge, bargain, vow, swear, imprecate, humour, allow, give warning, command, reconcile, submit, defy, affront, offer injury, complement, argue, dispute, explode, confute, exhort, admonish, affirm, distinguish, urge, doubt, reproach, mock, approve, dislike, encourage, recommend, flatter, applaud, exalt, humble, insult, adjure, yield, confess, cherish, demand, crave, covet, bless, number, prove, confirm, congee, salute, congratulate, entertain, give thanks, welcome, bid farewell, chide, brawl, consent, upbraid, envy, reward, offer force, pacify, invite, justify, contemn, disdain, disallow, forgive, offer peace, promise, perform, reply, invoke … demonstrate, regard, persuade, revolve, speak to, appeal, profess a willingness to strike, show our selves convinced, say we know somewhat which yet we will not tell, present a check for silence, promise secrecy, protest our innocence, manifest our love, enmity, hate and despite; provoke, hyperbolically extol, enlarge our mirth with jollity and triumphant acclamations of delight, note and signify another’s actions, the manner, place, and time, as how, where, when, &c. 15 Bulwer’s anxiety to convince his reader is evident in his use of copia to demonstrate how only hands can express the extraordinary topography of human affections and to suggest that the relationship between our hands and our feelings is what makes us human. However, as Classical and Renaissance oratorical theory suggests, gestures are meant to be applied to a rhetorical delivery. The fact that gestures can be performed means emotions can be performed. This complicates the presumption that interiority is always readable leaving gestures, more generally, vulnerable to misreading and mistrust. This gestural ambiguity is dramatized in Shakespeare’s plays, such as in Leontes’s mistaken interpretation of his wife’s courtly gestures as signs of infidelity in The Winter’s Tale: ‘But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, / As now they are …’ (1.2.115–6).16



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FIGURE 8  ‘Gestures’, Chirologia, or the Naturall Language of the Hand (1644), John Bulwer (© The British Library Board)

The relationship between gesture and emotion is crucial to performance in early modern theatres. Tiffany Stern points out that ‘a term often used to describe the art of acting at the time was “passionating”’.17 The sensation and expression of emotion was at the core of the early modern actor’s process. As Thomas Wright proclaims: affection poureth forth itself by all means possible, to discover unto the present beholders and auditors, how the actor is affected, and what affection such a case and cause requireth in them: by mouth he telleth his mind; in countenance he speaketh with a silent voice to the eyes; with all the universal life and body he seemeth to say, Thus we move, because by the passion thus we are moved, and as it hath wrought in us so it ought to work in you.18

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This mixed mode of performance – being able to speak audibly with the mouth and silently with the body – was understood to stir the emotions, albeit dangerously at times, as we will see was the case for the anti-theatrical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how did actors gesticulate on stage? Was it with exaggerated strokes? Or was it more subtle? Was ‘physical stasis’, as Paul Menzer suggests, ‘quite clearly part of the early English stage’s performance technology’? 19 Was there a formalized system of gesturing? Was it highly emblematic? Or was it entirely natural, for lack of a better term? Arguably, whether actors were performing outdoors or indoors, the gestural postures that they might have employed were characterized by variety and decorum. Gestures were as assorted and rich as the emotions (whether performed or felt) that lay beneath them.

‘Passionate action’ It is unnecessary for gesture to adhere to one particular form. My contention in this study is that gestures were fundamentally varied: sometimes iconic, sometimes natural or drawn from everyday life; sometimes subtle, other times transgressively passionate; occasionally they would have been ‘minute’ as Paul Menzer puts it, but still ‘signify great passion’ or they would have been sweeping, large and over the top.20 Actors would have ‘sawed’ the air if suiting the action to the word required it, even if it is simply to provoke laughter from the audience or to perform a dumb show. There are a number of factors that determine the performance of gestures: the type of theatre or performance space, the lighting conditions within that environment, the generic context (though this is not always fixed), the costumes the actors are wearing (restrictive in some cases), the passion beneath the gesture and the skill of the actor. All of these variables suggest there is more than one way of performing and interpreting gesture in the theatres of Shakespeare’s time.



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The cues for the performance of gestures are indicated in several ways: first through stage directions (explicit and implicit/embedded in speeches), such as when, in Hamlet, the ghost appears to Horatio and the watch, one stage direction reads: ‘It spreads his arms’ (SD, 1.1). Second, characters sometimes describe a gesture that has taken place or annotate a gesture while it is occurring: ‘I will bite my thumb at them, which is a disgrace to them if they bear it’, says Samson in the opening brawling scene of Romeo and Juliet; Abraham asks, ‘Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?’ (1.1.32–4). In this example, Shakespeare has a character (Samson) describe the gesture he is about to perform, while another character (Abraham) annotates the gesture as it is happening or immediately after it has been performed. This scene would be comical since it pokes fun at what was, even in the 1590s, a stereotype of the over-gesticulating Italian, but it would also create suspense, as insulting gestures such as thumb-biting, with their own historic narratives, could potentially lead to physical violence.21 A third type of gestural cue is that which is implied, alluded to in the dialogue and often characterized by demonstrative pronouns such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘there’, ‘yon’, ‘thus’. Polonius’ ‘Take this from this’ (2.2.154), for example, indicates the actor might point to his head on the first ‘this’ and to his shoulders on the second; an example that is more specific comes from 1 Henry IV when Poins says, ‘if you and I do not rob them, cut this head off from my shoulders’ (1.2.163). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom’s comedic stage direction – ‘let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper’ (3.1.64–5) – indicates a basic hand gesture, but potentially weighted with humorous innuendo. These are explicit in stage directions or implicit in directions embedded in speeches, such as we see in the opening scene of King Lear.22 Here the King is at his most powerful, performing gesturally the confident division of his kingdom: ‘Give me the map there’ (36); ‘Of all these bounds, even from this line to this’ (63); ‘To thee and thine hereditary

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ever / Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom’ (79–80). The actor playing Lear would be pointing to the map and then to those whom he addresses, his deictic gestures reflecting his authority, confidence and sovereign identity; later in the play, his gestures collapse into gestures of despair, such as when we hear he ‘Contending with the fretful elements; … / tears his white hair’(3.1.4,7). We see the cues for gesture in the text, but also, this example from Lear shows how Shakespeare demonstrates a character’s emotional progression or demise through a gestural as well as a narrative journey. In the first act of Hamlet, Shakespeare asks his audience to pay close attention to the gestures of the hand: ‘That you at such times seeing me never shall / With arms encumbered thus or this headshake’ (1.5.172–3). Again we see how within the speeches gestural indicators have been embedded. There is an emphasis on the actions and movements of the hands through words such as ‘thus’ or ‘this’ as they work ‘co-expressively’ with language.23 The often discussed line from Hamlet’s advice to the players, ‘do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus’, has been interpreted over the last century to suggest a subtlety of movement that we have come to value in modern performance, but it also indicates that Burbage in this moment would have moved his hand in the fashion Hamlet tells the players not to gesticulate: ‘thus’ (3.2.4). In Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Maudline, who wants her daughter Moll married to a rich suitor, laments: I cannot get her for my life To instruct her hand thus, before and after— Which a knight will look for—before and after, I have told her still, ’tis the waiving of a woman Does often move a man and prevail strongly (1.1.50–3) Here Middleton also mocks the investment in the codified gestures of the elite and the idea that the actions of women’s



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hands, in particular, could somehow have the capacity to provoke desire and secure marriage. As gestural cues, words like ‘thus’ offer a range of possibilities for an early modern, and indeed a modern, actor. I want to consider now specific gestures in play texts. An early modern audience member might see the same gesture in a variety of dramatic contexts. In Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet asks the nurse: ‘Ay me, what news? Why dost thou wring thy hands?’ (3.2.36), Shakespeare demonstrates the legibility of gestures, their capacity to reflect emotion and the powerful desire we have to read them. Wringing the hands was thought to express fear, anger, anxiety, grief or despair in early modern society and can be traced as a potent gesture back to antiquity.24 Seneca said that this gesture performed violently was a sign of anger: When all the heat and energy of the body has been directed to the face, with swollen veins, with eyes now restless and protruding, now fastened and rooted in one fixed stare; note also the sound of gnashing teeth, as if the owners were eager to eat up someone […] and, notice the cracking of joints as the hands are violently wrung together, the repeated beating of the breast, the fast breathing and deep groans, the shaking body …25 Although hand-wringing accompanies a range of other bodily manifestations of anger, it is a crucially recognizable mode through which to express this emotion and continued to be so well into the early modern period. We hear of and see this gesture again in Hamlet when the Prince is in his mother’s chamber: ‘Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down / And let me wring your heart’ (3.4.32–3). Not only does Gertrude’s gesture convey her grief and fear, but it also reveals what the actor playing Gertrude is doing with his hands. Vividly, Hamlet invokes a metaphorical image of his hands wrapped around her heart, wringing it further; the raw physicality with which early

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moderns understood and experienced emotions is exemplified here in this abstract gesture. Hand-wringing was both a highly iconic gesture as well as an instinctive one, since it is produced through feelings. The examples of hand-wringing I have already cited provide a glimpse of what the actors would be doing with their hands as the lines are spoken; i.e. if Juliet asks the Nurse why she wrings her hands, then it means the actor is performing that gesture. But they also serve to convey the dramatic intensity and emotional significance of the scene. We might see the same gesture take on a different function, though it indicates the same emotion, such as in a formal sequence of gestures. Dumb shows, for example, contain explicit cues for actions of the body that would probably have been exaggerated since the device itself is a form of pantomime. John Bulwer characterizes this as typical of the ‘common Jesters … [who] … without their voice, speaking only by gestures, can counterfeit the manners, fashions, and significant actions of men’, suggesting the artificial and representational nature of such counterfeiting.26 John Lyly’s Endymion (1588), performed indoors at court and then in an indoor playhouse by the Children of Paul’s, contains a dumb show in which three ladies enter, one with a knife and a looking glass; she gestures to stab Endymion who is asleep, but as she does this, the third lady ‘wrings her hands, lamenteth, offering still to prevent it, but dares not’ (2.3). We witness hand-wringing in Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet, but in Lyly’s play, the handwringing is an iconic gesture understood to represent grief or desperation since it is taking place within a set piece where speech is not assisting the hands. David McNeill has shown how gestures are now ‘regarded as parts of language itself – not as embellishments or elaborations, but as integral parts of the processes of language and its use’.27 Yet in the case of a dumb show, there is an obligatory absence of speech requiring an ornamental emphasis upon the gestural language itself.28 In this study, I use the term ‘iconic gesture’ to refer to a formal hand (or body) movement or sequence of movements that would have been highly recognizable to an early modern



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audience and for which there would be graphic correspondences in paintings and engravings. Most of the hand movements on Bulwer’s list of gestures seem to be ‘iconic’ in this sense. In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare has Claudio parody a series of iconic gestures when he is attempting to convince Benedick (eavesdropping) that Beatrice loves him: ‘Then down upon her knees she falls, weeps, sobs, beats her heart, tears her hair, prays, curses, “O sweet Benedick! God give me patience”’ (2.3.140). Moshe Barasch identified a number of gestures of despair in medieval and Renaissance art. Gestures of self-injury seem to be particularly common, such as breast beating, hair tearing and hand biting; according to Barasch, ‘from the twelfth century onward violent gesticulation was closely observed [and …] it filled a significant function in social life […] regarded as an established means of expressing emotion’.29 Iconic gestures were very likely meant to dominate theatrical dumb shows. The role of a dumb show in early modern drama might be either to convey the progression of the narrative or foreshadow elements of the plot through a spectacle of gestures. In Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (performed at the Phoenix Theatre by The Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1622) the dumb show is there to advance the plot but it also highlights the reciprocal relationship between gesture and narrative. We see Vermandero meeting Gentlemen with ‘action of wonderment at the flight of Piracquo’. Wonderment, surprise or astonishment might be performed with open mouths and hands reaching to the face to represent the emotions described here. However, the rest of the dumb show places significant emphasis on the ability of gestural performances to produce specific meanings: Enter Alsemero, with Jasperino and Gallants; Vermandero points to him, the Gentlemen seeming to applaud the choice. [Exeunt in Procession Vermandero,] Alsemero, Jasperino and Gentlemen, [Gallants]; Beatrice the bride following in great state, accompanied with Diaphanta,

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Isabella, and other Gentlewomen; De Flores after all, smiling at the accident. Alonzo’s ghost appears to De Flores in the midst of his smile, startles him, showing him the hand whose finger he had cut off. They pass over in great solemnity [and so exeunt] There are four parts to this dumb show: the response to Piracquo’s supposed flight; the pointing out of Alsemero as the new husband; Beatrice in state as a bride; and the private haunting of De Flores with the four-fingered hand. The elaborate nature of this display is presented within a highly symbolic structure by which the play’s concern with deception and murder is framed. An actor might respond instinctively to such directions, but very likely would use a number of iconic gestures to convey the scene. We are told the Gentlemen ‘seem’ to applaud the choice, which implies they show surprise at the choice; the word ‘seem’ is used, here and in other dumb shows, synonymously with ‘play’ or ‘perform’. Beatrice’s bridal procession highlights the increasing decline of her character; she had Piracquo murdered; she has been ravished by the murderer and is now marrying Alsemero who is unaware of her actions and she will continue to deceive him too. The four-fingered hand haunts De Flores, whose violent act of amputation lingers in the minds of the audience as well as his own. The function of the dumb show in The Changeling is thematic as well as structural. It advances the plot, represents specific emotions and reveals character psychology, but the gestures also remind us of the grisly trajectory of the play. Equally, we can infer from this dumb show a repertoire of recognizable gestures upon which early modern actors could draw, even if gestural ambiguity characterizes much of a modern audience’s experience of watching it. The dumb show that precedes the play-within-a-play in Hamlet, in contrast to the one in The Changeling, is targeted, deliberate and subjectively choreographed, thereby making it more complex. Here I focus on the Folio version, where the



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queen and king enter ‘lovingly’, perhaps holding hands; the queen embraces the king, kneels and ‘makes show of protestation unto him’. This could be expressed with one hand on her breast in a gesture of oath-swearing or, like a vassal who pledges himself to his Lord, the queen could place her hands into her husband’s. After her exit, a ‘Fellow’ enters ‘takes off his crown, kisses it, pours poison in the sleeper’s ear’. When the queen re-enters, she ‘makes passionate action’. It is at this point that a modern reader of the text has to imagine the range of gestures that could express grief. ‘Passionate action’ is open for interpretation, but such indications for bodily expression infer a kind of gestural literacy on the part of Shakespeare’s first audiences and the use of familiar signs would be a dramaturgical necessity in the absence of speech. When the ‘poisoner’ re-enters with ‘three Mutes’, the audience are meant to witness them ‘seeming to lament with her’, perhaps here meaning they would imitate her gestures of despair; again the word ‘seem’ means play or enact. The rest of the dumb show reads: ‘The poisoner Woos the Queen with Gifts, she seems loath and unwilling awhile, but in the end, accepts his love’ (3.2).30 What this moment would look like is similarly unclear, but it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s audience would have witnessed an early variant of this kind of wooing in 1.2 of Richard III, when Richard is attempting to woo Anne whose husband and father-in-law have been murdered by him. Although the player queen in Hamlet is not necessarily aware the poisoner has committed her husband’s murder, the ‘loath and unwilling’ expressions of rejection may have represented or elaborately imitated those performed by the actor playing Anne a few years earlier. Anne spits on Richard, looks ‘scornfully’ at him; he ‘kneels and lays his breast open, she offers at it with his sword’; she drops the sword; he offers her a ring and she obviously takes it. These scenes are not identical, of course, but some recognizable gestures may have had their own iconic reference points in the dumb show version of this staging of perverse wooing. The reluctantly wooed queen in Hamlet’s dumb show allegorizes

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the actions and emotions of being ‘loath and unwilling’, while Queen Anne’s performance in Richard III would have been designed to reflect the emotions instinctively. The dumb show in the beginning of 3.4 of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, provides another elaborate instance of a wholly gestural performance: Then ANTONIO, the DUCHESS and their Children, having presented themselves at the shrine, are by a form of banishment in dumb-show expressed towards them by the Cardinal and the state of Ancona, banished. This ‘form of banishment […] expressed’ might have been performed through the iconic gesture of expulsion. Given the Catholic context of Webster’s play, it is not implausible that such iconic or familiar gestures would have been invoked to communicate the themes of the play expediently. Studies of medieval art have established the conventionality of gestures of expulsion in the European visual tradition. A Jacobean audience would be aware of the two biblical expulsions that were most frequently illustrated in the medieval world: Christ expelling merchants from the temple and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. Webster may not have had these stories in mind or representations of it per se, but the gestures of expulsion would have been recognizable to his audiences. Typically there is some variation on the figure conducting the banishment touching or pushing the left shoulder or upper arm of the one being expelled; the banished figure generally holds one hand up in front of their face which is toward the banisher as their body is facing away.31 Although not a dumb show, King Lear’s banishment of Cordelia – ‘Hence and avoid my sight’ (1.1.124) – may also invoke a similarly iconic expulsion gesture to convey the emotional weight of the rejection of his beloved child. Jacques Lecoq has shown how gestures are inscribed upon the body and categorized into three groups: action, expression and demonstration. Because the expressive gestures of the face



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and the hands can convey powerful feelings, mime requires no speech whatsoever; as an art unto itself, gesture produces narrative through the body, provokes iconographic awareness or memory among spectators and, in so doing, produces passionate responses.32 Alonso emotes after the masque in The Tempest (1611): I cannot too much muse Such shapes, such gesture and such sound, expressing (Although they want the use of tongue) a kind Of excellent dumb discourse. (3.3.37–40) While there was a gestural vocabulary that spectators would have understood, such as the iconic gestures I have proposed, theatrical gesture in early modern performance defies strict codification. The lady in Lyly’s dumb show is required to wring her hands perhaps more exaggeratedly than the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet or Gertrude in Hamlet, because it needed to be witnessed by the spectators in the theatre and it is part of a pantomimic sequence; her gesture therefore allegorizes rather than reflects the emotion beneath it; it has a graphic quality. The Shakespearean examples of hand-wringing are not allegorical; they are gestural responses to or manifestations of the emotional turmoil of the character, but it is likely too that they needn’t have been overly-expressive even though hand-wringing was an iconic gesture; as Menzer says, ‘bodily control can signify not the absence of passion but its mastery’.33 The difference in the size or formality of a gesture depends upon the set of conditions under which the gesture occurs. An important question to ask at this stage is how the playing conditions impact upon the performance of gesture.

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‘Gestures and speeches’ outdoors By drawing attention to the components of early modern performance, such as actor training, minimal rehearsal, working with parts (cue-scripts) and the humoural body, Evelyn Tribble’s recent investigation of theatrical gesture within the context of ‘cognitive distribution’ provides a useful framework for a consideration of gesture in early modern theatres. She argues that ‘the player was not simply uploading and repeating words, but was instead using the cue script as a complex guide to personation through attention to the changing “passions” of the characters as they ebb and flow throughout the play’.34 Furthermore, Tribble sees gesture, in a performance context, as an ‘art’, a ‘techne essential to the craft of the actor’.35 In trying to pinpoint how gesture formed part of an actor’s repertoire of skills, Tribble traces the critical debate about gestural styles, reminding us of the flaws in the formalist approach, asserted, for example, by Alfred Harbage and grounded in the misconception that the, “open-air theatre of Shakespeare’s day, with its un-localized relatively unadorned, and centrally placed stage, was better suited to formal than to natural acting”… [Richard Burbage’s] “attitudes must have been statuesque, and his gestures such as would convey meaning to the considerable portion of his audience who could not see his face. The whimsical smile, the arched brow, the significant sidelong glance would not do. He had to act with his body.” (1939: 704)36 Studies in theatre history over the last three decades have produced ample evidence of approximate architectural conditions of the Elizabethan amphitheatres, such as the 1599 Globe and its 1614 reconstruction (see Fig. 9). There is evidence that these vertical structures, with their three levels of galleries, open yard where ‘groundlings’ stood exposed to



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FIGURE 9 Globe Theatre (stage), Shakespeare’s Globe, 2014. Photographer Pete Le May

the elements and the thrust stage with an upper gallery level for musicians, could potentially hold up to 3,000 spectators. It was presumed by twentieth-century critics, like Harbage, that gestures might have needed to be stylized and highly artificial in such a theatrical environment. M. C. Bradbrook came to the same conclusion, that in such spaces, ‘there would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalized. Conventional movement and heightened delivery

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would be necessary to carry off the dramatic illusion’.37 Tribble cites the early repudiation of this assumption by Bertram Joseph who argued against a purely formal or mechanistic mode: ‘The rhetoricians’ art strikes the modern who does not understand it as it existed in the renaissance as a matter of applying conventional gestures, externally, whereas real acting is expressing what is felt within’ (Joseph 1969: 84).38 More recent studies in theatre history have not necessarily gone a long enough way to prove the validity of Joseph’s argument, as Tribble notes, gestures are still, for the most part, treated as ‘a kind of “clip-on” feature, a superfluous decoration that helps to paper over lack of command of the words’.39 If there was a formal style deployed in early modern playhouses, it may have had nothing to do with the amphitheatre conditions. Now that many have witnessed numerous performances in the reconstructed Globe Theatre, the twentieth-century critique seems even more outdated. Actors in the reconstructed Globe, in fact, deploy a complex range of ‘gestural arts’, stillness being as effective in there as immoderate movement; formality as effective as instinctive or what we understand to be ‘natural’ movement.40 For example, in the 2010 production of 1 Henry IV, directed by Dominic Dromgoole, Roger Allam’s Falstaff in his speech ‘honour pricks me on’ (5.1.128–40) fashioned small gestures (where his hands did not rise higher than his hips), medium gestures (where his hands did not move above his midriff ) and large gestures in which he raised his arms and hands once or twice above his head (see Fig. 10), finally pointing his hand and directing his speech towards the audience sitting in the upper gallery. None of his gestures were formal or overly-artificial, but in some moments, his performance was characterized by stillness, which was emotionally riveting and widely visible in the amphitheatre (100ft in diameter and slightly bigger than the original two Globes). In other moments, Allam’s hand movements were far more animated and comedically exaggerated. This variation in one character’s movements



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FIGURE 10  Falstaff (Roger Allam) in 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Dominic Dromgoole (2010), photographer John Haynes

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suggests the size and style of a hand gesture depends upon a number of factors, including what play is being performed, which character is speaking, what level of gallery is being addressed in the playhouse, the skill of the actor and the emotional content of the given speech or line. Tribble has argued that ‘a skilled actor does not “tear a passion to tatters,” sawing the air, but is able to channel and regulate passions for maximum effect’.41 While this is true, ‘tearing a passion to tatters’ was occasionally called for. Although Hamlet rebukes himself for having done so – ‘Why, what an ass am I: this is most brave, / That I … / Must like a whore unpack my heart with words/And fall a-cursing like a very drab’ (2.2.517–18; 520–1) – it nevertheless means the actor playing him might have to show how, contrary to the ideal emotional behaviour in early modern England, not all passions can be reigned in at all times. Simon Forman’s account of seeing Macbeth at the Globe in 1611 suggests the actor playing Macbeth (probably Richard Burbage) ‘fell into a great passion of fear and fury’ upon seeing the ghost of Banquo.42 What exactly this ‘great passion’ looked like is irretrievable. Yet both Hamlet and Forman use a variation of the word ‘fall’, suggesting a collapse from or transgression of ‘suitability’ or decorum. Original Practices productions at Shakespeare’s Globe have raised important questions about the formality of theatrical gesture in Shakespeare’s original theatre. Although the reliability of these productions as historically accurate reconstructions of early modern performance practice is hotly debated, the painstaking attention to detail that goes into the research and design of the ‘clothing’ and manners of the period has been instructive for actors about deportment and the restrictions on movement imposed by the tight-fitting doublets and corsets when it comes to gesturing. I have observed of actors wearing these ‘renaissance clothes’ that they tend not to create large gestures with the full sweep of their arms.43 But Jenny Tiramani, founder of the School of Historical Dress and former Director of Theatre Design at the Globe, would



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argue that multiple factors would need to be considered before making an assumption about the kinetic relationship between period clothing and gesture: the character’s social status, the decade being staged (given that fashions changed), the context of the gesture in the play and the country from where the fashion derived. If we are to accept the theory that actors in early modern England wore similar clothes, then the Original Practices clothing might have something to teach us about the scale and delivery of gestural movement.44 One of the features of these productions is that in addition to observing the Tudor sumptuary laws when dressing characters of varying social degrees, they also observe the Renaissance code of manners which advocates many of the courtly gestures discussed in the last chapter. In particular, actors playing noble women tend, for the most part, to fold their hands and rest them on their stomachs or thereabouts, a gesture advocated by Giovanni Bonifacio in his gesture manual, L’Arte de’ cenni (1616), for example, and depicted in many portraits of the period as I mentioned in Chapter 2, where this gesture is meant to provide evidence of the sitter’s modesty. It is a gesture known in England as well as the continent; in the anonymous seventeenth-century cross-dressing pamphlet, Haec Vir; or The Womanish Man, the female speaker asks: ‘Because I stand not with my hands on my belly […] am I therefore barbarous or shameless?’45 When asked about his 2002 performance of Maria in Twelfth Night, Globe actor Paul Chahidi remarked that in order to play a woman he had to move ‘in curves’ on stage, generally speaking, but he also had to think consciously about his ‘hands to gesture’ in a feminine way. Speaking about the clothing, Chahidi said it was a ‘massive revelation’: [t]he corset which I had to be put into, it gave you a posture—with the skirt, the shoes and the hard-shelled wig—you had to move in a certain way. You had to be very upright in your carriage. There are some extant texts about lady-like deportment. My character was Maria—who is

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often played as a saucy milkmaid but is actually from a very good background and also brought up as a lady. We had read about the upright posture and smooth deportment, but actually, it was impossible to do anything else in that costume, you would fall over otherwise.46 The corsets create the ‘straight bodies’ that Lyly’s Euphes observes of English ladies. It was also well known that ‘an upright bearing demonstrated control both of body and passions’ as well as social class.47 Having been influenced by a formal discourse of civility and bodily deportment, these productions seem to reinforce the early twentieth-century critique of original Shakespearean performance, that gestures were applied rather than produced by actors. However, the natural comingling that occurs in these performances of everyday and instinctive gestures and the gestures borrowed from early modern conduct literature are what enable Original Practices productions simultaneously to invoke the past while being emotionally and thematically relevant to a modern audience, much like the performances of early modern actors that combined iconic with instinctive/ everyday gestures. In 2012 Twelfth Night was revived in the Globe Theatre and was again an all-male production with Mark Rylance starring as Lady Olivia (see Fig. 11). The company had training in Elizabethan manners, but Rylance was particularly attuned to the gestural cues in the play text and seemed to use a combination of Elizabethan rules of deportment, instinctive/everyday gestures produced spontaneously, but was himself largely influenced by onnagata technique in Japanese Kabuki. In an interview with The Economist, he admitted: ‘I like very much the kabuki actors and their physicality. How clear they are, how expressive they are vocally and physically – the parameters are much wider for them than our naturalism. […] they’re allowed broader, simpler strokes’.48 By integrating gestures from the Kabuki tradition, Rylance was not suggesting it was an Elizabethan original practice, but like Shakespeare’s actors,



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FIGURE 11  Olivia (Mark Rylance) in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Tim Carroll (2012), photographer John Tramper

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Rylance and other modern actors draw upon a combination of traditions and gestural techniques to convey the emotional lives of the characters they ‘passionate’. What the textual and archival evidence about early modern performances of gesture has suggested is that theatrical gestures in outdoor playhouses varied as much as the characters and emotions did. E. H. Gombrich said that Renaissance art ‘makes use of gestures that have their meaning in human intercourse’; early modern performance does the same.49 The use of gesture in performances at Shakespeare’s Globe since 1997 seems to correspond to what the seemingly conflicting evidence about gesture in the play texts and theatrical literature of the early modern period suggest: variety was the norm. While Tribble is right that current research into ‘the passions and the humors points to a theory of gesture that dispels the myth of a static, mechanical system applied by rote, or a stock repertoire of stage business meant to cover up lack of preparation’, it is not unlikely that iconic and, therefore, highly recognizable gestures were available to actors in Shakespeare’s time and that actors deployed these in combination with a variety of everyday and instinctive gestures.50 In Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VII or All is True, performed at the Globe in 1613, there are several moments where formal gestures are performed and invoked. In 1.2 when the surveyor reports the Duke of Buckingham’s potential treason he observes, ‘… and with one hand on his dagger, / Another spread on’s breast, mounting his eyes, / He did discharge a horrible oath …’ (205–7). Laying the hand upon the breast was a recognizably formal oath-swearing gesture used in secular as well as religious contexts: ‘Lay hand on heart. Advise’ (Romeo and Juliet, 3.4.190). Gombrich calls it a ‘gesture of power’, which would accompany a ‘spoken pronouncement and belongs to the repertory of movements recommended by ancient teachers of rhetoric’.51 Buckingham’s other hand is on his dagger, however. This gesture is a physical expression of aggression, but it may also have some local resonance for the King’s Men. Tiffany Stern has uncovered



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references to Richard Burbage’s tendency to place one hand on his dagger in his portrayal of Richard III, commented on in eyewitness accounts: Young gallants started to imitate Burbage’s Richard III, and the various traits with which he glamorized the tyrant king. As one contemporary poem had it: ‘Gallants, like Richard the usurper, swager, / That had his hand continuall on his dagger’. Years later, during the civil war, frightened politicians were still described as being ‘in such a perpetually bodily feare of their owne shadowes … that like cruell Richard, their hands are always upon their Dagers’.52 Curiously, in Henry VIII, the surveyor invokes Richard III just before this gesture is reported: ‘If’, quoth he, ‘I for this had been committed’— As to the Tower, I thought—‘I would have played The part my father meant to act upon Th’usurper Richard … (1.2.194–7) Although there are numerous portraits of early modern noble men who have one hand resting upon the hilt of their swords, and in some contexts a dagger can be another name for a short sword, the eyewitness accounts might indicate some gestures became trademarks of an actor. Our attention is drawn to Richard’s dagger in 3.1 when his nephew York asks for ‘this dagger’ (109), probably pointing to it, and Richard replies, ‘My dagger, little cousin?’ (110), spoken more than likely with his hand on his dagger. Might this gesture have been associated with Richard Burbage’s performance and thus call to mind the ‘usurper’ himself? After all, Burbage possibly coins the most famous theatrical gesture in Western theatrical history when, as Hamlet, he holds the skull of Yorick in front of him gazing into its empty sockets (see Fig. 12). The skull had long been

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FIGURE 12 ‘Nec metuas nec optes’, Minerva Britanna (1612), Henry Peacham (used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)

a symbol of death, but from the seventeenth century, a skull held out by the hand as a metonym for self-assessment and the contemplation of death may well have been invented in Burbage’s performance.53

Moving gestures indoors John Astington would agree that outdoor performances did not necessitate over-exaggerated gesticulations, but he wonders if it would have been more difficult to see such bodily details in the indoor, candlelit theatres (his book having



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been published before the Globe’s indoor playhouse opened in January 2014).54 After a few seasons of performance in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (an archetypal Indoor Jacobean theatre, lit entirely by candles and a small amount of simulated daylight), we can observe that the intimacy of the smaller space and the luminosity of the lighting conditions means actors are, in some ways, astonishingly more visible than they are in the amphitheatre (see Fig. 13). Gestures in there are much more enhanced and filmic, an effect which encourages an intense focus upon the hands of performers as they gesture towards and touch each other. What Bulwer says of the hand has resonance with the way in which hands can transfix in a small candlelit theatre: ‘the visible expressions of our Hand [are …] more loud and demonstrative’.55 Early modern indoor theatres would have been curved timber structures (the upper frater of the Blackfriars purchased by James Burbage in 1596 and fitted out with a stage and set

FIGURE 13  The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (Shakespeare’s Globe, London), photographer Pete Le May

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of galleries was a ‘found space’, originally a rectilinear hall). The indoor spaces mostly would have been constructed of two tiers of galleries, a pit with benches and a stage that is flanked by gallery boxes at two levels. We know from a number of anecdotes and play texts that gallants could purchase a stool and sit on the stage itself, thus reducing the performance space for the actors in undetermined, but significant ways.56 What seems certain is that, indoors, facial expressions are heightened in this space and seem far more intrusive than sweeping hand gestures. In 2014 the Globe Theatre production of Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Jonathan Munby and starring Eve Best, played for two nights in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as part of the Globe’s Outside/In experiment.57 The adaptations the company had to make to their performances in the smaller, more uncomfortably intimate space were focused on aesthetics and bodily comportment, but the minute gestural adjustments were a response to the lighting conditions and the overall ‘filmic’ quality that the indoor theatre space imposes upon a production. When asked if the company adjusted their hand gestures consciously to the smaller size of the venue, director Jonathan Munby observed that, they probably did a lot of that work unconsciously. The scale of performance happened on a sub-conscious level. The moment they needed to bring their vocal energy down, to play the new space vocally, I think their physicality probably followed suit […] I think actors’ instinct just takes over and they re-imagine and re-scale performance to fit [the space].58 The epic quality of the play, according to Munby, means for him that Shakespeare had not envisioned the play performed anywhere else but the Globe. It may be more accurate to say the play had been conceived for the Globe, but given that the King’s Men performed their plays at both the Globe and the Blackfriars after 1608 suggests they would have techniques for adapting their performances when they moved a play indoors.



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While large-scale battle scenes and dances proved physically challenging for Munby’s company when they brought Antony and Cleopatra into the smaller indoor playhouse, the gestures of the actors were not entirely muted or ‘brought down’, but they had to be precise in their movements. The comparatively smaller size of the indoor playhouse and the very fact of its ceiling meant that the grief of the tragedy was not dispersed but rather shared more personally with the audience, thus provoking a different type of emotional response to the tragedy, one characterized by privacy and intimacy. Eve Best’s hand gestures were large and animated at times, small and still at other times, but always able to convey the modulations in Cleopatra’s passions, Cleopatra being a character who Bridget Escolme argues experiences her emotions in ‘excess’.59 The gentle movement of her fingers as her hand would stretch towards Clive Wood’s Antony or as she extended her arm, shoulder to fingertip, toward the audience, invited the audience to see why Julius Caesar himself so often ‘rained kisses’ upon it (3.13.89). In the Globe Theatre performance of the same production, the gestures of the hand were not that different, but the effects of them were: large gestures, for example, seemed more reverberant and widely dispersed, moving like sound waves around the outdoor theatre; smaller gestures had a magnetic effect as audiences drew in towards Best’s performances of stillness. Her gestures contributed to the production’s overall effect which Paul Taylor characterized in The Independent as ‘exquisitely understated’.60 Modern performance in reconstructed or archetypal early modern playhouses can be illuminating when it comes to an interpretation of manual gestures in performance, as they show us the wide scope and versatility of gestures in the types of environment in which early modern performances took place. Theatrical gesture in the indoor theatres of the seventeenth century is as various as it is outdoors, tragedy and comedy requiring different modes of performance. Ben Jonson’s Epicene, staged first by the Children of the Queen’s

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Revels/Chapel and then by the King’s Men in the Blackfriars Playhouse, satirizes the gestures that people put on in order to impersonate or perform in disguise. In 5.3 when Cupbeard enters disguised as a canon lawyer and Otter as a parson, Truewit mocks the performativity of the body so important to social identity, while he draws satirical attention to acting, positing himself as a kind of theatre director: Come, Master Doctor and Master Parson, look to your parts now, and discharge ’em bravely. You are well set forth; perform it as well. If you chance to be out, do not confess it with standing still or humming or gaping one at another, but go on and talk aloud and eagerly, use vehement action, and only remember your terms, and you are safe. (11–16) Given the context we should not assume that the type of acting implied here – the ‘talking aloud’ and ‘vehement action’ (exaggerated gesture) – would have been valued, but we might infer from passages like this that actors would perform in such a way outdoors as well as indoors. In the example above, the gestures would need to be employed immoderately to produce the appropriate audience response: laughter. Abraham Fraunce argued that ‘much wavering and over curious and nice motion is very ridiculous’ when it comes to oratory.61 But one of the chief sources of humour in Jonson’s play is the gestural shenanigans involving Morose, the character who, though he lives in London, ironically detests any kind of noise. His exchanges with his servant, Mute, reveal the performative gap between the written dialogue and the ‘breaches’ that Jonson places into the text to mark the gestural spaces: Morose Let me see: all discourses but mine own afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent, and irksome. Is it not possible that thou shouldst answer me by signs,



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and I apprehend thee, fellow? Speak not, though I question you. You have taken the ring off from the street door as I bade you? Answer me not by speech but by silence, unless it be otherwise (–)    [At the breaches, still the fellow makes legs or signs.] Answer me not but with your leg, unless it be otherwise; if it be otherwise, shake your head or shrug. (–) So. Your Italian and Spaniard are wise in these! And it is a frugal and comely gravity. How long will be ere Cutbeard come? Stay, if an hour, hold up your whole hand; if half an hour, two fingers; if a quarter, one. (–) Good; half a quarter? ‘Tis well … . Very good. I see, by much doctrine and impulsion, it may be effected. (2.1.3–6; 17–22; 26–7) This exchange involves gestures that would have been varied in style: comic, formal, everyday and instinctive; while the exact nature of Mute’s movements is lost to us, we can see that early modern playwrights relied upon a diverse range and pattern of gestures that actors might skilfully express. Morose’s response to his servant’s ‘signs’ give us some sense of the clownish absurdity of Mute’s performance and therefore its humour. Apart from the fact that it was commonplace to refer to the Spanish and the Italians as preoccupied with gestures of the hand and the body (such as bowing with one leg behind) more broadly because of the conduct and courtesy literature that emerged from the continent, this reference parodies the concept of gestural codification altogether. More comically, a rude hand gesture might be implicit in Morose’s instructions to hold up either a whole hand, two fingers or one. The gesture occurs in the breach to which Morose responds with ‘Good; half a quarter?’. Mute’s gesture is none of the above, but instinctively, a bent finger, which Bulwer refers to as a ‘bowing down of the fore-finger’ as ‘an ironical expression’,62

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which could also suggest flaccidity and impotence. Performed within an intimate indoor playhouse, this scene encourages a heightened consciousness of hand gestures for two reasons: first, the mixed dialogic nature of the exchange, meaning, it is half verbal and half dumb show; second, because of the defining visual and proprioceptive (referring to the awareness of one’s body in space and proximity to others) conditions of indoor playhouses, which were characterized by candlelight and the short distance between the actor and the audience. These defining features of performance in the indoor playhouse provide an extraordinarily apt environment for perhaps one of the most affecting moments in Shakespeare. In 5.3 of The Winter’s Tale, performed at the Blackfriars Playhouse in 1611, the spectators are asked along with Leontes and Perdita to focus their gaze upon the statue of Hermione. The visual components of the scene include the aesthetic combination of luminous candlelight and glistening paint, which stimulates the combined theatrical and emotional effects Shakespeare’s text requires.63 After believing his wife has been dead for 16 years, Leontes, having only just reunited with his daughter, is ready to see a statue of his wife that Paulina has commissioned by the famous Italian artist Guiliano Romano. We have to imagine a candlelit venue with audience in close proximity as Paulina directs intense visual focus toward the statue when she beckons it to move: Paulina  [to Hermione] ’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir—nay, come away; Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs. [Hermione steps down.] Start not. Her actions shall be holy as You hear my spell is lawful. [to Leontes] Do not shun her Until you see her die again, for then. Nay, present your hand.



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When she was young, you wooed her; now in age, Is she become the suitor? Leontes O, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. Polixines She embraces him. Camillo She hangs about his neck; (99–113) This scene, carefully orchestrated by Paulina, has the power to draw tears from its audiences. It demonstrates the rhetorical correlation between appropriate gestures and psychagogia (the fundamental goal of ancient oratory, which was to take hold of or move the souls/passions). This moment should provoke the humours to stir the affections in the spectators. Nicholas Coeffeteau observed in 1621 that when such stirrings occur, ‘the whole body feels it self moved, not only inwardly, but also outwardly, according to the nature of that passio[n] which doth trouble it’.64 The first four lines are designed to produce a palpable tension, as the actors and the audience in uncertain anticipation wait for some sort of gesture to indicate life. Paulina points out, ‘perceive she stirs’ and the stage directions then indicate that Hermione steps down. What the actor does in the ‘breaches’ – to use Jonson’s term – between Paulina’s gentle instructions is not clear; a twitch of the finger might be all that is necessary to create the initial sensation of ‘marvel’ that Paulina observes in her spectators. Subtle or disciplined gestural movements of the hands and face would be essential in a moment like this. As the ‘[t]ongue speaketh to the Ear, so the Gesture speaketh to the Eye’.65 Bulwer describes a dialectical relationship between the hand and the eye when one person gestures toward another, which is relevant to a consideration of how the early modern theory of vision and the conditions of indoor performance help produce its unique forms of gestural display:

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Since whatsoever is perceptible unto sense, and capable of a due and fitting difference; hath a natural competency to express the motives and affections of the Mind; in whose labours, the Hand, which is already Midwife, takes oftentimes the thoughts from the forestalled Tongue, making a more quick dispatch by gesture: for when the fancy hath once wrought upon the Hand, our conceptions are displayed and uttered in the very moment of thought. Bulwer argues that the gestures of the hand have the capacity to be more efficient at conveying thoughts and emotions because they are visible; the sense of sight is its first organ of contact. He goes on to say that ‘the gesture of the Hand many times gives a hint of our intention, and speaks out a good part of our meaning, before our words, which accompany or follow it, can put themselves into a vocal posture to be understood. And as in the report of a Piece, the eye being the nimbler sense, discerns the discharge before any intelligence by conduct of the vocal Wave arrive at the ear.’66 Any hand gestures in the scene I have been discussing from Shakespeare’s play would be implied and the face as well as the head should titillate the spectators’ eyes with the gentle movements that preface Hermione’s awakening and her action of stepping down. Stuart Clark has shown how the early modern theory of vision was in flux in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.67 For many, eyesight was the superior sense, as Ambroise Paré, put it, ‘this is the most excellent sense of them all. For by this we behold the fabric and beauty of the heavens and earth, distinguish the infinite varieties of colours, we perceive and know the magnitude, figure, number, proportion, site, motion and rest of all bodies’.68 But this view was shifting, as moralists observed how the eye could be tricked in countless ways, and if the eye is deceived, the sense and reason will be prone to error. Richard Brathwaite lamented that the eye, ‘ought of itself to be a directrice to all other Senses’, but instead, it has become ‘the principal organ of error to the affections



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[…] there is no passage more easy for the entry of vice than by the cranny of the eye’.69 The eyes could be misled, see what is not there or not see what is clearly visible. Theatrical performance and its special effects and illusions relied upon this unreliability of sense perception. Physiologically and morally, in the early modern period, seeing was not always believing. It was deemed more important to watch carefully. The illusion of this scene might be credible if Shakespeare’s actor uses gesture here to emphasize the relationship between the eye and the hand in performance. But it is also due to the fact that indoor theatres produce illusion more effectively because actors could play with light levels. Earlier in the play we discover what happens when visual mistakes are made, as Leontes’s sequence of notorious mis-readings of the courtly mannerisms between Hermione and Polixines demonstrate: Hermione [Gives her hand to Polixines] Leontes [Aside] Too hot, too hot! (1.2.110) Leontes But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are …  (1.2.115–17) Leontes    – Still virginalling /Upon his palm? (1.2.125–6) Shakespeare’s performance strategy is not to undermine sight entirely, but rather to suggest that gestures are not easily determined or legible in one moment, while he asks his spectators to have a closer look for them in another, to watch for the stirring gestures of the hand that would facilitate the spectators’ experience of a miracle. It is possible that an actor would have had a full range of gestural utterances available to him outdoors and indoors, which therefore means we cannot presume that the style of acting in the commercial playhouses of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London was gesturally homogenous, nor were the emotional effects of these various performances.70 Smoothness and polish were ideals of acting in this period, as Thomas Heywood announces in An Apology for Actors; when

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prescribing performance techniques for orators he suggests the performer, … keep decorum in his countenance […] neither to buffet his desk like a mad man, nor stand in his place like a lifeless image, demurely plodding, and without any smooth and formal motion. It instructs him to fit his phrases to his action, and his action to his phrase, and his pronunciation to them both.71 Critics have cited this passage alongside Hamlet’s advice to the players to demonstrate subtlety was an ideal of performance in early modern England, but the use of the word ‘decorum’ suggests appropriateness. It requires an actor to perform the appropriate emotion for the scene. ‘Passionating’ would have, therefore, been characterized by a range of techniques that produced as many suitable gestures as there were emotions, which means subtlety was only one mode of expression. As I have already argued, Renaissance anatomists and artists marvelled at the mechanical engineering of the hand and the infinite variety of movements it could perform; to suggest in performance that hands had only one mode of gestural expression would be to deny that actors shared in the same anatomical delight. When we talk about gesture in early modern performance, therefore, we need to allow for the correlation between the passions and the actions of the hand to be characterized by expressive, rich variety.

Actors and audience: Interpersonal gesture All we have to rely on when it comes to the performance of a gesture in early modern theatre is how a witness to that gesture interprets and reports it. Peggy Phelan has notoriously remarked that the life of a performance exists only in the



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moment it occurs; ‘performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’.72 This notion has been debated, but the purpose it serves here is to provoke a consideration of the ways in which those who witnessed gestures in early modern performance perceived and described them as kinetic acts. We already examined the gaps between surviving illustrated examples of bodies in performance in the opening section of this chapter, but what other accounts are available and what can they tell us about how theatrical hand gestures were witnessed and received? Known to have travelled in theatrical circles, seventeenthcentury essayist Owen Feltham argued that preachers had much to learn from actors: We complain of drowsiness at a sermon, when a play of doubled length leads us on still with alacrity. But the fault is not all in ourselves. If we saw divinity acted, the gesture and variety would be much invigilate. But it is too high to be personated by humanity. The stage feeds both the ear and the eye; and through this latter sense the soul drinks deeper draughts. Things acted possess us more, and are, too, more retainable than the passable tones of the tongue … A good orator should pierce the ear, allure the eye, and invade the mind of his hearer.73 The theory that audiences went only to ‘hear’ plays has, in the last decade of theatre history and sensory studies, been put to rest. I hope. Too many contemporary accounts suggest that the eye had as much to gain as the ear from performances in early modern theatres for us to continue believing that plays were aimed at only one sensory organ. The anti-theatrical literature finds the multi-sensory nature of theatre most disturbing, while early modern commentators such as Owen Feltham suggested that preachers needed to invigorate their performances by adapting a gestural style similar to actors

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in order to ‘allure the eye’ of the spectator. The relationship between the hand and the eye, as I have discussed above, was also paramount to the effectiveness of oratorical delivery according to classical and early modern theory. Fraunce insisted that the ‘casting out of the right arm is as it were an arming of the speech & becometh continued and flowing sentences, where the very speech itself seemeth to pour forth it self with the stretching out of the arm’.74 The gesture, Fraunce indicates, would need to be so smoothly applied, that it would appear to be the force that draws words and sentences from the speaker’s mouth with a liquid fluidity. Lawrence Humfrey, in his treatise on decorum and the manners of the nobility, talks about the effects gesture can have on personation: ‘how hiss we out a well appareled player, if counterfeiting a king on the stage, he fail of his gesture, speak yawning, have a sour and harsh voice, miss his action, or use unseemly gesture for so stately personage?’75 Although this reference dates earlier than the commercial playhouses opened in London, we get a sense of audience expectations when it comes to the performance of gestures. Players had to gesture up, as it were, to play a king, for example. If gestures were not performed according to decorum, the audience might disapprove. J. A. Burrow observes that in the medieval period, there was a also ‘scholastic tradition which considered non-verbal messages as part of a general theory of signs, signa’.76 St Augustine identified two types of signs: natural and given [signa and data]; gestures as well as facial expressions are ‘involuntary’ or natural ‘signs of emotion’.77 In St Augustine’s own words: ‘Certain movements of the hands signify a great deal. Actors, by the movement of their limbs, give certain signs to the cognoscenti and, as it were, converse with the spectactors’ eyes […] All these things are, to coin a phrase, visible words [verba visibilia]’.78 It was common in ancient, medieval and early modern psychology, then, to ‘think of perception as a visual process, whatever the particular source of data. What eventually found its way into the memory, according to an authoritative modern account, was



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a mental picture or “phantasm”.’79 The visible gestures of the performing body should be carefully choreographed with the speech in order to ‘invade the mind’ of the hearer, as Feltham suggests. Stuart Clark’s analysis of the importance of vision in early modern Europe finds that ‘anything in the visible world could act as a symbol of the invisible one’.80 Applied to the dynamic system of passionate performance and emotional response, this notion is at the heart of the reception of drama in this period. The meaning that lies beyond or behind a given gesture depends on the speech, but also on the spectating, subjective interpreters of the gesture. Feltham’s observation of the multi-sensory effects of the performing body highlights why actors were able to communicate more effectively than their preaching counterparts. However, the power of the lively gestures of performance to penetrate the spectator’s mind fuelled anti-theatrical anxieties in Shakespeare’s England.81 The detail that some of the more puritanical of the antitheatrical texts delve into may suggest that some of them were eyewitnesses to acting in the early modern theatres. In addition to the enticing verse, the homoerotic pageant of boys playing women and the licentious subject matter, most antitheatrical writers found the movements of the body, dancing, kissing, embracing and gesturing of the hands, head and feet to be particularly loathsome and dangerously provocative. John Northbrooke asked ‘what filthy and foul acts are done of whoredom and bawdry, to the hurt of the beholders, adding this histrionicis gestibus inquinatur omnia, by the gestures of interlude players all honesty is defiled and defaced.’82 Stephen Gosson’s infamous rant, The School of Abuse (1579), accuses actors of using ‘effeminate gesture, to ravish the sense’.83 In a later publication, he laments this issue again because it is a form of lying: ‘that in stage plays for a boy to put on the attire, the gesture, the passions of a woman […] is by outward signs to show themselves otherwise than they are’.84 Antony Munday wonders ‘how the gesturing of a player, which Tully termeth the eloquence of the body, is of force to move and prepare a man to that which is ill. For such things be disclosed

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to the eye and the ear as might a great deal better be kept close’.85 Philip Stubbes’s anti-theatrical diatribe is characterized by his neurotic worries about contact: the gestural contact between the actor’s hand and the viewer’s eye as well as the touching that occurs between actors on stage: Nay, are they not rather plain devourers of maidenly virginity and chastity? For proof whereof, but mark the flocking and running to theatres and curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold.86 The associations the anti-theatrical writers made between the actions of the hand in performance and general immodesty, as exaggerated as they were, are evident in the gestures identified as either ‘wanton’, ‘effeminate’ or uncomely. Stubbes insists that ‘the shameless gestures of players serve to nothing so much as to move the flesh to lust and uncleanness’.87 The actions of the body in such an environment are subject to intense moral scrutiny because of the powerful links early moderns made between what is seen on stage and how people might be moved by it one way or another. Henry Crosse saw this aspect of performance as the most dangerous: ‘Are not their arguments pleasing and ravishing? And made more forcible by gesture and outward action? […] for it cannot be but that the internal powers must be moved at such visible and lively objects’.88 The ‘internal powers’ of the audience were indeed moved time and again by early modern performance, as many critics have commented, in particular Alison Hobgood’s illuminating study of ‘passionate playgoing’; however, what is often unacknowledged as a forceful contributing factor are the devices or bodily technologies that transmit emotions, such as gesture.89 We have, I believe, underestimated the shaping influence that actor’s gestures had on the empathetic reception



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of early modern drama. If we understand the gestures of the hand to be emotional transmitters, and carriers of thoughts or even the soul, then we need to take into account the ways in which hands moved on stage in the amphitheatres and indoor theatres and how audiences there may have gestured back.90 The recent approach of blending theatre history and phenomenology has characterized many studies that focus upon early modern audience response being entirely informed by contemporary theories of the body and psychology, namely humoural and sensory theory.91 The growing performance histories of the reconstructed Globe, the Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse have uncovered the dialogic nature of early modern performance and the complex exchanges, mirroring and interactions that occur between actors and audiences in those spaces. The anti-theatrical literature demonstrates aptly some of the theories that existed about the ways early modern bodies were understood to take in phenomena and how they attended to, processed and were moved by plays: emotions performed are transmitted via speech and gesture, which move into the body through the ear and eye. Spectators feed back their responses through their own gestures, forming a coherent pattern of gestural mutuality, the most powerful audience gesture being applause. John Bulwer tells us why: To CLAP THE RAISED HANDS one against another is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well pleased, used by all Nations. For, applause as it is a vulgar note of encouragement, a sign of rejoicing, and a token and sign of giving praise, and allowance, doth wholly consist in the Hands.92 The act of clapping the hands is a passionate gesture involving the senses of touch and sound and was, as Fraunce suggests, largely associated with the theatre: ‘the clapping of hands is fitter for stage than the court’.93 Thomas Dekker’s Prologue to If it Be Not Good, The Devil is In It (1612) laments that

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some even ‘clap their Brawny hands, / T’Applaud, what their charmed soul scarce understands’.94 William Fennor shows dismay at the amphitheatre crowd who, ‘The stinkards oft will hisse without a cause, / And for a bawdy jest will give applause’.95 Matthew Steggle’s analysis of accounts of early modern audience applause shows that its overwhelming characteristic was its loudness: ‘[i]n early modern writing, the sound of a theater audience applauding is compared to thunder, bells, and sometimes cannonfire. These are the three very loudest reference points available to early modern England, identified (for instance by the physician Ambroise Pare) as the three sounds so loud that they could make you deaf’.96 Bulwer’s Chironomia elaborates on applause, arguing it was commonly practised in the ‘public Theatres’ and that it is performed ‘with the hollow of both Hands; which being smitten together, caused that sound which is called Popismus, a word altogether feigned to the similitude of the sound’.97 Actors’ gestures communicated the emotional quality of the drama, induced passionate responses which would be experienced through the gesture of applause. Early modern theatres were richly characterized by this gesture-passiongesture nexus that made its critics notoriously terrified of the physiological consequences of performance. In his account of laughter in the playhouse, Steggle argues that gestures of laughter are more facial, but that hands provide the accompanying punctuations that give laughter its specific meaning in a given context; for example, mockery was often accompanied by a pointing gesture. Stage directions sometimes designate a character to laugh and point, such as in Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock (1612): ‘they point at her, and laugh’; or the late Jacobean play Herod and Antipater (1622): ‘Enter 3. Lords laughing, and pointing scornfully at Antipater’.98 Steggle identifies stage actions typically associated with laughter, which include ‘pointing, clapping, holding one’s sides, and falling into the arms of another character’.99 These gestures are naturally produced by the emotion that compels them and would be classified as everyday or instinctive gestures,



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which work in combination, with the various iconic gestures in the early modern actors’ repertoire. Social psychologists have identified amongst groups a phenomenon referred to as ‘behavioural matching’, which is ‘the well-documented tendency to mimic an interaction partner in body posture, laugh, speech accent, and syntax’; such ‘mimicry’ is ‘thought to occur because of the tight neural link between perception and action’.100 ‘Behavioural matching’ is an intriguing idea in the context of early modern performance, but one that could not in any obvious way be applied to a 400-year-old culture without further investigation. However, numerous studies have shown that individuals and groups are well known to mimic one another unconsciously and thereby establish affiliation. When audiences laughed in the early modern theatre, since some examples of stage directions for laughing require pointing, clapping and holding their sides, would they have been inclined to produce the same gestures they witnessed? Perhaps. But maybe playwrights and actors simply drew or adapted these gestures from the social matrix of everyday life which would produce a gestural affinity between themselves and their audiences nonetheless. As an expression of social or personal identity, an enhancer of speech or an emotional transmitter, gestures were signs in the theatre and in play texts; the way hands moved or were accounted for in performance forms a polysemous system incorporating a combination of instinctive, everyday and more formal or iconic gestures. Here, I have attempted to challenge the temptation to identify gestures in early modern performance as being overly codified and characterized only as formal or iconic, natural, exaggerated or subtle because, surely, gestures moved between each and all of these extremes depending on the various contexts in which they occur. The anti-theatrical writers do not tell us enough about the precise nature of the gestures, in part, due to the judgements that often attend these descriptions, but what we do learn is that different types of gesture occurred, were accounted for and that they took on a range of forms that were meant to signal

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class, gender and emotion; hands were as busy on stage as tongues, faces, heads and feet in performance and they were considered a core part of the technology of the actor’s body, a notion that derives from classical oratorical theory. These gestures worried moralists because they affected spectators emotionally, who, in turn, gestured back with approving hands. Gestures, as I have been suggesting, are often annotated while they are being performed by a character not performing the gesture. But what happens when gestures are described once they have already occurred and are meant only to flash in the imagination of the audience or a reader? In the following chapter, while tracing the rich iconographic history for some of the most impassioned gestures and gestural exchanges Shakespeare describes, I will explore Shakespeare’s artful depiction of gesture as a lively action of the body through the seemingly static form of narrative.

4 Gesture in Shakespeare’s narrative art1

FIGURE 14 ‘Family Portrait’ (1598–1600), Lavinia Fontana (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)

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What do the gestures in this portrait mean? The people depicted here are a family and they are communicating, some with others in the portrait and some directly with the viewer. This unidentified family, painted by Lavinia Fontana (1598– 1600), is extraordinarily expressive with their hands. We see here a few recognizable iconic hand gestures: the pointing or deictic gesture (the young woman’s index finger points up to heaven, while the older man’s pointing finger is held towards the dog); the young man in the centre of the panel holds out an open palm and is perhaps making the hand ‘hollow as in MANNER OF A DISH’2 gesture, which Bulwer says is a begging or covetous gesture; the two children on opposite sides of the painting each have a hand placed on their breast in a gesture of solemn oath; while the girl uses the thumb of her other hand as a place holder in the prayer book, the boy seems to be reaching towards her with his other hand. The mother on the far right holds a handkerchief, but not in the conventional way to display the decorative embellishments of the textile, but rather as if she is about to or has already used it to wipe away tears. Her other hand is placed upon the right shoulder of the young girl perhaps to give comfort or to take it. It seems unclear at first what the hands in this portrait are responding to. What emotions are being expressed here? Why is the old man’s gestural focus upon the dog? What does the young man with an open palm want? In actual fact, the painting represents a family arranged in order by age and gender; the old man was the father who is now dead as the mother’s widow garments and handkerchief suggest; most of the gestures in this portrait, therefore, invoke and express the shared grief of the family. The artist has rendered their hands to appear lively, in motion in order to create the effect of passionate expression. Each individual in the painting is saying something emotional with their hands; the specificity of the gestures could be decoded using contemporary gesture manuals, such as Bonifacio’s L’Arte de’cenni (1616). However, whether codified or not, the gesticulations of this family demonstrate the powerful



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role the hand plays in communicating emotions in human discourse and within a static medium, such as visual art. I cited E. H. Gombrich’s observation in the last chapter that art ‘makes use of gestures that have their meaning in human intercourse’, which implies that the artist closely observes social exchanges in order to imitate them, and they were instructed to do so in the many art manuals and treatises of the period, which counselled artists on the methods of capturing what are otherwise fleeting actions of the human body.3 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Caruinge and Buildinge, translated into English by Richard Haydocke in 1598, defines painting as ‘an art, which with proportionable lines, and colours answerable to the life, by observing the Perspective light, doeth so imitate the nature of corporal things, that it not only representeth the thickness and roundness thereof upon a flat, but also their actions and gestures, expressing moreover divers affections and passions of the mind’.4 Lomazzo suggests how representations of the body should reflect the emotional character of the subject which will determine the gazer’s interpretation. Significantly, according to Lomazzo’s and other art manuals, an artist must have some prior knowledge or understanding of humoural psychology, anatomy (of course), and the ways in which perception produces particular emotions, ‘all which being Philosophically understood’, the translation reads, bring with them a certain knowledge of all actions and gestures, to be imagined in bodies, by virtue of which they may be put in practice. Which knowledge, if it be behoveful in any artificer, then surely is it most requisite in a Painter.5 According to Lomazzo, because the body is altered by the passions, painters must be wary of these fluctuations so that rather than the picture to appear ‘like dreams, or works done hap-hazard’, they should rather be ‘true and lively representations of the history intended’6 ‘True’ and ‘lively’ are key constituents of the Renaissance theory of art when it comes

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to painting the body. These representations, if ‘true and lively’, had the potential to influence or shape the emotional responses of those viewing the painted gestures. In other words, the gesturing between subjects in a painting must reflect a life-like and animated exchange, so that the viewer can experience the emotion too. Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On Painting argued for a similar interplay between viewer and the gestures in art: A “historia” will move spectators when the men painted in the picture outwardly demonstrate their own feelings as clearly as possible. Nature provides—and there is nothing to be found more rapacious of her like than she—that we mourn with the mourners, laugh with those who laugh, and grieve with the grief-stricken. Yet these feelings are known from movement of the body.  (Book 2.41)7 The disposition of the limbs in a painting will reveal more about the passions that underpin their representation, according to Alberti. He insists, therefore, that the painter ‘must know all about the movements of the body, which I believe he must take from Nature with great skill. It is extremely difficult to vary the movements of the body in accordance with the almost infinite movements of the heart’ (Book 2.42). To be able to observe closely and then render the gestures to provoke emotional response is the skill artists needed to procure. According to this theory of art, gestures act as emotional transmitters, as I suggested in the previous chapter, they do in performance, but gestures have the same function in narrative too. Emotional transmission through gesticulating hands not only reflects the mind of a single gesturer but also has the potential to produce the same emotion and, perhaps, gesture in another; if this concept is fundamental to the accurate portrayal of gestures in art, then it is not unlikely that it underlined some of the impulses behind narrative verse and dramatic writing as well. In Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare presents the hand



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of female protagonists as an instrument of desire. Some of the techniques painters used to create emotionally complex gestural exchanges are comparable to Shakespeare’s art in his narrative representations of Venus’s seduction of Adonis and the fearful rape and suicide of Lucrece. The correlations are not entirely accidental. As Katherine Duncan-Jones and Henry Woudhuysen observe in their introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems, both poems ‘are remarkable for their allusions to the art of painting and invitations to the reader to compare the poet’s art with that of the visual artist’.8 They go on to say that ‘[i]t appears also that he [Shakespeare] had some acquaintance with artistic theory’.9 If this is the case, then it is not unlikely that the method for representing movement in a static generic form rests largely upon the poet/artist’s skill as observer and their understanding of how passion can be conveyed through gesture. Representing gesture as multisensory is, in part, Shakespeare’s strategy in narrative. Characters see gestures and narrators report them while the reader or audience members hear about them and are therefore able to imagine the feel of them through vivid poetic descriptions. I begin with Venus’s hands consciously engaged in tactile gestures; they are self-referential but prove, ultimately, to be powerless in their pursuit.

Gestures of desire: Venus and Adonis Shakespeare’s poem tells the mythic story of Venus, goddess of Love, and her pursuit of the beautiful, but indifferent young man, Adonis, who is more interested in hunting the boar. The boar eventually kills him, but not before a series of encounters that could read in modern times as a narrative of sexual harassment, largely due to the many instances in which the powerful Venus aggressively touches, seizes, even tackles the young mortal. Eric Langley argues that vision or the eye is a focus for the poem: ‘[i]n what is essentially a poem of amorous

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persuasion, the eye has particular importance as the site for an eroticized encounter, for a “war of looks” (l. 355)’.10 Referring to the Platonic theory of extramission (that eyes send out beams and bring images to it), Langley suggests that eyesight is haptic, or related to the sense of touch, which comingles with all the other senses, particularly vision. It is not untrue that vision is a dominant trope in the poem, yet the poem is steeped in the language of motion; its descriptions of the gestures help to create the effect of bodily movement: reaching, touching, seizing, retracting. Venus’s gestures express her longing to reach out and touch Adonis. Although Ovid’s version of the story does not invoke as much gestural language, the myth has been interpreted in the early modern period as one characterized by motion. Visual representations of the myth tend to represent bodies in highly dramatic poses, producing the visual effects of movement and the desire for tactility; for example, we see in some versions Venus reaching longingly for Adonis as he arches his body away from hers or recoils from her touch. The narrator in Shakespeare’s poem produces a similar sensation of action through a series of imaginative gestural encounters between Venus and the young lad she is attempting to seduce, encounters characterized by the juxtaposition of extreme desire and sexual apathy, a juxtaposition Langley would characterize as Platonic with Lucretian (based on Ancient Greek poet Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things) ideas of liquification and erotic desire.11 Arthur Golding’s translation of the Venus and Adonis myth does incorporate the language of physicality and describes some of the more iconic gestures to express the passions. For example, when Venus finds Adonis lying dead, ‘She leaped down, and tore at once her garments from her wrist, / And rent her hair, and beat upon her stomach with her fist’ (Book 10).12 Golding translates this moment using the iconic gestures associated with despair to express Venus’s grief. Shakespeare takes the idiom of gesture much farther than Golding, however. Shakespeare suggests the kinetic potential of the story to a much greater extent than Golding. The attention to the actions of the bodies, their conditions and



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temperaments, fluidity and movements throughout the poem shapes the reader’s experience of Venus’s sweaty pursuit of sensual desire. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen remark upon Shakespeare’s vivid portrayal of her physicality: Venus, though a goddess, inhabits a recognizably feminine, fleshly and highly sexualized body. She blushes, sweats and pants with a mature physicality that is both seen and “felt” in close-up. She appears to possess both mass and weight, being strong enough to “pluck” Adonis from his horse and to carry him under one arm while simultaneously controlling his “lusty courser” with the other (29–32)13 Langley sees Venus’s physical representation as Shakespeare employing ‘deliberately discordant or distasteful vocabulary, allowing her rapacious appetite to undermine her selfpresentation’.14 But the emphasis on the corporeality of bodies gives the poem its vital and rhythmic quality. The language of gesture is heightened particularly through the use of tactile verbs. After propositioning him, Venus takes action: With this she seizeth on his sweating palm, The precedent of pith and livelihood, And trembling in her passion, calls it balm, Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good. Being so enraged, desire lend her force Courageously to pluck him from his horse. (25–30) So soon was she along as he was down, Each leaning on their elbows and their hips; Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown, And ’gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips, (42–6)

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The narrator invites us to focus our attention upon Venus’s hands here and elsewhere in the poem; highly objectified, her hands signify her complex identity as the epitome of beauty and mythic divinity when the narrator describes their appearance – ‘fair hand’, ‘fair immortal hand’, ‘tender hand’, ‘soft hand’; but she is also the gluttonous sexual aggressor who seizes, wrings (‘You hurt my hand with wringing; let us part’ (421), complains Adonis), shakes and ‘takes him by the hand’. Adonis’s hand is unresponsive, his frigid narcissism figured in the image of him seizing his own hand: ‘Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?’ (158). The feminine ideal of pale, luminous skin with rosy cheeks extended, in this period, to young boys, exemplified most famously in visual and poetic portrayals of Cupid and Adonis.15 In Shakespeare’s poem Adonis’s physical features resemble those described in the anatomical blazons in sixteenth-century love poetry and are described in terms that would have been transferrable to the poetry of mistress worship. Venus’s love of Adonis is narcissistic in this regard, that in attempting to claim him, she is attempting to claim his beauty as her own. Her features would be very similar to his, being the embodiment of the beauty ideal. Shakespeare titillates us with this theme of mirroring in his somewhat filmic close-up on Adonis’s hand in hers: Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prisoned in a gaol of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band: So white a friend engirts so white a foe. This beauteous combat, wilful and unwilling, Showed like two silver doves that sit a-billing. (361–6) References such as ‘lily’, ‘snow’, ‘ivory’ and ‘silver doves’ are conventional descriptors of the perfect female complexion that is not only white but that seems to have a lustre. This



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passage also recalls the cultural preoccupation with beautiful ‘white’ hands, demonstrating that poetic meditations upon desire tend to concentrate the power of feminine (and here youthfully masculine) beauty not only upon the face but on the hands as well. By integrating the poetic tropes of mistress worship to refer to both Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare creates a visually compelling image of the frustrated pursuit of incorporation and mutuality. The narrator’s preoccupation with Venus’s and her reluctant lover’s hands highlights the poem’s sustained evocation of tactile gestures to create a rather unbalanced portrayal of desire. A curious set of gestures occurs in the moment when Adonis believes he has literally killed Love: ‘The silly boy, believing she is dead, / Claps her pale cheek, till clapping makes it red’ (467–8). This ‘clapping’ is followed by a dumb show of sorts in which he attempts to revive the goddess: He wrings her nose, he strikes her on the cheeks, He bends her fingers, holds her pulses hard, He chafes her lips: a thousand ways he seeks To mend the hurt that his unkindness marred. He kisses her, and she by her good will Will never rise, so he will kiss her still. (475–80) This is literally the most ‘action’ Venus will get in the poem. In some ways it is confounding that Adonis would assume he had the ability to kill the goddess, but here we see a reversal of the Petrachan trope of the deadly power of the cold, distant mistress. In addition to being quite funny, this gestural episode is deeply erotic and Venus comes off as a bit of a sadist when she does not ‘awaken’ immediately after the first nose wringing. Instead, she waits until after the slapping, finger bending, pulse holding (wrist grasping), lip chafing and, of course, the kissing. Shakespeare’s representation of visual kinesis through the medium of language here highlights the

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capacity of narrative form to produce an effective sense of materiality and motion. George Puttenham stipulates that to present poetically the moods and ‘pangs of lovers’, the figures need to be shown ‘sometimes praying, beseeching, sometime honouring, advancing, praising: an other while railing, reviling, and cursing: then sorrowing, weeping, lamenting’.16 Although he is referring to the range of forms and genres through which the emotions experienced by lovers should be represented, poets should aim to reproduce the actions associated with and the expressive vitality of bodies as they love and desire. Shakespeare achieves this vitality in Venus and Adonis, in part, through his attention to the hand (and its sense of touch), which Bulwer and others saw as the liveliest part of the body: ‘so proper and apt to make signs, and work great matters is the Hand of Man’.17 Hands bring a static body to life, whether it is in the flesh or in a narrative poem. When Venus finally gets her kiss, Shakespeare allows her to believe they have become ‘incorporate’ or so it ‘seem[s]’ (540). Her arms wrap around his neck and the pressure of her bulk presses upon his body, till they ‘fall to earth’ (546). The gestural language grows harsher as it all becomes a bit too much for Adonis: Hot, faint and weary, with her hard embracing, Like a wild bird being tamed with too much handling, Or as a fleet-foot roe that’s tired with chasing, Or like the froward infant stilled with dandling, He now obeys, and now no more resisteth, While she takes all she can, not all she listeth. (559–64) His subjugation is filtered through images of falconry, hunting and infancy. Venus’s hopes are dashed despite her attempts to seduce him, though; her physical advances produce only apathy. When he is dead, she touches him again in her pitiful lamentation at the loss of youthful beauty; his ‘soft hand’,



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however, does not feel any different from before: ‘She takes him by the hand, and that is cold;’ (1124). Venus’s penultimate gesture occurs at the end of the poem: ‘Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast; Thou art the next of blood, and ’tis thy right. Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest, My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night; (1183–6) [emphases mine] Her self-deictic gesture is emblematic; it represents Venus’s own identity in the poem overall. While this moment of intimacy between Venus and her dead, transformed lover suggests she will internalize and immortalize him, if we imagine the scene, she is not just pointing to her heart, but to herself. Venus’s self-referential gestures characterize her labour of pursuit throughout the poem. Her very first line – ‘Thrice fairer than myself’ (7) – addresses Adonis through self-reference. In pursuit of the emotion/action she embodies love/desire – the entire action of the poem has been a form of self-referencing. Shakespeare’s readers will be conscious of Venus’s indexical self-awareness, that she is the goddess of Love pursuing love, when she catalogues her own beauty and youth: Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow, Mine eyes are grey and bright and quick in turning, My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow, My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning; My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt, Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt. (139–44) This self-reflexive blazon culminates in an image of their hands melting into each other, the kind of narcissistic incorporation that shapes Venus’s self-presentation.18 She does not refer to Adonis other than in relation to herself. It

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can be argued, therefore, that throughout the poem she seems to say: ‘I am Love’; ‘Desire is here’; ‘Come to me’, a deictic metaphor that undermines the tragedy of Adonis. Her final gesture epitomizes the fact that all along it has been all about her.19 Both of Shakespeare’s narrative poems construct the experience of desire through a representation of and focus upon hands in a sequential description of gestures: in Venus, the active gestures of pursuit occupy the narrator, while in Lucrece, it is the hand’s involuntary gestures that capture the reader’s eye.

The Rape of Lucrece: ‘Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under’ In this section, I focus upon gestures and hands in The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare’s narrative poem describing the dangerous desires and resulting violation that female virtue seems to produce involuntarily. Like her face, the hands of a woman were tasked with showing evidence of her chastity and the honour of her family. As we saw in Chapter 2, where women placed their hands and how they held themselves in public was of utmost importance in early modern society. In addition to the conventional poetic tropes that detail facial perfection, as we learned, hands were also essential to the overall aesthetic of female beauty from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages and early modern era. The vivid description of the perfect hands we saw in Firenzuola’s discourse on beauty comes to mind when we imagine the hands of Lucrece, particularly when Firenzuola specifies the ‘hollow between the index finger and the thumb should be well set, without wrinkles, and of a lively color. Fingers are beautiful when they are long, straight, delicate, and slightly tapering toward the end, but so little as to be scarcely perceptible’.20



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Unfortunately, Lucrece’s ideal physical beauty created by her natural modesty provokes Tarquin’s unceasing desire for the Roman wife: When at COLLATIUM this false lord arrived, Well was he welcomed by the ROMAN dame, Within whose face beauty and virtue strived Which of them both should underprop her fame. When beauty boasted blushes, in despite Virtue would stain that o’er with silver white. (50–6) Her perfect complexion of what the narrator calls ‘beauty’s red and white’ glistens, as ‘silver white’ suggests. The glistening lustre of her complexion is a physical characteristic attributed to her inner virtue. This quality of the feminine ideal derives from the neo-Platonic principle that beauty is a manifestation of God’s light, shining from within the virtuous mind.21 Lucrece’s face, its flickering between white and red (her intermittent blushes), begins to provoke Tarquin’s lust. But it is when her body becomes animated by her emotions that we see Tarquin’s desire increasing to genuinely dangerous levels. When he narrates her husband’s victories, ‘Her joy with heaved-up hand she doth express, / And wordless so greets heaven for his success’ (110–11). This emotional gesture exemplifies the perfect union in Lucrece between bodily comportment and interiority. Her virtue is trustworthy as the attention to the correspondences between her actions and her feelings throughout the poem imply. John Bulwer tells us that ‘TO THROW UP THE HANDS TO HEAVEN is an expression of admiration, amazement, and astonishment, used also by those who flatter and wonderfully praise; and have others in high regard, or extol another’s speech or action’.22 But in his artistry manual, Henry Peacham instructs that to draw an allegory of PROVIDENCE, the artist must show ‘a Lady lifting

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up both her hands to Heaven with this word Providentia Decorum’.23 The polysemous nature of this gesture offers an opportunity for us to see the complexity of Lucrece’s actions and the relationship her gestures have to the emotions that compel them as well as how they signify more broadly in the poem. Evidently, upon hearing about her husband’s triumphs Lucrece throws or ‘heaves’ her hand into the air as a genuine release of joy. According to Bulwer, anytime hands go above the head, the gesturer is conversing with God or heaven in some way. Thus, Lucrece’s gesture here is a virtuous manifestation of her joy. The relationship this gesture has to providence – which according the Dictionarium Lingue Latinae et Anglicane (1587)24 also means ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’– seems indicative of the foreboding mood of the somewhat voyeuristic narrator, whose tone expresses a deep admiration for, while simultaneously seeming to fetishize the hand gestures of, Lucrece. One gesture of note in this poem is an involuntary one: ‘Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under, / Coz’ning the pillow of a lawful kiss’ (386–7) [emphasis mine]. The violation of Lucrece’s body begins with Tarquin sneaking into her chamber and witnessing her body asleep as she appears almost effigylike in her posture. Significantly, the narrator’s attention to her hands reveals that her silent, involuntary gestures help to excite Tarquin’s sexual desire. Lucrece’s unconscious gesture here invokes the familiar artistic and literary motif of the sleeping woman. The sleeping woman trope dates to antiquity – an exquisite example being the ‘sleeping Ariadne’ (see Fig. 15). This pose is one that had been admired for centuries. But why? The Roman poet Propertius in his third elegy describes a sleeping woman from the point of view of her lover: – So Cynthia, breathing slumber, lay in bed With her unconscious hands beneath her head When I returned tipsy feet one night With link-boys waving flares to give me light –

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FIGURE 15 Roman art: Ariadne Sleeping. Vatican, Museo Pio-Clementino. © 13 x 18 2015. Photo Scala, Florence

The tradition of depicting a sleeping woman who is being watched places the lady precariously on display as an assailable object and, in her statue-like stillness, she becomes the site upon which a man might meditate upon the desirability of her body, all the while appreciating the virtue that supposedly produces that desirability. Basically, it was considered enthralling to see a modest woman sleeping. We learn in the next passage of Lucrece that, Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet, whose perfect white Showed like an April daisy on the grass, With pearly sweat resembling dew of night. (393–6) Lucrece is not consciously aware of where her hands are lying: one is under her cheek and the other resting upon the ‘green

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coverlet’. She is not posing, instead, her hands fall gently into this natural posture. The narrator couches this description within familiar poetic tropes of beauty such as we see in Venus and Adonis, ‘lily’ hands, ‘April daisy on the grass’; her beauty is highlighted, however, as a sign of her virtue, a sign that perversely and paradoxically leads to the violation of her body. Lucrece’s involuntary pose is not uncommon iconographically as it reminds the reader/viewer of the vulnerability of the sleeping body. In doing so, it alludes to the number of sleeping woman gestures depicted in print, sculpture and paint over the centuries, with female virtue or sainthood primarily as the context, such as The Dream of Catherine of Alexandria (1593) and Paolo Veronese’s The Dream of St Helena (1576–8). Some images of sleeping women may have been familiar to or resonated with Shakespeare and some may have not. We do not know if he had ever seen, for example, Vittore Carpaccio’s Dream of St Ursula (see Fig. 16), but this painting is worth examining carefully as there are important parallels here with the narrative context of Lucrece’s own unconscious sleeping gesture and the conventionality of gestures associated with saints and mythic figures suggests Shakespeare may have been familiar with them even if he had not ever seen any of these paintings. St Ursula’s story was well known in early modern England. She was the Roman-British saint who was famously martyred; when on a pilgrimage with 11,000 virgins, she was intercepted by the Huns and killed; in the chronicle version adapted in 1509, her virtue and beauty incites the lust of the ‘rural rebel’ who, when rejected, shoots an arrow into her brain.26 In Carpaccio’s painting (part of a series depicting St Ursula’s life) an angel visits her in her dream to foreshadow her impending martyrdom. The main point to consider is how her posture reflects her virtue. The hand resting on the cheek, whether awake or asleep, has a number of meanings. It is contemplation, virtue and in some contexts, melancholy; in depictions of women, sometimes these meanings are fused, as



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FIGURE 16  Dream of St Ursula (detail, 1495), Vittore Carpaccio

is evident in Artemesia Gentileschi’s portrait of the sleeping yet melancholy Magdalene (c. 1621–2). The over-flexible wrist, the palm facing down, and the cheek resting on the back of the hand characterize the melancholy subject.27 The hand gestures of the unconscious Lucrece are couched within a sub-narrative of the hand in the poem. Shakespeare establishes the heroine’s hand as an agent of involuntary seduction in a set of complex references that foreground this

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lively part of the body. Lucrece’s gestures are not pre-fabricated or the studied courtly expressions delineated in the manuals on decorum. She does not apply her gestures as ornaments; instead, her hands move only to reflect her true emotions. We saw her ‘heaved up’ hands earlier manifesting her virtuous jubilation, a gesture that tragically captures Tarquin’s imagination. Later he recalls how she took him by the hand when she feared for Collatinus’s life, reporting, ‘And how her hand, in my hand being locked, /Forced it to tremble with her loyal fear!’ (260–1); her trembling hand imprisoned in his simulates for him the sexual encounter of which she is unconscious and which is shortly to occur. This image recalls the ‘lily prisoned in a gaol of snow’ (362) from Venus and Adonis as it is constructed with language associated with imprisonment – ‘locked’ – that concentrates the unbalanced dynamic between desirer and the desired into the image of a handclasp, usually reserved in early modern graphic contexts as a gesture of mutuality and amity. As Tarquin moves towards Lucrece’s chamber, he encounters another productive symbol and surrogate for the lady’s hand which serves as a potential final warning to him not to act on his desire: And being lighted, by the light he spies Lucretia’s glove, wherein her needle sticks. He takes it from the rushes where it lies, And, griping it, the needle his finger pricks, As who should say, “This glove to wanton tricks Is not inured. Return again in haste; Thou seest our mistress’ ornaments are chaste.” (316–22) Gloves conveyed a number of symbolic meanings for early moderns. Castiglione’s Count considers the subject of affectation and the cosmetic practices of women, noting that women ‘are always very eager to be – and when they cannot



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be, at least to seem – beautiful. So where nature is somewhat at fault in this regard, they try to piece it out by artifice whence arise that painting of the face with so much care and sometimes pains’ (I.40). Arguing that make-up deprives women of grace, he specifies what a woman should look like, arguing for simplicity throughout. He starts with the features of the face, including the teeth. But he lingers upon the hands: […] if they are delicate and beautiful, and occasionally left bare when there is need to use them, and not in order to display their beauty, they leave a very great desire to see more of them, and especially if covered with gloves again; for whoever covers them seems to have little care or thought whether they be seen or not, and to have them thus beautiful more by nature than by any effort or pains. (I.40)28 The Count objectifies female hands considering them to be particularly arousing. He admires a woman’s gloved hand, however, for the erotic curiosity it can provoke. Evelyn Welch argues that, during the Renaissance, gloves were accessories that titillated: ‘the woman’s hand entering or exiting the glove was presented [in art] as a highly sensual act’.29 The attention to the sensuality of the glove is taken a step further in the practice of exchanging gloves as love-tokens, an act which objectified and eroticized the hands, and possibly other parts of the body. In Francis Beaumont’s Jacobean comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the courtier Humphrey attempts to woo Lucy with such a gift: Yield, then! I am full Of pity, though I say it, and can pull Out of my pocket thus a pair of gloves. [He offers a pair of gloves.] Look, Lucy, look. The dog’s tooth nor the dove’s Are not so white as these; and sweet they be, And whipped about with silk, as you may see.

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If you desire the price, shoot from your eye A beam to this place, and you shall espy “F.S.,” which is to say, my sweetest honey, They cost me three and twopence, or no money. (1.2.73–81)30 Staged in 2014 in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London, the actor playing Humphrey (Dickon Tyrrell) removed the handkerchief from a slit in his hose, making a symbolic connection between the glove as a sign of Lucy’s hand, and his desire to feel her hand on his penis. The Spanish Humanist Juan Luis Vives advises maidens how to behave when they go out in public; in so doing, he is emphatic about what parts of their bodies they should cover up: ‘When she goeth forth abroad, let her not bear her breasts and the neck bare, but hide her face with scarcely an eye open to see her way withal’. Vives worries about the dangerous effects the sight of a naked female hand will have upon men: ‘[…] and some wanton men, seeing the part of the body, not used to be seen, are set on fire therewith. Whereto gloves ordained, but to hide the hands, that they should not appear, except it were in work?’31 Vives’s suggestion recalls the pervasive attitude within conduct books that women’s hands are meant primarily for housework. He also appears to deny the erotic potential of the gloved hand that Castiglione’s Count proposes. Angus Trumble observes that ‘[i]n France, according to Pierre de Bourdeille, abbé de Brantôme, Queen Catherine de Medicis (1519–89) “possessed the most beautiful hand ever seen,” and made it known that she wore rich gloves because they actually enhanced the natural beauty of her hand, attracting “much attention and compliment”.’ The theme of a woman’s virtue or desirability represented by her glove was a popular one in Elizabethan poetry and drama. In this moment in Shakespeare’s poem, the needle pricking Lucrece’s glove has more than the obvious sexual connotation



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as it also signals the impending puncture wound in the Roman lady’s honour. Her virtue as symbolized by the glove, though, ignites further Tarquin’s violent desire; the glove then flickers for the reader between its status as chaste ornament symbolizing its lady’s modesty, and erotically-charged symbol, evoking the fantasy of a woman’s absent hand. Shakespeare treats it differently in Romeo and Juliet as it is the glove, not the hand, that has to be imagined, but it is nonetheless an erotic mediator between Juliet’s hand and her cheek as Romeo wishes himself to be metamorphosed into her glove, as we will see in the following chapter. In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, we observe a subversion of this fantasy when Beatrice drops her glove, De Flores (who is loathsome to her) picks it up and hands it to her and she responds with: ‘Mischief on your officious forwardness!/ Who bade you stoop? They touch my hand no more:’ (1.1.231–2). She proceeds to throw the other glove down, as she no longer wants them, contaminated as they are by his touch. Perversely, when he is on his own and taking the fantasy of transfiguration a step further, He thrusts his hand into the glove, which pre-figures or simulates her impending ravishment. In each of these contexts, gloves produce a different symbolic meaning, but in all examples, the glove is a surrogate for a woman’s body. The curious practice of painters representing portrait sitters with either one glove off, both gloves on or, at times, in the act of donning them illustrates the variety of connotations these accessories had in the social world. Gloves are accessories that could be perfumed, exchanged as gifts and treated as intimate tokens signifying private emotions. As Stallybrass and Jones put it, gloves, ‘like hands, were given and taken as the embodied form of social acts – the bonding of a friend to friend, of lover to lover’. Not only this, they absorbed the identities of the wearer as well, not just symbolically, but also physically, as ‘the oils and smells of the body’ could leave their traces in a glove.32 The intimate relationship between a glove and its wearer becomes a poetic motif in moments

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such as Romeo’s love fantasy or De Flores’s rape fantasy, but in Lucrece, the glove has a dual purpose, to signify the desirability of Lucrece’s hand and her chastity, hence it offers Tarquin an opportunity to select for himself which function it will serve in the moment he observes it. He devastatingly makes the wrong choice. As I have been arguing, in Lucrece the narrative of the rape is punctuated by a carefully conceived composition of hand gestures that develop the emotional trajectory of the poem, the central image being that of her cheek resting unconsciously upon her hand. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen argue that when comparing the protagonists of both of Shakespeare’s narrative poems, the poet emphasizes Venus’s physicality, while ‘Lucrece is presented to the reader as a consciousness rather than as a fleshy body’ and that ‘Shakespeare’s narrator prefers always to recount the flow of Lucrece’s thoughts rather than her physical actions. She is in a sense audible rather than visible to the reader’.33 But Lucrece’s physicality is brought to the reader’s attention through the repeated references to her hands, her instinctive gestures reflecting her virtue and her iconic gestures symbolizing her despair. In her supplication, appealing to Tarquin not to commit the rape, she heaves up her hands again, but this time in an appeal to his conscience, not knowing how powerfully her ‘heaved up hands’ had aroused him earlier. After the rape, ‘She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear’ (739). She performs the despairing gesture of destroying her beauty, focusing shame upon her hands and her face, the natural sources of her desirability. We can imagine that Lucrece’s nails would likely be no longer than the length Firenzuola prescribed in his beauty treatise, but long enough to scratch away her own flesh in a gesture of self-injury that signals her trauma. Later still, she turns her nails on to the painted cloth she uses as her catalyst for grief: ‘She tears the senseless SINON with her nails’ (1564). Sinon becomes the surrogate for Tarquin as she enacts with her hands the aggressive gestures of grief. Shakespeare



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echoes this action time and again, for example, in Anne’s desperate threat to scratch away the beauty that Richard so admires: ‘I tell thee, homicide, / These nails should rend that beauty from my cheeks’ (Richard III, 1.2.128–9). J. A. Burrow has argued that the violent gestures of self-touching, like beating the breast and scratching the face, were part of the medieval manual vocabulary of despair.34 Here we see Shakespeare deploying iconic gestures to invoke the extremity of emotions that underpin them. Lucrece later addresses her ‘Poor hand’ directly as it quivers, leaving it to commit her final gesture of expunging her shame by taking her life: ‘For if I die,’ she says to her hand, ‘my honour lives in thee;/ But if I live, thou liv’st in my defame’ (1032–3). Lucrece develops a painful awareness of her hands as they enter her consciousness; by addressing her hand, she pronounces its role as agent of her will as she assumes control of the fleshy witnesses to her virtuous character that involuntarily provoked her violation.

Gestural narratio in Shakespeare’s plays In 2.8 of The Merchant of Venice, Salerio reports a parting exchange he witnessed between Bassanio and Antonio: I saw Bassanio and Antonio part, Bassanio told him he would make some speed Of his return: he answered, “Do not so, Slubber not business for my sake Bassanio, But stay the very riping of the time, And for the Jew’s bond which he hath of me – Let it not enter in your mind of love: Be merry, and employ your chiefest thoughts To courtship, and such fair ostents of love As shall conveniently become you there.”

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And even there (his eye being big with tears), Turning his face, he put his hand behind him, And with affection wondrous sensible He wrung Bassanio’s hand, and so they parted. (36–49) Rather than witness it, the audience are asked here to imagine one friend wringing the other’s hand with ‘affection wondrous sensible’. ‘Affection’ refers to love and feelings of faithfulness; ‘wondrous sensible’ invokes specifically the sense of touch and the emotional sensation of ‘feeling’. Shakespeare depicts a tactile gesture through vivid imagery again. As kinetic beings, we can almost feel our own hands being wrung as we imagine this exchange. But what did this particular gesture intimate? To wring one’s own hands, as we have seen, is an iconic gesture expressing despair, anxiety or fear; it is a gesture that, as Bulwer puts it, sorrow ‘provokes by wringing of the mind, tears, the sad expressions of the eyes; which are produced and caused by the contraction of the spirits of the Brain, which contraction doth strain together the moisture of the Brain constraining them by tears into the eyes; from which compression of the Brain proceeds the HARD WRINGING OF THE HANDS, which is, a Gesture of expression of moisture’.35 Wringing another person’s hands then might not only express but transfer such anxiety and sorrow as well as produce the tears that accompany it. Bulwer’s description reveals the links made possible by humoural theory between the hands, the brain and the liquid manifestations of the passions, evident in Shakespeare’s example of the hand-wringing gesture and the production of tears. The profound sacrifices and feelings that underpin friendship are emblematized here through the description of this hand gesture in The Merchant of Venice. What Salerio describes is no ordinary handclasp between two mates, but a solemn gesture of what Laurie Shannon has identified as ‘sovereign amity’, a term coined by Montaigne to characterize the ideal qualities of friendship in the Renaissance



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period: likeness and sovereignty.36 Bulwer glosses this gesture – ‘TO PRESS HARD AND WRING ANOTHERS HAND’ – by referring to it as a ‘natural insinuation of love, duty, reverence, supplication, peace, and of forgiveness of all injuries’.37 Citing his ancient source, the orator Themistius, Bulwer explains the gesture’s significance: ‘he would have the Hands of others to be laid hold on, and wrung with the fingers; for that, saith he, the Hands put forth a sting or goad, and are many times a convenient spur to future amity’.38 What Shakespeare gives us, then, is a gestural encounter in a narrative report that foregrounds the thematic significance of the sacrifice Antonio is willing to make for his friend; whether or not the amity is mutual is a question for another study. Shakespeare not only provides cues in his texts for the performance of gesture, as we saw in the Nurse and Gertrude’s hand wringing in Chapter 3, but he also creates verbal portraits of gestures or gestural exchanges in narrative sequences in the plays which can be equally illuminating about how actors gestured on stage. But, in this section, it is useful to pause upon specific instances of gestural narratio in Shakespeare; these are passages of text in which gestures are given as past bodily events through a character’s recollection and report. Crucially, gestures embedded in narrative function in three ways: they tell us something about how bodies interacted and socialized through hands and the sense of touch in early modern England; they are vehicles that advance the plot; most importantly, they represent passionate exchanges and signify broader concerns in the plays in which they occur. David Bevington tantalizingly notes that Shakespeare sometimes chooses ‘to convey the impact of a scene through reporting the language of gesture’, but he does not take this argument much further other than to suggest generally that the gestures of Shakespeare’s characters are expressed as eloquently as are their speeches.39 As I have shown, Bulwer observed that to interpret gesture one must study the hand and its most important function: communication. God did

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not endow humans with hands merely to conduct manual labour. Hands were, in Bulwer’s estimation, sophisticated tools of communication designed for the subtleties of human discourse. We see the gestural report or narratio quite often in Shakespeare, and one of its identifying features is that it can recount an emotionally harrowing or deeply passionate gestural encounter between two people. For example, in 5.2 of The Winter’s Tale, the third Gentleman or Steward (depending on the edition) reports the reunion between Leontes and his daughter Perdita, who have been separated for 16 years, Perdita having been presumed dead: There might you have beheld one joy crown another, so and in such manner that it seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands, with countenance of such distraction that they were to be known by garment, not by favour. Our king being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter … (42–9) This touching reunion is steeped in passionate language invoking motion and movement. The pair ‘waded in tears’, expressed their joy by ‘holding up of hands’, which we know was a gesture of joy. Spectators seeing the play for the first time are unaware, of course, that they will indeed get to see a happy reunion between Leontes and Hermione, his wife, whom he also thought was dead. But the question arises as to why we are not permitted to witness this reunion as well. Why are such emotional disclosures found within reconstructions of events that have taken place off stage? David Bevington argues that ‘visual language poses for Shakespeare […] a difficulty of interpretation. How are we to read its signals and not be misled?’40 Bevington raises an important question. One of the reasons Shakespeare is invested in the detailed description of gestures is because the movement of the hands formed part of the rich vocabulary of social and



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interpersonal exchange, which society attempted to codify. This codification is something Shakespeare challenges time and again. As it happens, hands can be as ambiguous as faces. While on the one hand there was a well-established system of signs and gestures that were explicitly readable during the Middle Ages and early modern period, on the other hand, people increasingly mistrusted the outward signs of the body in part because of the prescriptive books on manners attempting to reform and regulate the body’s communicative language thereby ascribing to it an artificiality. Manners, as we have seen in the humourous exchange about hand-kissing in As You Like It,41 were becoming over-codified, empty rituals. Equally, non-verbal language in early modern performance can be infinitely varied, manipulable by playwright and actor and open to subjective interpretation and misinterpretation by spectators. What reported gestures provide is an exploration of one character’s interpretation of a gesture or series of gestures and the potential number of emotional meanings beneath them. Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow observes that speech ‘conforms to a codified, recognizable system; gesture does not’.42 Gestures are ‘free to vary on dimensions of space, time, form, trajectory, and so on, and can present meaning complexes without undergoing’ the same type of ‘segmentation or linearization’ as speech does.43 The implications of this for those hand movements embedded in narrative is that the meaning of these gestures is inherently unstable. All we have to go on is what the witness tells us took place at some point in the drama, but that exists now only as phantom gestures reproduced by memory and narrative. In the example from The Merchant of Venice, the third-party witness of the exchange between Antonio and Bassanio is emphatic about the emotional impact the hand-wringing seemed to have on each friend; Antonio’s later willingness to give up his life for his friend bears out this eyewitness account. But we cannot know each time we read or hear about a gesture that has taken place offstage, just how accurate or truthful the chronicle

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is. In 2.1 of Julius Caesar, we encounter an example of Portia reporting a series of gestures, but misinterpreting their meaning, having been directly involved in and impacted by the exchange. Portia contends with Brutus about his recent erratic behaviour. Providing a running catalogue of the gestures she witnesses, Portia conveys to her husband the devastating effects of his seemingly hostile body language: Y’have ungently, Brutus, Stole from my bed: and yesternight at supper You suddenly arose, and walked about, Musing, and sighing, with your arms across; And when I asked you what the matter was You stared upon me with ungentle looks. I urged you further: then you scratched your head And too impatiently stamped with your foot. Yet I insisted, yet you answered not But with an angry wafture of your hand Gave sign for me to leave you. So I did, Fearing to strengthen that impatience Which seemed too much enkindled, and withal Hoping it was but an effect of humour, Which sometime hath his hour with every man. (236–50) From ‘ungentle’ looking and scratching of the head and impatient foot stamping to angry ‘waftures’ of the hand, Brutus projects outwardly through non-verbal language the anxieties that attend his thoughts. In performance, the actor playing Portia may have chosen to enact the gestures while she annotated them, but we cannot know this; it is now a fascinating choice for modern actors to make. Nonetheless, Shakespeare intended for his audience to hear about these gestures and to imagine them cognitively. Two things of note are happening in this moment: one, we the audience have more knowledge than Portia as to the reasons why



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Brutus’s body language is so agitated; she does not misread agitation, but she does misconstrue the reasons for it as she demonstrates the traumatic effects that interpersonal gestures of this kind can have. Second, it is in the gestural narratio where we are able to access the true impact and emotional strain of Brutus’s dilemma. Shakespeare has Portia narrate a few iconic gestures, again, in combination with more vague ones that build gestural silences or breaches into the narrative. Bulwer tells us that scratching the head is a ‘natural gesture’ of those ‘who are in anguish or trouble of mind: for commonly when we are in doubt, and uncertain what to do, we musing SCRATCH OUR HEAD’.44 Bulwer’s classification of this gesture suggests it was an iconic gesture, one with immediate legibility, even if it is naturally produced by the emotion of doubt. But this gesture is combined in Portia’s list with the more vague arms waving ‘across’, where perhaps we are meant to imagine Brutus speaking to himself, gesticulating wildly. He then angrily waves toward Portia in a dismissive gesture, which compels her to take Brutus’s mood into herself. Again, we see the expressive movements of the hand acting as transmitters of emotion producing a form of gestural or emotional contagion. This ‘contagion’ is evident in another Shakespearean couple as we hear about a gestural encounter that has an iconographic context that forces us to reconsider the wider importance of such moments to more than just the advancement of plot.

‘He took me by the wrist’ In The Passions of the Minde, Thomas Wright explains that ‘the gesture of the body may be reduced unto these head[ing]s: motions of the eyes, pronunciation, managing of the hands and body, [and] manner of going’.45 If we pay close attention to the outer surface of the body, he argues, we are a step closer to understanding the internal gesticulations of the heart. The

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notion that gestures manifest thoughts and emotions crops up time and again in medieval and early modern psychological theory. What Bulwer and earlier theorists of the period repeatedly offer is a way of perceiving the movements of the body as an unfolding of the self: ‘there riseth no passion in the soule,’ observes Nicholas Coeffeteau in 1621, ‘which leaveth not some visible trace of her agitation upon the body of man’.46 Given the relationship between the emotions and their ‘visible traces upon the body’, we might ask how thought, emotion and gesture form a crucial dialectic in narrative contexts. How can a ‘reader’ or an auditor experience gestures physically or empathize with them? Bruce Smith suggests there is an inherent tactility in narrative and has discussed, specifically, how verbal descriptions of torture, for example, may impact upon the hearer or reader in some physical way, such as a shudder or goose bumps: [w]e read, silently usually, verbal cues on the page that conjure up richly stocked visual worlds in our imagination. The sequence of events shapes up as verbal cue → visual image → tactile image → shudder.47 When it comes to gestures embedded in narrative, the iconicity of a gesture can also mobilize not only emotions, but perhaps too, the physical memory or sensation of a gesture. To close this chapter I want to explore an example from Hamlet and trace more fully its correspondences in the visual representations of the same gesture. In Shakespeare’s gestural narratio we encounter the concept of gesture as reflecting thought ambiguously since it can invoke a rather vast and complex set of meanings simultaneously. Particularly when we consider a gesture’s iconographic history, it has the capacity to invoke so many different meanings that it makes us question our previously held views of such moments in the plays. In 2.1 Ophelia describes an incident that took place while she was sewing in her closet; she is shockingly interrupted by Hamlet’s intrusion:



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with his doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, Ungartered and down-gyved to his ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors, he comes before me. (75–81) Hamlet’s un-princely appearance, his pallid complexion and facial expression harrow her to begin with, but it is the series of tactile hand gestures that seems to have the most traumatic effect on her: He took me by the wrist and held me hard, Then goes he to the length of all his arm And with his other hand thus o’er his brow He falls to such perusal of my face As ’a would draw it. Long stayed he so; At last, a little shaking of mine arm And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He raised a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. That done, he lets me go And with his head over his shoulder turned He seemed to find his way without his eyes (For out o’ doors he went without their helps) And to the last bended their light on me. (85–97) What Ophelia describes to her father is a kind of dumb show. The gestures Ophelia catalogues here are odd, disturbing and abusive. Critics tend to read this moment as Hamlet’s way of conveying his apparent madness to Ophelia or expressing his grief, knowing full well she will report it. A glance at Jacques Ferrand’s pathology of the symptoms of love melancholy

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might explain why Polonius thinks love is the root cause of Hamlet’s odd behaviour: ‘[t]here is besides, no order of equality at all in their Gesture, Motions, or Actions: and they are perpetually sighing’.48 But whatever the cause, of central importance is what the gestures themselves convey and transmit to Ophelia and how this exchange affects her. If we were to consider for a moment the argument that Hamlet’s gestural display is an elaborate attempt to ‘tell’ Ophelia about his encounter with the ghost, perhaps it is arguable that he relies upon Ophelia’s ‘kinesic intelligence’ to read his body language and infer the truth about his encounter with his father and the effects it had on him emotionally; perhaps it is his attempt to seek empathy.49 ‘Kinesic intelligence’, defined by Ellen Spolsky, refers to ‘our human capacity to discern and interpret body movements, body postures, gestures, and facial expressions in real situations as well as in our reception of visual art’.50 Spolsky suggests that this ‘“intelligence” stems from “our sense of the relationship of parts of the human body to the whole, and of the patterns of bodily tension and relaxation as they are related to movement”’.51 We might ask to what extent Shakespeare would have depended upon the ‘kinesic intelligence’ of his audience when he has his characters communicate an elaborate set of gestures aurally through narrative as well as when they are performed on stage. Regardless of whether or not we hear a gesture, see it performed or view a representation of one in art, we rely on our own motor memory of gestures, particularly tactile ones, as we come to understand or interpret their meanings in artistic contexts. Bolens argues that ‘gesture analysis in literature’ forces us to ‘take into account narrativity as a decisive parameter’.52 When it comes to Shakespeare’s dramatic examples, however, the first question we have to ask is why we are only allowed to hear or read about a gestural encounter, particularly one so infused with emotion. While it is generally accepted that some emotions, too deeply felt, are inexpressible, do we have to consider the prospect that certain emotions or emotional



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exchanges are un-performable? But how can this be the case if Shakespeare made his audiences watch the blood-curdling assault upon Gloucester’s eyes and Lear’s lamentations over Cordelia’s lifeless body? Does this mean then that gestural narratio is merely an expedient device to convey aspects of the plot? In considering these questions and this passage from Hamlet, I want to isolate the line – ‘he took me by the wrist’ – to propose rather that this gestural moment has an important iconic function that has resonances beyond the dramatic text but that sheds a broader light upon it. This particular gesture narrated in Hamlet is deliberately provocative in the way it contributes to Ophelia’s emotional trauma and its wider significance to the play. The cultural meanings it evokes through its ubiquitous visual correspondences within religious and secular art give us insight into the tragic underbelly of this encounter. It is a physiological fact that if the wrist is held hard, the hand is rendered immobile. Most wrist grasps would occur through the ‘power grip’ rather than the hand’s ‘precision grip’. The ‘power grip’, according to John Napier, deploys the fingers and the palm in the grip, while the ‘precision grip’ uses only the fingers.53 It is hardly surprising then, as Corinne Schleif suggests, that this gesture (impedio) ‘generally denoted a relationship in which a weaker person was subjugated to, or dependent upon a stronger person’.54 A brief survey of some examples reveals that, at its most basic, it was conceived of as a gesture of intervention and dominance. Numerous illustrations of the dans macabre, such as Hans Holbein’s sequence of woodcuts (1526) (see Fig. 17) or the Abbot and Bailiff examples from Las Danse macabre (Paris, 1486) or even the Heidelberg block book, one of the oldest versions of the danse macabre show Death sometimes rather cheerfully grasping his victims by the wrist. In such instances the wrist-grasp demonstrates a hierarchical relationship that highlights the helplessness or sense of incapacitation humankind might experience when faced with the overpowering effect of Death as a looming presence.

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FIGURE 17  ‘The Old Man’, Danse Macabre (1526), Hans Holbein (British Museum)



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FIGURE 18 Harrowing of Hell (1240), Arundel, © The British Library Board 157f11

The gesture occurs also in depictions of the harrowing of hell and Christ’s descent into limbo where Christ is seen grasping the wrists of Adam and Eve or sinners (See Figs 18 and 19). In this context, it symbolizes and celebrates Christ’s intervention in the salvation of mankind, while keeping in view the subordinate position of humans in relation to the divine.55 This particular tradition in which the gesture is common raises questions about Ophelia’s suggestion that Hamlet looks as if he was ‘loosed out of hell’. The divine hand, that sacred instrument, shows up in graphic representations as a determining as well as a punitive presence. Conversely, depictions of the last judgement show a range of gestures of despair, torture and self-injury and occasionally we glimpse a demon or Satan gripping a sinner by the wrist as in one of the winged demons in Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgement

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FIGURE 19  Christ’s Descent into Limbo (?), Martin Schongauer (Musee d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France)

(1504). It was a gesture that, again depending upon context, had meanings ranging from protection to violent intentions: protection, because there are a few paintings and woodcuts that show parents, mostly mothers, grasping their children by the wrist. The gesture appears in other religiously themed works, such as Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1598) where we see a highly theatrical rendering of the saint grasped aggressively by the wrist, signalling the association between martyrdom and divine intercession. What is even more disturbing is just how often this gesture is seen in art symbolizing female subordination. This type of depiction appears in religious iconography, found most often within pictorial narratives of the creation, the Fall and Expulsion. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle’s study



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on touch provides examples of the creation of Eve, noting that at times God holds her by the wrist or pulls her from Adam’s side by her wrist.56 The gesture establishes, in such contexts, woman’s subjectivity in light of divine creation and reinforces her subordinate position on earth; the immobilization of the hand that this gesture emblematizes may even invoke prophetically for Eve the admonition not to touch the forbidden fruit. It is a disabling grasp that recalls the biblical link between the creation of woman and the fall of mankind, generated by the touching hand. Another context for this grasp is even more unsettling when we consider Ophelia’s urgent and emotional response to her gestural encounter with Hamlet. In her analysis of medieval rape imagery, Diane Wolfthal identifies common visual tropes designed to signal that a rape was either about to occur or had already taken place. There are numerous examples from medieval scriptural iconography that show the wrist grasp as such a trope, such as the rape of Dinah from the Pamplona Bible, or the story of the Levite’s concubine in The Book of Judges, depicted in the Morgan Bible where the host presents the concubine, grasping her wrist, to a gang of rapists. Disturbingly it occurs again in a sixteenth-century German album amicorum where Lucrece is attempting to prevent her own rape by grasping Tarquin’s wrist, while hers is forcefully grasped by his hand. Wolfthal argues that this gesture is so often ‘employed as a sign of sexual attack’ that it became a metonym or shorthand visual signal of the act of rape itself,57 and this seems to be the case throughout the early modern period, as Giovanni Domenico Cerrini’s mid-seventeenth-century depiction of the rape of Tamar in Amnon and Tamar and Philip van Santvoort’s even later painting The Rape of Tamar by Amnon (1718) suggest.58 Hamlet’s use of this gesture does not necessarily signal that he represents Death, God, Christ or is a rapist; nor is Ophelia necessarily a martyr in the strictest sense. Yet the rich and complicated history of this gesture suggests all of these meanings somehow constellate around this description, or

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flash into view as Ophelia says ‘He took me by the wrist’. What is clear is that by using this gesture, Hamlet deliberately inflicts or transfers his grief and perhaps even pain upon Ophelia. The highest volume of pins in an early modern outfit were more often than not concentrated around the neck to hold a ruff in place or the wrists to attach cuffs to the sleeves, on male as well as female clothing. To take someone by the wrist and hold them hard would arguably be painful. Hamlet’s gesture is disturbing for all of these reasons. In King John (4.2) Shakespeare gives us another version of it in a narrative context to convey the grief experienced when listeners hear about Arthur’s death: And he that speaks doth gripe the hearer’s wrist, Whilst he that hears makes fearful action, With wrinkled brows, with nods, with rolling eyes. (190–2) The speaker, Hubert de Burgh, implies that the emotional weight of the subject is transferred to the listener (who gestures in response) through the physical image of a wrist grasp. It is a highly interpersonal, connective gesture and an emotional conduit. What Ophelia does not convey is her own gestural responses to Hamlet’s in the moment the encounter occurred. Rather it is through her later desperate gestures of despair that we are able to witness the impact of Hamlet’s actions to which her tactile encounter with Hamlet seems to have contributed. Gestural exchanges between lovers are ritualistically conventional. Bulwer says that the hand is a central feature upon which the intentions of both lovers are inscribed: ‘lovers’, he remarks, ‘I know not by what amorous instinct, next to the face direct their passionate respects to the Hand of those they love’.59 By intruding Tarquin-like into Ophelia’s closet and gripping her wrist, Hamlet inverts the usual function of the hand in the socially-encoded exchanges between lovers. Ophelia’s narrative report here tells us about



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an extreme intervention that gestures back toward a violently inflected iconographic history. More broadly, this gesture is a metaphor for one of the chief concerns of the play: incapacitation. Hamlet’s delay and his inquisitive displays of anxiety about his delay can be said to be characterized by the image of this gesture. Hamlet’s sense of immobility and Ophelia’s by tactile association is emblematized in the seizure of a wrist.60 What an investigation into the iconographic contexts of Shakespearean gestures can show is that there may be more to a single reference to gesture than a fleeting action of the body. As I suggested earlier, we can make some informed guesses as to what actors did with their hands on stage, but we may also acquire a sense of the visual and emotional impact of theatrical gestures when we hear or read how Shakespeare describes them through the device of narratio. Why are audiences asked only to imagine certain gestural encounters in the plays? Why is it that spectators are not permitted to witness these particular passionate expressions of reunion or the traumatizing exchanges like Ophelia’s with Hamlet? As we have seen, early modern theorists constructed a taxonomy and external portrait of the emotions as they would appear on the body, attempting to develop a standardized gestural vocabulary of the emotions. The Renaissance visual tradition and early modern discourses on the hand contribute to this vocabulary, which, with some ‘kinesic intelligence’, may give us some vivid clues about gesture in early modern performance as well as in narrative poetry, but Shakespeare demonstrates how complex and subject to misinterpretation gestures can be. Noting the iconographic histories of certain gestures complicates their meanings as narrators describe them in poetry and as characters recount gestural exchanges in the plays; these gestures can then be read as decisively complex encounters that express some of the deepest expressions of human experience. It was not just the appearance of gestures of the hand that Shakespeare asks us to consider, but also its tactile function. Writers and painters in the early modern period were actively

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preoccupied in a world of tactility. In the following chapter, we will see how touch was valued as a ‘living sense’ according to Richard Brathwaite, but such a valuation of active tactility was more often than not met with a fear of or anxiety about erotic or contagious touching; 61 these fears permeated satirical and religious discourses, fears that Shakespeare provokes through his expression of what Bruce Smith refers to as Shakespearean ‘fantasies of touch’.62

5 ‘Let lips do what hands do’: Shakespeare’s sense of touch

Anti-theatrical writers were deeply nervous about the tactile assault the sights and sounds of performance could impose upon the bodies, minds and souls of early modern audience members. John Northbrooke illustrates this fear when he warns against the physical and spiritual dangers of attending plays: All such spectacles and shows […] are therefore to be avoided, not only because vices shall not enter our hearts and breasts, but also lest the custom of pleasure should touch us, and convert us thereby both from God and good works.1 He implies that through performance the heart and breast would be penetrated by corruption and vice; the very touches of performance could literally turn people away from God. In this view, theatre has the ability to physically touch its spectators. Stephen Gosson similarly feared that ‘the open corruption’ of the playhouses ‘is a prick in the eyes of them that see it, and a thorn in the sides of the godly when they hear it’.2 Philip Stubbes assumes that those who attend plays

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will learn from the actors how to deploy their own hands in immoral activities: ‘if you will learn to murder, slay, kill, pick, steal, rob, and rove […] you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays’.3 Not only was early modern performance characterized as having the capacity to touch playgoers corrosively, but it could potentially teach people how to use their own hands in criminal and sinful activities. Theatres were places where, in addition to the pricks and stings of drama, actual groping, prickling, stealing hands threatened not just the soul and the body, but the purse as well. Henry Crosse informs his readers that the ‘lewdest persons in the land’ attend theatres, ‘the very scum, rascality, and baggage of the people; thieves, cut-purses, shifters, cozeners’.4 Women in particular were expected to guard themselves from the lascivious touches of young men. Juan Luis Vives required that when a woman is out in public, ‘[l]et her not suffer to be plucked at, or to be touched wantonly’.5 The fear for women in the amphitheatres when packed in with up to 3,000 people was that she would be vulnerable to lusty as well as thieving hands. There seems to have been less anxiety about the press of a crowd in the indoor theatres, but Sir John Harrington’s epigram 36 ‘Of the Lady that lookt well to her borders’ tells a tale about a high-born Lady who was wearing ‘a border of rich Pearle and stone’ who was groped by the ‘dark and privat staires’ of the playhouse; Harrington speaks of hands as intrusive and dangerous agents in the theatre: Two cozening mates, seeing her deckt so trimly, Did place themselves upon the stayres to watch her, And thus laid their plot to cunny-catch her: One should as ’twere by chance strike out the light; While th’other that should stand beneath her, might Attempt (which modestie to suffer lothes) Rudely to thrust his hands under her clothes. That while her hands repeld such grosse disorders, His mate might quickly slip away the borders.6



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The last part of the epigram tells us the Lady used her own hands wisely and held on to the borders of her gown so the thieves could not steal the pearls and rich trimming. Whether or not the story is true, the lewd manner in which the Lady is said to have been accosted speaks directly to the fears about the assaulting touches women were particularly susceptible to in the early modern theatres. These spaces were viewed by some as dangerous places of touch because of the tactility of theatrical language, the haptic threat of the special effects of performance, the tactile crowding and groping hands of its audiences. The anti-theatrical literature is steeped in the anxiety about the sense of touch, revealing a fear of what people might do with their hands as well as how bodies were touched by performance in such a volatile environment. According to the texts that were anxious about the sense of touch, humans cannot always control what touches them, so they must be vigilant and control how and what they touch with their hands. The sense of touch structures and defines our condition of embodiment. So why was something so basic to human existence and experience considered so dangerous? Touching was, after all, essential to religious worship, manual labour, punishment, violence, reproduction, preparing, making and eating food, reading and writing, playing dice, cards and musical instruments; it was of primary importance to all healing professions, to the creation of clothing, architecture, buildings; it was through touch that the beauty regimes of women, chivalric honour, courtesy and love were enabled and expressed. The metaphorical language of touch was even more prevalent, though it was far less abstract than it is today: ‘He is touched / To th’noble heart’ says Paulina about Leontes when he discovers Mamilius is dead (The Winter’s Tale, 3.2.218–19). He is moved emotionally; her words seem literally to strike into his heart. Benedick says of Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing: ‘She speaks poniards, and every word stabs’ (2.1.226). Such language suggests that the way the body experiences the world and emotions was primarily through the passive form of the tactile sense.

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What I am interested in here is how the sense of touch is mediated through the image of hands in Shakespearean tragedy. According to phenomenonologist Merleau-Ponty, using the hand to feel something is ‘an action of touching and being touched’; this idea provides a useful framework for a consideration of touch as both active and passive.7 This chapter, therefore, explains the theoretical and historical context for the positive and negative ideas about the sense of touch in early modern England and considers more closely the extent to which tactility underpins the experience of love and desire in Romeo and Juliet and Othello. In the former play, one way the lovers’ union is figured is through an emphasis upon the role of touch and touching hands in the generation of profound affection. However, in Othello, sensing hands and the objects associated with them become susceptible to scrutiny and inscription, conveyed through tactile language that deliberately perverts the meaning and foundations of love. Bruce Smith argues that Shakespeare’s works ‘are rife with fantasies of touch’; this chapter explores what compels such fantasies and how they are represented through the tropes and images of hands in two tragedies about the destruction of wedded bliss.8

Touch in early modern England Although some critics contend that the way to think about tactility in this period is to remember that there is no single organ that can be identified solely with the sense of touch, the hand, I would argue, can be identified as the part most prominently associated with touch and considered its most active performer. The academic play, Lingua, or, The combat of the tongue, and the five senses for superiority a pleasant comedy (1607), by Thomas Tomkis, stages an allegorical competition between the five senses. Lingua (the personification of language/the tongue) asserts her authority by challenging



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them to prove which one is superior. When it comes time for Tactus to assert his dignity, he does so by extolling the power and dignity of the hand as an active agent of touch: The instrument of instruments, the hand, Courtesies index, Chamberlain to Nature, The body’s Soldier, and mouth’s Caterer, Psyches great Secretary, the dumb’s eloquence, The blindman’s Candle, and his forehead’s Buckler, The minister of wrath, and friendships sign, This is my instrument: nevertheless my power Extends itself, far as our Queen commands, Through all the parts and climes of Microcosm. I am the root of life, spreading my virtue By sinews that extend from head to foot, To every living part. For as a subtle Spider closely sitting, In centre of her web that spreadeth round: If the least Fly but touch the smallest thread, She feels it instantly; so doth myself (4.6.35–49)9 Tomkis invokes the Galenic notion that the hand is the ‘instrument of instruments’. It is also the ‘body’s soldier’, able to perform violence as aptly as it does the gestures of amity. It is the blind man’s ‘candle’, able to see in the dark using the sense of touch. The last part of the speech focuses on the sensing operation of tactility, the ability to feel, and refers to the most ubiquitous zoological symbol for touch, the spider. Antony Munday, in his anti-theatrical diatribe, makes allegorical associations between theatrical performance and tactility through the image of actors as spiders: ‘the webs are so subtly spun that there is no man that is once within them that can avoid them without anger’.10 What Tactus emphasizes, then, are the active properties of the hand as well as the essential quality of the sense of touch to life itself. When

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Richard Brathwaite referred to tactility as the ‘living sense’, he was also repeating the Aristotelian principle that the animal without the sense of touch is dead or a stone. We hear this idea in Lingua, when Tactus declares, ‘For though one hear, and see: and smell: and taste/ If he wants touch, he is counted but a block?’(4.2.70–1).The capacity of the body to register feeling is fundamentally a sign of its vitality; thus, ‘to lose one’s sense of touch, as Aristotle would write, is to lose not just the faculty of touch, but life itself’.11 Sir John Davies’ A work for none but Angels & Men that is able to look into and to know ourselves (1653) includes an image of a woman with a bird pecking at her hand, under which reads the inscription: ‘When Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling’s past: Feeling (as long as life remains) doth last’.12 In Lingua, by privileging the hand in the first seven lines, Tactus distinguishes between the active sense of touch, the one that can probe, grasp and verify the world, and the passive sense of touch that enables us to feel, be affected and incorporate phenomena into our bodies. In spite of the explicit relationship between the hand and touch, sensory theorists, beginning with Aristotle, refer to the sense as the most elusive of all of them, the unmediated sense, arguing that there is no single organ through which touch could be experienced. As Helkiah Crooke also noted, ‘and for the touch, through all the skin, yes especially that of the hand […] Touching is diffused through all the body’.13 But this is only the case in its passive form. The positive writing about the hand included arguments by those who reasoned humans were noble because they had the sense of touch. In the seventeenth-century treatise The Dignitie of Man, the author explains that the uses of the hands are ‘[t]o touch, to take hold, and to defend’.14 Early modern anatomists, as discussed in Chapter 1, demonstrated that touch was essential to their profession and therefore to the discovery of human physiology and nature; medical science and the technologies of dissection afforded a privileging of tactility and of the hand that pushed against the moralistic vilification of this ‘living sense’. But what is it that makes the sense of



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touch so powerful? As Elizabeth Harvey observes, Helkiah Crooke insisted ‘that all the other sensory faculties derive their seemingly distinct abilities from touch, and whereas the other senses are “restrained” within small organs within the brain, touch is “diffused through the whole body” (648). He asserts that touch fundamentally shapes human experience’. Throughout his treatise, Crooke praises the hand, links it to reason, arguing that ‘“Reason, is the hand of the understanding, Speech the hand of Reason, and the Hand it selfe, is the hand of Speech”(10)’.15 While this affirmation of touch is encouraging, it is still only the male hand that is positively reinforced as active. Crooke noted the importance of the tactile sense in its passive form, its dispersal throughout the body and its ability to intervene in or activate the other senses. Synaesthesia was an important feature of the epistemology of sense perception in this period. Although the Platonic theory of vision as extramissive was being called into question by the seventeenth century, sight was nonetheless viewed as a tactile, projectile form of sensing, as we saw in the imagery of Venus and Adonis.16 The haptic function of sight might be represented pictorially as a hand with a seeing eye in the palm, such as in Alciati’s emblem (see Fig. 20).17 This synaesthetic concept of tactile vision worked both ways. In addition to eyes producing tactile phenomena, the hand could also use its fingers and its palm to see; as Tactus puts it in Tomkis’s play, the hand is ‘the blindman’s candle’ that helps identify objects and people. Nowhere is this notion of hapticity made more painfully explicit in Shakespeare than in Gloucester’s lament: ‘O dear son Edgar… / Might I but live to see thee in my touch, / I’d say I had eyes again’ (King Lear, 4.1.23–5). Bruce Smith’s reading of tactility in King Lear suggests that Gloucester’s pun on seeing ‘“feelingly” insinuates touch as the one dependable medium in a world where appearances have deceived, where sight and sound have disjoined, where words have been used as physical weapons’.18 Gloucester’s predicament calls to mind Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera’s series of paintings

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FIGURE 20  Emblem XVI (?), Andrea Alciato (Glasgow University)

on the five senses. His Sense of Touch (1615) shows a blind man feeling the face of the head of a sculpture, incorporating into his depiction of the sense the artistic debate about the pre-eminence of painting versus sculpture. The image of this and of Gloucester feeling the face of his son demonstrates how the act of touch has an essential role to play in the identification of truth.19 In 1543, the physician Alessandro Benedetti provides a breakdown of how the brain was understood to sort all of this sensory data:



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[i]n these cavities are contained the faculties of the most noble senses from which is drawn the strength of reasoning, judgment and understanding; there the so-called common sense collects the species of sensitive things; there are formed the most varied images and this is where the senses of sight, hearing, smell and the other senses converge through the nerves or the membranes.20 The sensory modalities each work in tandem with the common sense, where information gathered through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin mingle together. The human sensory network, in the early modern imagination, therefore, is a synaesthetic system, as I have been suggesting, where more than one sense worked together to understand the world. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman refer to this early modern psychological system as a ‘regulated chain of interactions linking sensations received from without to the so-called internal senses of common sense, imagination, memory’.21 But crucially, the sense of touch underpinned the entire system; as Aristotle put it: ‘without the sense of touch none of the other senses is present, but touch can be present without the others’ (II.3).22 According to Smith, ‘the radiant quality of light, its movement through the air, is felt in one’s eyes, even perhaps on one’s skin’.23 In the metaphorical world of early modern conceptions of touch, then, all phenomena seem to have hands and human bodies can be touched, groped and tickled by the material world, including air and light. While the sense of touch was understood to provide access to human intimacy, it was also associated with corporeality, lust, gluttony, violence, murder, as some of the anti-theatrical writers I cited earlier insinuate in their damnation of plays and theatre going. In addition to acknowledging the active and passive forms of touch, cultural theorists and historians who have written about the senses have demonstrated that the senses were placed into distinct hierarchies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, more often than not with sight as the highest and most valued sense, followed by hearing and smell, with taste

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and touch vying for bottom place. But early modern sensory theorists contradicted each other and there are various factors and contexts to consider, such as the pre-Reformation valuation of sight and the post-Reformation valuation of hearing.24 The sense of touch was collectively represented as morally ambiguous and often came in fifth because it was associated primarily with sexual licentiousness and excessive desire. The problem with desire for early modern moralists, though, was that its language was spoken primarily through the ‘baser’ sense. The anxieties about touch, therefore, were couched in the opposition to sensual pleasure, as we saw with the anti-theatrical arguments against the tactile force of performance. As such, the sense of touch was viewed as a conduit for communicable and venereal disease. Wrongful touching, in particular, could lead to the materialization of sinful corruption and thereafter to an eternity filled with despair and pain, as the body perpetually undergoes the punitive touches of hellfire. The pathological fear of illness or disease to which the senses made one vulnerable is evident in the range of disease pamphlets, some of which deployed the idiom of touch: contagion, for example, implies the very sense is at its root. The humoural body was one in flux, according to Galenic theory, unstable and the skin’s porous quality made the body and the soul vulnerable to penetrative vapours and contamination. Hence the anxious concerns about where people put their hands, how they conducted them in polite society and the expectations pertaining to their hygiene and appearance was not purely due to a concern about the social gesturing body, but also about the tactile, contagious one. Further anxieties about touch were centred upon the female hand. As I have been suggesting in this book, female hands could provoke desire but also fear. As we saw in Chapter 2, the anxieties about female touches is at the heart of the fear of witchcraft and diabolism in this period. Hence, it was expected that, like gesturing, the experience of touching for women should primarily be passive, unless it is within the context of domestic labour. The opposition to cosmetic beautification, for example, focuses at times on women as vain



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tactile agents in the fashioning and presentation of their own bodies, as is evident in John Taylor’s observation: Some practice everyday the Painter’s trade, And strive to mend the work that God hath made. But these deceivers are deceived far, With falsely striving to amend they mar: With devilish dawbing, plast’ring they do spread, Deforming so themselves with white and red25 Taylor’s purpose is to ridicule the very ability of women to perform a skill that was deemed to be the domain of men: ‘the Painter’s trade’. By attempting to use their hands actively to beautify their own complexions, women demonstrate the folly of appropriating the paintbrush and reveal their supposed inadequacies as creative, self-determining agents. But such criticism was not limited to women at the dressing table. Sujata Iyengar has identified concerns in this period about female participation in the medical sphere too. She argues that such anxieties resulted in a series of prohibitions against female doctors and surgeons. Eventually, the College of Physicians disallowed women ‘to wield instruments’. This ‘ban on instruments seems to suggest a cultural fantasy about surrogacy or supplementarity, an anxiety that, given mechanical means or agents, women would supplant men in professional and sexual life’.26 The hands-on nature of surgery and medicine was a potent concern when it came to female practitioners. Whether it is beautifying, the practice of midwifery, medicine or the wide range of other seemingly appropriative activities they might want to engage in, women should not be granted such an active, tactile participation in their social and cultural worlds. One method of undermining female tactility was by emphasizing their lack of manual skill, encapsulated in Taylor’s judgement: ‘falsely striving to amend they mar’. Female tactility was particularly dangerous and, as we will see, it is partly this moral anxiety that fuels Iago’s own anti-tactile rhetoric and enables him to convince Othello that his wife has been unfaithful.

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Touch was blamed for sin, lust and sensuality; as Richard Brathwaite put it, ‘many abuse it, who belulled with the lethargy of sin and security, never turn their eye to a serious contemplation of the supreme glory, or a consideration of their own frailty’.27 The Bible is particularly anxious to regulate different forms of contact: the ‘whole of Leviticus is in fact replete with interdictions against touching’.28 In the Book of Genesis, the admonition to Adam and Eve reads: ‘But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die’ (Gen. 3.3).29 The enduring image of what prompted the Fall of mankind is not only one of a woman tasting and consuming, but of a female hand reaching and touching the forbidden. As Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle observes, ‘art consistently depicted the primordial fault as touching, rather than tasting, the fruit’.30 Illustrations of the sense of touch are often, in the biblical context, negative depictions of the sense. However, the practice of illustrating the five senses, dating back to the Middle Ages as Carl Nordenfalk has shown, tends to incorporate the positive as well as negative connotations of each sense.31 A popular subject among Italian, Dutch and English painters and engravers, the senses are allegorized through certain animals, objects and activities; touch is very often personified as a woman, or depicted as a canoodling couple. Emblematic sequences of the five senses by artists like Cornelis Cort (1561), Hendrick Goltzius (1578), George Pencz, (1544), Crispijn de Passe (1600), Pieter de Jong after Martin de Vos or George Glover (c. 1630), to name just a few, represented ‘touch’ or ‘Tactus’ through common allegorical tropes: a spider and web, a bitten finger, sharp objects, a tortoise (because its hard shell invokes the sense of touch), a spinning wheel, an erotic embrace between a man and half-naked woman, as we see in ‘Tactus’ by Willem van de Passe after Crispijn de Passe the Elder (1615–25) (see Fig. 21) or in ‘Touch’, made by Jan Saenredam, after Hendrick Goltzius (1595) (see Fig. 22). In the Saenredam version, the zoological trope is a tortoise and



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FIGURE 21  Tactus (1615–25), William van de Passe (after Crispijn de Passe the Elder) (British Museum)

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FIGURE 22  Touch (1595), Jan Saenredam (British Museum)



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all of the elements of the engraving invoke tactility through the visual depiction of textures, such as the drapery in the curtains, the cushion, its tassel, the lacing and embossing of the textiles. The outline of the bodies, even the hairstyle and jewellery of the female figure, invite the viewer to long to touch. The tactile quality of the process of engraving, the textural surface of the finished product, suggests it is the perfect medium through which to appeal to what Mark Paterson refers to as our ‘tactile imagination’.32 What the engraving and others like it demonstrate is Aristotle’s assumption that ‘desire is appetite, passion or wish, all animals have at least one of the senses, namely touch, and for that for which there is perception there is also both pleasure and pain and the pleasant and painful’ (II.3).33 We might ask how the sense of touch might have been harnessed by poets to extol the virtues of the loving embrace?

‘Love’s own hand’ Carla Mazzio observes that, ‘[l]overs can touch heatedly, softly, blindly, roughly, they can touch each other’s clothes, gloves, and jewels, they can devour each other, and break each other’s hearts’.34 As such, the female hand becomes an important site of erotic fantasy precisely because it could be taken as a metonym for the entire body due to its conspicuousness, attractiveness and, most enticingly, its texture. The palm of the hand, as I have already suggested, was considered one of the most intimate places on the body. It was on the ‘inside of the hand’ where the cognitive and emotional character of a person could be read and felt.35 John Bulwer wrote that some physicians think ‘that there is in the Hand a certain secret and hidden virtue, and a convenient force or philter to procure affection’.36 Of course, the hand through gestures is capable of ‘procuring affection’ and moving or drawing forth emotional responses. But the tactile object, the hand itself, was discussed in the early modern period as having the capacity to inspire

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love and desire not just because of the way it looked but also because of how it felt. In Sonnet 128, Shakespeare creates an intimate picture of the desirability of the hand, by objectifying the mistress’s fingers as they play the virginals, locating the source of her erotic appeal in her musical touches: How oft when thou, my music, music play’st Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway’st The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap, To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap, At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand? To be so tickled they would change their state And situation with those dancing chips, O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait, Making dead wood more blessed than living lips. Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss. The speaker in this sonnet envies the musical instrument the mistress is playing or ‘tickling’ with her fingers. He imagines it kissing the ‘tender inward’ of her hand, drawing a close-up image of that quite private part. As she tickles her fingers over the virginals, the speaker then fantasies about becoming the keys or the ‘dancing chips’. The relationship between the musical instrument and the sense of erotic touch draws the reader into the speaker’s sexual fantasy. This coupling of erotic and instrument occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare. He refers a few times to ‘fingers’ or ‘fingering’ in a combined image of playing instruments and sexual touches. Elsewhere we find Shakespeare invoking the racier sense of the word ‘finger’ and the sexual image of fingers strumming or tickling/playing an instrument: ‘Madam, before you touch the instrument / To learn the order of my fingering, / I must begin with rudiments of art’ (The Taming of the Shrew, 3.1.62–5); ‘You are a fair



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viol, and your sense the strings, / Who, finger’d to make man his lawful music, / Would draw heaven down and all the gods to hearken; / But being play’d upon before your time, / Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime’ (Pericles, 1.1.82–6); ‘Come on, tune: if you can penetrate her with your fingering, so: we’ll try with tongue too’ (Cymbeline, 2.3.15–16). Sonnet 128 is an elaborate sexual metaphor, in which the speaker envies the instrument being played. While the mistress’s fingers excite him, he yearns even more for her kiss, a sensually rich journey similar to the one that we witness taking place between Romeo and Juliet in their first meeting. In George Chapman’s poem, Ovid’s Banquet of Sence, the reader follows Ovid through a similar but more fleshed out sensory journey in which his admiration and desire for the beautiful nymph Corinna is expressed through all five of the senses. Getting to see, hear, smell and even taste her through a kiss, the final consummation of his desires would be to touch her with his hands. The poet extols the sense of touch in this erotic context as, King of the King of Senses, Engines of all the engines under heaven, To health, and life, defence of all defences, Bounty by which our nourishment is given. (107.1–4)37 Here the poet/speaker praises the sense for the same reasons early modern thinkers and Aristotle had praised, or, at least, acknowledged touch for: vitality. He soon addresses his own hand to anticipate the touch of all touches that is to come: Dear Hand, most duly honored in this And therefore worthy to be well employed: Yet know, that all that honor nothing is, Compared with that which now must be enjoyed: ….

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With this one touch, have more than recompense, And therefore feel, with fear and reverence. (108.1–4, 8–9) The poet/speaker continues to eroticize the body of the mistress, raising the levels of anticipation when he finally ‘laid his hand upon her side’, she startles and recoils and Ovid is left with the frustration of his desire, but reformulates it as an impetus for inspiration and creativity, suggesting he will write The Art of Love in honour of the sense of touch. The poem may indeed just be a meditation upon the relationship between sense perception and intellectual knowledge, but its erotic tenor suggests that of all the senses, touch is simultaneously the most necessary for physiological health and philosophical contemplation even if it is deemed the most perilous. Henry Constable’s Sonnet vinti invites us into an extended metaphor where the lover/speaker imagines the mistress’s hand as a ‘cruell bowe’ and her five fingers each an arrow: Sweet hand the sweet, but cruel bow thou art,   from whence at me five ivory arrows fly:   so five wounds at once I wounded lie,   bearing my breast the print of every dart. Saint Frances had the like, yet felt no smart;   where I in living torments never die:   His wounds were in his hands and feet, where I   all these five helpless wounds feel in my hart. Now (as Saint Frances) if a Saint am I,   the bow that shot these shafts a relique is:   I mean the hand, which is the reason why   so many for devotion thee would kiss: And some thy glove kiss, as a thing divine, this arrow’s quiver, and this relic’s shrine. The motif of the speaker’s lament of the mistress’s cruelty is directed at the hands and fingers of Constable’s lady. Her hands



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transform into those of saints, relics to be kissed, suggesting the cold distance between the lovers (relics are, after all, body parts of dead saints). In the last part of the poem the speaker wishes to close the distance between him and his mistress and consummate his desire for her touch. Here the erotic anxiety of mistress worship reveals itself in the poet’s reference to the cruel lady’s glove, her fingers and the wounds these ‘arrows’ puncture into his heart; this imagery fantasizes her hand into an object capable of touching and wounding his body.38 Touching a woman’s palm was a far more intimate and erotic gesture than it is now understood to be. It was an expression of telling intimacy: the palm of the hand is, as we saw in the literature about palm-reading, the place where the inner secrets of a life reside; it is also the part of the hand that has a very different texture to the dorsal or outer surface of the hand, being soft and sweaty or ‘moist’. Adonis’s palm is ‘sweating’ (25) as we saw in Chapter 4, which is indicative of the feminine attributes that the narrator repeatedly ascribes to his beauty and the sensation of his body as Venus touches it. In Shakespeare’s narrative poem, part of Venus’s seduction technique was to entice Adonis to the liquefying union of their palms: ‘My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt, / Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt’ (Venus and Adonis, 143–4). If moist, the palm of the hand could indicate idleness and a sensual appetite. Ben Jonson suggests as much in his court satire, Cynthia’s Revels (1600), performed at the Blackfriars Playhouse by the Children of the Chapel. The play opens with Cupid and Mercury sparring, making phallic jokes about the size of each other’s ‘quiver’, judging it so by the ‘finger’. But Cupid goes on to tease Mercury about his soft palm, suggesting he has never really shot an arrow; his hands testify to a softer life, with the sexual connotation attached: ‘Alas your palms (Jupiter knows) they are as tender as the foot of a foundred Nag, or a Lady’s face new Mercuried; they’ll touch nothing’ (1.1.15–17).39 The textures with which the palm is repeatedly characterized in satirical drama and erotic poetry suggest that it was a potent sexual symbol gesturing

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toward the desire for incorporation or union with a beloved. Sometimes this part of the hand is held up to scrutiny; at other times, it is intimately eroticized. In Shakespeare, a simple touch on the palm could incite pleasure throughout the body and could even imprint love permanently upon the heart.

‘Pilgrims’ hands do touch’: Romeo and Juliet Laurence Perrine noted in 1966 that the internal sonnet Romeo and Juliet compose upon their first meeting is a ‘selfcontained episode’ and ‘metaphorically unified by a single extended metaphor, one in which a pilgrim, or palmer, is worshipping at the shrine of a saint’.40 Hands are objectified in religious worship as they perform their own fantasies of touch in the name of God. After the Reformation in England, the focus upon saints’ hands in medieval worship and iconography transferred to that of the mistress’s hand in poetry and treatises on beauty. The metaphor takes on greater significance when we think about the role of hands and the sense of touch in medieval and Renaissance practices of worship. Matthew Milner observes of pre-Reformation England that, [t]ouch was the fulcrum of traditional sacramentality. Through it Christians were made and passed through the stages of life; Christ was made present; objects sanctified; and people healed and protected by relics, sacramentals, and by the crosses they signed themselves with.41 The efficacy of touch was at the core of pre-Reformation religious worship. Shakespeare’s use of religious imagery in this play is not accidental. The parallels he makes between the position of and emphasis upon hands in Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting and the way in which particular religious rituals compelled hands into active devotion are difficult to dismiss.



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The ‘internal sonnet’ in this scene invokes the mistress-assaint motif typical of Elizabethan love poetry but a motif that Shakespeare has been known to mock in his romantic comedies. In this moment, however, Shakespeare invokes the ritualistic practices of the medieval cult of saints: the hands of saints that were routinely kissed, decorated and worshipped in the shrines of Europe. The votive tradition required, at times, body parts, particularly hands fashioned out of wax, alabaster or gold, to be delivered to shrines and left as offerings. No longer practised in England by the time Shakespeare was writing plays, votive offerings were re-imagined into secular and theatrical contexts and playhouses abounded with the imagery and props that gestured back to some of the religious practices that had been outlawed, as we will see in Chapter 6. Imagining hands as saints or religious relics was indeed an Elizabethan poetic and dramatic practice, but the palm touches between Romeo and Juliet have an added significance in that they express a depth of feeling also associated with the extremity of devotional worship and they occur spontaneously, triggering, at an instant, the feeling of love. Touch, in this play, is elevated as simultaneously spiritual and corporeal, as is evident from the allusions to a religious tradition that provokes ecstatic feelings of devotion. The performance of this moment would have worried anti-theatrical writers such as John Rainolds, who questioned whether or not the dramatization of love and amorous exchanges could deeply touch or infect the actor with the emotion being played: ‘That an effeminate stage player, while he feigneth love, imprinteth wounds of love?’42 Whether or not the actors are infected with love when performing this play, the capacity of the play to touch the spectator and provoke emotion is its enduring quality to this day. Romeo anticipates the effect Juliet will have on him when he first sees her, but like any lover well-versed in the rituals of courtship he immediately fantasizes about touching her hand: ‘The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand / And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand’ (1.5.49–50). Romeo’s anticipation of Juliet’s touch focuses upon the effects

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of her hand. He imagines her touch as reformative; if his ‘rude hand’ can be blessed, there is hope for his mind and heart. Referring to his hand as ‘rude’, Romeo aligns himself with a kind of rustic pilgrim, one who might be unpolished in manners and whose hands would be ‘rough’. When the lovers meet, the audience witnesses what critics for centuries have deemed one of the most moving dramatizations of love at first sight. But given that the theatrical encounter in early modern England was underpinned by tactility and that vision, love and its effects were also couched in the language of touch, we must adjust our thinking about this scene for a moment and suggest Shakespeare presents to us what it means to love at first touch: Romeo If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. Juliet Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this, For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. Romeo Have not saints lips and holy palmers too? Juliet Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. Romeo O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do— They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Juliet Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. Romeo Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. [Kisses her] (Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.92–105)



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FIGURE 23 Romeo and Juliet (James Alexandrou and Lorraine Burroughs) in Romeo and Juliet, Globe Education, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank, Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Bill Buckhurst, (2009) photographer Manuel Harlan

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Romeo is self-effacing about his hand, and therefore himself, calling it ‘unworthiest’ (perhaps even referring to his left hand) in order to build the case that Juliet as a type of saint has the power to reform him. This memorable exchange purposely draws the attention and gaze of the audience towards the space or threshold between the lovers’ bodies where their hands act as intermediaries, embodying more fully the tactile encounter between their eyes (see Fig. 23). The encounter is a dramatization of love at first touch through three stages of tactility as we are brought into the circle of their desire: eyes, palms and lips touching. These stages of touching are important when considering the original performances of this play in the amphitheatre and the anti-theatrical anxiety about the capacity of plays to touch spectators too deeply. Romeo and Juliet was probably performed at the Curtain Theatre in 1597. Although we do not know exactly what it looked like, this amphitheatre was probably configured architecturally much like the Globe Theatre, with a thrust stage, three levels of galleries and an open yard where audiences could stand around the stage. The whole theatre might be charged with a tactile frisson, with groundlings jostling and pressing each other to see the lovers, the language dramatically entering into the ears of the auditors and the actors drawing the eyes of the spectators to their touching hands. Of course, Romeo is ultimately seeking a kiss. But Juliet is bold when she presents her palm, the ‘tender inward’ of her hand, and invites him to touch it with his own. Kissing at court in social contexts on the hands and even on the lips was common practice; however, palm-to-palm touching is a unique gesture, outside of courtly dance, and it is not evident within the books on social decorum/gestures.43 I am not suggesting that their kiss is not the ultimate goal in this moment, but we might consider that Juliet’s assertive invitation to Romeo to touch her palm – ‘And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss’ – means the threshold of intimacy had already been crossed by the time their lips finally meet. This exchange reminds us of the incorporation of selves that Venus sought so desperately



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but failed to achieve through the touches of Adonis’s moist palm; when their palms meet, Romeo and Juliet become one. Is it any wonder then that Romeo is, throughout, preoccupied with the hands of his beloved?

‘White wonder’ Like Chapman’s Ovid, Romeo goes on a sensory journey through love and desire. One way to chart this journey is to account for his preoccupation with hands. He exhibits his particular ‘fantasies of touch’: first, in his longings for Juliet’s reformative touches, next in his desire to transform into Juliet’s (imaginative) glove, then when he chooses to turn his ‘desperate’ hands against his own life. As I have shown, gloves were thought to be synonymous with their owner’s hands and thereby a symbol of male desire, when it came to the gloves of a woman. The poetic precedent for imagining a mistress’s glove is evident in Sonnet LXIII of Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), where the speaker considers a metamorphosis of the kind Jupiter underwent when he took on the shape of a bull to rape Europa, except in this case, Barnes’s speaker fantasizes about becoming his mistress’s gloves: Would I were changed but to my mistress gloves, That those white lovely fingers I might hide, That I might kiss those hands, which mine heart loves (Sonnet LXIII, 5–7)44 This example reminds us of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece in that in their ideal form, female hands, specifically fingers in this passage, were objects of erotic fantasy as well as, paradoxically, symbols of virtue. Romeo’s fantasy of transfiguration into a glove is linked to the theme of touch that

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underpins the couple’s first emblematic union of their palms. He too, like Barnes’s narrator, envies a glove’s pleasurable proximity to his mistress’s cheek: See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek! (2.2.23–5) Romeo imagines becoming the erotic mediator between Juliet’s hand and her cheek; he wants to cover her palm and fingers entirely, and desperately desires the feel of her skin. If the hand is a symbol of a person’s identity, then it is not just her hand, but her entire self that Romeo wants to enfold. There is no physical glove in this scene, only the one Romeo imagines, but glove fantasies enact a lover’s desire for incorporation, and sometimes signal unsanctioned violating touches, as we saw in the previous chapter in the examples from Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Middleton’s The Changeling. Romeo’s preoccupation with the hand as a means of channelling mutual affection seems to build as the play progresses towards its tragic outcome. When the lovers are in Friar Laurence’s cell, Romeo instructs him to ‘close our hands with holy words’ (2.6.6), alluding to the hand-fasting that characterizes marriage ceremonies, but also articulating Romeo’s longing for the permanent security of Juliet’s touch, her palm enclosed within his for all eternity. This notion recalls again Venus’s hopes and reminds us of John Bulwer’s later observation that ‘nature who hath ingeniously thought on many conveniences of expression for the use and benefit of common life, among others, seems to have ordained the Hand to be the general instrument of the mind, and endued it with a courteous appetite of closing with anothers’.45 It is the special capacity of the hand (its shape, muscles, tendons and structure as the artists and anatomists observed) to wrap itself around another’s that enables it to be seen as a conduit of affection and an enduring symbol of union.



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When Romeo is banished he morbidly envies the ‘carrion flies’ who ‘may seize / On the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand’ (3.3.35–6) and steal kisses from her lips while Romeo will be starved of her touches in her death. In the tomb (5.3) Romeo falsely tells Balthasar that he intends to take a ‘precious ring’ (31) from Juliet’s ‘dead finger’ (30), which alludes to the couple’s sexual union, only recently experienced. The coupling of death, sex and identities through the references to hands signifies the desperation that envelops the emotional tone of the rest of the tragedy. In his introduction to the Arden edition of the play, René Weis observes that the ‘Friar calls both Romeo and Juliet “desperate” as, at different times, they each threaten to take their own life in his cell’.46 The Friar tells Romeo ‘Hold thy desperate hand!’ (3.3.107) when the young lover threatens to end his own life. In her desperation, Juliet tells the Friar: ‘God joined my heart and Romeo’s, thou our hands’ (4.1.55); she threatens then to use her hands to take her own life. As we saw in The Rape of Lucrece desperation and despair characterize hands that take violent action against the body. Despair, associated with sin in Christian doctrine, was an important agent in early modern love poetry. As Susan Snyder points out, ‘in the Petrarchan religion of love the woes of the rejected, hopeless lover naturally become colored by the motifs and images of theological despair’.47 Shakespeare’s preoccupation with touching hands is not entirely focused on mocking Elizabethan mistress worship; instead, his use of tactile language highlights how one touch of the hand can produce unfathomable depths of emotion. Fusing the traditions of saint worship and love, the play values tactility for its capacity to induce feeling, to be the medium through which the self is reformed and incorporated with another. Dangerously, the touching hand can also become a desperate hand that performs the despairing gestures associated with self-injury. And Romeo and Juliet’s fantasies of touch are frustrated by the consequences of their civilly unsanctioned union. Although too little too late, their suicides provoke a tactile gesture of union, a different kind

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of incorporation, a gesture signifying the long-awaited amity that comes far too late: ‘O brother Montague, give me thy hand. / This is my daughter’s jointure, for no more / Can I demand’ (5.3.296–8). From the lover’s fantasies of touching, to the brave presentation of their palms, to their intimate, but desperate gestures of self-injury, touch is dignified in this play as an essential pathway to union, despite the sense’s cultural associations with the sins of the flesh.

‘Paddle with the palm’ While in Romeo and Juliet touch is elevated as simultaneously spiritual and corporeal and is endowed with the ability to produce love, in Othello, touching is just filthy. In Othello the sense of touch is presented by its villain as something, like him, that is not to be trusted. Images of passive touching, dirty hands and foul touches are couched in the play’s rhetoric about unbridled sex, beasts, unfaithful women and the diabolical practices of foreigners. This conceptualization of touch is invoked almost immediately through Iago’s disparaging characterization of the sexual relationship between Othello and Desdemona; at Brabantio’s window he shouts, ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe!’(1.1.87–8); ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’ (109–10); ‘your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs’ (114–14).When Shakespeare was writing this play ‘tup’ as a noun referred to a male sheep, and in its verb form, meant two rams butting or knocking into each other’s heads or a ewe ‘admitting the ram’ (copulating); tactility is implicit in these early uses (OED online). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Erasmus may have been the first one to use it to refer to a man and woman copulating in The Praise of Folly (1549); it could have etymological links with the transitive form of the verb ‘to touch’ – to bring the hand or another part of the body into contact with something



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or someone. Either way, this play is concerned with Iago’s perverse fantasies of touch; his febrile imaginings of the roving hands of others form part of the play’s linguistic structure. According to Frank Kermode, ‘Bestial love’ is conceived of ‘as merely an affair of the senses’.48 As such, Iago’s invocation of bestial imagery in this scene is designed deliberately to provoke fear, shame and disgust, while tainting our perception of the couple before we have even met them. Iago’s strategy is worth pausing upon. His language and his imagination can be described as tactile. Using verbs and phrases that consistently invoke the sense of touch while emptying it of its positive connotations, Iago (like the antitheatrical and anti-tactile writers cited earlier) links touching with lust, violence, aggression, gluttony and bestiality. His own admission in 2.1 of spinning a web posits him as the allegorical sensing spider in the play, the one with the most knowledge and whose wispy web entangles the other characters most tragically. The comparison between Othello and beasts is more than racially inflected. Animals were considered inferior to humans for a number of reasons. One reason was because humans had hands, whereas animals did not, as both Aristotle and Galen observed. Constance Classen argues, ‘[t]he hand with its special abilities to grasp and manipulate, was seen as a clear indication of human superiority’.49 Iago then relegates Othello to a sub-human category by associating him with the bestial condition of handlessness. By comparing him to animals, Iago crudely suggests Othello lacks the part of the body that in the early modern period was deemed to be the dignifying feature of humanity. Brabantio, however, counteracts Iago’s rendering of Othello as being without hands when he accuses him of witchcraft, an accusation most often levied at women and that specifically calls for hands to perform demonic touches. Alluding to the contemporary anxieties around the hands and touches of witches and devils, Laura Gowing argues that ‘while witches’ bodies, in their merciless hardness, constituted the exact opposite of the fluid bodies of proper women, their

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corporeal power was also characteristically female. Poking, pinching and plucking were recognizably feminine assaults’.50 Brabantio’s judgement of Othello in 1.2 uses tactile language to levy these charges of effeminacy, thievery and witchcraft against the Moor: O thou foul thief, where hast thou stowed my daughter? Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her, For I’ll refer me to all things of sense, If she in chains of magic were not bound, …. Judge me the world if ’tis not gross in sense That thou hast practiced on her with foul charms, Abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals That weakens motion: I’ll have’t disputed on, ’Tis probable and palpable to thinking. I therefore apprehend and do attach thee For an abuser of the world, a practiser Of arts inhibited and out of warrant. Lay hold upon him; if he do resist Subdue him at his peril! (62–6, 72–81) Brabantio accuses Othello of using bewitching powers and ‘drugs’ that have somehow infected Desdemona’s common ‘sense’ and held it captive. Desdemona has been ‘touched’ by witchcraft and this, according to Brabantio, is ‘gross in sense’ or the only thing that makes sense since there can be no other possible explanation. Moreover, here, the words ‘gross’ and ‘palpable’ are tactile adjectives suggesting something obvious to the touch, tangible, perceptible, apparent or evident. We see this verbal coupling in Richard III also: ‘Who is so gross’, asks the Scrivener, ‘That cannot see this palpable device?’ (3.6.10–11) (emphasis mine). The two words appear together again in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Theseus describes the performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’



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as ‘palpable-gross’ (5.1.353); this phrase gestures toward not only the overly perceptible quality of the amateur dramatic performance Theseus and the other aristocrats observe, but also to the innate ability of plays to push into the body through the senses and stir emotions, a sensation imagined by anti-theatrical writers.51 Brabantio’s suggestion is that Othello has the capacity for touch, but his touches are dangerously corrosive and transformative. As with Romeo and Juliet, with Othello, Shakespeare asks his audience to look upon and think about the palm of the hand, but not to consider love at first touch. Instead, for Iago, palm touches are perverse. In 2.1, when Desdemona arrives in Cyprus, Cassio, the Florentine ‘arithmetician’ loathed by Iago, greets her using a series of formal hand gestures. Again, Shakespeare provides a close-up view of the social doctrine of manners in action while a character/actor annotates them. Iago’s annotations are not entirely to be trusted though; while he describes their gestural exchange, he puts a fairly lewd spin on it for the benefit of the audience: [aside] He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper. With as little a web as this will I ensnare a great fly as Cassio […] it had been better you had not kissed your three fingers so oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in. Very good, well kissed, and excellent courtesy: ’tis so indeed! Yet again, your fingers to your lips? would they were clyster-pipes for your sake! (2.1.167–77) As I have suggested, this type of gestural annotation is typical in Shakespeare as it provides a visual gloss of what the actors being described are actually doing with their hands. However, besides giving us insight into what this moment may reveal about theatrical gesture and the inclusion of identifiable decorous manners into performance, Shakespeare is asking his audience to look at Cassio’s and Desdemona’s hands, or more specifically, his fingers and her palm. What

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might be conventional gestures of taking one by the hand and hand-kissing is read by Iago as illicitly overstepping the mark. Iago may not be entirely wrong here. If Cassio takes Desdemona by the ‘palm’, he is indeed being overly familiar with her. The dorsal part of the hand was the side reserved for kissing and touching in social discourse. The palm, however, was the less obvious part to take. Kissing one’s own fingers, as Cassio does, was considered a socially-acceptable, albeit slightly affected, form of courtesy in early modern culture.52 In Italy, the gesture of kissing the fingertips and tossing the fingers away from the mouth was a gesture expressing delight or wonder. Bulwer observes that when the fore-finger is kissed, it is a natural gesture which ‘hath ever been took for a complemental salutation, and is used by those who adore, worship, give honour, thanks or a fair report’.53 So this gesture seems perfectly innocent, though highly affected; Cassio ‘gives honour’ to Desdemona. But the exchanges between the hands of Cassio and Desdemona continue to haunt Iago when later to Roderigo, he wonders, ‘Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand? Didst not mark that?’ (2.1.253). It is unclear as to what extent Desdemona actually ‘paddles’ Cassio’s palm, but the suggestion of it has indecent connotations. Shakespeare seems to be unique in his use of the word ‘paddling’ to insinuate the activity of the fingers in a lewd or lecherous sense, on a part of someone else’s body, typically the palm. Roderigo acknowledges that he does witness it, but quickly dismisses it as a normal gesture of courtesy. Iago swears (in a common form of oath-taking in Shakespeare) that it is ‘Lechery, by this hand: an index and obscure prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts’ (2.1.254–5). Swearing ‘by his hand’ and punning on index reinforces the gesture he accuses Desdemona and Cassio of performing physically; the actor may choose here to perform the gesture into his own hand in this moment. Early modern lexicons suggest that ‘paddling’ is more commonly understood as something done with a paddle or with hands and feet in a body of water. Why



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then does Shakespeare apply this word to fingers and palms? He creates an image of fingers wading into the skin. We might recall here that palms are referred to in this play and in Venus and Adonis as watery, ‘moist’ or ‘sweaty’ places on the body. In The Winter’s Tale, the same unsavoury connotations of paddling are invoked when Leontes thinks he witnesses this gesture audaciously occurring between his wife, Hermione, and his best friend, Polixines: ‘But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers’ (1.2.115) (emphasis mine). A few lines later, Leontes invokes the erotic metaphor of fingering an instrument: ‘—Still virginalling / Upon his palm?—How now, you wanton calf!’ (125–6). Shakespeare had used the verb in the same sense in Hamlet, when the prince instructs his mother not to let the ‘bloat King’ ‘Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse / And let him for a pair of reechy kisses, / Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers’ (3.4.181–3) (emphasis mine).54 In this reference, the palm is no longer the focus, but the unseemly or ‘damned’ fingers of the ‘bloat King’ carry the same crude suggestion as palm paddling. In each use of ‘paddling’ the fingers are rudely touching a body that it should not be touching, a body that is somehow legally or spiritually unsanctioned for such handling. This notion of unsanctioned touching is reinforced in The Winter’s Tale, when Camillo tells Polixines that Leontes thinks ‘you have touched his queen / Forbiddenly’ (1.2.412–13). In Othello, Iago’s rhetorical strategy is to isolate the hands of his victims and make their courteous hand touching something licentious or filthy so he can manipulate his audiences [the emphasis here on the root ‘manus’]. Curiously, having incorporated Iago’s misogynous rhetoric, Othello reads Desdemona’s; when he takes her by the hand in 3.4, he notes that it is ‘moist’, and, argues fruitfulness and liberal heart: Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires A sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer, Much castigation, exercise devout,

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For here’s a young and sweating devil, here, That commonly rebels. ’Tis a good hand, A frank one. (38–44) Again, as in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare offers an example of palm reading as a culturally-distant practice, but unfortunately, the chiromancer here has been infected by Iago’s anti-tactile language and reads the ‘moisture’ in the palm as a sign of Desdemona’s inability to contain her adulterous sexual desires. Ironically, in order to read her palm, Othello will have to paddle it with his own fingers. But in 4.2, Desdemona proclaims her innocence, denying the label of whore or strumpet: ‘If to preserve this vessel for my lord / From any hated foul unlawful touch / Be not to be a strumpet, I am none’ (85–7). But it is not just her hand that is read or misread for evidence of her faithfulness. Iago makes Desdemona’s hands a focus for a variety of complex accusations against her character, borne out in his fetishistic pursuit of her handkerchief.

‘Some minx’s token’ Handkerchiefs, as I suggested earlier, were linked through their function and etymology to the hand itself. They symbolized the leakiness of the humoural body. But they were also status symbols, documented visually in portrait after portrait. A popular token to pass on to monarchs, social superiors and lovers, the handkerchief took on even more significance in the Tudor period than it had before. Highlighting the relationship between the hand and the self, these textile witnesses to human emotion produced a variety of meanings on the early modern stage. The handkerchief in Othello has been discussed by critics for centuries. Rather than provide a history of the handkerchief here, I want to consider how its textural quality



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FIGURE 24  Handkerchief (c. 1600, English), Linen embroidered with silk (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

is key to the meanings hands make in the play and how it manifests or is manipulated into manifesting Iago’s perverse fantasies of touch. First we would need to consider what this ‘napkin’ might have looked like. Handkerchiefs came in a variety of shapes, sizes and materials and the level of decorative design varied extensively, designed to showcase the owner’s wealth and status (see Fig. 24). Othello describes to Desdemona the simultaneous historic and exotic origins of the handkerchief he gave to her: That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give, She was a charmer and could almost read The thoughts of people. …. ’Tis true, there’s magic in the web of it. A sibyl that had numbered in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses,

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In her prophetic fury sewed the work; The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful Conserved of maidens’ hearts. (3.4.58–61, 71–7) He emphasizes the skill, handiwork or manual labour involved in making the handkerchief, which is inherently linked to its magical properties in this narrative. Othello suggests its origins in feminine skill give the handkerchief its intrinsic value. Jones and Stallybrass have commented on the ways in which needlework was aligned with ‘virtuous femininity’ in the early modern period, an association that is stressed here, particularly given that the positive discourse on women’s hands in this period, if not in the context of beauty, was almost always in the context of domestic labour.55 As we have seen, the ‘good wife’ busied her hands with the day-to-day duties that demonstrated her devotion to God and family. At the core of this object narrative then is Othello’s emphasis on the industrious female hands the textile has already passed through in its generation, suggesting an ideal that Desdemona must live up to determined not only by the expectations of her own cultural environment, but also those of a more exotic culture of virtuous femininity that produces such complexly valuable textiles. By drawing attention to the fact that the handkerchief was made of silk, Shakespeare makes its texture sensually apparent or imaginatively palpable to his audience (at least those who have touched or seen silk), but we can imagine kinesthetically what it would feel like in our hands. The tactile force of language in this play means not only does the handkerchief move from Othello’s, to Desdemona’s, to Emilia’s, to Iago’s, to Cassio’s and into Bianca’s hands, but it metaphorically moves into ours as well, the ‘rude hands’ of the audience. The motion of the handkerchief through the play constructs its identity as it undergoes the acts of touch that shape its ever-shifting significance from loving gift token,



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to bargaining object of exchange, to false material witness. Its appearance and decorative pattern also draw attention to the various acts of touch it is involved in. When Iago is unravelling Othello’s sense of security in Desdemona’s fidelity, he asks him, ‘Tell me but this, / Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries, in your wife’s hand?’ (3.3.437–9). Here we finally learn about the exact nature of the design. I want to pause for a moment on the relationship between strawberries and the sense of touch in the early modern imagination. Associated as they were with sensuality and femininity in medieval and Renaissance contexts, strawberries had their own set of meanings and conflicting symbolic identities. On the one hand they represented paradise, virtue and virginity; on the other, the strawberry was a symbol of sensory pleasure. According to Walter Gibson, ‘if the strawberry was the fruit of the Virgin, it was also the fruit of Venus. Strawberries, appear, for example, in an Alsatian tapestry made about 1500 depicting a wild woman caressing a unicorn’.56 They signal the binaries attached to womanhood in the early modern period and their particular association with tactility (notable from the reference to unicorns which have been depicted in allegories of touch, such as in the series of tapestries La Dame a la licorne (1500) in which ‘Touch’ is represented by a woman fondling a unicorn’s horn) cannot be ignored. Neither can the association with sin in some of the moralistic emblems that depict strawberries with images of the serpent: ‘serpents lurking under strawberry plants also characterize fair but unfaithful women, reinforcing the strawberry’s venereal symbolism […] and, more generally, any deceitful appearance or pleasure’.57 In these visual contexts, strawberries compel the viewer to think about hypocrisy, often in a misogynistic vein, suggesting women will appear to be attractive and alluring on the surface, but are serpentine underneath. Geoffery Whitney’s 1586 emblem, which pictures a serpent entwined around a strawberry plant, is attached to a motto that moralizes about flatterers and deceivers: ‘Of flattering speech, with sugred

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words, beware, / Suspect the harte, whose face doth fawne, and smile’.58 This motto is clearly applicable to Iago, but it is one in a cluster of images of tactility that he harnesses to create the illusion of female unfaithfulness in the play through the sense of touch. The symbolic relationship between strawberries, unfaithful women and serpents compels us to consider how these ideas might constellate around the handkerchief, an object explicitly associated with hands, active touching and female sexuality in Othello. Shakespeare’s source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, also contains a handkerchief: ‘a handkerchief embroidered most delicately in the Moorish fashion, which the Moor had given her and which was treasured by the Lady and her husband too’; but the strawberries are Shakespeare’s invention.59 It is a fruit associated with taste but its rough surface appeals to the sense of touch as well. The invocation of the strawberry as a decorative emblem on the handkerchief reinforces the relationship in this play between women’s hands and their presumed capacity for unsanctioned touches. The handkerchief, with its strawberries and its trafficking through hands, is an emblem not only of Desdemona and the presumptions that lead to her murder, but it is also a token of Iago’s perverse fantasies and his mendaciously embroidered narratives about the roving hands of the other characters in the play. He is the serpent wrapped around the strawberry; the spider that sits upon his web, sensing the motion and manipulating the passions of those who trust him. In Othello, Iago constructs a theory of touch that is linked to betrayal, female transgression and sin. As part of his strategy to destroy the reputation of Desdemona, he focuses on her hands (the very symbols of her personhood and virtue), her palm and her handkerchief to suggest that through her active, adulterous touches, she has defiled marriage itself. The symbolic meanings of touch that Iago invokes reinforce the contemporary anti-tactile rhetoric that insisted the sense of touch was a gateway to sexual licentiousness, fornication and adultery. Desdemona’s hands and her gestures are, therefore,



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mis-read and annotated incorrectly to ensure Iago’s scheme to destroy Othello’s identity and emotional security. For Shakespeare, the stringent hierarchy of the senses that placed touch at the bottom of the scale seemed to deny the importance of the human instinct to reach out, touch and hold another as well as the excessive emotions the sensing hand could spark. Shakespeare surely destabilizes the sensory hierarchy. The tactile sense was ambiguous: it was a sign of life and love but represented the sins of the flesh as well. Shakespeare draws upon this dichotomy of touch by revaluing its capacity for inspiring love, as we saw in the amorous touches of Romeo and Juliet. In Othello, what Iago demonstrates is the destructive agency of the anti-tactile rhetoric and he illustrates how the language of tactility can be harnessed to destroy the very thing that compels hands to touch: love. While the sense of touch is something we feel/ experience passively, it is also an active sense performed by and through the hand; in Shakespeare’s plays discussed here, hands are objectified as symbols of desire, mutual affection as well as becoming ‘ocular proof’ of corrupt female sexuality and lechery. But what happens on the Shakespearean stage when bodies no longer have the ability to touch with their hands, and what ramifications might dismemberment have in a culture that places so much meaning and symbolic value upon the hand, its gestures and sensations?

6 Amputation: The spectacle of dismemberment in Shakespeare’s theatres

Devotees of the popular television programme Game of Thrones will remember Season 3 when the ‘kingslayer’ Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) lost his ‘sword’ hand, violently cut off by Locke and his group of mercenaries. In an interview, Coster-Waldau described it as a ‘horrifying experience’, but observed the impact on his character’s identity: ‘He’s defined as one of the greatest swordsmen of all time. He draws a lot of confidence from that. And if you have something that so clearly defines you—not only the way you see yourself, but also the way the world sees you, and then you lose it … Now anyone can kill him!’1 Coster-Waldau was aware of the significance of Jaime Lannister’s right hand; that single part carried his character’s identity as a swordsman and it was the hand that killed the king. In the violent scene, Jaime looks at the hand that has been cut off in a silent moment of self-recognition before screaming in shock and pain. We are as horrified now as audiences might have been in the early modern period by violent scenes of amputation. As we see in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the amputation of the hand of a warrior has dire implications not only for political or

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military agency, but also for personal identity. Severed hands and amputation provoke a mixture of emotions now and probably did in Shakespeare’s time, including horror, anxiety, even laughter. But perhaps it is more shocking for a modern audience, since severed hands do not regularly make their way into our visual worlds, though it is difficult to say whether or not the ubiquity of amputation made people any more or less fearful of it in the early modern period. On the Shakespearean stage, hands as severed parts would have, nevertheless, called to mind a plethora of visual and textual references. And as props on stage, they would have been a crucial part of early modern stage technology. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio argue that, in the early modern period, specific components of culture were ‘imagined to reside in, on, and about individual part[s] of the body’.2 Early modern culture was, in fact, preoccupied with ‘corporeal fragmentation’, a preoccupation that suggests to the editors an emerging notion of an ‘aesthetic of the part’.3 This idea is useful when considering amputation as a spectacle in early modern performance because it enables us to examine the effects of such spectacle. Albert Tricomi describes how visual spectacle is a condition of understanding the emotional impact of mutilation in the play: ‘By shackling the metaphoric imagination to the literal reality of the play’s events, the tragedy strives for an unrelieved concentration of horrific effect’.4 Equally, as I suggested earlier, texts are analogous to hands in that both could be read; thus, the fragmented form in which play texts are transmitted in the early modern playhouse is a useful backdrop to a discussion about the amputation of hands in Shakespearean performance. Tiffany Stern has shown that the early modern theatre traded in fragmentation in that the theatrical text itself was made up of a network of parts: play bills, plots, prologues, songs, scenes, epilogues and indeed the actor’s part distributed when he needed to learn a new role.5 But the actor’s scripted part was obviously not the only ‘part’ integral to and incorporated into performance. Body parts abound in the period’s drama; as Lucy Munro has shown,

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they demonstrate the ‘interplay between the corporeal and the symbolic on the early modern stage’. Not just stage directions but also the ‘set of lists of the props and costumes belonging to the Admiral’s Men in March 1598’, for example, tell us about the kinds of props that were required, including ‘among other items, “owld Mahemetes head”, “Faetones lymes”, “Argosse head”, “Kentes woden leags”, “Jerosses head”, “I frame for the heading in Black Jone”, “The Mores lymes, and Hecolles lymes” and “iii Turckes hedes”’.6 Prop hands are not explicitly listed in Henslowe’s papers, but ‘lymmes’ may refer to hands and arms as well as legs.7 The meanings that are inscribed upon the severed hand, a different kind of actor’s part, form the subject of this final chapter. Up to now this study has focused on the hand as part of the body, integrated into the corporeal whole. Here, I explore how the hand can make meaning detached from the body, as another form of fragmentation in the theatre. In doing so I examine the graphic context of the severed hand and then explore in practical terms how early modern theatre companies might have performed manual dismemberment. Did early modern audiences expect a realistic performance of amputation, since many of them might have witnessed hands being cut off during scenes of public torture and punishment or experienced amputation under the surgeon’s saw? What tools and materials were at the actors’ disposal when performing such violent acts? What were the effects of performances of dismemberment upon audiences and actors? More theoretically, once amputated, how does the hand, in performance, continue to express identity, character and the self? What does it mean to lose the ability to gesture and touch? As Titus Andronicus asks after losing one of his hands, ‘How can I grace my talk, / Wanting a hand to give it action?’ (5.2.17–18). John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1614) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth will briefly be examined here before a more in-depth discussion of Shakespeare’s staging of dismemberment in Titus Andronicus (1594) and one of the most controversial productions of

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Titus in recent years, directed by Lucy Bailey and designed by William Dudley (2014).

Severed hands A severed hand detached from its owner’s body is not a common sight in modern society.8 And if someone did see such a thing, it would likely be in a horrifying context, such as a grisly murder scene or a terrible accident. Severed hands rarely appear on television, in advertising or in the media outside of their periodic appearance in horror movies or programmes such as Game of Thrones. Occasionally, there may be a pointing hand on a sign directing people in a public building, but this type of signage is truly rare. While severed hands are not typically part of our graphic vocabulary, they were readily visible in early modern England and Europe through a variety of media, and they had been since the Middle Ages.9 Margaret E. Owens makes the very important observation that, a symbolic economy of corporeal fragmentation suffuses religious ritual and doctrine in this period. Everywhere one looks, one finds dismembered bodies—human flesh being chopped and lopped; body parts being preserved, displayed, revered; bought and sold, purloined, desecrated; and in some cases reassembled, transplanted, or restored.10 We might recall here a ritual of the medieval cult of saints, which required pilgrims to leave body parts at shrines and tombs.11 Christopher S. Wood observes that such practices took place throughout medieval Europe as well as England and that many of these parts, hands being most common, were made out of wax and almost always ‘life-sized’. Gruesome to modern sensibilities is the fact that, ‘at some shrines one might have seen displays of real amputated hands and feet dried or mummified’.12 The performative act of the pilgrim in creating

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such ‘props’ of worship and endowing them with hope and intention suggests that the meaning invested in these body parts should not be underestimated. Sometimes these offerings represented the part of the body that a pilgrim prayed would be cured or healed, symbolizing the work of the saint and the gratitude of the worshipper. At other times, they were offered as sacrifice, even if the part was made out of wax. The personal experiences and spiritual lives of pilgrims infuse these severed parts and demonstrate that ‘nothing signifies an absent holy person more effectively than a sample of his body’.13 The body parts in these rituals serve as an intermediary between the divine and human spheres, enacting a type of contract between pilgrim and saint, such as we saw enacted secularly in the palm-to-palm touches of Romeo and Juliet. An amputated hand in such a context is a powerful ‘sample of the self’, remarks Wood, ‘a relic of the still-living body’.14 To think of the severed hand as ‘still-living’ helps us to understand how it continues to make meaning in public performance throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Severed hands on stage continue to channel identity, whether they are real or artificial in the world of the play. Severed hands periodically appear on the early modern stage and in each instance in which they appear, they refer to violent acts or intentions. But the hands are also inhabited by a complex of meanings that are specific to the context in which they occur. The meaning of the severed hand in John Webster’s Jacobean play The Duchess of Malfi (1614), for example, is complicated by the very illusion upon which it depends. The Duchess needs to think the hand is real, though it is actually artificial. The audience must also think the hand is ‘real’, but in the full knowledge it is just a stage prop, making its artificiality multilayered. The prop itself was most likely made of wax; as such, we are led to think that the ‘fake’ hand is made of wax by the play’s dialogue. The meta-theatrical complexity of Malfi’s severed hand seems quite deliberate as it also alludes to the highly theatrical religious culture the play is attentive to. The cult of saints

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imagery is significant to a tragedy that can be considered either an anti-Catholic commentary, with its attention to fornicating Cardinals, poisoned bibles, creepy shrines and various other symbols, or a play characterized by a kind of nostalgic representation of the old religion. This early religious context is merely one in which severed hands had extraordinary visual currency and a play like The Duchess of Malfi, though performed in the Jacobean period, recalls the mediating power that body parts had in the transactions between individuals and their God. Regardless of whether or not Webster is endorsing or rejecting Catholic rites and images, the scene in Act Four in which the Duchess’s deranged twin brother, Duke Ferdinand, offers her a severed wax hand has particular resonance with the tradition of votive offerings of body parts at medieval shrines. The use of the wax that is suggested by the text may have contributed to the effectiveness of this particular illusion. Wood comments on the fact that wax was incredibly lifelike and could ‘uncannily resemble flesh’.15 Wax in sculpture, more generally, was widely hailed among Renaissance art theorists for its ability to create the effect of verisimilitude, and in early modern England, the use of wax effigies in royal funerary processions was still prominent and emotionally powerful for subjects looking on. The material quality of wax enables not just a portrayal of human flesh but seems also to replicate or reproduce it. The episode in 4.1 involving the severed hand and then the wax figures, in particular, has been criticized as overly sensationalistic.16 But this scene may well have provoked horror and fear, while probing religious anxieties within the original audiences, particularly during its indoor performances where the King’s Men could have played the scene, as the stage directions and Bosola instruct, in the dark.17 By Act Four, the Duchess’s clandestine marriage to her steward, Antonio, has been discovered and she has been taken prisoner by her brother’s spy, Bosola. She knows she is going to die, but first she must undergo episodes of macabre and perverse psychological torture. Bosola tells the Duchess

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that her brother is coming to see her, ‘And prays you gently neither torch nor taper / Shine in your chamber. He will kiss your hand / And reconcile himself;’ (4.1.25–7). In the indoor performance of this play, when Ferdinand enters, the stage is arguably shrouded in complete darkness.18 He approaches his sister, saying: ‘I come to seal my peace with you. Here’s a hand, / To which you have vowed much love. The ring upon’t / You gave. (Gives her a dead man’s hand.)’ (42–4). The pun here on ‘peace’ and ‘piece’ is apt, as he hands her a piece of flesh, albeit made of wax.19 The Duchess believes that this is her brother’s hand, which she proceeds to kiss. In a striking subversion of the rituals of gift-exchange, Ferdinand offers to leave the ring for her as a ‘love-token’ (45). The Duchess notes that his hand feels cold to the touch and then realizes what she is holding: Ha?-Lights! Oh, horrible! Ferdinand Let her have lights enough.  Exit. [Enter Bosola with a light.] Duchess What witchcraft doth he practise that he hath left A dead man’s hand here? Here is discovered, behind a traverse, the artificial figures of Antonio and his Children, appearing as if they were dead. Bosola Look you, here’s the piece from which ’twas ta’en. (50–5) A ‘dead man’s hand’ was linked with criminality and witchcraft in the early modern period. This reference might allude to the ‘hand of glory’, the lopped off hand of an executed criminal, used, Sarah Tarlow argues, as ‘a supernatural aid in the commitment of crimes’.20 Significantly, the material ingredient would have called to mind similar themes given that wax was

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a substance used in divination or soothsaying, referred to as ‘ceromancy’, a practice in which wax is dripped into water and the shapes it takes on are then read or interpreted.21 The Duchess’s emotional response to the severed hand is revealing in this scene. She throws it to the ground in horror, completely disorientated by what has occurred, the darkness contributing to her sense of disorientation. The production of The Duchess of Malfi directed by Dominic Dromgoole and staged in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in January 2014 exploited the candlelit conditions of the venue and extinguished all lighting during this scene, so that the audience experienced primarily the sounds of the Duchess (Gemma Arterton) screaming and the hand dropping to the ground. When the lights came on, the severed hand was on the stage, but instead of being sensationalistic, the scene played more effectively, this moment and the severed hand provoking anxiety rather than laughter from the audience members, who experienced also the unsettledness of being in the dark themselves. In this scene, the hand is in the service of the Duke, and its performance is complete when the Duchess is shown the ‘artificial figures’ of her supposed dead family: the figure representing Antonio is missing its hand. Webster relies upon cultural associations attached to severed hands and the emotions they can produce: fear, horror and anxiety. The severed hand in Malfi embodies Ferdinand’s misery, his psychotic fantasies of dismemberment (‘When I have hewed her to pieces’, 2.5.31) and his incestuous need to take hold of and tyrannize his sister. The hand torments her, but it cannot control her. For it absorbs the Duchess’s identity as well. Although she has been ‘cut off’ as it were from her beloved and is about to be removed from the state, she remains, like the effigy tombs alluded to throughout the play, a figure of stillness and fortitude. The play reminds audiences how hands can absorb and register character and identity, even when they are detached. Crucially, the detached wax hand becomes a psychological symbol mediating the relationship between the Duchess and Ferdinand as it is passed from one to the other.

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It simultaneously represents the Duke’s desire to literally take hold of his sister’s sexual behaviour and the Duchess as symbol of devotion, in this case, to her love and her identity. When we examine the graphic context of severed hands, whether medieval or post-Reformation, we begin to realize just how ubiquitous they actually were, which begs the question, how traumatizing might it have been to see severed hands on the early modern stage? Katherine Rowe establishes how the illustrations of hands in early modern anatomical texts showcase the vital importance of this body part to the practice of anatomy and the importance of the anatomist.22 As we saw earlier, William Sherman observed the sheer number of pointing severed hands drawn into the margins of medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books, designed as reading guides or literal indices. Sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury emblem books also commonly illustrated disembodied hands emerging from clouds representing either God’s hand or a demonstrative human hand, and are further evidence of the volume of graphic representations of severed hands in the period’s literature. Curiously, the hands emerging from clouds in these texts are not always those of God; at times, they are anonymous, truly severed from an identity so that they can absorb the reader’s/ viewer’s identity, and therefore point to a theme or moral that should be internalized, such as the example from George Wither’s collection, Illustration VIII, a simple memento mori emblem picturing a hand holding a lamp from which a half skeleton representing Death emerges.23 This emblem reminds people that death is at hand. Some of the emblems show hands gloved with a gauntlet, brandishing either a spear or a lance. These occur in emblems where mottos highlight the themes of honour, valour or justice. Shakespeare makes these associations in Henry V. Hands are described in this play as an extension of the political body: ‘While that the armed hand doth fight abroad / Th’advised head defends itself at home’ (1.2.178–9). The ‘gage’ that the King exchanges with Williams while in disguise is like a disembodied hand, its meaning

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shifting when it reappears at the end of the play on Fluellen’s cap to fool Williams. The play’s many references to hands and gages occur often in the context of sovereignty, honour and victory, whether it is victory in battle or in obtaining the hand of the French princess, who is herself concerned with how to name the hand and parts of the anatomy in English: ‘Comment appelez-vous la main en anglais?’ (3.4.5). Returning to emblem books, the many naked disembodied hands hold a range of symbolic objects which alter the meaning of the hands in each instance: scales of justice, hearts; some are crowned and some on fire, signifying passion, sometimes in combination with the friendship gesture of the handclasp, such as in Joannes Sambucus’s Vera amicitia (True Friendship) in which two friends are shown in a hand clasp, while the figure on the left receives a fiery heart from God, signifying the faith that should attend mutual amity (see Fig. 25).24 In other examples, severed hands might brandish crowns, quills, scythes, scimitars, death heads, candles, lilies, ivy, olive branches, falcons, coats of arms, a compass, a staff, flags, bows, a serpent/viper (biting a finger as a symbol of Touch), torches and daggers or swords. The emblem hand could literally be embodied on stage, such as in the Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene biblical drama A Looking Glasse for London and England (the Queen’s Men, 1588–9). At the centre of this play are the corrupt and over-sexualized court of King Rasni and the moralizing messages of the figure Jonah. After an angel sends Jonah to Nineveh to reform Rasni’s court, the signs from God intensify. At one point ‘A hand from out a cloud’ emerges brandishing a ‘burning sword’; dramaturgically, it is unclear whether this would be an elaborately constructed prop or performed by another actor who might be lowered from a trap.25 However it might have been staged, this moment is a materialization of the emblem book images that insert the symbolic hand of God into human affairs. Fundamentally, in the literary culture of early modern England images of severed hands invested with a range of moralistic meanings were a common sight.

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FIGURE 25  Vera amicitia, Les emblemes (1567), Joannes Sambucus (courtesy of the University of Glasgow)

Handwriting manuals designed to help perfect one’s ‘character’ provide another space where severed hands have been carefully illustrated. Jonathan Goldberg’s excellent study of these continental and English manuals has observed that in many of these illustrations, ‘the hand appears to have been separated from the body, made to serve the quill’.26 These representations objectify the hand, setting it apart as a sign or metonym for skill. Goldberg suggests that the authors of writing manuals deployed these severed hands to emphasize the importance of the correct pen-hold and elegant penmanship as primary indicators of a sophisticated intelligence: ‘various training regimes are prescribed,

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pedagogic regimes that socialize the hand and make the hand human by inserting it within the act of writing’,27 and this socializing or civilizing process is represented in these visual demonstrations by the most iconic symbol of human endeavour: the hand. Goldberg queries to what extent script or handwriting becomes synonymous with the hand and how one’s ‘characters’ can reveal one’s character. In Hamlet (4.7), when Laertes asks Claudius if he knows the ‘hand’ of the letter he is reading, the King replies: ‘’Tis Hamlet’s character’ (51). Goldberg suggests the ‘letter presents Hamlet as mere body, unclothed with social trappings, solitary, Hamlet as private individual produced by script’.28 But if severed hands were a form of synecdoche – what rhetorical theorist Abraham Fraunce defined as ‘when the name of the whole is given to the part, or the name of the part to the whole’ – then the script or image of the written ‘hand’ of Hamlet embodies his character as socialized and en-skilled.29 His identity as prince and his education are recognizably distinctive through his character/ script/hand. But for my purposes, what is compelling is the notion that one’s handwriting is an extension of the hand and thereby a symbol of the self. Hands are always ghosting, then, when handwriting in the form of letters appears on stage. And in many examples, they are referred to by characters as ‘hands’, though they can be as fraudulent as the wax hand in Malfi, as we see in Twelfth Night when Malvolio finds a letter and thinks it is from Lady Olivia: ‘By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand’ (2.5.85–8). The bawdy joke here demonstrates Malvolio’s ignorance of the subtleties of his lady’s hand, her character and the more private parts of her body. The letter on the early modern stage is severed from the body that wrote it, but as the ‘hand’ of a person it incorporates the identity of that person, providing another example of how the image of a severed hand could exist within and haunt the imaginations of early modern audiences. Furthermore, the playwright’s hand imbues the theatrical performance in its inception, indicative

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in the ways in which actors encountered their parts: in their study of the actor’s part, Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey argue that in early modern theatre practice an actor’s performance was determined by his part, the word ‘part’ standing for ‘the written paper, often made into a roll, on which that part was transcribed, and the nature of the way in which the text was presented on that roll’.30 In this type of textual scenario, an early modern actor’s initial introduction to the play was fragmented, initiated only through the ‘hand’ of the playwright. Arguably, the severed hand was a trope that could be heard on stage as well as seen. In Macbeth, although hands are not literally lopped off at any point, the violence and savagery of Macbeth’s tyranny and his dependency upon dark forces are figured through a series of references and allusions to the hand as a disembodied entity. Whether hands are washed, wrung, shaken, or called upon, they are referred to over 30 times in the play: in the macabre ingredients of the weird sisters’ brew: ‘Here I have a pilot’s thumb / Wrack’d, as homeward he did come’ (1.3.28–9); or ‘Finger of birth-strangled babe’ (4.1.30) and their incantating gestures ‘hand-in-hand’ (1.3.32); in Lady Macbeth’s instructions to her husband to ‘bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue’(1.5.63–4) but to hide his true intentions; in her later vigorous attempts to ‘sweeten this little hand’ (5.1.48); in Malcolm’s confirmation that ‘by self and violent hands’ Lady Macbeth died (5.9.36). In Macbeth, Shakespeare draws attention to the centrality of this part not only as a highly expressive subject but also as an isolated object that reflects the psychological vicissitudes of the play’s chief characters. The most important and, indeed, severed hands, however, are Macbeth’s. After committing regicide within his castle, Macbeth is horrified at the sight of his own hands covered in blood; holding them out in front of himself, they become unrecognizable to him, ‘What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes’ (2.2.58). In this moment, he begins the process of disembodiment, detaching his mind/ conscience from his hands and, by extension, the actions he

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has performed with them. The invocation of this body part throughout the play produces an atmosphere appropriate for the psychological dismemberment that Macbeth performs just after he has decapitated the state. Macbeth’s figurative self-amputation is preceded by his vision of the phantom dagger floating before his eyes; he hankers after its handle, expressing yet another Shakespearean fantasy of touch: The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:— I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling, as to sight? (2.1.34–6) Here we witness the vain gestures of the hand unable to grasp what he is about to do. While he is able to divorce his conscience from his hands, Lady Macbeth is not, even though she initially believed differently: ‘My hands are of your colour; but I shame / To wear a heart so white’ (2.2.63–4). It is after the murder and the quick succession of hand references when we hear the intrusive knocking. The sound of knocking is a haptic effect in its simultaneous assault on ears and on hands. Shakespeare punctuates the psychological dismemberment Macbeth experiences when he discovers the terrible acts his hands are capable of with the sound and image of a disembodied hand knocking repeatedly against the gates. Before he exits Macbeth confirms that hands represent selves: ‘To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself’ (2.2.72). He suggests his ‘unlineal’ hands (3.1.62) need, hereafter, to be imagined as disembodied from his thoughts so he can go on to conduct his tyrannous usurpation of the throne of Scotland.

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Amputation plays Amongst these graphic and metaphorical examples of severed hands was the literal usage of their prop counterparts on stage. The Tragical Reign of Selimus (1594), once attributed to Robert Greene and performed by the Queen’s Men, has quite an elaborate episode involving the torturous amputation of Aga, a messenger. The Turkish prince Selimus wants to usurp the empire from his father, Bajazet: ‘attain it at his hands: / if I cannot, this right hand is resolv’d, / To end the period with a fatal stab’ (2.398–9). What ensues are episodes of extreme violence couched in language that concentrates the power and aggression of Selimus into his hand: ‘I will not take my rest, till this right hand / Hath pulled the Crown from off this cowards head’ (3.559–60); ‘I will advance my strong revenging hand, / And pluck thee from thy everturning wheel’ (7.678–9). In the meantime Bajazet’s other son, Acomat, also wants the crown and he begins a reign of terror, murdering innocent citizens of Natolia and killing his cousins, Prince Mahomet and his sister Zanora. Bajazet sends a messenger – Aga – to talk to him and convince him to stop, but Acomat enacts a series of tortures upon Aga that results in a bizarre scene of dismemberment. He gouges out his eyes, but in a macabre yet weirdly comic sequence, he loses more than that by literally asking for it: And thinks thou then to scape unpunished, No Acomat, though both mine eyes be gone, Yet are my hands left on to murther thee. (15.1427–9) Acomat responds punningly with: T’was well remembered: Regan cut them off. [They cut off his hands and give them Acomat.] Now in that sort go tell thy Emperour

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That if himself had but been in thy place, I would have u’sd him crueler than thee: Here take thy hands: I know thou lov’st them well. [Opens his bosom, and puts them in.] Which hand is this? right? Or left? Canst thou tell? (15.1430–41) Aga unthinkingly reminds Acomat that he still has his hands, to which Acomat promptly responds by ordering Regan to amputate them. The effects of amputation in this play should be horror and anxiety but laughter might also be an apt response to this moment. The pun on ‘remembered’ is brought to fruition when Acomat returns Aga’s hands to him, tucking them inside his shirt or ‘bosom’ as gory messengers to the Emperor. Aga returns to Bajazet in his mutilated condition and delivers an extended lamentation for his dismembered state: Open my bosom, there you shall see. [Mustaffa opens his bosom and takes out his hands.] Those are the hands, which Aga once did use, To toss the spear, and in warlike gyre To hurtle my sharp sword about my head, Those sends he to the woeful Emperor, With purpose so cut thy hands from thee. (16.1489–93) Early modern staged representations of Turks such as this seem to incorporate the stereotypical traits that Daniel Vitkus argues were identified with them, such as ‘aggression, lust suspicion, murderous conspiracy, sudden cruelty masquerading as justice, merciless violence rather than “Christian charity,” wrathful vengeance instead of turning the other cheek’.31 The scene seems oddly complex in its staging and would require a significant amount of stage trickery; the Queen’s Men performed in a variety of venues, including court, so the stage

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trickery would need to be effective and portable. In another play, Edmund Ironside; or, War hath Made All Friends (1597), possibly performed at the Red Bull amphitheatre,32 two pledges have their hands and noses cut off. The ironically named character Stitch is charged with conducting the amputation through, a stage direction calling for him to enter carrying an ‘Axe’ with which ‘He cuts off one hand’, followed by, ‘He cuts off the other hand’.33 What is striking about this example is that the stage directions imply the speed and efficiency with which the performance of amputation should occur. This suggests that such scenes would not have always needed to be realistically performed. The Wars of Cyrus (1576–94), performed by the Children of the Chapel, moves a step further away from realistic staging than the previous example. The play is based on the life of the Persian King and involves not a staging, but a narrative of the amputation of the King of Susa. The Captain who recounts the death of Abradates (King of Susa) reports: ‘The Egyptians as their barbarous custom is, / When he was dead cut off his stout right hand, / And left it lying by the breathless corpse’.34 The corpse should have one stump at the end of its wrist with the severed hand accompanying it separately as the grieving Panthea’s speech tells us: Is this the hand, that aye hath managed kingly arms, And brought whole troops of mighty warriors down, Now sended from the body of my Lord, Clean void of feeling, sense and vital breath …35 After the 1590s onstage amputation occurs less frequently in the repertory, but we see another example in Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s play The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), performed by the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre. This ‘witchcraft’ play includes a scene involving a character named Mistress Generous (a shape-shifting witch), who transforms into a cat. As a cat her paw is amputated, but once it is cut off, it turns back into a human hand. Her

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husband is, then, able to confirm she is a witch when he asks to see her hand and she cannot produce it. He forces her to show him her wrist while he holds up the hand that is missing: ‘And see how this will match it’.36 Again, in an act of re-membering, the hand is returned to the amputee. Amputation is, in this context, linked to witchcraft, but the amputation is no less horrific even in the absurd context of shape shifting. Audiences may have laughed and been simultaneously horrified at this play, given its topicality; it was based on the trial and threat of persecution of several women accused of witchcraft in Lancashire. In addition to the mixed emotions that might have been produced by the scenes I have been discussing above, it is important to explore just how the rather elaborate spectacles of dismemberment and the subsequent display of severed hands might have been staged by the actors.

Performing amputation In early modern Europe, amputation was a grisly affair. Surgically, it was the only solution for infected limbs or incurable wounds incurred in battle. The French barber surgeon Ambroise Paré is known for his advancements in surgical technology, particularly on the battlefield. Paré emphasizes the importance of surgeons/physicians by referring to them as ‘The hands of Gods’ before relating his medical theories in his ‘Workes’ translated by Thomas Johnson in 1634. In Book I, he says there are five things ‘proper to the duty of a Chirurgian’, such as ‘to take away that which is superfluous’; for example, one might need to have their finger amputated if they have six on one hand. Or if a part of the body is ‘putrified’, it will need ‘lopping off’ as well.37 In the case of gangrene if the infected ‘member’ cannot be cured with incisions and with ointments, then amputation would be necessary. Paré asserts the importance of the surgeon’s

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‘wisdom and judgment’ here, as amputation of a limb is no small matter.38 He instructs the budding surgeon how to do it; the detail he provides is not for the faint-hearted: The first care must be of the patients strength, wherefore let him be nourished with meats of good nutriment […] let him be placed, as is fit, and drawing the muscles upwards toward the sound parts, let them be tied with a straight ligature a little above that place of the member which is to be cut off, with a strong and broad fillet […] Wherefore when you have made your ligature, cut the flesh even to the

FIGURE 26  Dismembering (Huntington Library, CA)

knife

(1634),

Ambroise

Paré

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bone with a sharp and well cutting incision knife, or with a crooked knife, such as is here expressed.39 Paré includes illustrations of a ‘crooked knife fit for dismembering; or a dismembering knife’ and a saw (see Fig. 26). He suggests an incision knife may prove inadequate: Now you must note, that there usually lies between the bones, a portion of certain muscles, which you cannot easily cut with a large incision or dismembering knife; wherefore you must carefully divide it and separate if wholly from the bone, with an instrument made neatly like a crooked incision knife […] for if thou shouldst leave any thing besides the bone to be divided by the saw, you would put the patient to excessive pain in the performance thereof; for soft things as flesh tendons and membranes, cannot be easily cut with a saw. Therefore when you shall come to the bared bone, all the other parts being wholly cut asunder and divided, you shall nimbly divide it with a little Saw about some foote and three inches long …40 In a surgical context, the standard amputation instruments were incision knives and a saw for the bone, which seems to have remained the case throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Fig. 27). The care of the patient that Paré insists must be observed in such a procedure suggests the extent to which amputation could not only be messy and bloody, but extraordinarily painful. In the context of public torture and punishment, hands, ears and at times noses might be amputated in order to demonstrate the state’s lack of tolerance for particular crimes or acts of minor treason. Margaret Owens notes that amputations on the public scaffold were more often than not tinged by an ‘aura of shame’ since these types of punishment were very ‘rarely inflicted upon nobility’; instead, the lopping off of heads and putting them on public display was reserved for the more elite traitors and heretics.41 William Harrison makes

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FIGURE 27  Bow Frame Amputation Saw (c. 1600–1700), Science Museum, London

much of this clear in ‘Of Sundry Kinds of Punishment’, where he describes how public decapitations are carried out and upon whom. He reveals that thieves that can claim benefit of clergy, ‘for the first offence, if they have stolen nothing else but oxen, sheep, money, or such like, which be no robberies, as by the highway side, or assailing of any man’s house in the night […] are burned in the left hand, upon the brawn of the thumb, with a hot iron’. Harrison says that if ‘willful murder’ or manslaughter is committed the offender will be hanged, but first, ‘hath his right hand commonly stricken off before or near unto the place where the act was done, after which he is led forth to the place of execution’.42 By conducting the amputation on the site of the crime before the execution, the authorities exemplify the crime as the last act that hand will perform. The most notorious example of a punitive amputation in Elizabeth’s reign was that of the aptly named John Stubbs, who wrote an offensive treatise entitled The discoverie of a

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gaping gulf, whereinto England is like to be swallowed by an other French marriage (1579); both he and the printer, William Page, were publically punished in 1580 under ‘a statute “against seditious Woordes and Rumours,” which decreed that anyone convicted of disseminating such material was to “have his right hande stricken off”’.43 Throughout his imprisonment, Stubbs continued to send petitions for his release to the Queen deploying the vocabulary of fragmentation and repeatedly referring to his hand.44 The image of the disembodied hands holding pens in the period’s handwriting manuals is a chilling emblem of Stubbs’s predicament. The crime and the punishment are inherently connected as the hand that created the offending ‘hand’ (script) is cut off in a public proclamation of monarchical power and it demonstrates the way in which the early modern body and its parts were owned and conscripted into service and obedience by the state. Stubbs is very earnest in his deliberate use of images of hands to lament his imprisonment and to express his actions. Stubbs’s focused use of hand imagery in his petitions to the Queen forces us to consider that, although Shakespeare’s use of hand puns in Titus provides a macabre form of comic relief, it is also a deliberate, serious reminder of the hands that have been cut off and the bodies that have been violently assaulted, as we will see. The amputations performed on stage in the examples I cited earlier are not surgically motivated; but they are akin to public scaffold mutilations in their performative nature. These are examples of torture, vicious attacks designed to highlight the horrifying cruelty that can be found in human nature and the political state. It is doubtful that acting companies would be furnished with amputation saws or that they would carefully simulate the use of incision knives on stage. We saw already that, in Edmund Ironside, Stitch enters with an ‘Axe’; presumably given the close proximity of the stage directions to cut one hand off, then the other, he would need to strike only once each time. In both instances the severed hands are present and visible to the audience, which presents a problem

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for the actors, but only if they wanted to achieve an effective and reasonably realistic staging of dismemberment and the resulting severed hands. Philip Butterworth has shown how in medieval drama amputation and severed body parts were commonly staged; some of the stage directions in these early English plays are so explicit that they provide some clues about how amputation scenes could have been credibly performed on the commercial stages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He cites the use of a ‘dummy hand’, which is what would have been used in scenes like the one from The Duchess of Malfi. Discussing The Croxton Play of the Sacrament (c. 1461), for example, Butterworth observes the clear guide that the stage directions provide. In the play, the character Jonathas has the Host stuck on his hand. In order to attempt to remove it, his hand is nailed to a post: ‘[a]t this point an explicit stage direction declares: “Here hall [here shall] they pluke ƥe arme, and ƥe hond shall hang styll with ƥe Sacrament”. The arm is ripped away from what is a dummy hand, which remains stuck to the nailed Host’.45 There is no cutting away of the hand involved here, but rather a ripping away. Clearly the dummy hand was held by the actor when it was nailed into the post; before the ripping occurred, the actor would have pulled his hand into his sleeve leaving the false hand nailed to the post. The illusion is achievable, but nevertheless quite complex, as Elizabeth Dutton reports in her summary of directing the play in 2014.46 Butterworth assumes that dummy hands were typically used in such instances and it is likely that this stage prop would not be any different by the time Webster is writing Malfi. Dummy hands were probably made of wax, but direct evidence is scant. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) provides some material clues. This tract is designed to convince the reader of the dangers of superstition and to warn against the tricks, illusions and devices used by papists as well as con-artists who attempted to convince people witches and apparitions were real. In a chapter entitled ‘Desperate or dangerous juggling knacks, wherein the simple are made to

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think, that a seelie juggler with words can hurt and help, kill and revive any creature at his pleasure: and first too kill any kind of pullen, and to give it life again’, Scot uncovers some of these tricks that many scholars, including Butterworth, agree could have been deployed by early modern theatre companies as well. When Scot describes how easy it is ‘To cut off ones head, and to lay it in a platter, &c: which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist’, he says besides using two actors and a cleverly designed board with holes in them, a trickster might, to astonish the audience, ‘put about his neck a little dough kneaded with bullocks blood, which being cold will appear like dead flesh […] being pricked with a sharp round hollow quill, will bleed, and seem very strange’.47 Using cold dough might create an effective illusion, but if a theatre company wanted to use a dummy hand in more than one play, it would seem impractical to have to keep recreating it rather than retaining a prop hand. The blood that emerges from dismembered limbs or that appears on the dummy hand or the clothes surrounding the ‘stumps’ of a mutilated character would have been made of either animal blood, a combination of vinegar and wine or paint.48 Elizabeth Dutton speculates that in the Croxton play, at least, the dummy hand may have been filled with blood so that when pierced, it would appear to spout; she suggests that ‘Jonathas has at some point to be wearing a prosthetic hand, it is possible that the dummy hand was already in use at the moment of nailing: the dummy hand could itself be filled with sponges soaked in vermilion of the type used for Christ’s bloody sweat, so that when it was nailed to the post it would then inevitably bleed as the sponges were pierced’.49 More simply, dummy hands may have been flesh-coloured gloves stuffed with sponges or straw which would still allow the illusion of amputation to be achieved rather than realistically performed. In this scenario, gloves communicate with even more symbolic fluency as they are used to stand for hands themselves rather than merely symbolize them. While it is unclear as to the exact materials used to make prop hands, there is enough evidence to suggest a range of fascinating and

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weird possibilities that would have allowed for the illusion of onstage amputations to be effective in early modern theatres, where audiences are in the same light as the actors. When we consider the fact that severed hands were a more common sight in the early modern period; that many witnessed public torture, amputation and executions; that playwrights (particularly in the 1590s) wrote scenes of dismemberment into their plays and that the staging of such scenes might have been quite varied in the technology and methods used to trick the audiences, the question arises as to what the effects of Shakespeare’s explicit attention to onstage amputation, the handless, violated bodies of amputees and the rhetoric of hands might have been and how we might still be affected by the actions and display of ‘such violent hands’ (Titus, 3.2.21).

Titus Andronicus Titus Andronicus (co-authored with George Peele, who wrote The Battle of Alcazar in 1591–4) is even more merciless in its violent fragmentation of bodies, particularly the female body.50 Albert Tricomi observed Shakespeare’s insistent use of metaphor in the play was designed to ‘keep the excruciating images of mutilation before our imaginations even when the visual spectacle is no longer before us’.51 Structurally, the language is replete with the imagery of dismemberment and fragmentation. Early on Lucius hints at the disastrous consequences of the denial of Tamora’s supplication to save her sons: ‘Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, / That we may hew his limbs’ (1.1.99–100), invoking the ancient ritual of prisoner dismemberment and sacrifice. Again, in line 132 Lucius says, ‘Let’s hew his limbs’; and finally he reports the deed after it is done: ‘Alarbus’ limbs are lopped’ (146). The insistence upon the ritual of sacrifice is indicative of the violent compulsions within the Andronici as well as the Goths while it alludes to the hacking off of body parts yet to come.

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Eventually, the word ‘hand’ occurs with increasing intensity, referred to over 60 times, the most in any Shakespeare play. Perhaps not surprisingly, before the dismemberments occur, the word ‘hand’ does not appear with as much frequency as it does after hands have been hewed. Shakespeare makes the audience aware of their own hands through the next cluster of images. Lavinia says to her father, ‘O bless me here with thy victorious hand, / Whose fortunes Rome’s best citizens applaud’ (1.1.166–7); then Marcus declares ‘With voices and applause of every sort, / Patricians and plebeians, we create / Lord Saturninus Rome’s great emperor’ (234). Finally, Satruninus asks Tamora to ‘applaud my choice?’ (326). The reference to applause, a communal gesture of approval, is a deliberate invocation of hands and the will and intention with which they can reinforce the actions of the state and, more theatrically speaking, the performances of the actors. The play’s attention to severed hands manifests in the off-stage mutilation of Titus’s only daughter Lavinia, which involves not only her tongue being cut out, but her hands being lopped off by her rapists as a deliberate strategy to silence the speaking parts of her body. The second amputation takes place on stage. When Titus hopes to strike a bargain with the emperor Saturninus, he offers his hand in exchange for his sons’ lives. Aaron the Moor, as intermediary in this negotiation, gleefully cuts off Titus’s hand but returns with the heads of Titus’s sons. It is important to ask at this stage how these two events are framed by the language of the hand and what emotional responses such spectacles of dismemberment can provoke.

‘He hath cut those pretty fingers’: Lavinia Unlike the cluster of what I have been calling ‘amputation plays’ of the mid-1590s, Titus Andronicus has at the centre of its spectacle a traumatized female body, who, distinct from

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Aga in Selimus, is unable to comment upon her own mutilation verbally. Much critical ink has been spilled on Lavinia’s rape and mutilation over the decades; yet critics have been unable to exorcise the horror of the play even when considering its Senecan roots and possible contemporary political resonances. Some critical readings of Lavinia’s dismemberment have suggested that she is a site where political or familial divisions are literally materialized. For example, Molly Easo Smith argues that Lavinia’s body ‘represents the plight of Rome’,52 while Douglas E. Green calls Lavinia an ‘utter victim’ and sees her ‘mutilated body’ articulating ‘Titus’s own suffering and victimization’.53 But Lavinia’s condition is read too often through the political framework of the play where she is seen merely as a trope, a sign of the violently fragmented body of Rome, or as ‘an icon’ and ‘space where the political distribution of signs of agency is worked out’.54 While her uncle and father comment upon her condition, Lavinia is commonly read as embodying the grief and ‘suffering’ of these patriarchal figures. Lavinia is not just a symbol, though she produces symbolic meaning; she is a woman, a woman without hands. Handlessness, a condition that Iago metaphorically placed Othello in through his language comparing him to beasts, is literalized in this play through Lavinia. By placing on stage a virtuous woman without the ability to gesture or touch, what does Shakespeare want us to make of hands and their meaning in the context of their absence? In this study I have considered what hands signified for women in the social world of early modern England. As we saw, the classical and neo-Platonic ideals of beauty insisted upon the composite wholeness of the body, its symmetry and proportion, with the hand as a particular object of desire. Such formulations of beauty render a deformed, mutilated or disabled body as monstrous or ugly. In the early scenes of the play, Lavinia is, as Bassianus puts it, ‘Rome’s rich ornament’ (1.1.55). She is the most desirable woman in the city, who Saturninus planned to make ‘Rome’s royal mistress, mistress of my heart’ (1.1.245), and who Bassianus claimed belonged

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to him. Represented through the language of mistress worship, Lavinia is a rich prize, the feminine ideal of the Renaissance: beautiful and virtuous. When she is violently transformed into a damaged body in fragments having been brutally raped, Shakespeare provides an eerie embodiment of the subjects of mistress worship poetry; these are poems, the reader will recall, that itemized the female body into parts in order to praise each one individually, including the ‘white hands’ of the lady. Lavinia’s Goth attackers, Demetrius and Chiron, perversely joke about the fact that she no longer has any aesthetic value; her beauty is gone and they challenge her to beautify herself: ‘Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands’ (2.3.4). Sweet waters were cosmetic distillations that could be used on the face and the hands; the term also refers to perfumes. Hand washing is cruelly impossible for Lavinia, this moment hinting at the copious amounts of blood that would have been oozing from her mouth and stumps. The notion of sweet waters washing hands re-emerges most memorably when Lady Macbeth imagines washing metaphorical blood from her hands repeatedly with sweet waters, the blood representing her guilt, fear and shame: ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’ (5.1.48). What the Goth brothers’ cruel taunts indicate is that Lavinia is unable to even try to wash away the fear, guilt and shame that attend her violation; she cannot wash it away through suicide, the noble Roman’s privilege, as we saw with Lucrece, who takes back control of her hands by ending her own life. The absence of physical hands in this play compels their increasing presence in the language. By having characters lop them off, Shakespeare draws even more attention to hands as urgent signifiers of identity and character. When Marcus Andronicus sees Lavinia after her attack, he laments the loss of her hands and recalls the social value attributed to female hands: Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare

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Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in And might not gain so great a happiness As half thy love … … Fair Philomela, why she but lost her tongue, And in a tedious sampler sewed her mind; But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee. A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, And he hath cut those pretty fingers off, That could have better sewed than Philomel. O, had the monster seen those lily hands Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute And make the silken strings delight to kiss them, He would not have touched them for his life. (2.3.16–21; 38–47) Marcus refers to the myth from Shakespeare’s source, Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Tereus rapes Philomel and cuts out her tongue; she is able to communicate the crime through needlework, however. Shakespeare deviates from his source, as Marcus tells us, with the added torture of the double amputation, reinforcing the notion that hands are as effective at communicating as the tongue. He reminds the audience of the acceptable use female hands had in society: as decorative emblems of femininity and skilful exponents of needlework and music. Marcus’s despair forces him to poeticize Lavinia’s ravaged state, emphasizing the activities of her beautiful ‘lily hands’ that kissed the ‘silken strings’ of a lute. He compares her hands to aspen leaves trembling to remind the audience of their beauty.55 In some ways he does so in the hopes of re-membering her. We saw in Selimus the odd reference to ‘remembering’ as a pun when Aga’s severed hands are placed back on to his body; in some of the plays that deal with amputation, hands are returned to the victim or accompany it. In Titus, the re-membering occurs figuratively

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and linguistically. It feels like a cruel device to Titus, as he draws attention to the compensating linguistic hands in the play: Ah, wherefore dost thou urge the name of hands To bid Aeneas tell the tale twice o’er How Troy was burnt and he made miserable? O handle not the theme, to talk of hands, Lest we remember still that we have none. (3.2.26–30) The language of the play, particularly after the amputations, is metaphorically prosthetic in its many references and allusions to ‘hands’ and ‘fingers’, words and ideas that echo but also compensate for the corporeal wounds of the play. The linguistic hands that occur in what Michael Neil refers to as ‘sequences of spontaneous word-play’ abound like phantom limbs, acting as ghostly gestures toward the paradoxically increasing legibility of Lavinia’s body.56 The dynamics of the gesturing body in the theatre seem to be under more urgent scrutiny here than anywhere else in Shakespeare. When Lavinia first appears, as the stage direction tells us, ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished’ (SD, 2.3), Chiron and Demetrius hint at the severing of the social self from the body when one no longer has hands, while alluding to the challenges for the actor who has only gesture and speech at her/his disposal: Chiron And if thy stumps will let thee, play the scribe. Demetrius See how with signs and tokens she can scrawl. (2.3.3–4) They note she is no longer able to write and that her gestures are now desperate and chaotic. The word ‘scrawl’ has been another word for gesticulate since the 1300s. The kind of

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gesticulation it refers to, however, is somewhat chaotic, ‘to spread the limbs abroad in sprawling manner’; ‘to move with scrambling and shuffling motion’ (OED). ‘Scrawl’ also means to write and hints at Lavinia’s later ability to do so. This chaotic gesticulation is disturbing to watch in performance. But audiences must watch her to understand the dis- and then re-orientation her body and its ability to communicate must undergo. Pascale Aebischer points out that ‘in the theatre, the mutilated rape victim is insistently kept before the audience’s eyes for six scenes. The actor’s body represents the absence of words. Watching Titus Andronicus therefore means watching Lavinia’.57 Kim Solga also sees ‘Lavinia … [as] foremost an actor in a play that goes awry when she loses her hands and tongue, the means by which all performers participate in the uniquely aural-gestural economy of the theatre’.58 Both critics allude to the relationship between the gesticulating body and the eye (as I discussed in Chapter 3), that Lavinia’s silence is what, paradoxically, makes her more visible. However, the original boy actor portraying Lavinia would have been unable to ‘wring the hands’; he would have been challenged to demonstrate grief and despair without the typical ‘signs of mourning and lamentation’ that hands can express.59 So how does the body of Lavinia express her complaint? An odd moment occurs when the Andronici seem to experience the height of their collective grief; Marcus says: ‘See thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here, / Thy other banished son …’ (3.1.255–7). As they make their vow as a family to respond to their assaults, Titus orchestrates a strange procession: ‘Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other will I bear, / And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employed: / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth’ (3.1.280–3). This moment is perplexing; it might foreshadow Lavinia’s eventual use of her mouth as a surrogate for her hand; but it is also one form of an iconic gesture. Biting one’s own hand was a common gesture of despair in classical, medieval and early Renaissance iconography, enacting self-injury to represent guilt, fear, sin, anger

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and the desire for revenge.60 Here Titus literally lends her his hand to express this seemingly gustatory gesture. It is a gesture that purges emotions such as grief and anger; it may also help with the traumatic pain her body must be experiencing throughout the play even long after the amputation. Amputees would be given something to bite down on in order to bear the excessive pain. As we know, characters sometimes annotate the gestures of other characters giving us some clues as to how actors gestured on stage. When Titus is faced with his ravaged daughter, he longs to do the same thing. He wants to find a way to narrate the vivid spectacle of her scrawling body, so that she can become more legible: […] Hark, Marcus, what she says: I can interpret all her martyred signs— She says she drinks no other drink but tears, Brewed with her sorrow, mashed upon her cheeks. Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought. In thy dumb action will I be as perfect As begging hermits in their holy prayers. Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven, Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign, But I of these will wrest an alphabet And by still practice learn to know thy meaning. (3.2.35–45) Titus will develop a new system for interpreting the gestural language of his daughter, suggesting, that through necessity, her body will become even more expressive than before. To ‘wrest’ an alphabet plays on the double meaning of the word ‘wrest’, both to obtain by force and to distort, or invent, a meaning. He settles on the former. But ‘wrest’ may also allude to the part of the hand upon which all movement depends: the wrist. ‘Wrist’ is sometimes spelled as ‘wrest’ in this period and might be a deliberate pun to draw visual attention to her

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stumps, which are at the site of her wrists. In some ways, though she has lost her ‘pretty fingers’, Titus reminds her she still has the ability to communicate: ‘Thou map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs’ (3.2.11); her body is text and he will serve as manicule. If the body is able to transcend manual dismemberment, an amputee might still be an active force expressing identity and intention. Ambroise Paré’s Workes contain a section called ‘On Monsters and Prodigies’ where he describes and illustrates the variety of bodily disfigurements and deformities known to him. He includes one or two anecdotes (whether or not they are based on fact or myth is unclear) about people who suffered the traumatic loss of limbs. Like the man, for example: who although he wanted his arms, notwithstanding did indifferently perform all those things which are usually done with the hands; for with the top of his shoulder, head and neck, he would strike an Axe or Hatchet with as sure and strong a blow into a post, as any other man could do with his hand.61 Whether or not this story is true, it attests to the sense that the body, in spite of its disability or disfigurement, could somehow adapt itself to its new condition and radically continue to use hands, figuratively speaking, even while being bereft of them. Modern research into prosthetic limbs has meant that people who have suffered amputation are able to lead relatively normal lives, and hand transplantation is becoming more common. But even in the early modern period, in a military surgical context, prosthetic limbs were being developed. Ambroise Paré provides illustrations and descriptions of such devices (see Fig. 28): Necessity oftentimes constrains us to find out the means whereby we may help and imitate nature, and supply the defect of members that are perished and lost. And hereof

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FIGURE 28 Prosthetic Hands (1634), Ambroise Paré (used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)

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it commeth that we may perform the functions of going, standing and handling with arms and hands made by art, and undergo our necessary flexions and extensions with both of them. I have gotten the forms of all those members made so by art […] of a most ingenious & excellent Smith dwelling at Paris […] They are not only profitable for the necessity of the body, but also for the decency and comeliness thereof.62 Paré’s concern is not much different to the concern of modern hand surgeons; he wants to improve the quality of life for the patient and to enable the body to re-acquire a sense of aesthetic wholeness. Current disability studies provide models for understanding the brain’s plasticity under such circumstances as the loss of a hand and its sense of active touch. The body can reorganize itself to adapt to painful bodily changes. According to Tobin Siebers, ‘blind hands envision the faces of old acquaintances. Deaf eyes listen to public television. Tongues touch type letters […] Mouths sign autographs. Different bodies require and create new modes of representation.’63 Siebers refers to the use of the mouth as a substitute for the hand. As we have seen in John Bulwer’s formulation, the hand was equal to the mouth, rather than deferent to it. Physiologically speaking and in Siebers’s estimation, this equality is essential for the amputated body to continue to express itself. Lavinia is interpreted by her father and uncle, but when it matters the most, she speaks prosthetically for herself. When Marcus Andronicus says, ‘Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say ’tis so?’ (2.3.33), he attempts to describe the indescribable: the pain she suffers, using what Elaine Scarry terms the ‘language of agency’ to arouse the pity for Lavinia’s trauma.64 But it is Lavinia who is most able to communicate her narrative by using an index to the past and a prosthetic limb: Ovid’s book and the stick. The stick serves as her prosthetic limb that invokes the ghostly memory of her absent hands. She does just what Chiron viciously challenged her to do: she writes

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with her stumps. But first Lavinia uses her body frantically to describe what happened as her father and uncle annotate her gestures: Titus Marcus Titus Boy

Why lifts she up her arms in sequence thus? I think she means that there were more than one Confederate in the fact. Ay, more there was— Or else to heaven she heaves them for revenge. Lucius, what book is that she tosseth so? Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphosis; (4.1.37–42)

Without her hands, Lavinia is still able to make meaning through gesture. She is now the manicule, pointing towards the text that can reveal the truth of her tragedy. As we saw with Lucrece, Lavinia’s gesture of heaving her ‘hands’ or arms to heaven expresses the profound emotions she is experiencing; here it is in response to being understood, to being able to tell her story. It is evidence of communication but may also convey relief. In the playhouse this gesture is an amputated one, the actor’s hands bound into stumps, but it is clear what it means. The director of the Globe Theatre’s 2014 production, Lucy Bailey, astutely calls this moment an ‘awakening’: once this terrible thing happens to her, Shakespeare seems to examine astonishingly accurately the trauma a woman goes through: the shut down in Lavinia, the fact she seems to numb to everything. [In the production] we literally almost mummify her, by wrapping her as if her whole body is bandaged, as if her own soul has shrunk to a very tiny part of her, because everything has been so hurt that she can afford no nerve endings. For the first part of the second half you can’t see Lavinia; as she’s just closed down. And then Shakespeare shows an awakening through an image that reawakens all the pain and the

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shock-horror of the event; and it is as if all the blood comes to the surface …65 Bailey’s notion of an ‘awakening’ was effective in helping to reconcile the grief and pain in the play, which was emblematized through the use of bandages in this production. In the play, when Titus and Marcus begin to understand Lavinia’s dumb show, they ask her to name her attackers. Marcus demonstrates without the use of his hands how to write: This sandy plot is plain. Guide, if thou canst, This after me. I here have writ my name Without the help of any hand at all. (4.1.69–71) The stage direction tells us: ‘She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes’ (SD, 4.1.) The act of writing produces her ‘hand’. Here she is re-membered properly through her script, her ‘character’, seen in early modern England as synonymous with the hand and as redolent of identity. This act of re-membering gives Lavinia a powerful sense of agency, which is brought to fruition when she participates actively in her revenge by collecting the blood of her attackers shed by her father: ‘This one hand yet is left to cut your throats, / Whiles that Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold / The basin that receives your guilty blood’ (5.2.181–3). The memory of Lavinia’s absent hands manifests itself through the language and prosthetic properties of the play. Her hands and their ghostly traces continue, therefore, to make meaning, to signify her despair and to enact her revenge. Titus’s sacrificial killing of her receives mixed responses from critics and audiences. Lucy Bailey sees it as a mutual act, a ‘mutual understanding between father and daughter’. Now that she has collected the blood of her perpetrators and witnessed the revenge, she has what Bailey argues is closure. In the context

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of this Roman and Elizabethan world where a woman’s chastity, her value as ‘rich ornament’, her hands that can play the lute, her tongue that can sing sweet notes are the only currency with which she can trade, Titus does the only thing with his remaining hand that he can to preserve her value to that world.

‘Shall we cut away our hands’: Staging amputation in Titus In the culture of anatomical votive offerings, a donor or pilgrim would give a gift, such as a body part, in the hope that some kind of miracle of healing might occur. The gift is given with faith. We saw in the Duchess of Malfi how the cult of saints might be invoked in the appearance of a severed hand on stage to gesture towards the aesthetics and the artificiality of theatre. In Titus hands are cut off to prevent truth-telling and to be offered as bargaining chips in hope and faith in the state. The votive offering of body parts dates back to ancient cultures; it was never just a strictly Catholic ritual. H. S. Versnel observes that ‘[a]natomical votive offerings were spread over a large area both in time and in space. In antiquity they appeared not only in the Greek world but also in Italy’.66 Shakespeare’s preoccupation with dismemberment in this play may be inflected by both traditions as well as by the Elizabethan punitive practices of dismemberment. Either way he presents it in two contexts: the attempted destruction of a female body and as a ritual offering to the state. Andrew Lipman has written a fascinating account of the ways in which the exchange of body parts was a political practice between English and Native American cultures in the 1600s: ‘body parts were trophies in the sense that they were mementos of a violent act, yet they stood for more than just a single man’s triumph over another’.67 Noting the similarities between long-standing punitive acts of the English state and the native tribes, he observes that in

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both cultures, amputated hands and decapitated heads had traditionally been viewed as ‘valued tokens of reciprocity and loyalty’ that signified new alliances and demonstrated the political value of the body.68 Although he writes about a unique cultural relationship and a slightly later period in England’s history, the 1640s, Lipman’s notion of the value and currency of body parts in political exchanges is a useful framework for understanding Titus’s own amputation. Titus already expresses a willingness to chop off his own hands when he first lays eyes on his mutilated daughter: Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight? … Give me a sword, I’ll chop off my hands too, For they have fought for Rome, and all in vain; And they have nursed this woe in feeding life; In bootless prayer have they been held up, And they have served me to effectless use. Now all the service I require of them Is that the one will help to cut the other. ’Tis well, Lavinia, that thou hast no hands, For hands to do Rome service is but vain. (3.1.67–8; 73–81) Titus here narrates the long history of his hands. They were agents for the body of Rome; they were used in prayer and worship; they have nurtured and fed his woes, but have been rendered fundamentally ‘effectless’, a sensation King Lear, another Shakespearean retiree, experiences when he suggests ungrateful children are like mouths that bite off the hands that feed them: ‘Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to’t?’ (King Lear, 3.4.15–16). Titus offers to cut off his own hands as an act of empathy for his daughter. But the physical reality of his amputation comes moments later when Aaron brings a false message of hope:

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Let Marcus, Lucius, or thyself, old Titus, Or any one of you, chop off your hand And send it to the king, he for the same Will send thee hither both thy sons alive – And that shall be ransom for their fault. (3.1.153–7) Titus mistakenly believes that his hand still carries value in the current regime, even though he had acknowledged earlier that, ‘hands to do Rome service is but vain’ (80). Titus posits himself as political enemy ready to negotiate or, in terms that illustrate the emotional depth of his willingness to sacrifice a limb, he is a faithful venerator, offering a sacrifice in the hopes of recovering unity and healing the body of his dismembered family. What ensues is a farcical competition between the male members of the family each to give up his hand as offering: Titus  With all my heart I’ll send the emperor my hand. (161) Lucius  Stay, father, for that noble hand of thine /That hath thrown down so many enemies / Shall not be sent. My hand will serve the turn (163–5) Marcus  Which of your hands hath not defended Rome / […] My hand hath been but idle: let it serve (168, 171) Titus tricks his family into leaving the stage and when they return he convinces Aaron to help him using the most ironic pun in dramatic history to preface a hideous act of violence: ‘Lend me thy hand and I will give thee mine’ (188). The juxtaposition of humour and pain is worth pausing upon. Lucy Bailey contends that this play is about ‘extremity and the physical violence that potentially becomes comic’. She observes that with the volume of hand references, Shakespeare is asking for his audiences to laugh in order to escape the penetrating horror of what is happening, so it must be

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carefully staged to provoke the dichotomous emotions with which the play requires its audiences to respond: With the hand and its many references, we tried to create a kind of farcical black comedy. If we didn’t do that and we went into it with only horrific seriousness, I don’t think we could actually stand the pain […] Shakespeare is asking us to do this; it’s in the text, I believe.69 Bailey’s production proved nevertheless to horrify and shock its audiences in ways that Elizabethan anti-theatrical writers argued plays could. Audience members fainted regularly and some vomited, most often at the sight of the bleeding Lavinia and sometimes upon the sound of chopping when Aaron cuts off the hand of Titus (William Houston). As I have argued in this chapter, severed hands and dismemberment are not part of our current visual vocabulary; the shock of witnessing amputation performed live in a venue where people can see each other’s reactions can have severe physiological consequences. One reviewer referred to the effect that Bailey hoped to achieve, calling it a ‘grinning skull of revenge tragedy’ that was ‘gorier and funnier than ever’.70 After Selimus one might dwell on the absurdity of the violence and come away with an estranged attitude towards ‘Turks’, but Shakespeare forces his Elizabethan (and current) audiences to connect with the Romans in the play through the presentation of physical trauma and the whirligig of its emotional effect. Bailey was aware of this going in: There’s so much violence it almost stopped me wanting to do the play originally, because. I wasn’t sure if I could cope with the arbitrary nature of the violence, but at the same time, Shakespeare shows us that’s what the play is about – how to access grief and how to access tenderness after trauma. So, it’s about the survival of love, not only about the horror of what people do to each other […] we are horrified by the violence done to Lavinia; we feel faint;

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but we have to find our way beyond the cruelty and despair. With the references to the hand, we are meant to laugh. Even at its most bleak, we discover our capacity to laugh.71 The emotional encounter with amputation in this play in performance can be characterized, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, as ‘a narrative between apocalypse and carnival’.72 The juxtaposition of humour and gore is, as we have seen, not unique to Shakespeare, but Titus is, amongst the plays that stage amputation and severed hands, the only one to explore fully the variety and extremity of human emotions experienced upon such shocking violence and profound loss. The Globe production staged the amputation using a sleight-of-hand trick. The dummy hand was cleverly disguised on box with a spring loaded top (see Fig. 29); the underside had the fake hand attached to it with magnets and thread; when it is spun around it loads the springs, a catch is engaged and the trick is set. Obi Abili’s Aaron carried the box on to the stage, William Houston’s Titus knelt in front of the box and placed his left hand on top, at which point he opened the catch stopping the flipping of the box with his hand. Titus pulls his left hand into his sleeve at which point the lid flips to reveal the fake hand and Aaron swings the axe with one hand and bursts a blood bag with the other. Following this moment, a dummy hand is put into play as it moves from Titus to Aaron and then returned to Titus, along with his sons’ decapitated heads, in another act of re-membering: ‘Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand’ (SD, 3.1.234). The failure of Titus’s sacrificial offering escalates the action towards revenge, but it also ushers in more hand references and allusions, such as when Titus draws attention to the empty space at the end of his right wrist to declare his vengeance: ‘Witness this wretched stump, witness these crimson lines, / Witness these trenches made by grief and care’ (5.2.22–3). As the play closes, Marcus appeals to the citizenry of Rome:

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FIGURE 29  Dummy hand, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s Globe (Farah Karim-Cooper)

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O let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. (5.3.69–71) Here he describes the assault on the Andronici and Rome as a kind of ritual dismemberment and suggests the symbolic work Roman hands must do to ‘knit’ together the severed state. Hands persistently make meaning through the linguistic framework of the play, signifying the intentions and identities of characters to whom they once belonged. In this chapter, we have considered how, once amputated, the severed hand becomes objectified thus maximizing our attention to it and enabling it to continue to express the self in performance. Although touching and gesturing are such crucial acts of communication and can reflect the emotions and identities of individuals in powerful ways, the amputated hand, nevertheless, remains ‘talkative’ on the early modern stage, a ‘busy instrument’ that persists in signifying character and identity through phantom limbs and in acts of re-membrance. Whether it is within a symbolic version of self-amputation, as in Macbeth, or a traumatic assault like that against Lavinia, or sacrifice as a form of political exchange and offering to the state as with Titus, manual dismemberment in Shakespeare offers hands as crucial components of political exchange, selfhood and the vast complex of human emotions.

EPILOGUE

Fingers As you lick your fingers to turn the pages of this book (unless it is the e-version), you may be reminded of the ways in which our fingers shape and define our experience of reading and acquiring knowledge, as they did for early modern readers. I want to conclude this study with some brief thoughts on the finger. I opened this book with the argument that Shakespeare represented the hand as a powerful instrument of human exchange, emotional expression, self scrutiny, character and identity. The human finger is wired to touch and to feel. As Christopher Perricone observes, there is more ‘brain space in the somatosensory cortex […] given to the hand than to any other part of the body’; equally significant is the fact that the ‘fingers have a high density of touch receptors compared to other body areas, hence their greater acuity.1 Fingers had their own individual set of symbolic associations during Shakespeare’s time. Authors who explicated the hand, whether in anatomical, oratorical or poetic contexts, gave to the fingers and the thumb (technically defined as a finger in this period) individual qualities and symbolic meanings. When John Veslingus describes the muscles and bones of the hand, he attributes the motion of the hand largely to the fingers, which require muscular capacity and ‘strong Tendons’ in order to ‘bow them, extend them and turn them to the side’.2 We might recall here the manicule; Sherman mentions that it is always the index or second finger that ‘extends from the hand toward the text’ and cites the medieval encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus, De proprietatibus rerum, translated by John of Trevisa, which explains:

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The second [finger] hyght Index, & salutaris, also yt is gretter, for by hym is moche shewynges made, and is namyed Likpot, and also yt techer. For with hym we grete, & shewe, and teche all thynges.3 The index points, indicates authority, guides the eye and the mind; it is demonstrative. With the index finger we ‘grete’ (greet) and ‘shewe’ (show) and ‘teche all thynges’ (teach all things). The visual tradition of Doubting Thomas places emphasis on this activity of hands and the index finger for obvious reasons. One of the more gesturally complex versions of this biblical narrative is Caravaggio’s (1601–2). Despite its singularity, the finger of St Thomas provides an index for the broader concerns under examination in this book: the relationship of the hand to the conceptualization of identity, the acquisition of knowledge and the expression of the self in early modern culture and in Shakespeare’s work.

FIGURE 30  The Incredulity of St Thomas (1601–2), Caravaggio (Sanssouci, Potsdam)

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The Bible is curiously vague about the details of St Thomas’s tactile encounter with Christ. When Jesus rises from the dead, his disciples see him: ‘he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord’ (Jn, 20.20). But Thomas, who was one of the 12 disciples says, ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe’ (20.25). Days later, Jesus comes to Thomas and says: ‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands: and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’ (20.26). This all seems fairly straightforward until we hear Thomas’s reply: ‘And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my god’ (20.27), fundamentally declaring his faith. Jesus says to him: ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (20.29). The ambiguous nature of this oft quoted biblical episode lies in the ‘breach’ in the text between Thomas’s adamant doubt in the ‘ocular proof’ of Christ’s body, his need to verify it through the sense of touch and Christ’s curious invitation to touch him. This invitation is followed by Thomas’s sudden belief (both the Geneva and the King James Bibles are equally ambiguous about these details).4 There is, therefore, no concrete biblical evidence that Thomas ‘thrust’ his finger into Christ’s wound. Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Caravaggio and others fill the gaps in the narrative by depicting Thomas’s finger penetrating Christ’s wound in often rather graphic and vivid detail. Caravaggio’s depiction of the story is worth considering because of the artist’s attention to the intrusive nature of Thomas’s probing finger and the responsive gesture of Christ, a gesture that will be recognizable to the reader. The wrist-grasp was a popular tactile gesture in art and literature, as we saw in Chapter 4. Depicted in numerous paintings and engravings from the period, it appears again in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas where Christ grasps Thomas’s wrist with his left hand. What the gesture usually intimates is

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some form of hierarchical intervention, but it is unclear as to whether Christ is encouraging his hand towards or away from the wound. The ambiguity in the painting corresponds to the topos of doubt that Caravaggio and Shakespeare are invoking in their respective representations of the sense of touch and its relationship to verification. Othello’s insistence to ‘see before I doubt, when I doubt, prove’ (3.3.193) participates in some way in the debates about sensory epistemology with which Caravaggio’s painting is concerned. Aristotle had argued centuries before that touch was the most infallible of the senses because it made direct contact with the world, whereas each of the other senses is mediated or refracted through something that lies between the object of sense and the sense organ itself. Theological scholars have interpreted Thomas’s story as a vehicle for the doctrinal assertion that non-epistemic belief is essential – that is, belief in something without seeing or without touching – in order for the faith to survive through the centuries. Caravaggio’s painting demonstrates, however, the powerful tactile invasion of human curiosity into the body, reminding us of the Renaissance anatomists whose assertive gestures into cadavers enabled human progress and the understanding or verifiability of the body and its systems. But Thomas’s touch appears almost to be a violation; we are disturbed by the forceful contact between Thomas’s finger and Christ’s skin; the pain is palpable or ‘gross’, and the somewhat homoerotically-charged image seems designed to unsettle the viewer. Thomas uses his index finger, the finger that had the most impact when it came to gesturing and touching. This tactile gesture seems even more assertive when we consider the connotations that pointing had in this period. Pointing, or the ‘deictic’ gesture (from the Greek deicticos – ‘demonstrate’), signals authority. Bulwer said the ‘Index erected from a fist, doth crave and expect attention; and, if moved, it doth threaten and denounce’.5 Used often in oratory, the brandished index finger is designed to command a hearer’s attention. It would seem, disconcertingly, that Thomas’s pointing/touching finger is aggressively advanced into Christ’s skin; but Christ’s

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seizure of his wrist, a gesture of incapacitation and aggression, challenges this advancement; thus, it would appear that the ‘Lord’ has the upper hand. But like Katherina’s suggestion of placing her hand beneath Petruchio’s shoe in the scene with which I opened this book, the gestures in Caravaggio’s painting are suspended in a position of ambiguity. Here, they lie somewhere between the notion of audacious, invasive touching and Christ’s potentially prohibitive wrist-grasp. With the use of light and darkness, Caravaggio draws the viewer’s gaze into the wound as a way of objectifying the interplay of hands and invoking the relationship between the active touching human finger, identity and knowledge; it also embodies, to use again the phrase that Bruce Smith coined, the early modern ‘fantasies of touch’ that also characterize many of Shakespeare’s characters, such as Romeo, Juliet, Iago, all with their own peculiar preoccupation with hands. Shakespeare and Caravaggio are similar in their invitation to us to focus upon hands before we cast our gaze across the broader canvas of their work. From the hands of women, objectified in the rituals of courtship to the number of close-ups and descriptions of gesturing, touching and severed hands, Shakespeare expresses delight and curiosity in the way hands reflect and articulate cultural, social and emotional selves even while the language of the hand remains partially elusive and ambiguous. For Shakespeare, the hand was a source for knowledge and inspiration, a primitive instrument deployed in the service of human progress and an eloquent mediator between people and objects within the sensory environment. The aim of this book has been to uncover the way Shakespeare draws attention to the movement and the meaning of the hand in his poems and plays and how, in doing so, he invites us to look upon and study our own hands as they turn the pages of books, type letters, text messages, swipe across touch screens, write, gesture, reach and touch if only to try and discover what they might unlock for us about our own identities and the selves we think lie hidden.

FIGURE 31  Hand Study, by Kesandra Karim

NOTES

Introduction 1

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (eds), The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1998, 2001).

2

Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.4 (Winter 1987): 179–213, 183.

3

Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds’, 189.

4

Raymond Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (London, 1988, 2010), 21.

5

David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 1997).

6

Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, The Body in Parts, xi.

7

Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, The Body in Parts, xviii.

8

Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, The Body in Parts, xiv.

9

Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, 1999), Preface, x.

10 John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand (London, 1644), 1. 11 Antony Nixon, The Dignitie of Man, Both in the Perfections of His Soul and Body (London, 1612), 9. 12 Francis Bacon, ‘De Analogia Demonstrationum’, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Book II, in Robert Leslie Ellis and James Spedding (eds), The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (London, 2011), 212. 13 Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Oxford, 2010), 145.

248 Notes

Chapter 1 1

See Walter Melion, ‘Love and Artisanship in Hendrick Goltzius’s Venus, Bacchus and Ceres of 1606’, Art History 16.1 (March 1993): 60–94, 70.

2

See, for example, Cesare Ripa’s personification of Costanza in Iconologia (1603), English Translation (1709).

3

Mark J. Schiefsky, ‘Galen’s Teleology and Functional Explanation’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 33, ed. D. Sedley (Oxford, 2007): 369–400, available online: http://nrs. harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3708554 (7) (accessed 17 January 2015).

4 Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. James G. Lennox (Oxford, 2001), 99. 5 Galen, De usu partium (On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body), trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, 1968), 71. 6

Rebecca Flemming, ‘Demiurge and Emperor in Galen’s World of Knowledge’, in Christopher Gill, Tim Whitmarsh and John Wilkins (eds), Galen and the World of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009), 59–84, 68.

7

See Stephen N. Joffe, Andreas Vesalius: The Making, The Madman, and the Myth (Bloomington, IN, 2009, 2014), 108.

8

See Martin Kemp, ‘Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Antomies’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 200–25, 200.

9

Claire Richter Sherman, ‘Introduction’, Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle, 2001), 109.

10 Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990), 90. 11 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) (Ch. 27), available online: http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/ (accessed 5 November 2014). 12 Hillary M. Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Aldershot, 2005), 11.

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13 Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Ch. 27), available online: http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/ (accessed 5 November 2014). 14 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and Renaissance Culture (London and New York, 1995), 2. 15 Crooke, Microcosmographia, cited in Katherine Rowe, ‘God’s handy-worke’, in Hillman and Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts, 285–309, 290. 16 Katherine Rowe, ‘God’s handy-worke’, in Hillman and Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts, 285–312, 287. 17 OED online, available online: http://oed.com/ viewdictionaryentry/Entry/9808 (accessed 10 February 2012). 18 John Banister, The Historie of Man (London, 1578), Fol. 28v. 19 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Painting, Carvinge and Buildinge, trans. Richard Haydocke (London, 1598), 25. 20 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Kemp (London, 2004), 85. 21 Leonardo da Vinci, Drawings held in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, trans. in Martin Clayton and Ron Philo, Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man (London, 2010), Folio 13v, 127. 22 Kemp, ‘Dissection and Divinity’, 208. 23 Clayton and Philo, Leonardo da Vinci, 12. 24 Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (London, 2012), electronic edition, 203. 25 Clayton and Philo, Leonardo da Vinci, folio 10v, 104. 26 This treatise is bound and published with another one by Bulwer, called Chironomia: or, The art of Manuall Rhetorique. 27 Nineteenth-century theorist Sir Charles Bell, also an anatomist, wrote a treatise comparing the human hand to the hands of other animals, concluding that it was what made humans superior to other creatures: ‘the human hand is so beautifully formed, it has so fine a sensibility, that sensibility governs its motions so correctly, every effort of the will is answered so instantly, as if the hand itself were the seat of that will; its

250 Notes

actions are so powerful, so free, and yet so delicate …’ The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, As Evincing Design (Philadelphia, 1833), 23. 28 Bulwer, Chirologia, 4. 29 The culmination of Bulwer’s enquiry into the hand and its communicative function were his later works Philocophus: or, the deafe and dumbe mans friend (published in 1648), a polemical and educational treatise stipulating the importance of educating the deaf, and his unpublished manuscript, Philocophus, or the Dumbe mans academie, wherein is taught a new and admired art instructing them who are borne deafe and dumbe to heare the sound of words with their eie. This synaesthetic model was inspired by and drawn from Spanish writer Juan Pablo Bonet’s ‘sign language manual’ published in Madrid in 1620. Bulwer seems to have intended to introduce and establish sign language in England. 30 Carla Mazzio, ‘Sins of the Tongue’, in Hillman and Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts, 53–79, 55. 31 Bulwer, Chirologia, 2. 32 Bulwer, Chirologia, Sig. A2v. 33 Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis, 2003), 107. 34 The idea and image of one’s heart in one’s hand is extremely common in this period, particularly in Shakespeare: ‘’Tis but the boldness of his hand, haply, which his heart was not consenting to’ (All’s Well That Ends Well, 3.2.76–7 – here the reference is to a letter again); ‘Ours be your patience then and yours our parts; / Your gentle hands lend us and take our hearts’ (All’sWell That Ends Well, Epilogue – spoken to audience); ‘… even there, / Against the hospitable canon, would I / Wash my fierce hand in’s heart’ (Coriolanus, 1.10.25–7 – here spoken in a violent context); ‘Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands / Unite Commutual in most sacred bands’ (Hamlet, 3.2.152–3 – the player King remembers here the act of marriage which is steeped in symbolism related to hands and hearts); ‘To give my hand, oppos’d against my heart, / Unto a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen’ (The Taming of the Shrew, 3.2.9–10 – Katherina uses the common symbolic

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image of giving away one’s heart when giving of the hand gesturally, which is expected in marriage). These are just a few examples of Shakespeare’s commingling of the hand and heart in a shared image; they occur in a range of contexts, as these examples show and demonstrate the deep connections between hands and the passions. 35 William Austin, Haec-Homo: wherein The Excellency of the Creation of woman is described (London, 1637), 15. 36 Caroll Camden, ‘Elizabethan Chiromancy’, Modern Language Notes 62.1 (January 1947): 1–7, 2. 37 John Indagine, The Book of Palmestry and Physiognomy Being Brief introductions, both Natural, Pleasant and Delectable unto the art of Chiromancy (London, 1651), Sig. A8r. 38 Indagine, The Book of Palmestry, Sig. A8r–A8v. 39 Indagine, The Book of Palmestry, Sig. Fr. 40 Thomas Hill, The Contemplation of Mankind (London, 1571), 169. 41 Hill, The Contemplation of Mankind, 170. 42 See Sherman, Writing on Hands, 210–29. 43 See Carol V. Kaske, ‘Marsilio Ficino and the Twelve Gods of the Zodiac’, Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 45 (1982): 195–202. 44 Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night Or, A Discourse of Apparitions (London, 1594), Sig. Fr. 45 Robert Browne, Relgio Medici (London, 1642), 116–17. 46 Jacques Ferrand, Erotomania, or A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love, Or Erotique Melancholy (Oxford, 1645), 173. 47 William Bercher, Nobility of Women (London, 1559), 108–9. 48 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin (Leiden, 1998), 112. 49 Daldianus Artimedorus, The Interpretation of Dreames (London, 1644), 24. 50 Rowe, ‘God’s handy worke’, 287.

252 Notes

51 Moshe Barasch traces the isolated hand of God to medieval and European art, traditionally in the context of representing God’s word and thus usually fashioned into some type of speaking gesture. See Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge, 1987), 26. 52 Philip Sohm, ‘Maniera and the absent hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 Fractura (Autumn 1999): 100–24, 102. 53 Anti-cosmetic writer, Thomas Tuke insists ‘there is wrong done to God, whose workmanship they would seem to mend, being discontented with it’ (A Treatise Against Paint[i]ng and Tincturing of Men and Women, London, 1616), 2. 54 Sohm, ‘Maniera and the absent hand’, 102. 55 While published several years ago, Barasch’s study of Giotto and gesture provides a useful list of the ritual gestures (found in Giotto’s paintings and frescos) that were associated with medieval and Renaissance religious iconography. He notes that the ‘oldest and most common gesture of prayer … [orans] was believed to re-enact Christ’s crucifixion’ (8); thus the codified gestures of early Catholic worship were infused with spiritual significance and scriptural narrative. The combination in Giotto’s work of the use of ritualistic gestures and natural gestures (those produced in everyday life) could have powerful effects on viewers. Liturgical gestures such as the blessing and gestures of lamentation in biblical depictions could induce highly emotional responses that ensured spiritual and doctrinal devotion. 56 Carole Levin, ‘“Would I could give you Help and Succor”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Touch’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 21.2 (Summer 1989): 191–205, 198. 57 Cited in Levin, ‘Would I could give you Help and Succor’, 199. See William Tooker, Charisma sive Donum Sanationis (1597), which provides a somewhat hyperbolic account of the queen’s ability to cure the sick with her hands. 58 Levin, ‘Would I could give you Help and Succor’, 200. 59 William Clowes, A Right and Frutefull and Approved Treatise for the Artificial cure for that Malady called in Latin Struma and in English, the Evil (London, 1602), Av.

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60 Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 98. 61 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 4. 62 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 5. 63 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 5. 64 Bulwer, Chirologia, 7. 65 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (London, 1582), Sig. G8r. 66 William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2008), 48. 67 Sherman, Used Books, 47. 68 Lori Anne Ferrell, ‘How-To Books, Protestant Kinetics, and the Art of Theology’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71.4 (December 2008): 591–606, 597. 69 Ferrell, ‘How-To Books’, 597. 70 Ferrell, ‘How-To Books’, 597–8. 71 Simon Smith’s work on the tactility of musical instruments can be read in Simon Smith, Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny (eds), The Senses in Early Modern England 1500 to 1800 (Manchester, 2015). 72 See Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1584) and Richard Perceval, A Dictionary in Spanish and English (London, 1599). ‘Frets’ also means ‘brawls’. 73 See A new Booke of Tabliture, Containing sundrie easie and familiar Instructions, shewing how to attaine to the knowledge, to guide and dispose the hand to play on sundry instruments, as the Lute, Orpharion, and Bandora (London, 1596). 74 C. Sherman, Writing on Hands, 39, 158. Sherman’s catalogue of the Folger exhibition ‘Writing on Hands’ contains several medieval and early modern illustrations of mnemonic and Guidonian hands.

254 Notes

Chapter 2 1

Ruth Styles, ‘The beauty salon spendthrifts’, Mail Online, 25 March 2013, available online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ femail/article-2297649/British-women-spend-450-YEAR-nails. html (accessed 18 January 2015).

2 Austin, Haec Homo, 116. 3

John Taylor, Superbiae Flagellum, or, The Whip of Pride (London, 1621), Sig. A3v. See Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh, 2006, 2012).

4 Bulwer, Chirologia, 87. 5

John Gillingham, ‘From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6.12 (2002): 267–89, 271.

6

Edward Guilpin, Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth, in certain Epigrams and Satyres (London, 1598 ), Sig. C7v.

7

De Maisse, A Journal of all that was Accomplished by Monsieur De Maisse Ambassador in England From King Henry IV to Queen Elizabeth Anno Domini 1597, ed. G. B. Harrison (London, 1931), 24.

8

Paul Hentzner, Hentzner’s Travels in England, During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, trans. Horace, Late Earl of Oxford (London, 1797), 35.

9

Desiderius Erasmus, ‘On Good Manners’ (1530), in Erika Rummel (ed.), The Erasmus Reader (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1990), 112.

10 Erasmus, ‘On Good Manners’, 120. 11 Galateo of Maister John Della Casa, Or rather, A treatise of the Manners and behauiours, it behoueth a Man to Vse, trans. Robert Peterson (London, 1576), 13. 12 Galateo, trans. Rober Peterson, 113, 119. 13 Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture, or Schoole of good manners (London, 1577), Sig. Bvir–v. 14 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev.

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edn, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (Malden, MA, 2000), 85. 15 Anna Bryson, ‘The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth and SeventeenthCentury England’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660 (London, 1990), 136–53, 139. 16 Cited in Elias, The Civilizing Process, 122. 17 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1993), 14. 18 Evelyn Welch, ‘Art on the edge: hair and hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies 23.3 (June 2009): 241–68, 243 19 Bridget Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (London, 2014), 200. 20 Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2005), 38, 45. 21 This phrase comes from Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 25. 22 Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’, Critical Enquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001): 114–32, 115. 23 John Walter, ‘Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 203, Supplement 4 (Oxford, 2009): 96–127, 103. 24 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke (New York, 2005), 26 25 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 31 26 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 41. 27 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 180. 28 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in generall (London 1601), 213. 29 Thomas Becon, ‘Catechism’, The Workes of Thomas Becon (London 1564), 431–4. 30 Patrick Hannay, A Happy Husband (London, 1618), Sig. C1r–C5v.

256 Notes

31 Joseph Hall, The Anathomie of Sinne: Briefely discovering the braunches thereof (London, 1603), Sig. D2v. 32 Anonymous, A Wedding-Ring, Fitted to the Finger of every Paire that have or Shall Meete the Feare of God (London, 1632), 4. 33 Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford, 2011). 34 See Bulwer, Chirologia, 62: ‘To open the hand … implies to be free-hearted’. 35 William Whately, A bride-bush (London, 1617), 36ff. 36 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, lines 587–90, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto, 1967), 36–7. 37 John Lyly, Euphes and his England, in Leah Scragg (ed.), John Lyly Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England: An Annotated Modern-Spelling Edition (Manchester, 2003), 329–30. 38 Austin, Haec-Homo, 117. 39 Christopher Marlowe, (finished by George Chapman), Hero and Leander (London, 1598), Sig. A3v. 40 Giles Fletcher, Licia, or Poemes of Love (London, 1593), 6. 41 See Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama and ‘Performing Beauty on the Renaissance Stage’, in Christie Carson and Christine Dymkowski (eds), Shakespeare in Stages (Cambridge, 2009), 93–106. 42 Agnolo Firenzuola, First Dialogue, On the Beauty of Women, trans/ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Philadelphia, 1992), 13. 43 Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Painting, 27. 44 Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, 21–2. 45 Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, 67. 46 Kenneth Gouwens, ‘Female Virtue and the Embodiment of Beauty: Vittoria Colonna in Paolo Giovio’s Notable Men and Women’, Renaissance Quarterly LXVIII.1 (Spring 2015): 33–97, 65. 47 Welch, ‘Art on the edge: hair and hands in Renaissance Italy’, 243.

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48 Bartholomew Griffin, Sonnet 39, in Fidessa, more chaste than kinde (London, 1596). 49 In recipe manuals such as Hugh Platt’s Delights for Ladies to Adorne their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories; with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters (London, 1628) there are numerous recipes for cosmetic waters and unguents that can clear spots from the hands, suggesting spots and unsightly marks on hands were fairly common in early modern England. 50 See John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-craft (London, 1616). 51 Boyle, Senses of Touch, 110. 52 Marcus, The Vision of Tundale, in Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Goy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale, ed. Edward Foster (Kalamazoo, MI, 2004). 53 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies Vpon the Fiue Senses (London, 1620), 44. 54 Anon., The Problemes of Aristotle, with other Philosophers and phisitians (Edinburgh, 1595), Sig. Dr. 55 Cited in Boyle, Senses of Touch, 129. 56 John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, or Man Transform’d (London, 1650), 166, 167, 169. 57 Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, 172–3. 58 Marsilio Ficino, De Christiana religione, Ch. 3, cited in Christopher S. Celenza, Piety and Pythagoras in Renaissance Florence: The Symbolum Nesianum (Leiden, Boston, Cologne, 2001), 23. 59 See Peter Elmer and Ole Peter Grell (eds), Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1500–1800: A Sourcebook (Manchester, 2004).

Chapter 3 1 Bulwer, Chironomia, 77. 2 Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger, 21. 3 Bulwer, Chirologia, 62.

258 Notes

4

Fritz Graf, ‘Gestures and Conventions: the gestures of Roman actors and orators’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenberg (eds), A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1991), 36–58, 37.

5

David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago and London, 1992), 38.

6

Jon Hall, ‘Cicero and Quintilian on the Oratorical Use of Hand Gestures’, The Classical Quarterly 54.1 (May 2004), 143–60, 144.

7

Hall, ‘Cicero and Quintilian on the Oratorical Use of Hand Gestures’, 146.

8

Hall, ‘Cicero and Quintilian on the Oratorical Use of Hand Gestures’, 146.

9

Cited in Hall, ‘Cicero and Quintilian on the Oratorical Use of Hand Gestures’, 150.

10 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), 64. 11 Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Sig. Aiiiir. 12 Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, Sig. Ggiiv. 13 Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), 4. 14 Michel de Montaigne, ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Book II, Chapter 12 in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London, 2003), 507. 15 Bulwer, Chirologia, 8–10. 16 For more discussion of this gesture in The Winter’s Tale, see Chapter 5, pp. 188–9. 17 Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare from Stage to Page (London and New York, 2003), 80. 18 Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 176. 19 Paul Menzer, ‘The Actor’s Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint’, Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), 83–111, 84. 20 Menzer, ‘The Actor’s Inhibition’, 92. 21 See Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘The language of gesture in early modern Italy’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds),

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A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1991), 71–83. 22 Scholars Andy Kesson and Stephen Purcell conducted a workshop in the Globe Education Gesture Lab (a symposium and set of workshops exploring the performance of gesture in Shakespeare’s theatres) in 2010, which examined these implied gestural cues in three scenes from plays by John Lyly. What the experiment revealed was that there are a variety of gestural possibilities with each individual reference and that it is impossible to know with certainty which choices were made by early modern actors. Moreover, Bruce Smith has shown how, in the grammar text books of the early modern period, demonstrative pronouns are given a ‘startling immediacy’, and that people understood them, as William Lily described, as ‘a part of speech which is used in one of two situations: “showing” or “rehearsing”’ (Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 70); Smith provides a coherent analysis of what implications this has for the performances of gesture in the early modern period. 23 David McNeill has argued for the inextricable relationship between gesture and speech, suggesting that cognitively the brain is performing one action in two ways: speech and gesture are one; therefore, gesture provides visual evidence of cognition. McNeill argues that ‘gesture is “part” of language … [gestures] and synchronous speech are co-expressive’ (Gesture and Thought, 4: 21–2). 24 See J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge, 2004): ‘To wring one’s hands is a common gesture of distress in English and also in French texts’ (39). See also Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 1 when Sir Guyon approaches a gentle ‘lady’ (who is actually Duessa pretending to be a virtuous woman who has been raped) ‘With garments rent, and hair dishevelled, / Wringing her hands and making piteous moan’ (13, 6–7). 25 Seneca, ‘On Anger’, Book 3, in Seneca: Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie (Oxford, 2007), 18–52, 21. 26 Bulwer, Chirologia, 5. 27 David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago, 2007), 13. 28 McNeill, Gesture and Thought, 7.

260 Notes

29 Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York, 1976), 20. 30 See Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson (eds), Hamlet (Arden, 2004) for the variances between the dumb show descriptions in Q1, Q2 and F, 306. 31 Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gestures, 147. 32 See Jacqus LeCoq, Theatre of Movement and Gesture, ed. David Bradby (London and New York, 2006). 33 Menzer, ‘The Actor’s Inhibition’, 96. 34 Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance (New York, 2011), 85. 35 Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 87. This term techne derives from Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric and it implies ‘making’ or bringing something into being. 36 Alfred Harbage, ‘Elizabethan Acting’, PMLA 54.3 (1939): 685–708, cited in Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 87–8. 37 M. C. Bradbrook, Elizabethan Stage Conditions (Cambridge, 1932), 109. Cited in Marvin Rosenberg, ‘Elizabethan Actors: Men or Marionettes?’, PMLA 69.4 (September 1954): 915–27, 915. 38 Bertram Joseph, Acting Shakespeare (New York, 1969), cited in Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 90. 39 Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 88. The work of Tiffany Stern and John Astington have moved beyond the formalist perspective and have written convincing accounts of the processes in which actor’s worked: see John Astington, Actors and Acting in the Theatres of Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge, 2012) and Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare from Stage to Page (London, 2004). 40 While I understand that ‘formal’ means highly stylized, I will be using the word ‘iconic’ interchangeably with ‘formal’ to indicate gestures that would have been encoded with meaning from religious and secular contexts, primarily in visual arts and conduct/books on manners in the Renaissance, and thus recognizable and widely legible. 41 Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 92.

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42 Simon Forman, cited in Judith Cook, Dr Simon Forman: a most notorious physician (New York, 2011), 189. 43 For an account by scholars and the practitioners who founded the ‘Original Practices’ movement at Shakespeare’s Globe, see Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge, 2008). 44 I am grateful to Jenny Tiramani for sharing her views with me about this in email correspondence. 45 Cited in Zirka Z. Filipczak, ‘Poses and Passions: Mona Lisa’s “Closely Folded” Hands’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia, 2004), 68–88, 73. 46 Paul Chahidi, ‘Discoveries from the Globe Stage’, in Carson and Karim-Cooper (eds), Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, 208. 47 Zirka Z. Filipczak, ‘Poses and Passions’, 87. 48 Mark Rylance, Q &A, The Economist (29 April 2011), available online: http://www.economist.com/blogs/ prospero/2011/04/qa_3 (accessed 20 November 2014). 49 E. H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford, 1982), 66. 50 Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 92. 51 Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, 66. 52 Samuel Rowlands, The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine (London, 1600), A2a; and Mercurius, Bellicus, no. 5 (1648), 4, cited in Stern, Making Shakespeare, 72. 53 I have not yet found an example of Death/a skull being gazed at through the gesture of an arm extended with a skull in the hand prior to 1601. 54 See Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time. 55 Bulwer, Chirologia, 9. 56 For more detail about the architecture and effects of performance in the indoor theatres and about the design and construction of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, see the essays in Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving

262 Notes

Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge, 2014). 57 Productions designed and directed for the Globe Theatre are moved indoors for one or two nights in the summer with minimal rehearsal. 58 Jonanthan Munby, Globe Research Interview (November 2014). 59 Escolme, Emotional Excess, 167. 60 Paul Taylor, Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Globe, theatre review: ‘Exquisitely understated’, The Independent, Friday 30 May 2014, available online: http://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ antony-and-cleopatra-shakespeares-globe-theatre-reviewexquisitely-understated-9460457.html# (accessed 27 January 2015). 61 Abraham Fraunce, The Arkadian Rhetorike: or The Praecepts of rhetorike made plaine by examples (London, 1588), Sig. I7v. 62 Bulwer, Chirologia, 170. 63 See ‘To Glisten in a playhouse: cosmetic beauty indoors’, in Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors (Cambridge, 2014), 184–200. 64 Nicholas Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions With the Causes and Effects, trans. Edward Grimestone (London, 1621), 17. 65 Bulwer, Chirologia, Sig. A5v. 66 Bulwer, Chirologia, 4. 67 See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007). 68 Ambroise Paré, The Workes of that famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), 181–2. 69 Brathwaite, Essaies Vpon the Fiue Senses, 3. 70 Discussing the children’s companies, Michael Shaprio suggests there were three types of acting style: natural, declamatory and parodic; natural imitated everyday gestures, declamatory took its cues from formal oratory and parodic did just that, parodied the current theatrical practice – all of these categories

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would have a variety of gestural nuances and modes through which to perform a repertory that was equally varied in scope and theme. See Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and Their Plays (Ithaca, 1977). There is not the scope here to conduct a thorough analysis of boy company plays and the accompanying gestures, as so much else would need to be considered, including: size of actor’s hands, actor training within the context of these companies, etc. 71 Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), in Tanya Pollard (ed.), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford, 2004), 227. 72 Peggy Phelan, ‘The Ontology of Performance’, in Unmasked: The Politics of Performance (New York, 1993), 148. 73 Owen Feltham, ‘Of Preaching’, Resolves; Divine, Moral and Political (London, 1628), in Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke (eds), Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry (New York, 1982), 321–2. 74 Fraunce, The Arkadian Rhetorike, Sig. K2r. 75 Lawrence Humfrey, The Nobles or of Nobilitye (London, 1563), Sig. Xviiir. 76 Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 1. 77 Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 2. 78 St Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 11.5, cited in Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 2. 79 Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 10–11. 80 Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 12. 81 See ‘Taste and Touch in Shakespeare’s Theatres’, in Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (London, 2013). 82 John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes with other Idle Pastimes (London, 1577), 64. 83 Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1579), Sig. B7r. 84 Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue Actions, Sig. E5r. 85 Antony Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters (London, 1580), 95.

264 Notes

86 Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1582), Sig. L8v. 87 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Sig. L7r. 88 Henry Crosse, Virtue’s Commonwealth (London, 1603), in Tanya Pollard (ed.), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, 188–197, 189. 89 Alison Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2014). 90 The word ‘gesture’ in the anti-theatrical texts refers not only to the gestures of the hand, but also to the face, legs and feet, but crucially, for my argument, I consider the references to gestures in light of the movement of the hands. 91 For such approaches, see: Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, 1999); Katherine Craik and Tanya Pollard (eds), Shakespearean Sensations (Cambridge, 2013); Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot, 2007); Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (London, 2013); Alison Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing (Cambridge, 2014). 92 Bulwer, Chirologia, 30. 93 Fraunce, The Arkadian Rhetorike, K3v. 94 Thomas Dekker, If It Be Not Good The Devil is In it (London, 1612). 95 William Fennor, ‘The Description of a Poet’ in Fennors Descriptions, or A True Relation of Certaine and divers speeches, spoken before the King and Queenes most excellent Maiestie (London, 1616), Sig. B2v. 96 Matthew Steggle, ‘Notes towards an analysis of early modern applause’, in Katherine Craik and Tanya Pollard (eds), Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013), 118–37, 125–6. 97 Bulwer, Chironomia, 105. 98 Cited in Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot, 2007), 35. 99 Steggle, Laughter and Weeping, 37.

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100 Michael J. Hove and Jane L. Risen, ‘It’s all in the Timing: Interpersonal Synchrony Increases Affiliation’, Social Cognition 27.6 (2009): 949–60, 950.

Chapter 4 1

Extracts of this chapter were first published as an essay in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge, 2015), and are reprinted here with kind permission of Cambridge University Press.

2 Bulwer, Chirologia, 59. 3 Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, 66. 4 Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, 13. 5 Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, p. 14. 6 Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, p. 15. 7 Alberti, On Painting. 8

Katherine Duncan-Jones and Henry Woudhuysen, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s Poems (London, 2014), 2.

9

Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s Poems, 3.

10 Eric Langley, Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Oxford, 2009), 67. 11 See Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, 73–80. 12 Ovid, The Fifteene Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1612), 132. 13 Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s Poems, 33. 14 Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, 76. 15 See ‘Performing Beauty on the Renaissance Stage’, in Christie Carson and Christine Dymkowski (eds), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories (Cambridge, 2010), 93–106.

266 Notes

16 George Puttenham, The Arte of English poesie (London, 1589), 36. 17 Bulwer, Chirologia, 1. 18 See Langley, Narcissism and Suicide, 76–7. 19 Joseph Leo Koerner writes about Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait (1500) as self-referential. Like Venus, Dürer points to his heart and the gesture recalls: ‘the arrangement of Rogierian Blessing Christ panels, in which the Savior raises his right hand at the center of his chest in a gesture of benediction. In these pictures the cultic power of the vera icon is made plain… . In Dürer’s panel, the hand turns back on itself. Instead of conducting redemptive love to the viewer, this likeness enacts self-love or narcissism, one might argue, aiming to consecrate the artist’s person magically present in his image’ (The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago, 1996, 174). 20 See full citation of this passage from Firenzuola, Chapter 2, p. 58. 21 See Ch. 1, Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama for an explanation of the neo-Platonic ideal of beauty. 22 Bulwer, Chirologia, 29. 23 Henry Peacham, Graphice or The Most Ancient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limning (London, 1612), 111. 24 Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (London, 1587) on Lexicons of Early Modern English, available online: http:// leme.library.utoronto.ca (accessed 2 December 2014). 25 Propertieus, Elegy 3, cited in Udo Kulterman, ‘Woman Asleep and the Artist’, Artibus et Historiae 11.22 (1990): 129–61, 134 citing, G. S. Tremmenheere, The Elegies of Propertius (London, 1923). 26 Anonymous, Here begyn[neth] y lyf of saynt Vrsula after y[e] cronycles of englo[n]de (London, 1509), Sig. Aviiir. 27 The over-flexible or ‘fractured’ wrist motif is yet another gesture signifying despair. See Barasch, Gestures of Despair, 67.

Notes

267

28 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 52. 29 Welch, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, 260. 30 Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Eric Rasmussen (eds), English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (London and New York, 2002). 31 Juan Luis Vives, A very fruitfull and pleasant booke, called the Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London, 1585), 112–13. 32 Stallybrass and Jones, ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’, 118, 120. 33 Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, Introduction, Shakespeare’s Poems, 42–3. 34 Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 40. 35 Bulwer, Chirologia, 28. 36 See Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002). 37 Bulwer, Chirologia, 116. 38 Bulwer, Chirologia, 117. 39 David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MASS, 1984), 19. 40 Bevington, Action is Eloquence, 1. 41 See Chapter 2, p. 43. 42 Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think (Cambridge, MASS, 2005), 23. 43 Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture, 25. 44 Bulwer, Chirologia, 85. 45 Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 210. 46 Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, 17. 47 Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 165. 48 Ferrand, Erotomania, 112. 49 Giles Block’s production of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in 2000 interpreted this scene as Hamlet’s silent re-enactment

268 Notes

of his father’s narrative by having the Ghost perform these gestures on Hamlet in Act I. In so doing, the production seemed to argue that Hamlet actively sought empathy. 50 Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore, 2012), 1. 51 Ellen Spolsky, ‘Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures’, Poetics Today 17.2 (1996): 157–80, 159, cited in Bolens, The Style of Gestures, 1. 52 Bolens, The Style of Gestures, 1. 53 John Napier, Hands, revised by Russell H. Tuttle (Princeton, 1980, 1993), 62–3. 54 Corine Schleif, ‘Hands that Appoint, Anoint, and Ally: Late-Medieval Donor Strategies for Appropriating Approbation through Painting’, Art History 16 (1993): 1–33, 18. 55 In addition to the example discussed here, there are numerous instances of this gesture in depictions of the harrowing of hell and the descent into limbo from across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. This is a common gesture in such portraits, illustrating the potency of the divine in relation to the human hand. 56 See Boyle, Senses of Touch, specifically the chapter ‘Eve’s Palm’. 57 Diane Wolfthal, ‘“A Hue and a Cry”: Medieval Rape Imagery and Its Transformation’, The Art Bulletin 75.1 (March 1993): 39–64, 42. 58 Cerrini’s painting is held privately and Santvoort’s is in the National Gallery, London, available online: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/ philip-van-santvoort-the-rape-of-tamar-by-amnon 59 Bulwer, Chirologia, 117. 60 I want to thank John Astington for drawing my attention to the same gesture described in Shakespeare’s King John (4.2) when Hubert de Burgh describes the prophesy of young Arthur’s death. This narrative account of the gesture is similar in that the one gripping or that ‘gripe[s]’ the wrist is harrowing the one listening. 61 See Brathwaite, Essaies Vpon the Fiue Senses. 62 Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 145.

Notes

269

Chapter 5 1 Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, 62. 2 Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, Sig. G6v. 3 Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, Sig. M1r. 4 Crosse, Virtue’s Commonwealth, Sig. Q1r. 5 Vives, A Very Fruteful and Pleasant Boke called the Instruction of a christian woman, Sig. p. 9. 6

Sir John Harrington, Epigram 36, ‘Of the Lady that lookt well to her borders: To Sir John Lee’, in Norman Egbert McClure (ed.), The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harrington together with The Prayse of Private Life (Philadelphia, 1929), 245–6.

7

Cited in Evelyn B. Tribble, “‘O she’s warm”: Touch in The Winter’s Tale’, in Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (eds), Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (Basingstoke, 2010), 65–81, 77.

8 Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 145. 9

Thomas Tomkis, Lingua: Or The Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (London, 1607), Sig. 12v–13r.

10 Munday, A Second and Third Blast, 97. 11 Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia, 2003), 159–86, 181. 12 Sir John Davies, A work for none but Angels & men (London, 1653), 19. 13 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 666, 724. 14 Nixon, The Dignitie of Man, 9. 15 Elizabeth Harvey, ‘The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope’, in Sensible Flesh, 81–102, 89. 16 See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye; Eric Langley, Narcissism and Suicide; Bruce Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare; and

270 Notes

Marcus Nordlund, The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton (Göteborg, Sweden, 1999). 17 The term ‘haptic’ relates to ‘the perception and manipulation of objects using the sense of touch and proprioception’ (OED); it also implies a link between the sense of touch and the other senses of the body. 18 Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare, 133. 19 This painting is held in the Norton Simon Museum, California, available online: http://www.nortonsimon.org/collections/ browse_title.php?id=F.1965.1.052.P 20 Cited in François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2010), 19. 21 Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman (eds), ‘Introduction’, Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (Basingstoke, 2010), 1–23, 19. 22 Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Lawson-Tancred, 163. 23 Bruce R. Smith, ‘Within, Without, Withinwards’, in Karim-Cooper and Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres, 171–94. 173. 24 See Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham, 2011) to see how sensory discourses shift and are reformulated to suit a Protestant ideology. 25 Taylor, Superbiae Flagellum, Sig. C7r. 26 Sujata Iyengar, ‘“Handling Soft the Hurts”: Sexual Healing and Manual Contact in Orlando Furioso, The Faerie Queene, and All’s Well That Ends Well’, in Sensible Flesh, 39–61, 41. 27 Brathwaite, Essaies Vpon the Fiue Senses, 27–8. 28 Elizabeth Sauer and Lisa M. Smith, ‘Noli me tangere: Colonialist Imperatives and Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England’, in Elizabeth Harvey (ed.), Sensible Flesh, 141–58, 145. 29 The Bible, Authorized King James Version, eds Carroll and Prickett, 3. 30 Boyle, Senses of Touch, 110. 31 See Carl Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Late Medieval and

Notes

271

Renaissance Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 48 (1985): 1–22. Nordenfalk catalogues the history of the pictorial representation of the five senses and argues that the dominant medieval perspective was that they were ‘instruments of sin’ (13). 32 Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford and New York, 2007), 85. 33 Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Lawson-Tancred, 162. 34 Carla Mazzio, ‘The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and the Media in Early Modern England’, in David Howes (ed.), The Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford and New York, 2005), 85–105, 91. 35 Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, 31. 36 Bulwer, Chirologia, 117. 37 George Chapman, Ouid’s Banquet of Sence (London, 1595), Sig. E3r. 38 Henry Constable, ‘Sonnet vinti’, in Diana. The praises of his Mistres, in certain sweete Sonnets (London, 1592), Sig. D2v. 39 Ben Jonson, The Fountaine of Selfe-Love. Or Cynthias Revels (1601), Sig. B1v. 40 Laurence Perrine, ‘When Form and Content Kiss / Intention Made the Bliss: The Sonnet in Romeo and Juliet’, The English Journal 55.7 (October, 1966): 872–4, 873. 41 Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, 321. 42 John Rainolds, The Overthrow of Stage-Plays (London, 1592), 19. 43 The history of dance in early modern England is relevant when considering the choreography of Romeo and Juliet’s first encounter. Contemporary dance manuals do not explicitly call for a palm-to-palm gesture in court or country dances. There are many gestures the hand must perform, however, and the hands provide guidance for which direction the body must move in. See John Playford’s The Dancing Master, or Plain and easie rules for the dancing of country dances (London, 1653). Skiles Howard discusses the origins of courtly dancing and its association with courtly forms of self-fashioning in

272 Notes

The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Boston, 1998). Fabritio Caroso’s and other continental dance manuals might be useful documents to consider how the hands were to be deployed in parallel with dance and behaviour in social contexts. See Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the Nobiltà Di Dame (1600). 44 Barnabe Barnes, Sonnet LXIII in Parthenophil and Parthenophe (London, 1593), Sig. Fiiiv. 45 Bulwer, Chirologia, 110. 46 Rene Weis, ‘Introduction’, Romeo and Juliet (London, 2012), 16. 47 Susan Snyder, ‘The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition’, Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965): 18–59, 18. 48 Frank Kermode, Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London and Glasgow, 1971), 94. 49 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, 2012), 104 50 Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 2003), 74. 51 See Karim-Cooper, ‘Touch and Taste in Shakespeare’s Theatres’, in Karim-Cooper and Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres. 52 Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels makes a satirical point of this gesture when describing the actions of a courtier, Amorphus says: ‘A light, revelling, & protesting face, now blushing, now smiling, which you make help much with a wanton wagging of your head, thus; (a feather will teach you) or with kissing your finger that hath the Ruby, or playing with some string of your band, which is a most quaint kind of Melancholy besides’ [emphasis mine] (2.3.54–7), Sig. D3r. 53 Bulwer, Chirologia, 167. 54 I am grateful to Jonathan Hope for his advice about these references. 55 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, (Cambridge, 2000), 134.

Notes

273

56 Walter S. Gibson, ‘The Strawberries of Hieronymus Bosch’, Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 8 (2003): 24–33, 27. 57 Gibson, ‘The Strawberries of Hieronymus Bosch’, 28. 58 Cited in Gibson, ‘The Strawberries of Hieronymus Bosch’, 28. 59 Giraldi Cinthio, Hecatommithi, in Geoffery Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols, 7 (London, 1973), 246.

Chapter 6 1

James Hibberd, ‘“Game of Thrones”: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on Jaime’s Big Surprise’, Entertainment Weekly, 14 April 2013; available online: http://www.ew.com/article/2013/04/14/ thrones-jaime-hand (accessed 29 May 2015).

2

Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, The Body In Parts, xi.

3

Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, The Body In Parts, xiv.

4

Albert H. Tricomi, ‘The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus’, in Catherine S. M. S. Alexander (ed.), Shakespeare and Language (Cambridge, 2004), 226–39, 237.

5

See Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009).

6

Lucy Munro, ‘“They eat each other’s arms”: Stage Blood and Body Parts’, in Karim-Cooper and Stern (eds), Shakespeare’s Theatres, 73–93, 86.

7

See Tricomi, ‘The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus’.

8

The amputation of hands occurs regularly in some countries where Sharia law is observed; although there are strict parameters by which this punishment is sentenced, it is something that is still practised punitively in various parts of the modern world. Images of these amputations (as well as the brutal decapitations performed by the terrorist group ISIS) have been posted on various social media websites, so stories and images of severed body parts and the act of dismemberment are gradually becoming, grimly, more widely accessible through the internet. For a story about amputation

274 Notes

and how it is performed under more brutal regimes, available online: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/20/ somali-islamists-schoolboy-amputation-ordeal 9

Severed hands were depicted in medieval religious paintings (particularly in representations of the Passion), woodcuts, altarpieces, tombs and shrines throughout Europe. The representation of disembodied hands showing the stigmata upon them was an effective way of illustrating the centrality of hands to religious worship and in compelling the emotions of pilgrims. See, for example, Lorenzo Monaco’s Pietà (1404), held in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

10 Margaret E. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Cranbury, NJ, 2005), 53. 11 See p. 177. 12 Christopher S. Wood, ‘The Votive Scenario’, RES 59/60 (Spring/Autumn 2011), 207–26, 223. 13 Wood, ‘The Votive Scenario’, 211. 14 Wood, ‘The Votive Scenario’, 224. 15 Wood, ‘The Votive Scenario’, 209. 16 See David Gunby, ‘The Critical Backstory’, in Christina Luckyj (ed.), The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide (London, 2011). 17 See Martin White’s discussion of lighting in this play in Gurr and Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors, 115–36. 18 This play was written for the King’s Men, who, after 1608, performed their repertory outdoors on the Globe stage in the summer and indoors at the Blackfriars Playhouse in the winter. The title page to the 1614 Quarto tells us that this was indeed the case. Performing the scenes in daylight outdoors would have had an entirely different effect, as darkness would have to be performed by the actors and imagined by the audience; whereas, indoors, darkness could be a very useful illusionistic tool for actors and would make such a scene very effective and convincingly eerie. 19 The word ‘piece’ in such contexts referred to body parts. In the opening scene of Hamlet, in pitch blackness, Barnardo asks,

Notes

275

‘Say, what, is Horatio there?’, demonstrating he cannot see. To verify his identity, Horatio offers his hand for Barnardo to clasp: ‘A piece of him’ (1.1.18–19). 20 Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2011), 168. See also Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, 1999). 21 See entry for ‘Ceromantie’ in Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611). 22 See Rowe, Dead Hands (1999). 23 George Wither, Illustration VIII, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London, 1635), 8. 24 See Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, which stresses the necessity of individual autonomy before union with another and the foundation of Renaissance friendship as ‘likeness’: ‘Friendship discourses themselves depend upon such likeness being rare, even anomalous and bizarre, celebrating it as a wonder or a marvel’ (21). She discusses George Wither’s emblem – Bona Fide – in which two hands clasp, joined by a crowned heart: ‘Beneath the literal token of actual political sovereignty, friendship shows emblematically: “their Affections merits to be crown’d, / Whose hearts are fastned where they joyne hands”’(38). She goes on to argue that the image ‘indicates an agreement made by two sovereign selves who are, by that virtue, competent to agree; they are capable of consent’ (38). 25 Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, A Looking Glasse for London and England (London, 1617), Sig. G2r. 26 Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990), 84. 27 Goldberg, Writing Matter, 91. 28 Goldberg, Writing Matter, 313. 29 Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, Sig. B3r. 30 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2005), 1. 31 Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘Introduction’, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York, 2000), 1–53, 2.

276 Notes

32 Martin Wiggins (ed.) in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 2013), 1590–7, 1597. 33 Cited in Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge, 2005), 145. 34 Richard Farrant (?), The Warres of Cyrus, King of Persia, against Antiochus King of Assyria (London, 1594), Sig. G3r. 35 Farrant (?), The Warres of Cyrus, Sig. G3r. 36 Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches (London, 1634), Sig. K3r. 37 Paré, The Workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 4. 38 Paré, The Workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 457. 39 Paré, The Workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 458. 40 Paré, The Workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 459. 41 Owens, Stages of Dismemberment, 146. 42 William Harrison, Description of England (London, 1577), ed. F. J. Furnivall (1876), ‘Modern History Sourcebook’, available online: http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1577harrisonengland.asp#Chapter XVII (accessed 5 January 2015). 43 Owens, The Stages of Dismemberment, 178–9. 44 See Owens’s account of Stubbs’s story, Stages of Dismemberment, 179–81. 45 Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage, 140. It is worth having a look at a performance of this moment staged by Elizabeth Dutton for the Oxford Blood Project conference in January 2014; it occurs 21.50 minutes into the video: available online: http://www.thebloodproject.net/performance/ 46 Elizabeth Dutton, ‘Blood and Belief in Early English Stagecraft’ (conference paper for The Blood Project Conference, January 2014: available online: http://www.thebloodproject.net/. To be published in Eleanor DeCamp and Bonnie Lander Johnson (eds), Blood Matters: Blood in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700 (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

Notes

277

47 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), ed. Hugh Ross Williamson (Arundel and London, 1964), 290. 48 See the Proceedings from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre History Seminar, Stage Blood: A Roundtable, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Ryan Nelson: available online: http:// www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/ffiles/2012/03/999977. pdf; see also Lucy Munro, ‘They eat each other’s arms’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres, 73–93, and Andrea Stevens, Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 (Edinburgh, 2013). 49 Dutton, ‘Blood and Belief in Early English Stagecraft’, 5. The Croxton play seems to suggest that perhaps medieval drama might have been more bloody and more liable to throw blood around the staging area/stage than the later plays of the commercial theatres. 50 The date of the play is disputed, though Wiggins places it between 1591 and 1592; its staging history is complex, having been performed first by Pembroke’s Men, Derby’s Men, Sussex’s Men and, eventually, by the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Wiggins (ed.), British Drama, Vol. 3, 1592). We can assume that the play, while it seems neatly plotted into an Elizabethan amphitheatre with three levels of playing space, has a theatrical history of portability. 51 Tricomi, ‘The Aesthetics of Mutilation’, 226–7. 52 Molly Easo Smith, ‘Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 36 (1996): 315–31, 327. 53 Douglas E. Green, ‘Interpreting “Her Martyr’d Signs”: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.3 (Autumn 1989), 317–26, 322. 54 Rowe, Dead Hands, 73. 55 Beaumont parodies this comparison in The Knight of the Burning Pestle when he has the Citizen’s Wife express her fear: ‘By the faith o’my body, ’a has put me into such a fright that I tremble (as they say) as ’twere an aspen leaf. Look o’my little finger, George, how it shakes!’ (3.1.131–4).

278 Notes

56 Michael Neil, ‘“Amphitheatres of the Body”: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearean Stage’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (Cambridge, 1996): 23–50, 43. 57 See Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge, 2004), 26 [Cited in Kim Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke, 2009), 45]. 58 Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance, 45. 59 Bulwer, Chirologia, 28–9. 60 See Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (1976). 61 Paré, The Workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 652. 62 Paré, The Workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 881 63 Tobin Siebers, ‘Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body’, American Literary History 13.4 (Winter 2001), 737–54, 738. 64 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), 16. 65 Lucy Bailey, Globe Research End-of-Season Interview (September 2014). 66 H. S. Versnel, Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World (Leiden, 1981), 101. 67 Andrew Lipman, ‘“A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather”: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 65.1 (January 2008): 3–28, 13. 68 Lipman, ‘“A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather”’, 13. 69 Lucy Bailey, Globe Research End-of-Season Interview (September 2014). 70 Lyn Gardner, ‘Titus Andronicus Review – Shakespeare’s bloodbath becomes a sadistic delight’, The Guardian, Sunday 11 May 2014, available online: http://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/may/11/titus-andronicus-globe-review accessed (14 January 2015).

Notes

279

71 Lucy Bailey, Globe Research End-of-Season Interview (September 2014). 72 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982), 141.

Epilogue: Fingers 1

Christoper Perricone, ‘The Place of Touch in the Arts’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 41.1 (Spring 2007): 90–144, 92.

2 Veslingus, The Anatomy of the Body of Man, 182. 3

Cited from the 1495 edition in Sherman, Used Books, 30.

4

Biblical citations from The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, eds Carroll and Prickett.

5 Bulwer, Chironomia, 78.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary works cited Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, ed. Cecil Grayson, notes by Martin Kemp (New York and London, 1972, 2004). Anon., A new Booke of Tabliture, Containing sundrie easie and familiar Instructions, shewing how to attaine to the knowledge, to guide and dispose the hand to play on sundry instruments, as the Lute, Orpharion, and Bandora (London, 1596). Anon., A Wedding-Ring, Fitted to the Finger of every Paire that have or Shall Meete the Feare of God (London, 1632). Anon., Here begyn[neth] y lyf of saynt Ursula after y[e] cronycles of englo[n]de (London, 1509). Anon., The Problemes of Aristotle, with other philosophers and phisitions (Edinburgh, 1595). Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London, 1986). Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. James G. Lennox, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford, 2001). Artimedorus, Daldianus, The Interpretation of Dreames (London, 1644). Austin, William, Haec-Homo: wherein The Excellency of the Creation of woman is described (London, 1637). Bacon, Francis, ‘De Analogia Demonstrationum’, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Robert Leslie Ellis and James Spedding. Routledge Revivals (London, 2011). Banister, John, The Historie of Man (London, 1578). Barnes, Barnabe, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (London, 1593). Beaumont, Francis, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Eric Rasmussen (London and New York, 2002).

282 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becon, Thomas, The Workes of Thomas Becon (London, 1564). Bell, Sir Charles, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, As Evincing Design (Philadelphia, 1833). Bercher, William, Nobility of Women (London, 1559). The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford, 2011). Brathwaite, Richard, Essaies Vpon the Fiue Senses (London, 1620). Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici (London, 1642). Bulwer, John, Anthropometamorphosis, or Man Transform’d (London, 1650). Bulwer, John, Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand (London, 1644). Bulwer, John, Chironomia: or, The Art of Manuall Rhetorique (London, 1644). Carroll, Robert and Stephen Prickett (eds), The Bible, Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford, 1997). Casa, John Della, Galateo of Maister John Della Casa, or rather, A treatise of the Manners and Behaviours, it behoveth a Man to Use, trans. Robert Peterson (London, 1576). Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke (New York, 2005). Chapman, George, Ouid’s Banquet of Sence (London, 1595). Cinthio, Giraldi, Hecatommithi, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffery Bullogh, 8 vols, 7 (London, 1973). Clowes, William, A Rightful and Frutefull and Approved Treatise for the Artificial cure for that Malady called in Latin Struma and in English, the Evil (London, 1602). Coeffeteau, Nicholas, A Table of Humane Passions With the Causes and Effects, trans. Edward Grimestones (London, 1621). Constable, Henry, Diana. The praises of his Mistres, in certain sweete Sonnets (London, 1592). Cooper, Thomas, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (London, 1584). Cotta, John, The Triall of Witch-craft (London, 1616). Crooke, Helkiah, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615). Crosse, Henry, Virtue’s Commonwealth (London, 1603). Davies, Sir John, A work for none but angels & men (London, 1653).

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News articles/reviews Gardner, Lyn, ‘Titus Andronicus Review – Shakespeare’s bloodbath becomes a sadistic delight’, The Guardian, Sunday 11 May 2014, available online: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/ may/11/titus-andronicus-globe-review (accessed 14 January 2015). Hibberd, James, “‘Game of Thrones”: Nikolaj-Coster Waldau on Jaime’s Big Surprise’, Entertainment Weekly, 14 April 2013, available online: http://www.ew.com/article/2013/04/14/thronesjaime-hand (accessed 29 May 2015). J. T., ‘The Q & A with Mark Rylance’, The Economist, 29 April 2011, available online: http://www.economist.com/blogs/ prospero/2011/04/qa_3 (accessed 20 November 2014). Styles, Ruth, ‘The beauty salon spendthrifts’, Mail Online, 25 March 2013, available online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ femail/article-2297649/British-women-spend-450-YEAR-nails. html (accessed 18 January 2015). Taylor, Paul, ‘Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s Globe, theatre review’, The Independent, Friday 30 May 2014, available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/ reviews/antony-and-cleopatra-shakespeares-globe-theatre-reviewexquisitely-understated-9460457.html# (accessed 27 January 2015).

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Theatre productions Francis Beaumont, The Knight of Burning Pestle, dir. Adele Thomas, Shakespeare’s Globe, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2014). William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, dir. Tim Carroll, Shakespeare’s Globe, Globe Theatre (2002, revival 2012). William Shakespeare, Henry IV part 1, dir. Dominic Dromgoole, Shakespeare’s Globe, Globe Theatre (2010). William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Jonathan Munby, Shakespeare’s Globe, Globe Theatre and Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2014). William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, dir. Lucy Bailey, Shakespeare’s Globe, Globe Theatre (2006, revival 2014). John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, dir. Dominic Dromgoole, Shakespeare’s Globe, SamWanamaker Playhouse (2014).

INDEX Page references in italic denote a figure. actors 9, 74, 88, 111–12, 209 and gesticulation 7, 30, 78, 88–90, 112–13, 114–15 Adam and Eve 27–8, 63, 151, 151, 153, 168 adultery 24, 190, 194 Alberti, Leon Battista 18 On Painting 120 Alciato, Andrea, Emblem XVI (?) 163, 164 Allam, Roger 90, 91 amputation 84, 197–8, 214–16 audience response to 212, 237–8 instruments/tools for 215, 215, 216, 217 performance/staging of 3, 9–10, 199, 212–14, 218–20, 221, 227, 237, 238 punitive 216–18 and Sharia law 273 n.8 and witchcraft 213–14 see also dismemberment amputation plays 211–12, 225 see also under individual entries anatomical drawings 11, 12, 14–15, 16, 18–19, 205 anatomy, studies of 4, 13–15, 17–20, 57, 162, 205

Anaxagoras 32 anger 81 animals 184–5 anti-Catholic sentiment 202 anti-theatrical writing 111–12, 113, 157–9, 180 anxiety 42, 81, 140, 144 and touch 111, 112, 157–9, 165–6, 180 applause 113–14 Arden of Faversham (Anon., 1592) 64 Ariadne Sleeping (Roman art) 131 Aristotle 12–13, 32, 162, 165, 171, 173 art manuals/treatises 18, 119 art theory 119–20, 121 Artimedorus, Daldianus, The Interpretation of Dreames (1644) 28 artists see anatomy, studies of and under individual names astrology 22, 25 audiences 75, 84, 108–10, 113, 115, 159, 180, 204, 236–7 Austin, William 22, 42, 55 Bailey, Lucy, Titus Andronicus

298 Index

(Globe Theatre, 2014) 232–3, 236–7, 238, 239 Banister, John, The Historie of Man (1578) 17–18 Barnes’, Barnabe, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) 181 Bartholomaeus, De proprietatibus rerum 241–2 Beaumont, Francis, The Knight of the Burning Pestle 135–6 beauty 6, 55–60, 61, 127, 132, 223–4 female 55, 57–60, 61, 124–5, 134–5, 138–9 and proportion 18, 56–7 see also ideal beauty Becon, Thomas 52 ‘behavioural matching’ 115 Bell, Sir Charles 249 n.27 Benedetti, Alessandro 164–5 Bercher, William, Nobility of Women (1559) 27 Best, Eve 100, 101 bestiality 184–5 bi-pedalism 33, 57 Bible, The 53, 168 biting 227–8 Blackfriars Playhouse, London 99–100, 102, 104, 175 blindness 163–4 body language 144–5, 148 body parts 4–5, 200–1, 234–5 body systems, early modern theories of 12–13 Bonet, Juan Pablo, ‘sign language manual’ (1620) 250 n.29

Bonifacio, Giovanni, L’Arte de’ cenni (1616) 93, 118 Book of Common Prayer 53–4 Book of Judges, The (Morgan Bible) 153 Bosch, Hieronymus, Last Judgement 151–2 Brathwaite, Richard, Essaies Vpon the Fine Senses (1620) 64, 106–7, 162, 168 Brome, Richard see Heywood, Thomas Bronzino, Agnolo, Christ’s Descent into Limbo (1552) 152 Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici (1642) 26 Buchelius, Arnoldus see de Witt, Johannes Bulwer, John Anthropometamorphoses (1650) 64–6 Chirologia: Or, The Naturall Language of the Hand (1644) 20–1, 33, 44, 75–6, 77, 82, 105–6, 113, 129, 140, 141–2, 171, 182 Chironomia: Or, The art of Manuall Rhetorique (1644) 20, 71, 114 Philocophus (1648) 250 n.29 Burbage, Richard 97 Burrow, J. A. 110 Caravaggio 245 The Fortune Teller, 22–3 The Incredulity of St Thomas 242, 242, 243, 245

Index

Martyrdom of Saint Matthew 152 Carpaccio, Vittore, Dream of St Ursula (1495) 132–3, 133 Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier (1561) 50–1, 134–5 Catholicism 202, 252 n.55 Cerrini, Giovanni Domenico, Amnon and Tamar 153 Chahidi, Paul 93 Chapman, George, Ovid’s Banquet of Sence 173–4 chastity see virtue Children of the Chapel 213 chiromancy see palm reading/ palmistry ‘chopped hands’ 62 Christianity 27–30, 32–3, 35–6, 53, 63, 176, 242–4 see also marriage ceremonies; original sin, the Cicero, De Oratorio 73–4 Cinthio, Giraldi 64, 194 clapping 113–14 cleanliness 41, 45, 58 see also washing Clowes, William 31–2 Coeffeteau, Nicholas 105, 146 comedy 4, 6, 69, 79, 90, 103 see also laughter conduct books 52–3, 94, 136, 260 n.40 see also courtesy literature/ manners Constable, Henry, Sonnet vinti 174–5 cosmetics 42, 61, 135, 166–7, 257 n.49

299

costume/clothing 92–4 Cotta, John, The Triall of Witchcraft (1616) 63 courtesy literature/manuals 2, 42, 44, 50–1, 67 courtesy, gestures of see courtly practice/etiquette; manners courtly practice/etiquette 43–4, 93, 105, 107 Crooke, Helkiah, Microcosmographia (1615) 17, 33, 162, 163 cross-dressing 93–4, 95 Crosse, Henry 112 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The (c. 1461) 219, 220 cult of saints 177, 183, 200–1, 202 Curtain Theatre, London 180 dance 51, 111, 271 n.43 dans macabre 149, 150 Davies, Sir John, A work for none by Angels & Men… (1653) 162 de Vos, Cornelius, Mother and Child (1624) 59 de Witt, Johannes (Buchelius after), Sketch of Swan Theatre (c. 1596) 69, 70 ‘dead man’s hand’ 203 deformity 63 Dekker, Thomas, If it Be Not Good, The Devil is In It (1612) 113–14 desire 6, 56, 58–60, 80–1, 123–4, 135, 171–5, 181 and touch 60, 126, 168–71, 177–8

300 Index

despair 83, 183 devil, the 185 diabolism 63, 166 Dignitie of Man, The (Anon., seventeenth century) 162 disembodied hands 200, 205, 206, 210, 218, 226 disfigurement/deformity 229 dismemberment 3, 5, 221 human responses to 3–4, 237, 240 performance/spectacle of 3, 9–10, 199, 212–14, 218–20, 221, 227, 237, 238 see also amputation dissection (anatomical) 15, 17, 19 ‘divine hand’, the 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 63, 151, 206 doctors/surgeons 167 drawings see anatomical drawings dumb shows 82, 83–6 dummy hands 201, 202, 208, 219–21, 238, 239 Dürer, Albrecht, Self Portrait (1500) 29, 266 n.19 ear pick 66 Edmund Ironside; or, War hath Made All Friends (1597) 213, 218–19 Egerton, Stephen 35 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 31, 44–5 emblem books (seventeenth century) 28, 56, 206 see also under individual entries

emblems 28–9 Erasmus of Rotterdam 47 On Good Manners (De Civilitate) (1530) 45–6 The Praise of Folly (1549) 184 eroticism 6, 58, 60, 122, 127, 135 see also homoeroticism etiquette see manners/social behavior/etiquette expulsion, gestures of 86 Eyck, Jan van, portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife (1434) 54 eye, the 122, 180 in palm 163, 164 see also sight Feltham, Owen 109, 111 female body, violation/ mutilation of 222, 223, 224 see also female hands female hands 1, 4, 53, 54, 181, 225 and beauty 55, 58–60, 61, 124–5, 128, 223–4 demonization of 27–8, 63, 166 eroticism/evoking desire 56, 58–60, 80–1, 123–4, 135, 171–5, 181 and housework 52–3, 62, 63, 136, 192 maintenance of 41, 55, 58 and moral character/identity 24–5, 41, 54, 63, 66 and ugliness 61–2, 63, 66, 257 n.49

Index

see also manicures; women femininity 51, 124, 125, 129, 175, 192, 193, 225 Fennor, William 114 Ferrand, Jacques 147 Erotomania… (1645) 26 Ficino, Marsilio 66 Field, Nathan, A Woman is a Weathercock (1612) 114 fingernails 58, 60, 64, 65, 65, 66, 138–9 see also manicures fingers 37, 172, 241 and ideal beauty 56–7, 58 kissing 187, 188, 272 n.52 pointing 71, 114 Firenzuola, Agnolo 56–7 On the Beauty of Women 57–60, 128 Fletcher, Giles, Licia (1593) 56 Fontana, Lavinia, Family Portrait (1598–1600) 117, 118–19 foreigners 64–6, 103 see also xenophobia Forman, Simon 92 Fraunce, Abraham 102, 110 Galen 13–14, 161 On the Natural Faculties 13 On the Use of the Parts 13 Game of Thrones 197 Geoffrey of Vinsauf 55 gesticulation 7, 30, 78, 88–90, 112–13, 114–15 gestural cues 79–80, 81, 94, 141, 259 n.22 gestural theory 20–1, 67 gesture 2, 7–8, 21, 87, 92, 96, 103

301

in art 19, 117, 118–20, 242–4 and emotion 75, 76–8, 81, 118–19, 120, 145–6 exaggeration of 74, 88–90, 98–9, 100, 102 gendered rules of 50–2 and speech 73, 75, 110–11, 143, 144–5 within narrative sequences 8, 141–2, 155 see also gesticulation; performance; and under individual entries gesture manuals 93 see also under individual entries Giotto 19, 252 n.55 Globe Education Gesture Lab 259 n.22 Globe Theatre, London 88, 89, 100 modern reconstruction of 7, 89, 90, 113, 262 n.57 performances at 92, 94–6, 95, 101, 179, 232–3, 236–7, 238, 239, 267 n.49 see also Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London gloves 60, 62, 137–8 erotic curiosity/desire 135, 137, 181–2 preserving virtue 136–7 women, association with 49, 55, 60, 62, 134–5, 181 God 27, 28–9, 33, 34, 63, 252 n.51 see also ‘divine hand’, the Goltzius, Hendrick, Right Hand 11–12, 11

302 Index

Gonzaga, Cesare 51 Gosson, Stephen 65, 157 School of Abuse, The (1579) 111 Greene, Robert (attrib.), The Tragical Reign of Selimus (1594) 211–12 grief 81, 82, 85, 101, 118, 122, 138, 154 Griffin, Bartholomew, Sonnet 39 61 Guidonian hand 36 Guilpin, Edward 44 Haec Vir; or The Womanish Man (Anon.) 93 hand-fasting 56, 182 hand-kissing 6, 21 as courtly practice 43–4, 180, 187–8 of monarchs 44–5 and saints 177 hand-washing 46, 50, 209, 224 hand-wringing 81–2, 87, 140–1 handkerchiefs 47–8, 190–1, 191, 192–3 props (paintings) 48–9, 118, 190 women, association with 49, 55, 193–4 handlessness 185, 221, 223, 233 see also amputation; dismemberment hands 2–3, 17, 21–2, 24–5, 49, 218, 246 anatomical drawings of 14–15, 16, 18–19 biting 227–8 cleaning/cleanliness of 41, 45, 58

communication tools 3, 20–1, 32, 74, 141–2 see also gesture eroticizing 56, 58–60, 80–1, 123–4, 135, 171–5, 181 see also gloves ‘ideal’ form 14, 31, 55, 57, 58 and identity 2, 3, 6, 22, 24–6, 54, 175 and physiological health/ emotional state 6, 22, 25–7, 134 and social behavior 6, 44–8, 67, 115 structure of 13–14, 15, 161, 249 n.27 see also anatomy, studies of and virtue 6, 52, 61, 128, 132, 136–7 and vision 163–4 see also female hands; left-handedness; palms; palm reading/palmistry; touch handwriting 21–2, 62–3, 207, 208 handwriting manuals 207–8, 218 Hannay, Patrick, A Happy Husband (1618) 52–3 ‘haptic’ 270 n.17 Harrison, William, ‘Of Sundry Kinds of Punishment’ 216–17 harrowing of hell 151, 151 hearing 165, 166 heaven 118, 129–30 Hentzner, Paul 44 Herod and Antipater (1622) 114

Index

Heywood, Thomas An Apology for Actors (1612) 107–8 Late Lancashire Witches, The (with Richard Brome, 1634) 213–14 Hill, Thomas, The Contemplation of Mankind (1571) 24–5 Holbein, Hans, ‘The Old Man’ from Danse Macabre (1526) 149, 150 homoeroticism 111 Humfrey, Lawrence 110 humours, the 13, 48, 105, 166, 190 Hurault, Andre 44 hygiene 41, 45–6, 47–8, 50, 166 ‘iconic gestures’ 82–3, 84 ideal beauty 31, 55, 56, 57–60, 124–5, 129 identity 3, 5, 9–10, 12, 24–5, 41, 54, 63, 66 Indagine, John, The Book of Palmistry and Physiognomy… (1651) 24 index finger 71, 118, 242, 244–5 intimacy 171, 175–6, 180–1, 184, 187–9, 190 Jesus Christ 242, 243–5 jewelry 54, 59, 60 Jonson, Ben Cynthia’s Revels (1600) 175, 272 n.52 Epicene (1609) 62, 72, 101–4

303

Kabuki theatre practices/ tradition 94–6 Karim, Kesandra, Hand Study 246 ‘kinesic intelligence’ 148, 155 King’s Men, the 96, 100, 102, 274 n.18 Kings see monarchy kissing 180 see also hand-kissing laughter 114, 115 learning 34–5, 38 left-handedness 27–8 Leonardo da Vinci 18–20, 27, 57 Adoration of the Magi, studies for 19 Last Supper, The 19 letters 21–2, 62, 208 limbs, loss of 229–31 Lodge, Thomas and Greene, Robert, A Looking Glasse… (1588–9) 206 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge… (1598) 18, 57, 119 love 6, 56, 177–80 ‘at first sight’ 9, 177–8 love poetry 31, 124, 126, 177, 183 love tokens 47, 48, 49, 135, 137, 192 see also handkerchiefs Lyly, John 259 n.22 Endymion (1588) 82, 87 Euphes and his England 55, 94

304 Index

make-up see cosmetics ‘manicule’ 34–5 manicures 41, 50, 58, 66 manners 44, 46–7, 50–1, 93, 143, 187, 260 n.40 see also courtly practice/ etiquette; hand-kissing manual deformity 11, 12 Marafioti, Girolamo, The Art of Memory (1602) 38 Marlowe, Christopher, Hero and Leander 55–6 marriage 52–3, 54, 63 marriage ceremonies 1–2, 53–4 see also hand-fasting medieval period 63, 110–11 art 29, 83, 86 literature 2, 34 medical theory 13 religion 32–3 see also cult of saints melancholy 132–3 memento mori 205 memory 38 men social expectations placed on 50–1 women’s theatre roles, playing 94–6, 95, 111 Michelangelo Creation of Adam 33 Temptation and Fall (fresco) 27–8 Middleton, Thomas Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A (1613) 80–1 Changeling, The (with William Rowley) 83–4, 137 mime 86–7

mimicry 115 monarchy 30–1, 44–5 Montaigne, Michel de 75, 140–1 moral character, reflections/ symbols of 2, 24–5, 41, 53, 54, 63, 66 Morgan Bible 153 Munby, Jonathan 100 Munday, Antony 111–12, 161 music 36–7, 172 musical instruments 36–7, 51, 172–3 nail parer 66 nails see fingernails Nash, Thomas, The Terrors of the Night… (1594) 25–6 New Booke of Tabliture…, A, (Anon., 1596) 36 Nifo, Agostino, On Beauty and Love 60 Nixon, Antony, The Dignitie of Man (1612) 6–7 Northbrooke, John 111, 157 oration 73–5, 102 oratory manuals 73–5 Original Practices productions (Globe Theatre, London) 92, 93, 94 original sin, the 27–8, 63, 168 Outside/In experiment (Globe Theatre, London) 100 Ovid 122 Metamorphoses 225, 232 ‘paddling’ (palms) 76, 107, 188–9, 190 Page, William 218

Index

painting 29–30, 119 see also portraiture; and under individual artists’ names palm reading/palmistry 22–5, 175, 190 manuals 24–5 scepticism towards 25–6 palm-to-palm touching 180–1, 271 n.43 palms 2, 6, 22, 24, 72, 54, 118 character and identity read/ evident in 2, 6, 22, 24–6, 54, 175 eroticism/intimacy of 6, 58, 171, 175–6, 180–1, 187–9, 190 eye in 163, 164 ‘paddling’ 188–9, 190 and touching 177, 180–1, 187–9, 271 n.43 see also hands; palm reading/ palmistry Pamplona Bible 153 Paré, Ambroise 106, 114, 214 Workes (trans. 1634) 214–16, 215, 229, 229–31, 230 ‘passionating’ 77, 96, 108, 111 Passe, Willem van de (after Crispijn de Passe the Elder) ‘Tactus’ (1615–25) 168, 169 Peacham, Henry Graphice (1612) 129–30 Minerva Britannia (1612) 28, 98 Titus Andronicus (drawing) 69–71, 71, 72 Peele, George 221

305

performance 5, 6–7, 9, 27, 69, 70, 71, 71–3, 78, 108–10 affect on audience 157–8, 180 of dismemberment 9, 199, 212–14, 218–20, 221, 227, 237, 238, 240 and gesture 7, 67, 69, 72–3, 74–5, 78–9, 81–3, 88–90, 96, 115–16 indoor 98–101, 104, 274 n.18 outdoor 7, 88–90, 96, 98, 274 n.18 and period costume 92–3 see also dumb shows; mime perfumes 42, 48 Peterson, Robert, Galateo… (1576) 46 Petrarchism 4 phantom limb syndrome 10, 229, 231 playhouses see theatres; and under individual entries pointing 71–2, 80, 114, 118 severed hands 200, 205, 207–8 portraiture 54, 59, 60 use of props 48–9, 60, 97 Poussin, Nicolas, The Healing of the Blind (1650) 29 prayer 27, 29, 31, 33, 126 Problemes of Aristotle, The (Anon., 1595) 64 prop hands see dummy hands proportion 18, 56–7 props 198, 199, 201 see also dummy hands prosthetics 229–31, 230

306 Index

Protestants 35–6 psychagogia 105 public torture/punishment 216–18 puns/punning 18, 36–7, 188, 203, 212, 225, 228–9, 236 Puttenham, George 266 Queen’s Men, the 212–13 Queens see monarchy Quintilian 74 Rainolds, John 177 rape 128, 130, 132, 137, 138, 153, 223, 224, 225 reading, process of 34–5 Reason 21 religion 27–30, 33–4, 53, 152–3, 202 see also Christianity; cult of saints; marriage ceremonies; prayer Rembrandt(?), Old Woman Cutting Her Nails (1655–60) 65 Renaissance art 29, 96, 252 n.55 see also under individual artists’ names Rhodes, Hugh, Boke of Nurture (1577) 46–7 Ribera, Jusepe de, Sense of Touch (1615) 163–4 rings 54, 59, 60 Rome, ancient 73–4 Rowley, William see Middleton, Thomas royal touching ceremonies 30, 31–2 royalty see monarchy

rudeness 103 Rylance, Mark 94–6, 95 ‘sacred mystery’ of the hand see ‘divine hand’, the Saenredam, Jan (after Hendrick Goltzius), ‘Touch’ (1595) 168–71, 170 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London 7, 99, 99, 100, 113, 136, 204 Sambucus, Joannes, Vera amicitia (Les emblemes, 1567) 206, 207 Satan 63–4 see also diabolism Scot, Reginald, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) 219–20 script see handwriting self-injury 83 Seneca 81 senses, the 160–1, 163–5 hierarchy in 9, 106, 165–6, 195 illustrations of 168–71, 169, 170 see also sight; touch sensory network 165 severed hand 197–8, 199, 200, 201, 203–6, 218, 235 illustrations of 200, 205, 207–8, 274 n.9 pointing 200, 205, 207–8 staging of 204, 205, 238 sex 184 see also desire; eroticism sexuality 9, 52, 122–3 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 42, 250 n.34

Index

Antony and Cleopatra 23, 45, 66, 100–1 As You Like It 42–3, 45, 62–3 Coriolanus 250 n.34 Cymbeline 173 Hamlet 2, 8, 37, 81–2, 84–6, 92, 98, 108, 189, 208, 274 n.19 Ophelia, gestural exchanges with 146–8, 151, 153–5 performances of 79, 80, 97–8, 267 n.49 Henry IV 79, 90, 91 Henry V 15, 205–6 Henry VII or All is True (Globe, 1613) 96 Henry VIII 97 Julius Caesar 6, 62, 144–5 King John 27, 154 King Lear 22, 64, 79–80, 86, 163, 235 Macbeth 30–1, 62, 209–10, 224 Merchant of Venice 54, 139–40, 141, 143 Midsummer Night’s Dream 17, 64, 79, 186–7 Much Ado About Nothing 21–2, 53, 62, 83, 159 Othello 9, 23, 49, 160, 167, 184–90, 244 handkerchief in 49, 190–3, 194–5 Pericles 173 Rape of Lucrece, The (poem) 8, 61, 120–1, 128–30, 131–2, 133–4, 136–7, 138, 181

307

Richard II 37–8, 45 Richard III 42, 49, 64, 85, 86, 97, 139, 186 Romeo and Juliet 9, 79, 81, 96, 137, 160, 176–80, 179, 181–4 Sonnet 128 172, 173 Taming of the Shrew 1–2, 36, 54, 172–3, 250 n.34 Tempest, The 64, 87 Titus Andronicus 18, 70–2, 71, 228–9 hand dismemberment 3–4, 9, 197–8, 199–200, 221–2, 225–6, 234, 235–40 Lavinia, attacks on 222–4, 226–8, 231–4 Twelth Night 93–6, 95, 208 Venus and Adonis (poem) 8, 120, 121–8, 175 Winter’s Tale, The 2–3, 60–1, 76, 104–5, 106, 107, 142, 159, 189 Sharia law 273 n.8 sight 105, 106–7, 122, 163–4, 164 sin 66, 166, 168 see also original sin, the skulls 97–8, 98, 261 n.53 sleeping woman, motif of 130–1, 131, 132, 132 smell 165 social behavior/etiquette 45–6, 48, 50–1 see also hand-kissing sorrow 140 special effects 107, 212–13 see also staging St Augustine 110

308 Index

St Thomas 242–3, 242, 244–5 St Ursula 132–3, 133 stage directions 1, 79, 114, 219 staging (theatre performances) 107, 212–14, 218–20, 221, 237, 238 stillness (gesture) 90, 101 strawberries, symbolism of 193–4 Stubbes, Philip 112, 157–8 Stubbs, John, The discoverie of a gaping gulf… (1579) 217–18 Swan Theatre, the 69, 70 synaesthesia 163, 165 tactility 8–9, 140, 155–6, 167, 193, 195 healing, association with 30–2 and music 36, 172 and reading 35–6 taste 165 Taylor, John 43–4 theatres 7, 8, 69, 70, 158–9 indoor 98–101, 104, 274 n.18 lighting in 99, 104, 107 open-air 88–9, 89 see also performance; props; special effects; staging (theatre performances); and under individual entries thumb 25 see also fingers Tomkis, Thomas, Lingua, or, The combat of the tongue… (1607) 160–2 Tooker, William 31 touch 3, 8–9, 63, 159, 162,

165–6, 168–71, 169, 170 anxieties about 111, 112, 157–9, 165–6, 180 and Christianity 35–6, 243 erotic desire 60, 126, 168–71, 177–8 healing, association with 30–2, 63 and intimacy 175, 180–1, 184 palm-to-palm 180–1, 271 n.43 sin, association with 165, 166, 168, 185, 194 see also blindness; tactility Trumble, Angus 136 Tyrrell, Dickon 136 ugliness 61–2, 63–4, 66, 257 n.49 Van Santvoort, Philip, The Rape of Tamar by Amnon (1718) 153 Veronese, Paolo, The Dream of St Helena (1576–8) 132 Vesalius, Andreas 15 De humani Corporis fabrica libri septem (1543) 14–15, 16 virtue 6, 52, 61, 128, 132, 136–7 symbols of 60, 136–7, 181, 225 vision see eye, the; sight Vision of Tundale, The (Anon., 1149) 63–4 Vives, Juan Luis 136, 158

Index

votive offerings/tradition 177, 202, 234 Wars of Cyrus, The (1576–94) 213 washing 30, 46, 50, 209, 224 wax 212, 202–3, 208, 219 see also dummy hands Webster, John Devil’s Law-Case, The (c. 1620) 61 Duchess of Malfi, The (1614) 86, 201, 202–5 weddings see marriage ceremonies Whately, William 54 Whitney, Geoffrey, Choice of Emblemes (1586) 28, 193–4 Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique 74 witchcraft 63, 166, 185–6, 203, 213–14 witches 64, 185–6, 213–14 Wither, George, A Collection of Emblemes… (1635) 28

309

women 1, 4, 27–9, 49–50, 51–2, 158–9 and beauty 55, 57–60, 61, 134–5 and domestic sphere/ housework 52–3, 62, 63, 136, 166 social status of 2, 52–3, 54 subjugation of 2, 53, 54, 152–3, 167 and ugliness 61–2, 63–4 and virtue 52, 61 see also female hands; femininity; sexuality Wright, Thomas 77 Passions of the Minde, The (1601) 51–2, 145 wrist-grab 149–52, 150, 151, 152, 154–5, 243–4, 245 writing 208 see also handwriting xenophobia 63, 64, 185 zodiac, the 25