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Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of
the Body
By David Hillman
Palgrave Macmillan, £50
Dateline: 14th February, 2007
If there were a prize for coming up with the most arresting title of
the year David Hillman would surely be one of the front-runners. But
anyone hoping for a scholarly dissertation about the effects of indigestion
on the Bard's work will be disappointed - Shakespeare's Entrails
examines an aspect of Shakespeare's plays that can strike modern readers
as odd and rather comical, namely his fondness for siting what we would
call mental and emotional states in the viscera rather than the brain.
Hillman suggests that expressions such as "intestine joys"
and "bowels full of wrath", not to mention Menenius' "fable
of the belly" in Coriolanus, are not picturesque metaphors
but an accurate reflection of early modern beliefs. Despite dramatic
advances in the fields of anatomy and physiology old ideas about the
role of the heart, liver and other internal organs died hard. He detects
in Shakespeare's England "a loss of sense of access to the interior"
coupled with "a recurrent fascination with the contents of the
human body", knowledge of which could be gained only by dissecting
corpses or disembowelling traitors.
This potent combination left its mark throughout Shakespeare's plays
but Hillman concentrates on four: Troilus and Cressida, so packed
with images of food, digestion and entrails it more than justifies Hillman's
description of it as "The Gastric Epic"; Hamlet, a
play of "claustrophobic, enclosed spaces" in which he sees
"a desire for aperture coupled with a disgust at openness";
King Lear, the polar opposite of Hamlet in its depiction
of characters expelled from the shelter of home and family into the
empty wasteland of Act Three; and The Winter's Tale, in which
Leontes' paranoid obsession with the permeability of his wife's body
leads to tragedy.
Shakespeare's Entrails is strongly influenced by the fact that
before opting for an academic career Hillman trained as a child psychotherapist.
Not every reader will share his confidence in the Freudian theories
that loom much larger in the book than the handful of index references
would suggest, but students of Shakespeare will find plenty of food
for thought (no pun intended). Hillman's discussion of the cannibalistic
fantasies that pervade Hamlet and the extensive heart imagery
in King Lear are particularly interesting, and his chapter on
Troilus and Cressida is essential reading for anyone tackling
this strange but fascinating play. Shakespeare's Entrails is
another excellent addition to the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies series.
J D Atkinson
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