Corporeal selfhood: visceral identity in early modern medicine and Shakespearean text

Odbert, Mary (2021). Corporeal selfhood: visceral identity in early modern medicine and Shakespearean text. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The body is an integrated participant in identity formation, and the autonomous interpretation of its visceral matter by the individual subject provides an opportunity to construct a notion of selfhood grounded in the fabric of the body. Its transhistorical and interdisciplinary presence as the physical mediator of human experience situates corporeal materiality within a nexus of critical discourses. Within literature, the body is often subject to metaphorical, rhetorical, and poetic readings which tend to displace its viscera into symbols and emblems. However, the corporeality crafted throughout Shakespearean text exposes, satirizes, and refutes these conceptual readings by confronting their immaterial interpretations with reassertions of the physical body. My work holds that conceptual displacement poses a detriment to the legibility of the physical body by usurping its homeostatic meanings with more easily manipulated allegorical ones. This thesis examines the ways in which Shakespearean bodies reject conceptualization and reassert corporeal materialism as a component of the self.
Before exploring the examples of corporeal selfhood embedded throughout Shakespearean characterization, the first chapter situates these readings within the context of the early modern body. By investigating the scientific advancements heralded by anatomists like Andreas Vesalius, this chapter traces the dissemination of body knowledge to a wider public from the mid to late sixteenth century. Bookending Shakespeare’s life and work, this history moves from pre-Vesalian foundations in Galenic tradition to the application of Vesalian empiricism in mid seventeenth century imperatives of nosce te ipsum, “to know thyself” through corporeal self-exploration. The Diary of Samuel Pepys provides a case study in the individuated practice of corporeal self-creation through autonomous engagement with the experience of surgery.
The close readings of Shakespearean text move from the boundaries of the bodily exterior to the inner workings of the vital body via Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear. Chapter 2 puts the visceral body in dialogue with the rhetorical body politic, using the wounds of Coriolanus to explore the interpreted public body, the bodily interior as a sanctuary of selfhood, and the continuity of self with the generative maternal body. Chapter 3 reads the fragmented body in Titus Andronicus as a condensed unit of meaning, which contains and transmits identity in the corporeal unit severed from homeostatic purpose, whilst reframing the corporeally altered remaining body within adaptive modes of agency. Chapter 4 unpacks the homeostatic mechanisms of form and function relations underscoring anatomy and physiology in the context of King Lear’s linguistic vivisections and reunifies the human body with its animalistic continuity in nature.
Although its textual bodies are early modern, the transhistorical performance of Shakespearean drama revives the historical experience of corporeality in the present physical bodies of modern actors. Reading the bodies of these texts within the context of their contemporary medical understanding illuminates more nuanced elements of their characterization and facilitates a more continuous view of medical history as an inherent component in humanity’s ongoing development, rather than an isolated oddity of the past. By reasserting the visceral into readings of humanity through the Shakespearean lens, we allow the body and its parts to retain value, not as representations of other ideas, but as the manifest matter of humanity.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):