How does gender inform embodiment studies of Shakespeare? This question animates the forty-two varied chapters collected here. As one would expect of an Oxford Handbook, the volume is packed with influential scholars and the research is incisive and generally excellent. Yet the title is somewhat misleading. The watchword for the book is feminism as much as—if not more than—embodiment. The editor, Valerie Traub, notes that she was first invited to create a volume on gender but declined as she felt feminist concerns might seem “belated” (1). Hence the current project arose in contradistinction, seizing on the rising interest in bodies as a trend by bringing together phenomenology, psychoanalysis, disability studies, queer studies, historicism, presentism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, geohumoralism, and affect theory. Indeed, the book’s greatest strength lies in its dazzling array of theoretical approaches. Intersecting with each is Traub’s argument for the vital place of feminism in Renaissance studies and its urgency now. The methodology of intersectionality—considering bodies as they are constituted by and within overlapping dynamics such as gender, race, class, and sexuality—feels particularly relevant on the heels of the women’s marches in 2017.
The book is divided into seven sections. Of these, part 5 is the core: its nine essays are most relevant to scholars pursuing embodiment studies in the established sense. Citing Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan—two critics notably absent from this collection—Stephen Spiess encapsulates the turn the book makes from embodiment “as a noun … [that has] come to indicate the varying ways in which the body was understood and experienced ‘as embedded in a larger world’” to, by contrast, embodiment as an “action” (95). Parts 1 through 4—spanning Shakespeare’s biography, early modern women’s lives, ethnic contexts, and sexualities—likewise engage with embodiment more as process than as subject. The body, in many chapters, becomes the vehicle through which the authors collectively expose systems of socialized difference. For example, M. Lindsay Kaplan demonstrates how medieval Christian theology writes back onto conceptions of somatic alterity for Jews, specifically in Shylock’s case. Similarly, Patricia Akhimie interprets bruises as signs of racial servitude in The Comedy of Errors that reveal “the indelibility of somatic markers” as a “social construct” (188). Part 6 of the volume posits linkages between material texts, editorial choices, and absent bodies, offering up readings of what Laurie Maguire dubs “typographical embodiment” (527). Part 7 explores how the body materializes in “cultural performances past and present.” One area that is surprisingly underrepresented in the book (save Evelyn Tribble’s nod at 630) is embodied cognition, especially as this has emerged as a recent force. When taken as a whole, however, these wide-ranging essays survey Shakespearean scholarship far beyond embodiment proper.
Several chapters focus on self-reflection and field-shaping questions. Ania Loomba uses Caliban as a test case to rethink race as a “porous and mobile” category (233). Tobin Siebers and Vin Nardizzi both debate the overemphasis on Richard III’s physical deformity as the “standard bearer” for disability studies (452). The book also challenges prevalent critical assumptions. Lena Cowen Orlin disputes the evidence surrounding Shakespeare’s marriage that gives rise to the legend of his supposed unhappiness, proposing alternate Annes and suggesting the marriage furthered his interests. Ian Smith extends blackface beyond cosmetics, maintaining that a stage livery of black fabrics inflects objectifying racial discourse. Will Fisher refutes “oft-repeated generalizations” about Renaissance sexual attitudes in order to contextualize Venus and Adonis within a cultural framework of cunnilingus (334). While it is, of course, impossible to address the full range of ideas present in such a tome, several threads cross sections: temporality (Susan Frye, Will Stockton, Gina Bloom, and Kathleen E. McLuskie each consider how time can be collapsed, paused, or played within Shakespeare’s “creative temporal juggling” [423]), rivalry (Alan Stewart, Emily C. Bartels, and Mario DiGangi show how decisions and declarations—even over female bodies—are often subtended by “intimacies between men” [388]), and plurality (Julie Crawford, Kathryn Schwarz, and Carol Thomas Neely disrupt traditional binaries in favor of alternative relational models).
Especially noteworthy essays include Wendy Wall’s playful and eloquent piece arguing for the value of a recipe archive. She illuminates how domestic practices of cooking subsumed health treatment, and even raised for women epistemological “questions about how ‘nature’ or ‘the body’ operated as a category of knowledge” (133). Elizabeth D. Harvey’s intriguing chapter dissolves binary logics by blending psychoanalytic animism, air, and early modern spirits. Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi helpfully critique the universalist rhetoric of performance-based pedagogy that erases, rather than reveals, student diversity. They note how “colour-blindness” in college classrooms can be “counterproductive” and offer strategies for embodied teaching that broach the conversation about identity politics (730).
Shakespeareans will appreciate the helpful opening list of contents by genre as well as the uncharacteristically large focus on histories and romances. While the writing occasionally becomes stereotypically academic, the collection overall is exciting to read because of its rich complexity of thought. This book will undoubtedly make its mark on the body of early modern research.
