| While the body has been investigated many times by scholars, relatively little work has been done specifically on the dramatic body of the early modern era; my work helps fill that gap. I analyze a high number of brief references to bodies and body parts as they appear in a wide range of the plays written for England's public stage and in many non-dramatic period texts, including medical treatises, courtesy manuals and portraits, in order to advance hypotheses about how the drama read and imaged bodies, in both textual and production forms.; My work offers a new set of arguments about bodies and the early modern theater. I approach the topic from a different angle—most debate on early modern bodies has centered on cross—dressing or genitals and the one-sex model of the body; and I reach different conclusions—my account is the first that evaluates the complicated relationship between body parts and whole bodies as it pertains to the actorly body in particular.; One of my main conclusions is that the early modern drama conceives the up of parts, but the actorly presence is understood to be in different parts. Moreover, it is the particular disposition and comportment of the parts that conveys, or fails to convey, gender and status for the characters.; Each chapter of this dissertation studies one body part, discovering how its constitution and presentation affected what was communicated in the drama. In turn, I train my focus on faces, bellies and legs, the three main parts that form the body's front in public and onstage. My work is never simply about a literary phenomenon. Rather, I try to understand how something in the theatrical setting functions, at the same time that I study the ideological patterns of the early modern theater. I conclude that bellies play the role more commonly played by genitals, operating as sexual parts significantly affecting the construction of gender and sexuality; while faces and legs are the locus for bodily expressions and obfuscations of social status. |
