Free Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

more and no less. She rules that Shylock may have his pound of flesh, provided he sheds not ‘One drop of Christian blood’, and takes an exact pound to within a twentieth of a scruple (a scruple was little more than a gramme).
    This judicial pronouncement is meant to pose a moral conundrum, not merely a dissector’s dilemma. The lawyer’s interpretation follows biblical convention in generally distinguishing flesh from blood. In Jewish doctrine, the flesh is the body (they share the Hebrew word bâsâr ). But then, as Leviticus tells us, ‘the life of the flesh is in the blood’. So there is an important distinction to be made between the two. Where ‘flesh and blood’ appear yoked together in the Bible it is usually in reference to burnt offerings and animal sacrifices. Because his bodily flesh may be taken but not his vital blood, we understand at least that Antonio is not to be sacrificed in this brute fashion.
    Bodies and their parts abound in Shakespeare. ‘Flesh’ occurs 142 times, with The Merchant of Venice employing the word twice as much as any other play. There are 1,047 ‘heart’s in the plays and sonnets, with another 208 ‘heartily’s, ‘sweet-heart’s and other variations. King Lear has the highest count with thirty-nine, not Romeo and Juliet as you might expect. ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’, Cordelia answers viscerally to her father’s demand to know whether she loves him any more than her voluble sisters do. There is even a subtle indication that she truly is her father’s dearest daughter in her name: Cordelia, Shakespeare scholars have noted, is homonymous with cor-de-Lear (heart of Lear).
    By his own admission, Hamlet is ‘pigeon-liver’d, and lack[s] gall’. The Dane also accounts for the single occurrence of ankles in Shakespeare, when he appears before Ophelia, ‘his stocking fouled, / Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle; / Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other’. Macbeth speaks of his ‘barefaced power’ – the first English usage of the adjective. ‘Lily-liver’d’ is Shakespeare’s coinage too, used twice, in Macbeth and Lear . A pale liver was thought to be a sign of weakness, related to its then presumed role in generating blood and bodily heat. There are heads and hands, eyes and ears by the hundred, but more significantly also 82 brains, 44 stomachs and 37 bellies, 29 spleens, 20 lungs, 12 guts, 9 nerves and a lone kidney, which crops up in The Merry Wives of Windsor , when Falstaff seeks to paint himself as a pitiable figure as he recounts the indignities he has suffered at the hands of the ‘merry wives’ – ‘a man of my kidney’, as he splutters incredulously. Indeed, no character in Shakespeare is more splendidly corporeal than Falstaff, who has in this same scene already reminded us how, in the course of one of the women’s tricks, his vast, collapsing form was ‘carried in a basket, like a barrow of butcher’s offal’.
    Shakespeare was writing at a time of crisis in the development of our understanding of the human body. It was around this time that the body was given, as it were, a hard outline in contradistinction to the rest of the world. We became homo clausus , as the sociologist Norbert Elias labels us: closed-off man. I’m not entirely sure I buy this theory. Surely the living body has always been an impenetrable mystery. When I scratch because I have some itch below the surface, I know its cause will remain hidden to me by my skin. And so it was always. I am tantalized by the thought that if only I could see through it, just briefly part it even, then I could deal with the problem more effectively. Doctors must feel this frustration still more keenly. Yet this is apparently a modern thought. According to the theorists, it simply was not within the imaginative compass of itchy medievals to think in this way. They would have sought their answers to the hidden body’s ailments exteriorly, perhaps by looking to