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

astrology and magic.
    The rise of anatomy is part of this shift, for the urge to open up the body demands that it is closed to begin with. The anatomist, like the sceptic, must see with his eyes in order to believe and understand. Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica threw open the doors to this inner world. People began to speak more boldly and unashamedly in bodily terms. Even Queen Elizabeth assured her troops preparing to repel the Spanish Armada: ‘I know that I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England, too.’ Shakespeare’s abundant references not only to external parts of the body but to the innards that we so rarely see are the writer’s response to new literary possibilities. The body’s parts provide a wealth of fresh images and metaphors. The Italian historian of medicine Arturo Castiglioni even makes the claim that Shakespeare got the idea for his most famous visual scene, where Hamlet in the graveyard picks up the skull of the king’s former jester and holds it in his hand while speaking the lines ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’, from one of the illustrations in Vesalius, which shows ‘a skeleton in meditation’, with its right hand resting on a skull placed on the stone tomb in front of it.
    Shakespeare goes further than his contemporaries into this new world of language. He is medically literate, and includes somewhere in his plays references to most of the diseases and remedies of the day. More than this, his use of corporeal images encourages our involvement in the drama and produces in us a strong identification with his characters. This distinguishes him from his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and even the bloodthirsty John Webster. And, of course, the new language and juicy metaphors based on body parts could only work dramatically if Shakespeare’s audiences already shared his sense of the human body.
    It is Hamlet who wrestles most with the meaning of human embodiment, using successive scenes to probe the question ever more deeply. Is the embodied self bounded by the physical edges of the body? Upon what he calls Hamlet’s ‘transformation’, his uncle Claudius, the new king, observes that ‘nor th’ exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was’. Hamlet says of himself: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.’ As it is, he struggles to reconcile the confines of his body with the scale of his increasingly crazy ideas. Hamlet dreams: ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.’ And in his most famous soliloquy, he weighs the possibility of ending for ever ‘The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to’.
    In Macbeth , it is images of blood that predominate. Blood slops and surges through the play like a river bursting its banks. No longer properly contained within the body, it stains daggers and hands and faces. It even spills out of the drama itself and into the real world of the theatre to ‘Threaten this bloody stage’, as one character announces. The witches stir baboon’s blood and sow’s blood into their cauldron. By Act Three, Macbeth is in so deep he finds he must ‘wade’ in blood. Scotland, like Denmark, is a body: ‘Bleed, bleed, poor country!’ says Macduff. ‘It weeps, it bleeds,’ concurs Malcolm a few lines later.
    Almost equally liquid imagery accompanies Falstaff – that barrow load of ‘butcher’s offal’ – through the action of three plays. In Henry IV, Part I , the fit young Prince Henry repeatedly taunts Falstaff about his alarmingly mobile insides: ‘you carried your guts away’, ‘that stuffed cloak-bag of guts’, ‘how would thy guts fall about thy knees!’ Again, the two characters represent facets of the body politic, presently soft and flabby, but with the potential to become lean and efficient. We hear the same language today, for