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The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. By Farah Karim-Cooper. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016; pp. 328.
Farah Karim-Cooper opens her book The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage with some compelling anecdotes of hands in Shakespeare. She compares Katherina, who volunteers to place her hand beneath Petrucchio's foot, to Hamlet, who holds Ophelia's wrist hard. She observes that Paulina of The Winter's Tale suggests an infant's hand identifying its parents. She notes that Titus's and Lavinia's amputations robbed them of their power in society. Using extensive early modern sources, Karim-Cooper argues that Shakespeare and his contemporaries expressed identity, emotion, and social engagement through a character's hand gesture, contact, and action. While at times the extent of the source work is exhaustive, Karim-Cooper skillfully locates the expressive hand in an emotional and theatrical context.
In chapter 1, "The Idea of the Hand in Shakespeare's World," the author examines the function of the hand in Aristotle, Galen, Bulwer, and Vesalius. She connects these studies and Mannerist paintings of the hand to Elizabethan gestures, then locates the same gestures in Shakespeare. In one example, Karim-Cooper juxtaposes Hortensio's attempt to teach Kate to play the lute in The Taming of the Shrew with Hamlet's chiding of Guildenstern's attempt to play him like an instrument. Karim-Cooper uses these and other close readings to reveal Shakespeare's expressive mind/body connection through gesture.
In chapter 2, "Manners and Beauty:...