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Admirably, Farah karim-cooper "tried to avoid punning" (viii) in The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage, leaving me free to indulge and thus recommend this excellent handbook. Within the joy of the pun rests the richness of karim-cooper's achievement. her encyclopedic consideration of the hand and her specific attention to gesture as narration and to the complexities of touch do the work for those of us who will go on to play with the discoveries she offers.
If cordelia had trouble heaving her heart into her mouth to speak to her needy father, so early modern scholars have had trouble heaving a body back into the plays and performances where the somatic power pulses through both the language onstage and the affective reception of the audience. karim-cooper builds comprehensively upon the work of those for whom the body is more than a theoretical trope—Bruce r. Smith, Gail kern Paster, Erin Manning—and adds interdisciplinary force to her discussion of the hand through concepts such as kinesic intelligence in work on literature and visual art (148).
This thorough anatomy of early modern ideas of hand, gesture, and touch alongside modern interpretation becomes animated in karim-cooper's other encyclopedic understanding—that of Shakespeare's plays in performance. She is what Susan Melrose might call a particular...