Comparative Drama

Continuing the long-standing yet ever evolving scholarly treatment of the early modern body, Farah Karim-Cooper crafts a study that is narrow in focus yet wide-ranging in breadth by casting attention upon the early modern hand. Like previous notable contributions to early modern body studies, Karim-Cooper takes a historicist approach, culling the archives to uncover discourses about the hand in pamphlets, art manuals, anti-theatrical tracts, and conduct books, among other texts. These varied discussions of the hand, Karim-Cooper demonstrates, significantly informed its presentation on the early modern stage, and more specifically, in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The hand in early modern England, she argues, “was viewed as a microcosm of the self and could indicate the moral character and physical health of the person to whom it was attached” (2). She notes that even today, “the hand is the instrument with which we engage with the physical world and it is the part of our body, apart from the face, with which we communicate most expressively and passionately” (3). For early moderns, the hand even served as a part that distinguishes the human from animal-kind. As such, “The hand is and always has been a symbol of our dignity as human, as civilized beings” (3). It is unsurprising then, that the hand has garnered attention in texts such as Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture and David Hillman and Carla Mazzio’s collection The Body in Parts. Karim-Cooper productively builds upon these accounts by concentrating on the hand “as a sign of character and identity” (5). Whether “attached or amputated,” she contends, the hand on Shakespeare’s stage continuously communicated facets of the self, particularly “character and identity” (5). [End Page 410]

Across six chapters, Karim-Cooper reveals the capacious symbolic capacity of the hand in early modern culture and, attendantly, on the stage. The hand signaled on a metaphysical scale by revealing a person’s character, gesturing toward the pursuit of knowledge, or serving as a reminder of human dignity and the “omnipresence of God” (27). On a more personal and interpersonal level, the hand communicated qualities like gentility, beauty, and foreignness. Karim-Cooper ably weaves the connections between these significations and numerous early modern concerns, such as aesthetics, music, clothing, medicine, and more. The female hand, for example, served a key role in romantic exchanges with its visible whiteness, cleanliness, and sleekness signaling for suitors a woman’s beauty and suitability. In order to highlight these qualities, artists therefore commonly painted women’s hands holding “something, like gloves, an elaborate fan or a handkerchief ” (60). Her study thus shows the hand’s key role in the philosophical as well as in day to day life.

As her title suggests, it also served an important purpose on Shakespeare’s stage. Of particular interest to readers of Comparative Drama would be chapters 3, 5, and 6, which focus most extensively on Renaissance plays. In chapter 3, Karim-Cooper turns to an act of the hand—gesture—and considers how early modern actors may have performed gestures that emphasized the hand. Karim-Cooper notes how gestures on stage served many functions, one of the most important being the communication of emotions. Because emotions are so wide ranging, and because they were at times represented as being fabricated, Karim-Cooper makes the case that gestures on the early modern stage were not performed in any one particular way. “It is unnecessary for gestures to adhere to one particular form,” she explains (78). Rather, “My contention in this study is that gestures were fundamentally varied: sometimes iconic [meaning a ‘formal hand (or body) movement or sequence of movements that would have been highly recognizable to an early modern audience’ (82–83)], sometimes natural or drawn from everyday life; sometimes subtle, other times...