On 11 November 2022, Professor Farah Karim-Cooper of King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, explained the importance of bodily gesture in early modern drama to a packed lecture theater in Oxford’s English faculty. Karim-Cooper argues that the ‘technologies of gesture’ in the actor’s hand, face, and body movements disclose early modern attitudes about emotional responses and registers. The session reminded participants of the importance of thinking about early modern drama kinesthetically, how the implicit gestures of King Lear dividing his Kingdom in ‘these bounds…from this line to this’ foreshadows the king’s transition from all-powerful sovereignty to senescent madness upon his abdication, or how Shakespeare’s interlocutor, the actor Richard Burbage, relied on his entire body to convince the audience of his performances as Lear, Othello, and Richard III. The talk served as a reminder that Shakespeare’s dramatic worlds are built not only by the set but by the dramatic intentions of the actors who inhabit it.
Farah enumerated a series of gestural cues and dialectics with which to think about gestures on stage. She argued that while the text is sometimes explicit in its gestures through stage directions and script annotations, they are often embedded implicitly through demonstrative pronouns. In Lear’s quote above, the words “this to this” not only captures the whole of England, but it gives the actor onstage a cue to point out the land on the map he has ordered over in his demand of Gloucester to ‘give me the map there.’ In Lear’s dismemberment of the kingdom for Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, Karim-Cooper asserts that actors evoke an ‘emotional history and a sense of the somatic history of the body in early modern performance.’ If Lear’s gestures dismember the Kingdom, they also figuratively dismember him as its divine monarch by stripping him of authority and pushing him into a state of disorder, a state brought on implicitly by the movement of the actor’s hands.
This interest in gestures stemmed from conversations between Professor Karim-Cooper and the psycholinguist David McNeil at the University of Chicago, who argued in Hand and Mind (1992) that "gestures do not simply form a part of what is said but have an impact on thought itself.” Farah expands and complicates this idea in her monograph, Hand on the Shakespearean Stage (2020), which situates McNeil’s psycholinguistic ideas about gesture in the early modern theories about the body. Reading alongside the anatomical theories of Vesalius and John Bulwer’s Chironomia: or, The art of Manuall Rhetorique (1644), Farah maintains that hand gestures are an early modern signifier of divine right, social status, and physical health. Her argument situates gesture into early modern bodily discourses, and it is worth returning to the Lear example, as Farah did in her talk. There is an early-modern doubleness to Lear’s gestures on the map that actors have long exploited. On the one hand, he is a divine monarch, seen as an extension of God, but he is also a father giving way for his children to take his land and livelihood in old age.
These two vantage points capture two of Farah’s dialectics of gesture, the iconic and the instinctive. When Lear sinks to his knees in the rainstorm, he embodies an extreme, allegorical emotional response parallel to the contrast of the period’s art. His emotional state is exaggerated and represents a fixed type. But when Sir Ian McKellen takes his classic turn as Lear in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2007 production, he makes a face of subtle, visceral confusion during the storm, embodying the instinctive, realistic cues actors pick up in everyday life. The key, Farah argues, is in actors' ‘sociology of gesture’ a negotiation of both dialects of gesture based on character and context. The movement between the two, or the reliance on the iconic over the instinctive, provides an early modern emotional vocabulary with which to read and watch how actors deploy Shakespeare’s dramatic text.
And it was this juggling that participants were invited to try themselves as we transitioned into a theater workshop with actors from Shakespeare’s Globe. As someone used to reading and annotating Arden editions of Shakespeare late into the night, it was dynamic and intimidating to have to act out his characters. A good friend and I moved between playing the gaslighting of Othello by Iago, to the married pair of Portia and Brutus in Julius Caesar. As I said many times in the session ‘I am no actor,’ but taking the leap did convince me of the importance of gestures on the stage. I found myself curious about the movement of my hand, why my body turned one way and not the other, and how I could match the moment of playing a bitter Portia recounting Brutus’ transgression.
The feelings which accompanied the movements of my body transported me from one place to another and from me to someone else. What lurks behind our workshop performances is what gesture can tell us about performances’ ability to capture the emotional experience across time and what kind of bounds this gives actors to shape characters. Lauren Berlant argues that studies of affect and emotional response are “another phase in the history of ideology theory” by “bringing us back to what is sensed with what is known.” I take Berlant to mean that affective responses are a way to navigate ideology in the same way that the actors’ gestures, as Karim-Cooper points out, negotiate a whole history of emotion. The body, like many early modern theatrical objects, is a vessel for ideology. Putting names to these gestures invites us to reconsider Shakespeare’s characters. If we do not take up this invitation, we run the risk of losing a sense of them in the brush of a hand and the turn of a head.
Dominic Madera is a Donovan-Moody Scholar at Exeter College, Oxford, pursuing a second BA in English Language and Literature. He is originally from Houston, Texas, in the United States, and he is a current intern at TORCH. He is interested in many things, most of them revolve around the rhetoric and narratives of gender, race, and sexuality written in English.
