Ineffable Bodies

Ineffable Bodies focuses on the heroic body on the early modern English stage, envisaged from a literary and historical point of view. Utilizing examples of Shakespearean plays and his contemporaries, this volume examines the symbolic and physical destruction of the heroic body. This demolition reflects the mutations of early modern England -- the crisis of the aristocracy and the loss of its values, the changes in warfare, the political and religious remapping of English society -- as well as an epistemological crisis affecting the question of representation: while the classical heroic body was endowed with sacredness, the early modern heroic body is literalised and objectified, and becomes an inexpressible presence on the early modern stage. English playwrights had to negotiate with this question of representation, thereby showing a new consciousness of the inability to represent. The loss of heroic substance on the early modern stage is the symptom of an aesthetic shift, making the notion of the "ineffable" central to modern aesthetics.