‘And all is semblative a woman’s part’: body politics and Twelfth Night

That the Renaissance seems peculiarly concerned with the somatic might seem justification enough for a study of the body in Shakespeare. We might concur with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg who argues, ‘During periods of social transformation, when social forms crack open…ideological conflict fractures discourse…sexuality and the physical body emerge as particularly evocative political symbols.’4 But the resurgence of the body in Renaissance studies (and elsewhere) is not a perennial, cyclical phenomenon. Rather, the intensity of focus on the body is related to very specific, historically situated developments in poststructuralist theory.