ABSTRACT
Taken together, the essays in this book constitute, in all their variety, a fascinating reminder of the two-faced character of their subject, the human face. Shakespeare's contemporaries, Farah Karim-Cooper insists, regarded the face as “a legible map of the inner workings of the mind and heart” (29); and indeed the face of “Good Duke Humphrey” in 2 Henry VI is described as a “map of honour, truth, and loyalty” that exactly delineates his inward nature (3.1.202–3). 1 Numerous writers of the period, especially those committed to the doctrines of physiognomy, emphasized the fundamental lucidity of the face as an index of “character”—a word whose very etymology reveals a notion of selfhood as something inscribed upon the countenance for all to see. So Sir Thomas Browne writes that “there are mystically in our faces certain Characters which carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures.” 2 Varying the metaphor, Thomas Wright tells us that “wise men often, thorowe the windowes of the face, behold the secrets of the heart.” 3 But then, as Sean Lawrence reminds us, faces can prove to be quite “as unreliable as other signs, because they can be used to lie,” so that they persistently “demand interpretation” (66, 67); and interpretation, by its very nature, is subject to doubt and contestation. Thus David Goldstein, citing Duncan's skeptical insistence that “There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face” (Macbeth, 1.4.12–13), argues that “for Shakespeare the face is, foremost, a site of epistemological, ontological, and ethical crisis”: is it “a mask or a mirror, a screen or a window?” (75)—there is no way of knowing; and Goldstein's essay ends, as it began, with questions: “Is a description of the face's ethical power real, or just a description of an image, which may only fitfully approximate reality—or worse, may only disguise and misdirect?” (88). This indeed was very much the anxiety expressed by Thomas Wright who, even as he proclaimed the lucid transparency of the face, cautioned that hearts are, after all, “inscrutable, and onely open vnto God,” so that the best we can do is aim at them “by coniectures” producing “rather an image of that affection that doth raigne in the minde, than a perfite and resolute knowledge.” 4
