ABSTRACT
To begin with a simple observation: Shakespeare's plays are suffused with references to human entrails. While there are of course several plays in the Shakespearean canon in which the body's internal organs are barely mentioned, there are also in this corpus quite a few works that are preoccupied with an imagination of the visceral interior of the human body. The question of why this should be so is the point of origin, and the subject, of this essay. The plays I discuss at some length below—Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale—seem to me to be important places to begin to examine Shakespeare's understanding of corporeal inwardness. 1
