ABSTRACT
Once a marginalized object in traditional literary scholarship, the body has emerged as a crucial category of critical inquiry. In Renaissance studies it has become the focus of attention as the site of emergent notions of the modern subject and attendant concepts of privacy and intimacy hitherto viewed as natural and transhistorical. Transformations wrought by the Reformation and by the shift from feudalism to capitalism rendered the body subject to what Norbert Elias has called “the civilizing process” (Elias 1978-82 [1939]; Gent and Llewellyn 1990:1-10). More specifically, Renaissance theatre itself had a corporeal, sexual identity. It was a place where, to use Dekker’s redolent term, “stinkards” gathered, where patrons engaged in those sexual practises so often vilified by anti-theatricalists: arousal, prostitution, perhaps even copulation itself (Gurr 1987:38). The Renaissance body, then, especially in the arena of theatre, has been recognized as political, that is, as a site for the operation of power and the exercise of meaning, and one “fully social in its being and in its ideological valency” (Barker 1984:13).
