Shakespeare’s Body Language

Shaming Gestures and Gender Politics on the Renaissance Stage

Miranda Fay Thomas

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350228146
• eBook ISBN: 9781350035485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Why do the Capulets bite their thumbs at the Montagues? Why do the Venetians spit upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine? What is it about Volumnia's act of kneeling that convinces Coriolanus not to assault the city of Rome? Shakespeare's Body Language is a ground-breaking new study of Shakespearean drama, revealing the previously unseen history of social tensions found within the performance of gestures – and how such gestures are used to shame those within the body politic of early modern England. The first full study of shaming gestures in Shakespearean drama, this book establishes how shame is often rooted in the gendered expectations of the Renaissance era. Exploring how the performance of gestures such as figging, the cuckold's horns, and even the in-action of stillness created shaming spectacles on the early modern stage and its wider society, Shakespeare's Body Language argues that gestures are embodied social metaphors which epitomise the personal as political. It reveals the tensions of everyday life as key motivators behind the actions of Shakespeare's characters, and considers how honour and its opposite, shame, are constructed in terms of gender norms. Featuring in-depth analyses of plays across Shakespeare's career, this book explores how the playwright's understanding of shame and humiliation is rooted in performance anxiety and gender politics, explaining how theatrical gestures can create dramatic tension in a way that words alone cannot. It offers both rich insights into the early modern context of Shakespeare's drama and confirms the startling relevance of his work to modern audiences.

1

Thumb-biting: Performing Toxic Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet

Two households, both alike in dignity, in Mississippi where we lay our scene. A belligerent young upstart named Sampson has just given his rival the finger. Does he bite his thumb? No; instead, he makes a gesture that the contemporary audience can more easily recognize. So began Cornerstone Theatre’s 1989 production of Romeo and Juliet, which modernized the play’s famous gesticulatory opening salvo between the Montagues and Capulets.¹ Such an emendation is reasonably unusual. More often, the thumb-biting is retained in modern performance, with directors taking pains to alert the audience to the gravity of the Elizabethan insult. For instance, the promptbook from Peter Hall’s 1947 production reads ‘crowd freeze to silence’ after Sampson makes the gesture.² Michael Boyd’s version for the RSC in 2000 had Abram’s enquiry into the thumb-biting spoken ‘very quietly, as the scene took on a sudden deadly earnestness’.³ And in Daniel Kramer’s surrealist production for Shakespeare’s Globe in 2017, the thumb-bite was pantomimically amped up, with the Montague servant recoiling backwards from the insult. This latter gesture was performed directly in front of a tableau of Lady Montague and Lady Capulet giving birth to the star-crossed lovers, implying how the children of each family are born into a pre-existing cycle of masculine violence.

Different methods of performing the thumb-bite gesture will depend on a variety of factors: whether the performance is staged indoor or outdoor, the size of the auditorium, the demographic of the audience, the stylistic expectations of a particular theatrical institution, in addition to the contextual social mores of the production and its relationship to the world of the play. For instance, if Cornerstone’s 1989 production of Romeo and Juliet had toured to countries such as India or Pakistan, or cities such as Naples, Italy, the thumb-biting gesture would not necessarily have needed amending. The ‘cutis’ gesture, as it is known there, is still used today and involves ‘mak[ing] a fist then flick[ing] the thumb off the front teeth’.⁴ However, the history of obscene thumb gestures in general can be traced all the way back to ancient Rome. While Desmond Morris and his colleagues observe that Shakespeare does not leave any clues as to why the thumb-bite in Romeo and Juliet should be so provocative,⁵ gestural experts such as Fritz Graf maintain that the vulgarity of using the thumb to point with is still recognizable today.⁶ Often, it is not so much the gesture itself as the characters’ responses to it that indicate to a modern audience the ramifications of what occurred. However, by examining the connotations of thumbs as well as the codes of public sparring, it becomes possible to unlock the gesture’s underlying social assumptions. What is more, such associations reveal the potent gender politics that are coded within such gestures, provoking the consideration that such actions represent a microcosm of the wider tensions within the plays themselves.

Let us turn to the act of apparent masculine bravado in question. Walking about the streets of Verona are Samson and Gregory, servants of the house of Capulet, who soon catch sight of Abraham, a servant of the Montagues:

SAMSON

My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee.

GREGORY

How, turn thy back and run?

SAMSON

Fear me not.

GREGORY

No, marry, I fear thee!

SAMSON

Let us take the law of our sides; let them begin.

GREGORY

I will frown as I pass by and let them take it as they list.

SAMSON

Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them, which isdisgrace to them if they bear it.

ABRAHAM

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

(1.1.32–44)

Samson and Gregory’s verbal exchanges crescendo into the enactment of the gesture, but it is worth noting that while this opening scene contains the first example of brawling within this violent play, the buildup to it is rooted in cowardice. While Samson is apparently spoiling for a fight, Gregory knows him better: as someone who will flee at the sign of any real trouble. In fact, as soon as Gregory points this out, Samson ducks behind the legal precedents for engaging in street fighting: ‘let us take the law of our sides; let them begin.’ Yet when Gregory offers to frown at their enemy, Samson has a better idea: to bite his thumb. Rather than openly starting a brawl, Samson’s tactic is to rile up his opponent in as nondescript a way as possible by using a gesture which can be mistaken for a perfectly innocent action. His so-called virulence is far more impotent than it looks; while excited at the prospect of getting into a fight, he baulks at the possibility of actually putting his manhood on the line. Gestures are, in this sense, the shadow of action: from a distance, they may look as important, but ultimately, they lack substance.

Yet potential alterations to the thumb-biting scene are extant within the variant texts of the play before modern actors and directors even get their hands on it. The first quarto of 1597 renders the exchanges more impersonal: instead of naming the characters, the text refers to them as ‘1 Capulet serving-man’, ‘2 Capulet serving-man’, and ‘1 Montague serving-man’. There are fewer exchanges between the servants of the two houses, and less verbal quibbling.⁷ In addition, by anonymizing the names, we do not get a sense of the characters as having motives in their own right as opposed to, say, the motives of their house masters. By contrast, 1599’s second quarto names the men as Sampson, Gregory, and Abram, and the quarrel’s linguistic pedantry creates a far more fraught scenario:

ABRAM

Do you bite your thumbe at us, sir?

SAMP

I do bite my thumbe, sir.

ABRA

Do you bite your thumbe at us, sir?

SAMP

Is the law of our side, if I say ay?

GREG

No.

SAMP

No, sir, I do not bite my thumbe at you, sir, but I bitemy thumbe, sir.

GREG

Do you quarrell sir?

ABRA

Quarrell sir, no sir.⁸

This is where Gregory’s linguistic pedantry becomes useful. Earlier on in the scene, his exchanges with Sampson appear to reveal a character who is either dense enough to take things literally (‘we’ll not carry coals.’ ‘No, for then we should be colliers’ (1.1.1–2)) or over-exacting in the extreme (‘I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.’ ‘That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall.’ (1.1.10–13)). But as the scene progresses and the brawl brews, we see the necessity of such scrupulousness as Abraham keeps on asking, ‘Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?’ The repetition in the language creates a sense of the disdain reverberating between the characters, rendered more tense by the frequency of faux-polite words such as ‘sir’, and ‘you’ instead of ‘thou’, creating a pantomimic linguistic benefit of the doubt that thinly veils the disrespect lurking behind it. Until the sense of the gesture is ascertained, the men must remain gentle in word, if not in tone.

Such over-the-top reactions to the gesture, and the subsequent need for their deniability, emphasize how, in Renaissance England, gestures that undermined rank and status were often seen to be as insulting as a verbal obscenity.⁹ This type of argument was common in Shakespeare’s age, as we can see from Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet The Dead Tearme: ‘What swearing is there, what shouldering, what jostling, what jeering, what byting of thumbs, to beget quarrels!’¹⁰ There were, in fact, a variety of gesticulatory ways to get on the wrong side of a Renaissance man: ‘bearding, nose-tweaking, ear-boxing, gown-pulling, spitting and striking up heels’ are just some of the colourful examples listed in Alexandra Shepard’s book The Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England.¹¹ There were even printed guidelines for engaging in such arguments. It is therefore not insignificant that Sampson’s gesture is made in a public place, as actions such as these were supposed to occur ‘on neutral territory to avoid any suspicion of advantage’.¹² According to Shepard, competitive masculinity and its inbuilt code of honour emerged as a lively and often unsettling feature of early modern society: ‘violence was a vivid threat flamboyantly woven into the fabric of men’s daily lives, often simply as the implicit threat suggested by bodily gestures and taunts, but nonetheless displayed as proof of strength and status in connection with a range of male identities.’¹³ The opening scene of Romeo and Juliet, then, is very much in keeping with contemporary social mores of honour and status: Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I all issued proclamations against public fighting,¹⁴ but these measures were not enough to prevent civil disorder flaring up until the end of the century.¹⁵ According to Lawrence Stone, ‘street outbreaks persisted and the number of recorded duels and challenges jumped from five in the 1580s to nearly twenty in the 1590s.’¹⁶ Charles Edelman correctly notes that such affrays performed on the popular stage would have been readily recognized as the sort an audience might see on the city streets,¹⁷ and Murray J. Levith further observes that the characters at the opening of Romeo and Juliet act like London apprentices, with the brawl being reminiscent of a tradesmen battle.¹⁸ Furthermore, there is a keen sense of such lower-class scuffles occurring because such people wished to imitate their betters¹⁹; perhaps Sampson and Gregory had seen one of Tybalt’s previous swordfights and had been thrilled by the masculine bravado and street theatre that it entailed. In this way, Shakespeare presents a stark contrast between the expectation of ‘two households, both alike in dignity’ established in the prologue and the reality of what happens on the streets outside these houses; or, rather, he reveals both houses to be as bad as each other when it comes to incivility.

In her edition of the play, Jill L. Levenson notes that these exchanges parody the Renaissance duelling codes that underline the play as a whole:

Samson, aware of legalities […] does not acknowledge the object of his insult; he hesitates to make biting his thumb an official challenge […] Abraham persists in attempting to confirm the insult, which would qualify as both a defiant challenge and an illegal act […] Gregory sets the legal trap for Abraham, who neatly avoids it.²⁰

By asking, ‘do you quarrel, sir?’ (1.1.50), Gregory is almost teasing Abraham; all three serving-men know that, although Abraham is clearly up for an argument, to answer ‘yes’ would demarcate the official beginning of a fight, which the Montagues would have to take the blame for. This sense of fastidiousness both escalates the masculine tension and prevents outright violence from immediately occurring. The servants of the two houses are concerned with preserving honour in two seemingly contradictory ways: on the one hand, they want to prove their bravado, but on the other, they do not wish to be caught fighting in the street. It is almost a burlesque performance of masculinity, teetering between arrogance and timidity. The scene also parodies the action of gesticulation itself. The fact that the action can be misinterpreted reveals not only the shaky legal ground that the gesture’s instigator stands on but also the gesture’s lack of immediate clarity and consequent deniability, which is, of course, its power in such tense social situations. Indeed, John Walter’s essay ‘Gesturing at Authority’ makes exactly this point: ‘the performer of a gesture from which information is “given off” cannot be held fully responsible as to the intended meaning of the act and, if challenged, has some latitude to deny the message as wrongly received.’²¹ Gestural theorist Adam Kendon also notes how insulting gestures often have a certain deniability about them in performance:

in Germany there is a gesture in which the forefinger touches the side of the head and is rotated back and forth. It is used to mean ‘he’s crazy’ and it is regarded as a grave insult. Its use has been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• Introduction: Embodying Shame
• 1 Thumb-biting: Performing Toxic Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet
• 2 Figging: Spanish Anxieties and Ancient Grudges in Pistol’s Henriad
• 3 Spitting at Richard: Taming the Beast in Richard III
• 4 Spitting at Shylock: Shameful Conversion in The Merchant of Venice
• 5 Horning: Fragile Masculinity in Othello
• 6 Handwashing: Feminine Shame in Macbeth
• 7 Kneeling: Passive Aggression in Coriolanus
• 8 Stillness: Female Constancy in The Winter’s Tale
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index