"Carv'd out in bloody lines": Interiority, Truth, and Violence in Early Modern Drama

In “Carv'd out in bloody lines”: Interiority, Truth, and Violence in Early Modern Drama, I examine dramatic presentations of truths and truth-telling as they connect to interior spaces, including the heart, the theater, and the uterus. I argue that viewing the theatre as a heart helps us understand the power of drama and its role in social criticism during the early modern era. In the theaters, playwrights invited audiences into the beating heart of their society by asking them to see truth and truths as political, contingent, and even contradictory. My figuration of the theater as the heart of the social body is supported by early modern English monarchs’ construction of the realm as a body and themselves as the head of that body. I argue that in the body of London, it is in fact the theater that functions as a heart and prime circulator, using its privileged space to introduce and move ideas in the social body. The individual human body and its organs, particularly the heart and the uterus, are linked onstage to problems of knowing and understanding. The body and its insidiously unknowable interior present a rich dramatic framework for explorations of truth, love, epistemology, ontology, and violence. Playwrights link truth and interiority by physically and figuratively housing evidence inside the body, inscribed on the heart or contained in the uterus, tantalizingly close yet frustratingly invisible to others. I argue that by complicating the body, organs, and signs, playwrights complicate the truths that they are said to house and signify. Acts of misreading and misunderstanding permeate early modern drama; knowledge is deconstructed and made unreliable at every stage of assessment. Early modern writers firmly linked the conscience and the heart, using them essentially interchangeably, and often described inscriptions or writing of the conscience in and on the heart. As in my examination of the body, questions of being versus seeming and whether interior realities are externally evident come to the fore in my analysis of belief, piety, clergy, and the church. Playwrights tap into these concerns by dramatically juxtaposing the tongue and the heart, or playing up the distance between the two, emphasizing the possible divide between the invisible interior and the spoken word, and raising the question of whether what is spoken truly represents the person’s heart, conscience, thoughts, or beliefs. The question of how to ascertain an individual’s belief, loyalty, and morality -- how to read their hidden heart -- is of paramount importance