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The Shakespearean Grasp

Climactic moments in Shakespeare often suggest a need for proportionate physical gestures (such as embraces, or touches). Such movements are very carefully managed, and sometimes strikingly deferred. Close attention to the precise stagecraft and textual manoeuvres involved raises questions about how touches in his plays should be approached. From a variety of perspectives (especially John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century manual of the rhetoric of hands, and the research of twentieth- and twenty-first century cognitive scientists into how we watch actions) suggestions emerge about the special affective processes pertaining to touches which are linked to, and sometimes encapsulate, intentions and emotions. These help illuminate Shakespearean dramaturgy, but they also reveal the kinds of knowledge and experiment arising in the plays themselves.