Fay Bound Alberti - This Mortal Coil

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wishd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, theres the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: theres the respect

That makes calamity of so long life

The playwright William Shakespeare is often depicted as the first modern writer, with Hamlet as a particular example of anti-mediaeval modernity.

Few of us are happy with our bodies, despite their endless, dedicated service. But for most of us our bodies are the inescapable material reality that we live with and in. Whether regarded as machines or temples, they get us from A to B and from birth to death. They also give us considerable pleasure along the way, in kissing our lovers, hugging our friends; in eating and drinking; and in endless forms of physical exercise and expression, from dancing and singing to running, pole-vaulting, and sex.

We know that conceptions of the perfect body are cultural: perceptions of beauty and health vary across time and continents. But it is taken for granted that humans through history have felt relatively similarly about their bodies, and what they can experience. After all, why should we feel any differently from our forebears? Like them, our hearts beat within our chests, our cheeks blush, our tongues taste, our stomachs digest and our lusts are inflamed. Some people claim to have penises with minds of their own; others possess vaginas that are by and large described by their absence (i.e. the lack of a penis). Like the similarly problematic concept of human nature, the body is an unchanging entity in a changing world. For manycertainly outside academic debates about bodies and emotionsthe idea that the body has a history is faintly absurd. Bodies just are: stable and solid vehicles for our emotions, our memories, and even our souls, if such things exist.

Yet the idea that Shakespeare is our contemporary, as was claimed in the 1960s, ignores the considerable differences in ideology, religion, medicine, politics, philosophy, and art that have taken place between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries.

A particular influence on the academic study of the body in the twenty-first century is the emergence of new technologies.

This Mortal Coil is situated within the histories of medicine, pathology, and the body as well as the histories of emotions and culture. It uses not only medical scholarship but also literary evidence to understand how and why our beliefs about the body have emerged and how those beliefs impact on our lived experiences. It argues that the ways we inhabit the body have changed, along with the meanings bestowed on certain organs like the heart, the brain, the spine, and even the tongue. Throughout history the body, with all its nerves, its veins and arteries, its organs and pathways, its fears and worries, is terrain that has been mapped in different ways, while the analogy of the body as foreign land to be explored and understood reinforces the idea of the anatomist as explorer and civilizer. For centuries we believed that we possessed souls that were part of the body and inseparable from it. Now we exist in our heads, and our bodies are vessels for that uncertain and elusive thing we call our selves, at least in the West.