Tearing the Skin Off of History: Brecht and the Early Modern Body

Abstract

Brecht examines the early modern body from the inside out. His adaptations of Renaissance texts dispense with the surface, tearing off the outer skin. As these visceral texts explore the human figure from the inside, violence against the human form proliferates until it seems that every body—physical, textual, political—lies on stage profaned, its innards exposed. From the sacrificial skinning of Edward II to the grave robberies of The Duchess of Malfi to the wounded bodies of Coriolanus, Brecht’s adaptations are constantly inward-turning: the need to dismember and tear open the human body, to expose its inner secrets, is presented as parallel to the inward-turning text, which is always doubling back on itself, exposing its own status as wounded corpus. Exposure is always about alienation, about unveiling secrets that lie beneath. There is nothing more alienating than ripping off the political surface to reveal the economic deep structure, nothing more alienating than seeing the skin-deep façade as illusion, a mere stage trick to distract from the truth of the play, nothing more alienating than tearing off the outer layer to discover “the skull beneath the skin.” In the end, Brecht’s adaptations of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster present image patterns that equate violence against the human body (the exposure of entrails) with violence against the literary corpus (the exposure of history).

The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them.

—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte