Actors and the body: Meta-theatrical rhetoric in Shakespeare

The ways in which the performing of gesture is inscribed into the very texts of Shakespeare’s plays constitutes a “meta-theatrical” and “meta-gestural” discourse which this article analyses with reference to Hamlet, Othello, The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is shown to be a “gestural writer”, well versed in the rhetorical tradition and sensitive to the subtleties of body language within and without the world of stage.