‘Amphitheaters in the Body’: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearian Stage

Summary

In more than one respect, man's hands have been his destiny.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

The hand is a peculiar thing.

Heidegger

'Hath not a Jew hands?' What exactly does Shylock mean when he makes the hand a defining mark of humanity? The gesture called for by his rhetorical demand is likely to make us feel that something more than the mere possession of opposable thumbs is involved; but we might be hard pressed to say precisely what. I should like to begin answering the question in a somewhat oblique way by invoking a powerful piece of ritual from Frank McGuinness's drama, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, a play whose action displays an almost fetishistic fascination with the human hand - gesturing, reaching, clasping, crafting, drumming, striking, 'seeing', and bleeding. At the climax of the second act, the protagonist, Kenneth Pyper, signs his reluctant allegiance to the atavism of Protestant tribal history by slashing his left hand: 'Red hand,' goes the chant, 'Red sky. Ulster.' In the London production the significance of this gesture was underlined by the backdrop against which the entire action was performed - a huge Ulster flag with the blood-red hand at its centre. Despite the fact that the Red Hand was originally a native Irish device, the clan badge of the Northern O'Neill, and although (as the Irish Labour Movement's 'Red Hand of Liberty') it served as a Republican emblem in 1916, it has by now become almost exclusively associated in most minds with the intransigent politics of Orange Unionism.