Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England

When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern "would pluck out the heart of my mystery," he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England: the struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart. Elizabeth Hanson examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, "cony-catching" pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing to demonstrate a reconceptualizing of the "subject" in both the political and philosophical sense of the term.