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 reconceptualising of the 'subject' in both the political and philosophical sense of the term.
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