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.

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