The Fool repeatedly attributes female body parts to Lear and as early as Act I, scene 4, the Fool reveals the reversals of identity: “thou madest thy daughters thy mother” and thus “thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides, and left nothing i’the middle’ (166-189). Both Kent and the Fool focus on ‘differences’ and fail to convey to Lear a distinguishing eye. Instead, Lear’s wit is scripted as empty female genitalia with “nothing i’the middle.” Lear names his own madness “Hysterica passio” (2.4.55), representing his madness in a way that suggests an official scientific terminology for his condition and also tellingly uses a name associated with females. Lear’s words script him as “a male hysteric, [he] fears that he harbors within himself the internal organs of the despised female body" (Rudnysky 295). The words ‘hysterica’ and ‘mother’ name associated maladies: “Hysteria, thought to be caused by a malfunction of the womb, was called familiarly 'the mother,' as in Lear's passionate attempt to master his imminent madness...Like the rising gorge to indicate vomiting, the rising 'mother' is an unpropitious physiological sign" (Charney 451-2).

While it was understood in Shakespeare’s time that only women had wombs, anatomical illustrations of the time suggest that there was an understanding of woman’s internal structures as derivative from or correspondent to the male’s (Laquer 81). The wide proliferation of anatomical illustrations and the appearance of some reports on the condition of madness suggests an attempt to control and know:

By theorizing and representing madness, the Renaissance gradually and with difficulty began to try to separate human madness from the supernatural...and from the sheerly physical...and began to try to map the normal, 'natural', and self-contained secular human subject. Attempting to define what remained, the period began to separate mind from body, man from woman, insanity from both sanity and from other types of aberrance such as poverty, heresy, and crime (Neely 318-9).

A sort of control or mastsery is found in language--language that provides distance and security. Lear attempts to distance himself from the fear of facing the other: he attempts to "quell a knowledge (of the other) that is unbearable and threatens to bust [his] insides...[his] Latinism...appear[s] at [a] moment...of great pressure, and may be taken to signify a kind of desperate turn to a medical or sciencfidic register that lends a certain frounding to [his] skeptical refusal...to take in the other" (Hillman 96).

In anatomical illustrations women’s sexual organs were visually mapped out in a way that seeks to make them legible to the male viewer: “A whole world view makes the vagina look like a penis to Renaissance observers” (Laquer 83). The body as text is always being used rhetorically—in King Lear the tension of differences is perhaps most striking over the issue of sex itself. The idea of a ‘monster’ or illegible body is at the center of patriarchal fear: at the trial scene from the quarto version, Lear calls for them to “anatomize Regan; see what breeds /about her heart” (3.7.76-7). Female love, sexuality and innards are a mystery to Lear that he desires to rip apart in order to discover the science behind her workings. Albany shares Lear’s desire to tear apart the female body to reveal the monstrous innards: “Were’t my fitness /To let these hands obey my bood, /They are apt enough to dislocate and tear thy flesh and bones” (4.2.63-6). Although division of the body was seen as a sort of violation (legally troubling and used also as torture), the dissection can be revealing of the darkness imagined inside the body of the self and the other (Hillman 96). There is a sort of mastery to be found in ‘knowing’ the body piece by piece: “To know our enemies’ minds, we’d rip their hearts, /Their papers, is more lawful” (4.6.259-60).

Shelley Jackson’s texts raise consciousness—joining in Haraway’s ‘spiral dance’ by shifting meanings of reader/author and male/female through the vehicle of the body. The body (and textual form) are exaggerated and hyperbolized in a way that defamiliarizes the reader from some of our most internalized ideologies (regulation and control of the body and the autonomous self). Each text is an experimental fiction that through different forms plays with the performative nature of reading and writing the body. Jackson and her readers together rip open the scripts we are familiar with to allow other patterns to take shape.