The works of William Shakespeare often look back from the early modern period upon the sensibilities of the medieval world, illuminating similar anxieties about culture, identity, ethnicity, and gender. In his plays, taboo subjects of medieval literature and history are given centre stage, acted out for an early modern audience coming to grips with its own fraught place in history. Shakespeare's dramas (Antony and Cleopatra perhaps more explicitly and completely than any other) feature numerous instances of emasculation, yet these are seldom considered in corporeal terms. Recent scholarship on early modern castration shares a number of curious features: the majority of the discussion takes place in relation to a very select number of Shakespearean sources, and the references are invariably contextualized through psycho-analytic theories of phallic lack. Through the new historicist and cultural materialist turn of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century academia, Shakespeare has become recognized as the spokesperson for Western sensibility in general, not just a historical time and place in particular – and the deep-seated fear of effeminization or castration that is extracted from his work does indeed often appear more modern than early modern. The anachronistic moves that have been made in these studies can be conceptualized through three specific types of ‘cuts’: a temporal cut that removes Shakespeare's plays from their contemporary contexts; a textual cut that removes drama from its social functions; and finally an often horrifying and graphically illustrated corporeal cut found in early modern medical compendia.