THE threat of physical fragmentation became a particularly harrowing concept to the minds of Elizabethans and infiltrated the philosophies and literature of the age. Gail Kern Paster argues that individuals struggled to maintain control over their own bodies by enforcing a regiment of shame to discipline bodily functions, all while anxieties over the unknown, uncontrollable body—the vulnerable essence of self—permeated the theatrical and psychological worlds of the English Renaissance. As Canutus explains in the anonymously printed Edmond Ironside, the loss of hands and nose was punishment “worse than loss of life, / For it is a stinging corsive to [the soul],” and an “earmark to know a traitorous villain by.” Violating the physical integrity of his prisoner's bodies would illustrate their incapacity to govern their own corporeal states while simultaneously establishing Canutus's power over them. His victims, he claims, would rather die than live “earmarked” for life, and his speech illuminates the horrific threat any physical attack on the sacred body posed to the early modern man and woman. The mysterious boundaries of their inner and outer bodily realities could be ravaged and their ignominy branded by the end of a knife. The injured body manifested what Paster refers to as “dense inner workings” of the projected self and made previously internalized concepts, or secrets, “curiously external and tangible.”