Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage [1st ed.] 978-3-030-14427-2;978-3-030-14428-9

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction: Beyond the Plague (Darryl Chalk, Mary Floyd-Wilson)....Pages 1-21
Front Matter ....Pages 23-23
Comedy, the Senses, and Social Contagion in Plays Confuted in Five Actions and The Comedy of Errors (Jennie Votava)....Pages 25-45
“A Deal of Stinking Breath”: The Smell of Contagion in the Early Modern Playhouse (Amy Kenny)....Pages 47-61
“Go Touch His Life”: Contagious Malice and the Power of Touch in The Witch of Edmonton (Bronwyn Johnston)....Pages 63-81
Kisses and Contagion in Troilus and Cressida (Jennifer Forsyth)....Pages 83-102
Front Matter ....Pages 103-103
“Search This Ulcer Soundly”: Sex as Contagion in The Changeling and Othello (Emily Weissbourd)....Pages 105-125
“Amend Thy Face”: Contagion and Disgust in the Henriad (Ariane M. Balizet)....Pages 127-145
Bad Dancing and Contagious Embarrassment in More Dissemblers Besides Women (Jennifer Panek)....Pages 147-168
Contagious Pity: Cultural Difference and the Language of Contagion in Titus Andronicus (Jennifer Feather)....Pages 169-187
Front Matter ....Pages 189-189
The Hungry Meme and Political Contagion in Coriolanus (Clifford Werier)....Pages 191-211
Hamlet’s Story/Stories of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Theater, the Plague, and Contagious Storytelling (J. F. Bernard)....Pages 213-231
“Nature Naturized”: Plague, Contagious Atheism, and The Alchemist (John Charles Estabillo)....Pages 233-253
Embedded in Shakespeare’s “Fair Verona” (Rebecca Totaro)....Pages 255-276
Back Matter ....Pages 277-292

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage

Edited by Darryl Chalk Mary Floyd-Wilson

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Catherine Belling Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial Board Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Darryl Chalk · Mary Floyd-Wilson Editors

Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage

Editors Darryl Chalk University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

Mary Floyd-Wilson University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-14427-2 ISBN 978-3-030-14428-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935507 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book started as a seminar, “Shakespeare and Contagion,” at the 2015 Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Vancouver. We owe a sincere debt of gratitude to all of the participants in that session, many of whom are represented in this volume, for helping to make it such a lively, searching, and fun conversation. We were very fortunate that Rebecca Totaro joined us as an auditor: Her fine work on the plague has been a constant source of inspiration. We would also like to thank our editorial team at Palgrave, especially Ben Doyle and Camille (Milly) Davies, for their belief in this project and continuous support and patience throughout the process. And, personally, from Mary: My thinking on contagion has been inspired by several key events and conversations. I am grateful first to my co-editor Darryl Chalk who initiated our collaboration on this project. Despite our busy schedules and the long distance between us, we have worked together seamlessly. Darryl’s extensive knowledge and good humor ensured that this project has been both fun and productive. I owe thanks to my graduate students in the UNC seminar “English 829,” “Contagion and Early Modern Drama” who happily shared my enthusiasm for slimy pools and festering buboes. Some of the research for this volume took place while I held a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, where I benefitted from their unmatched support in library resources and the magical collegiality of the place. Thanks as always to my family, Lanis, Claude, and Maddie, who bless me daily with companionship, understanding, and infectious laughter. v

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Acknowledgements

From Darryl: I would firstly like to thank my co-editor Mary for agreeing to go on this journey with me. To work with Mary has been, in so many ways, such an honor. Mary’s generosity, calmness, and wisdom throughout the process have made this collaboration a genuine pleasure. I am very grateful to Mark Harvey and the staff of USQ’s Research and Innovation office for the funding and support over the last few years, especially in making the long and expensive trip to the SAA each year, which helped facilitate work on this volume. Particular thanks also to my USQ colleague Laurie Johnson for his friendship, exemplary collegiality, and for setting the benchmark on how to take Shakespeare scholarship to the next level at a small, regional university in Australia. Finally, my eternal love and thanks to my wife, Tonia, and our little boy, Oscar. Their unconditional love, infectious joy, and unending patience have kept me going even at the most arduous moments in the making of this volume.

Contents

1

Introduction: Beyond the Plague 1 Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson

Part I  Contagious Sensations 2

Comedy, the Senses, and Social Contagion in Plays Confuted in Five Actions and The Comedy of Errors 25 Jennie Votava

3

“A Deal of Stinking Breath”: The Smell of Contagion in the Early Modern Playhouse 47 Amy Kenny

4

“Go Touch His Life”: Contagious Malice and the Power of Touch in The Witch of Edmonton 63 Bronwyn Johnston

5

Kisses and Contagion in Troilus and Cressida 83 Jennifer Forsyth

vii

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Contents

Part II  Spreading Abjection 6

“Search This Ulcer Soundly”: Sex as Contagion in The Changeling and Othello 105 Emily Weissbourd

7

“Amend Thy Face”: Contagion and Disgust in the Henriad 127 Ariane M. Balizet

8

Bad Dancing and Contagious Embarrassment in More Dissemblers Besides Women 147 Jennifer Panek

9

Contagious Pity: Cultural Difference and the Language of Contagion in Titus Andronicus 169 Jennifer Feather

Part III  Viral Ideas 10 The Hungry Meme and Political Contagion in Coriolanus 191 Clifford Werier 11 Hamlet’s Story/Stories of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Theater, the Plague, and Contagious Storytelling 213 J. F. Bernard 12 “Nature Naturized”: Plague, Contagious Atheism, and The Alchemist 233 John Charles Estabillo 13 Embedded in Shakespeare’s “Fair Verona” 255 Rebecca Totaro Afterword 277 Index 285

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Darryl Chalk is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Southern Queensland and has served as Treasurer on the executive committee of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association since 2004. He is co-editor of Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares (2010) with Laurie Johnson. He has published a series of articles and book chapters on contagion, emotion, and theatricality in Shakespearean drama. He is currently writing a book with the working title, Pathological Shakespeare: Contagion, Embodiment, and the Early Modern Scientific Imaginary. Mary Floyd-Wilson is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003) and Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (2013). She has co-edited Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (2007) with Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., and Reading the Early Modern Passions: A Cultural History of Emotion (2004) with Gail Kern Paster and Katherine Rowe. She is currently writing a book about the devil titled The Tempter or the Tempted: Demonic Causality on the Shakespearean Stage.

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Editors and Contributors

Contributors Ariane M. Balizet is Associate Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at Texas Christian University. She is the author of Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2014) and many essays on blood, breastfeeding, and domesticity in early modern drama and Shakespeare in popular culture. Her second book, entitled Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies, is forthcoming from Routledge. J. F. Bernard  is Assistant Professor of English at Champlain College in Montreal, Canada, with particular interests in the philosophical, cultural, and scientific underpinnings of Renaissance drama. His monograph, Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy, was recently published with Edinburgh University Press (August 2018). His current research places notions of contagion, theatrical publicity, and narrative in critical dialogue, in an attempt to understand the social, cultural, and cognitive impact of stories produced and circulated by early modern drama. He was the project coordinator for the city of Montreal’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016. John Charles Estabillo is associate editor at Early Modern London Theatres (https://emlot.library.utoronto.ca/), a project by the Records of Early English Drama (REED). He has lectured on Shakespeare and the literary tradition at the University of Toronto, and is currently working on a book-length project on atheism and material conceptions of the soul in the English Renaissance. Jennifer Feather is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, USA. Dr. Feather’s research focuses on issues of gender and violence in early modern literature. Her book Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword (Palgrave, 2011) examines competing depictions of combat in sixteenth-century texts as varied as Arthurian romance and early modern medical texts. She has published articles in a range of venues on drama, medicine, and violence and co-edited a volume with Catherine E. Thomas, Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave, 2013).

Editors and Contributors   

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Jennifer Forsyth is Professor of English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is an Associated Textual Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, is the textual editor of Henry 6, Part 1 (Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition), and authored “Cutting Words and Healing Wounds: Friendship and Violence in Early Modern Drama,” which appeared in Violent Masculinities (Palgrave, 2013). She has written numerous papers on the intersection of the physical and the emotional in early modern writing; editorial theory and practice; stylometric approaches to authorship attribution, especially in cases of collaboration; and conditions of early modern dramatic authorship and textual production. Bronwyn Johnston lives in the UK and is currently on parental leave. She works on science, medicine, and magic in early modern English literature, especially drama. She studied at the University of Otago and the University of St Andrews, and received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2015. She has held research fellowships at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto and at Birkbeck, University of London. Amy Kenny is Visiting Assistant Professor at University of California, Riverside, and co-editor of The Hare, a peer-reviewed, academic journal of untimely reviews. She has worked as Research Coordinator at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where she was the chief dramaturg for 15 productions and conducted over 80 interviews with actors and directors as part of an archival resource for future scholarship. She has published on dramaturgy, the performance of laughter, and the senses. Her book with “Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science, and Medicine,” entitled Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage, was published in 2019. Jennifer Panek is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge, 2004) and the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Roaring Girl. Her essays have appeared in ELR, ELH, Renaissance Drama, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book about sexual shame in early modern drama. Rebecca Totaro  is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she specializes in Shakespeare and writing produced in response to the bubonic plague and other complex natural phenomena. Series editor

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Editors and Contributors

for Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400–1700, Penn State UP (formerly Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, Duquesne UP), Totaro is also recipient of the Monroe Kirk Spears Award from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 for “Securing Sleep in Hamlet” and author/editor of five books, including most recently Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation (2017), as part of the series, Routledge Perspectives on the Non-human in Literature and Culture. Jennie Votava  is Assistant Professor of English at Allegheny College in the USA, where she specializes in early modern English literature and the health humanities. She received her medical training at Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her doctoral dissertation at New York University examined the four “lower” senses in early modern drama, and she is currently working on a project about gender and sensory contagion in Shakespeare’s plays. Emily Weissbourd is an Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University (USA). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on representations of race and religion in early modern English and Spanish literature. She has published articles in journals including Modern Philology, Comparative Drama, and Huntington Library Quarterly and is the co-editor, with Barbara Fuchs, of Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She is currently working on a book project titled Bad Blood: Race and the Place of Spain in Early Modern English Literature. Clifford Werier is Professor of English at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada, where he has been teaching early modern literature since 1987. He is the editor of Shakespeare and Consciousness (Palgrave, 2016) and Much Ado About Nothing for the Internet Shakespeare Editions. His recent work focuses on the application of interface theory to Shakespearean media, especially questions of design and phenomenological engagement on page, stage, and screen. His writing on cognitive theory considers the application of Buddhist mindfulness categories to the Shakespearean present moment and on timing associated with the media-specific characteristics of Shakespearean jokes.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Beyond the Plague Darryl Chalk and Mary Floyd-Wilson

In the absence of germ theory, what constituted contagion in the minds of the early moderns? This was undoubtedly a period of frequent epidemics of a variety of illnesses and when medicine was still dominated by the classical medicine of Galen and Hippocrates, which posited disease as a largely internal problem caused by humoral imbalance. Lethal afflictions like the bubonic plague and syphilis were clearly able to spread and infect new bodies despite the real micro-organic culprits remaining invisible to observers of such endemic illnesses. It might be easy, therefore, to presuppose that there was simply no understanding of contagion in this period. As this volume seeks to demonstrate, however, early modern writers devoted constant attention to the possibility of contagious transmission, the notion that someone might be infected or transformed by the p ­ resence of others, through various kinds of exchange, or if exposed to certain ideas, practices, or environmental conditions, and they often did so in ways not limited to medical inquiry or the narrow study of a particular disease. D. Chalk (*)  University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Floyd-Wilson  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_1

1

2  D. CHALK AND M. FLOYD-WILSON

One of the most prominent and familiar examples of this can be seen in antitheatrical writing during this period, which repeatedly identifies the theater and its constituent attributes as kinds of contagion. From Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579) to William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix (1633), contagion remains the consistent definitive image of antitheatrical invective.1 William Rankins, in A Mirrour of Monsters (1587), regards the players’ art as a “poison [that] spreddeth itself into the vaines of their beholders.” He compares the stage to the deadly entrance to Hades, the lake “Avernus, which striketh dead those which come within the sente of the same … such is the infectious poison of these men, and such danger is [it] to be neare the view of their vitious exercise.”2 The metaphorical resonance is clear: Theater is likened to the long-standing theory of plague as a miasma, a vaporous, invisible poison that hangs in the air and attacks the bodies of its victims via the senses. The smells, sights, and sounds of the playhouse were all considered part of this sensory assault on the spectators by theater’s contagious effects. The players are contaminated through the apparent dangers of acting, the audience by their proximity, being “neare the view,” to such contagious spectacle. In A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580), Anthony Munday suggests that this dual capacity for infection is peculiar to the theater, averring: “Al other euils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers … Onlie the filthiness of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors and beholders giltie alike.” They might be silent witnesses to this act, but “they by sight and assent be actors.”3 The theater’s most dangerous quality, then, is that its histrionic “evils” might be spread by the playgoers themselves, as they become unwitting vectors of the contagion through imitation. Prynne, who suggests that “Playhaunters are contagious in quality, more apt to poison, to infect all those who dare approach them, than one who is full of plague sores,” characterizes theater as an entity first able to enter the body of the spectator by way of their eyes and ears.4 After arguing that playhouses were “the very worst evill,” since spectators leave them senseless of the fact that they are now “diseased,” Prynne suggests that from theater “both by the eyes, and by the eare, a disease may proceed to the very soule itself: they imitate the calamities and mischances of others from whence the contagion of filthinesse gets into ourselves.”5 To Prynne, the affective plague of theater generates “contagious persons”6 who then threaten to become a full-blown epidemic of theatricality since they now “swarme thicke of late on the streets of our metropolis.”7

1  INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE PLAGUE 

3

Plague and associated ideas of contagion thus become repetitive ­ eapons in the arsenal of tropes used to demonize the theater. To the w antitheatricalists, however, this is not necessarily mere metaphor. It is often expressed in quite tangibly material ways. John Rainolds, in Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599), largely follows the metaphorical logic of his peers in denouncing, “how the maners of all spectators commonlie are hazarded by the contagion of theatricall sights.”8 But he also constructs acting as a practice capable of manifesting real diseases in the bodies of the players: Seeing that diseases of the mind are gotten far sooner by counterfaiting, then are diseases of the body: … diseases of the body may [also] be gotten so, as appeareth by him, who, faining for a purpose that he was sick of the gowte, became (through care of couterfeiting it) gowtie in deede. So much can imitation … doe.9

According to Rainolds, imitation is so transformative that pretending to have a disease leads to contracting a real one. This adds a more literal capacity to his idea that acting is “a venom and poison [which could] spred it selfe abroad through more parts of your body” than any other affliction, making it likely that “you would instill the same humour … into the rest of your players” and beyond to the audience.10 Playing is thereby not only like a contagious disease, it is itself habitually rendered in antitheatrical discourse as a genuine somatic infection that can be spread and reproduced in others. As the essays in this collection will show, this slippage from the metaphorical to the material, and from the figurative to the literal, is a common feature of writings about contagious phenomena. If the playhouse is a site of contention with regard to theories about contagious affect in the period, it is also a location for representing and playing out various kinds of contagious operations. Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, then, is a collection of twelve scholarly essays that focus on the variety of things or conditions, material and immaterial, thought able to pass between individuals, or to cause action at a distance, that fall under the wide-ranging banner of contagion in early modern English culture, with particular attention to the frequent representation of such phenomena in the period’s popular drama. In addition to its engagement with the history of disease transmission, this collection considers how the language of contagion shapes dramatic

4  D. CHALK AND M. FLOYD-WILSON

narratives, contemporary understandings of theater-going, the history of emotion, and the perception of natural and preternatural phenomena. Much has been said in recent criticism about the plague in relation to literature and the early modern theatrical enterprise. In particular, the works of Rebecca Totaro in Suffering in Paradise, and Ernest B. Gilman in Plague Writing in Early Modern England, along with their collection of essays, Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, have firmly established that plague is the near-ubiquitous concern as both material phenomenon and metaphorical force in the period’s thought and discourse.11 This volume seeks to move the discussion well beyond the plague and into a much more comprehensive consideration of the extensive array of pathological states understood to be communicable in early modern culture. This broader conception can be seen in the work of the respected Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, who offers an understanding of contagion in early modern terms through an account of pathogenic transmission long before the advent of microbiology. In the preface to his 1559 treatise Occulta Naturae Miracula (translated into English as The Secret Miracles of Nature in 1658), Lemnius makes discerning the mysterious workings of contagious phenomena the key concern of the book. He outlines that “there are many hidden and secret things in nature, of an hidden and unknown effect” that are “destitute of reason” because they do not “present a manifest demonstration to the sense and understanding.”12 These “hidden qualities” might provide an “abundance of difficulty” to fathom but, he suggests, “a probable reason may be devised, and the cause of the effect shewed very likely, if not apparently, and clearly.” In the list of illustrative examples that follows, he includes the way bleared or bloodshot eyes “doth happen to corrupt the eyes of others,” how wolves cause “hoarsenesse” if they but “come near a man” with their “venemous breath” and that women “having their Monthly terms flowing from them” will make mirrors dusky, kill garden herbs, blunt the edges of swords, and “not onely deform everyone that she meets, but her own self with spots and blemishes.”13 These occurrences he compares to “how far a contagious disease may extend itself, especially in the winter season … because of the thicknesse and grossnesse of the Ayre” and through the “stinking damp and strong smelling breath” of the infected “that unlesse you stand farther off they would strike every one they meet, with the contagion of their breath and kill them.” But this airborne contagion has a specific transmissive passageway since “men

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5

do breath forth the greatest infection to men, where they stand just opposite” and thus care can be taken to ensure that its path is thwarted, “which very thing I more diligently observe, when I go to assist those that are sick of a contagious disease, so that when I talk with them I am always turned away.” What is striking about Lemnius’s account is that the condition in question is not the plague per se but “contagious disease[s]” in general.14 That diseases and other phenomena are contagious is not in dispute here—the focus is on how the seemingly hidden force of contagion can be comprehended and, perhaps, apprehended and prevented. In doing so, he combines a scientific approach with magical thinking and this mix sits alongside his empirical observations as a practicing physician. This explanation of contagion’s secretive operation as consisting of both knowable material conditions and unseen but understandable occult properties is suggestive of a much more flexible and multi-faceted approach to defining contagion than has been seen in postmicrobiological science. Pre-modern thinking about the causes of sickness and the spread of a variety of conditions is as much a continuation of classical models even as early modern writers responded to emerging etiological theories. The invisible, or perhaps sub-visible, mode of contagious diseases tested the limits of the classical but still authoritative medical knowledge, represented particularly by Galen and Hippocrates, whose theories were considered largely compatible with the natural philosophy of Aristotle. Mary Thomas Crane has recently suggested that the observably contagious spread of disease epidemics shook the very foundations of the once seemingly immutable scientific or medical models. She states: We can see some signs of threat to the Galenic system in the sixteenthcentury reaction to “new” diseases like syphilis and bubonic plague, which were not known to Galen and which seemed to be spread by some means of contagion (rather than arising from an imbalance of humors). … The causes of contagious disease were literally occult, since the means of transmission could not be observed, and medical writers in the period argued over how best to explain these diseases. The “miasma” theory that corrupted air spread disease provided a way to render contagion perceptible, since the bad smell could be perceived even if the means of transmission could not be seen. This explanation could not explain every instance of contagion, though, so speculation about the invisible means of transmission sometimes led to anti-Aristotelian theories.15

6  D. CHALK AND M. FLOYD-WILSON

The work of continental physicians like the Veronese Girolamo Fracastoro and the Swiss Theophrastus Phillipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hoffenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus, challenged the classical model by arguing that disease was not the product of humoral disorder but a contagion spread by tiny invisible agents. Both figures have been seen as the proponents of a proto-­ microbiological germ theory but such lineal views about the ­historical development of the understanding of disease transmission tend to ignore just how pre-modern their conceptions of contagion remained. Fracastoro proposes the idea of seminaria prima, tiny “seeds” that could, for example, infect vulnerable bodies by way of the air or cling to receptacles of contagion such as garments and bedding of the sick (called fomites) for some months and then re-infect when those items were used again.16 Fracastoro is certainly an early exhibiter of the shift from an endogenous theory of internal disease to an exogenous model of external contagion, but his seeds were far from the living organisms discovered by modern science and, as Margaret Pelling has suggested, “he included as contagious a range of occult influences characteristic of his period but alien to modern materialism.”17 The Fracastorian model of contagion incorporated the medieval notion of species, a kind of emanation by which infections could be transmitted, but also required a certain likeness between the sender and receiver in which the seeds of disease were generated inside another body without the necessity of material contact.18 Paracelsus’s theory is more suggestive of the recent ontological understanding of disease, with minute seeds existing as essences that infiltrate bodies from without. As Crane has noted, “Paracelsus astutely recognized that the Galenic humors and qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry) were not causes of disease but rather ‘after-effects, products of the disease, rather than primary factors in its causation.’”19 The sources for Paracelsian contagion were, however, decidedly occult in quality. He argued that the seeds were either earthly minerals or part of a gaseous astral plague that caused disease in the body through sympathetic correspondences with the disturbances in the stars. This invisible “seed” of disease, as Jonathan Gil Harris has shown, “would direct itself through the body’s orifices or pores towards the organ to which it was related by a predestined sympathy.”20 Indeed, according to Isabelle Pantin, occult forces like sympathy and antipathy provided both Fracastoro and Paracelsus a “much larger philosophical framework” within which to situate their medical theories as part of an examination of “natural changes

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which could not be fully explained within the framework of strict Aristotelianism.”21 Like Lemnius, then, Fracastoro and Paracelsus clearly posit models of contagion with an agency of invisible movement outside and between bodies that appear, on the surface at least, to anticipate the later emergence of germ theory. The problem with this notion is that it treats the history of science as a linear process, as if all earlier attempts to explain contagion were part of a teleological development toward the inevitable discovery of microbes. Such thinking significantly limits the richness of historical writing about medicine and disease, narrowing the view to the prism of bacteriological science. As Pelling explains, the result is that “some categories of cause have been ignored and eliminated.”22 She suggests that before the advent of bacteriology, explanations of disease were multifactorial: The ‘person-to-person’ emphasis of the post-bacteriological period might lead us to see conceptions of contagion as dependent on high-density living or urbanization. However, it is more accurate to see contagion as reflecting the relationship between things in the world, as well as the influence upon human beings of factors in close and remote spheres of their environment. In analyzing humanity’s situation, the classical period adopted a structure of causation which was elaborated in subsequent periods and continues to be relevant today. The history of the concept of contagion cannot be understood without reference to this traditional multifactorial structure of natural and supernatural causation, the validity of which was briefly obscured by the bacteriological period and by advocates of laboratory medicine.23

All three of the writers mentioned thus far include supernatural ideas in their theories of contagion. For the early moderns, like their classical forebears, contagion presented a set of problems that were literally occult: unseen and inexplicable occurrences in nature that were not apparent to the senses but where the secret means of their operation nevertheless required explication.24 In the face of such hidden phenomena, those writing about contagion frequently combined multiple approaches in ways that might seem contradictory to modern readers. This problem, along with the multifactorial approach to defining causation, can be seen in the myriad attempts to explain the plague throughout the period in England. The malevolent and mysterious affliction terrorized London’s inhabitants in a series of major outbreaks

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blighting the city in 1578, 1593, 1603, 1625, and 1636. Each of these horrendous years generated dozens of pamphlets devoted to explaining, categorizing, and remedying the disease. The plague’s ability to work by secret means was often noted in these periodic outbursts of attempting to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible. As Benjamin Spencer wrote in 1625, the plague had a “hidden beginning” and proceeded by a “hidden procession.” He attests that for civic authorities and medical practitioners attempting to control its inexorable spread, “the effect … was visible, but the invisible operator and operation was hidden from them, and therein they did but guess.”25 The imperceptible nature of its transmission led to a debate in the proliferating pamphlet literature about its causation. To make the plague more explicable, the authors of such tracts often brought together a variety of approaches to account for its complex and confounding etiology. Perhaps the most prominent English plague tract prior to London’s “Great Plague” of 1665 is Thomas Lodge’s A Treatise of the Plague (1603). It is certainly, along with the plague pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, the most frequently cited in criticism about early modern literature and the plague. His work draws on a range of authorities and sources, citing biblical passages alongside Galen and Hippocrates, the medieval Persian physician Avicenna, and emerging continental theories of plague’s causation and spread. Although he actively discounts the Paracelsian idea that the disease could descend from astrological influence, calling it “false and erroneous,” Lodge is clearly aware of such occult theories.26 He appears to have much more time for the work of Fracastoro, citing his theory about the ability of plague’s venomous seeds to remain in the clothing and personal effects of victims as well as a caution against the use of bloodletting during epidemics.27 The oft quoted but frequently misunderstood account of plague’s etiology in the Treatise is, crucially, framed as part of a broader definition of contagion. Before offering his theory of causation, Lodge carefully distinguishes between “Epidemick” disease, “Endemick” conditions, and what he calls “private sicknesse.” A private illness is one that seems entirely internal in origin, “proceeding from particular indisposition of the body … or by some disorderly dyet by him observed, or rather by some excess committed by him, or through the corruption of the humours in the bodie, yet not contagious” (B2r-v). “Endemick” diseases are those that commonly dwell in a particular place or region, caused by peculiarities in the air or water of that location. He includes as examples

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“the valley of Lucernes” where “swelling in the throat” is a common affliction and “Calabria” where he claims “the most part of the inhabitants” suffers from “Iaundis.” Crucially, such sicknesses are “prouintiall or regionall infirmities” and thus not to be considered as “pestilential or contagious” (B2r). Plague transcends the private or endemic because it is “a pernicious Epidemie” which is both “popular and contagious” (B2r-v). It engenders the transformation of the body’s interior harmony, “corruption of the humors and spirits of the body,” by exterior forces such as “the attraction of corrupted aire, or infection of euil vapours, which have the propertie to alter mans bodie.” This “venomous contagion” consists of a “straunge and daungerous qualitie, contrary and mortall enemy to the vitall spirits” which “suddenly ravisheth & shortly cutteth off mans life” (B2v). It is thus a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors that make plague “both contagious and mortal” (B2r). It is with such important distinctions in mind that he finally defines plague as a kind of contagion in the most commonly cited passage of his work: Contagion, is an euil quality in a bodie, communicated vnto another by touch, engendering one and the same disposition in him to whom it is communicated. So as he that is first of all attainted or rauished with such a qualitie, is called contagious and infected. For very properly is he reputed infectious, that hath in himselfe an euil, malignant, venomous, or vitious disposition, which may be imparted and bestowed on an other by touch, producing the same and dangerous effect in him to whom it is communicated, as in him that first communicateth and spreddeth the infection. This sicknesse of the Plague is commonly engendered of an infection of the Aire, altered with a venomous vapour, dispearsed and sowed in the same, by the attraction and participation whereof, this dangerous and deadly infirmitie is produced and planted in vs, which Almightie God as the rodde of his rigor and justice, and for the amendment of our sinnes sendeth downe vppon us … . (B2r–B3v)

Lodge’s treatise has often been seen as confused, representing an unwieldy collection of incongruous theories.28 In the multifactorial explanations seen in early modern models of causation, however, such a range of competing ideas is not unusual or necessarily illogical. There is no contradiction here: To Lodge, the plague is simultaneously natural and supernatural, material and divine, a miasmic affliction corrupting the body’s delicate humoral accord and a contagion spread from body to body.

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What makes the plague distinctively contagious to Lodge is its apparent ability to be communicated from person to person, but this does not make his work a precursor to germ theory. “Touch,” the term used twice here to describe the method of transmission, is not necessarily about contact. As Margaret Healy has shown, early modern meanings of the term included the possibility for contagion to occur by an affective process akin to “action at a distance.”29 The OED records a late sixteenth-century definition where “the act of touching or fact of being touched” incorporates the notion of “an impression upon the mind or soul; a feeling, sense (of some emotion etc.).” Thomas Cooper’s 1578 Thesavrvs lingvae romanae & britannicae provides in its definition of “touche” an even deeper and more complicated set of resonances almost entirely unrelated to physical contact, including in its range of meanings: “to mooue or grieve.”30 This capacity for touch to encompass forms of emotional and psychosomatic contagion should be read, Healy suggests, as literal rather than metaphorical, in ways that can include the spread of the plague itself: “Far from constituting a mere figurative device, psychic transmission was construed by many as a real phenomenon; one that was rendered plausible, and was even empirically sanctioned, through the observation of the passage from soma to soma … of plague contagion.”31 Healy cites Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605), which speculates that the fact of material contagion provides reasonable cause for a theory of more intangible communication. If, he suggests, “the secret passages of things, and specially of the Contagion that passeth from bodie to bodie” can be understood as such “it should likewise be agreeable to Nature, that there should be some transmissions and operations from spirit to spirit, without the mediation of the senses, … Incident vnto this, is the enquirie how to raise and fortifie the imagination, […].”32 Later, in Sylua Syluarum (1627), Bacon will suggest that infections that pass “from Body to Body (as the plague and the like),” can be “Repulsed” if the receiving body has “Strength, and good disposition thereof” and this is “so much more” the case “in impressions from Minde to Minde, or from Spirit to Spirit” where “the impression taketh” but can be “Overcome” if the imagination is resolute. It is clear, however, that he continues to believe in the possibility of such transmissions, especially in “Weake Mindes” such as those of young children or the elderly.33 Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “On the power of the imagination,” also draws the same comparison between contagions of body and mind, suggesting that “the imagination should sometimes act not merely upon its

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own body but on someone else’s. One body can inflict illness on a neighboring one (as can be seen in the case of the plague, the pox and conjunctivitis which are passed from person to person).”34 Lodge’s definition of plague causation, with its conception of communicable “dispositions” between individuals, can thus be contextualized in a much larger network of thinking about contagion in this period rather than simply through the more narrow lens of a supposed anticipation of germ theory. A commitment to negotiating this broader set of varying and theoretically hybrid ideas about the invisible communicability of diseases and other bodily states in the period, what might be termed an early modern contagion theory—something quite distinct from nineteenth-­century germ theory—is the unifying approach of each of the essays in this collection.35 With such ideas in mind, Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage contributes to on-going conversations in the field about affect, bodies, racial identity, the senses, religion, agency, and medical discourse.36 But this volume also takes these conversations into a new realm in its careful demonstration of how early modern contagion theory provides an historically specific framework for discerning why and when the literal and the figurative, or the material and the metaphorical, or the internal and the external, repeatedly meld and separate in the period’s texts, depending on the cultural or polemical circumstances. We have organized the volume into three parts. In the first part, “Contagious Sensations,” the essays examine how early modern writers privilege, in different contexts, the senses of touch, sight, and smell as the most vulnerable to corruption. Since it was held that a body could be contaminated by an array of forces, including bad air, demonic spirits, or infectious words, anxiety about contagion often focused on the dangers of sensory perception. In the volume’s second section, “Spreading Abjection,” the contributors examine how contagion discourse informs how writers not only establish but also undermine the boundaries that construct individual identity, family, and the state. Early modern ideas about the transmission of disease and corruption cannot be separated from the cultural investment in determining who or what is defined as “other.” In the third part of this collection, “Viral Ideas,” contributors shift the discussion away from the early modern body to examine how “contagious” social environments and eco-systems were also understood to foster the replication and reproduction of beliefs, concepts, and words. Thinking with contagion may allow modern readers to discern with more clarity the early modern assemblages of human and non-human in their shifting and changing forms.

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In “Contagious Sensations,” Jennie Votava and Amy Kenny both observe that fears about crowds and the theater tended to focus on the susceptibility of the senses to physical and spiritual infections. Votava’s essay, “Comedy, the Senses, and Social Contagion in Plays Confuted in Five Actions and The Comedy of Errors,” shows that the antitheatrical writer Stephen Gosson describes the corrupting influence of theater-going with the same language found in treatises on the plague. For Gosson, the theater is the “chair of pestilence,” and the representation of immoral behavior on the stage feeds the devil’s capacity to contaminate the audience. In Gosson’s view, the contagious tactile effects of a play transform individual spectators into an “aggregate organism.” While some playwrights, including Shakespeare, present the experience of attending a comedy as health-affirming, Votava demonstrates that The Comedy of Errors reinterprets the social contagion of theater, “which breaches the boundaries between self and other,” as establishing sympathetic communal bonds rather than generating a fatal loss of integrity. Amy Kenny’s “‘A deal of stinking breath’: The smell of contagion in the early modern playhouse,” shifts our focus to the sense of smell in the theater and in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The early modern association between bad smells and the possibility of contamination holds a special power in the space of theater, where closely packed bodies and special effects (which rely on sulfur or saltpeter) exacerbate the noisome air. As Kenny shows, the tribunes in Shakespeare’s tragedy repeatedly identify the plebian crowds with malodorous air; moreover, the threatening link between the rabble’s foul breath and infection gives citizens the power to disrupt the social hierarchy. When Casca expresses fear of “receiving the bad air,” he recognizes that the mob’s capacity to contaminate the tribunes will blur the class-based boundary drawn between the two groups. The social anxieties about bad air in the play, Kenny argues, are mirrored in “the material conditions of the playhouse’s smoky atmosphere,” where smells also dismantle the audience’s class distinctions. As Bronwyn Johnston demonstrates in her analysis of Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, contamination (whether it be physical disease or immorality) operates through material means, even when the devil functions as the primary vector. In “‘Go Touch his Life’: Contagious Malice and the Power of Touch in The Witch of Edmonton,” Johnston sheds light on how the play presents, and even assimilates, competing etiologies of disease through its

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representation of the devil as a primary “pathogenic transmitter.” He can take the form of an “airborne and invisible species,” or harness the town’s miasmic vapors, or, infect most visibly, through his physical touch. What proves clear is that disease cannot be separated from spiritual depravity. Moreover, some people prove “more susceptible to wicked influence than others.” In a world populated with contagious witches and contaminating familiars, the morally degenerate prove most vulnerable to both disease and evil. Jennifer Forsyth’s essay, “Kisses and Contagion in Troilus and Cressida,” also recognizes that role of spirituality in the discourse of contagion. Forsyth alerts us to the counterintuitive perceptions of kissing in the period, observing that many writers did not necessarily associate the kiss with sexual interaction or the transmission of diseases. Citing a long-standing tradition of kisses as spiritually and physiologically beneficial, Forsyth traces the subtle distinctions made between the corruption of exhalations and the special sanctity of kissing. Against this background, she reads the discourse on kissing in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida; here, she finds that it is Cressida who understands the kiss as the metaphysical sharing of souls, whereas Troilus, like the men in the Greek camp, identifies the kiss with lust, contagion, and disease. In Forsyth’s deft reading, Shakespeare suggests that corruption lies in “men’s speech rather than in women’s bodies.” In part two of the volume, “Spreading Abjection,” contributors share an interest in how the language of contagion delineates and dismantles the fictional borders that individuals, families, and nations construct to preserve their investments in autonomy and purity. In “‘Search This Ulcer Soundly’: Sex as Contagion in The Changeling and Othello,” Emily Weissbourd addresses how the women in both plays function as sites of contamination in the cultural fantasies of patrilineal and national self-­ replication. In Weissbourd’s discussion, early modern patriarchal models of kinship and patrilineal descent depend on constructing the female body as poisonous. Recognizing that contemporary medical accounts often conflate poison and disease, she suggests that the elasticity of these concepts allows the plays to project the specter of foreign infection onto the “native” female, whose reproductive capacity is always already tainted. Patriarchal imaginings of pure male kinship, independent of women, produce the narratives in both tragedies. Where The Changeling suggests the possibility of self-replication without sex, Othello subjects the parthenogenic fiction to critical but also “voyeuristic” scrutiny.

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In Ariane M. Balizet’s “‘Amend Thy Face’: Contagion and Disgust in the Henriad,” the affective and individualized experience of disgust becomes a generalized anxiety about contagion that helps shore up the political authority of the English crown. Beginning with Hal’s recognition that he must stage his emergence from the “base contagious clouds” that plague his reputation, Balizet focuses on the seemingly inconsequential role of Bardolph in this dramatization. A character whose face provokes disgust for its apparent signs of infection, sin, and even damnation, Bardolph develops over the course of the Henriad into an emblem of a much more significant moral threat. The discourse of contagion, as Balizet demonstrates, is easily deployed for political purposes: In this case, Bardolph’s execution functions as a national purgation, enabling King Henry to represent his reign as free from moral degeneracy. The early modern concept of sympathetic contagion, which holds that eruptions of disease indicate a latent affinity between the corrupting agent and the afflicted, informs both Jennifer Panek’s and Jennifer Feather’s discussions of affect in early modern drama. Experiences of pity or empathy suggest underlying similarities that run counter to the divisions or distances that would appear to safeguard self-hood or national identity. Panek’s essay, “Bad Dancing and Contagious Embarrassment in More Dissemblers Besides Women,” establishes how the concept of affinity in contagion discourse has relevance for the affective experiences in the theater, where a spectator’s emotional response to an embarrassing performance may produce the “recognition of similitude where there might seem to be only alterity.” Although it may be distinct from physical instances of contagion, “empathetic embarrassment” produces a similar experience that modern science still cannot explain—a shared, but involuntary, emotional response that affiliates the onlooker with persons on display. In “Contagious Pity: Cultural Difference and the Language of Contagion in Titus Andronicus,” Feather reminds us that the metaphor of disease as foreign invasion is so commonplace in modern discourse that it may blind us to how the pre-modern language of contagion can function as a “metaphor for the fraught operation of pity.” Pity, in a modern sense, may denote distance, but for early moderns, a feeling of shared suffering collapses distances and difference. Consequently, a dread of contagion or assimilation may accompany compassionate impulses. When Titus fails to show pity for Tamora at the start of Titus Andronicus, his denial “sets into motion a series of mimetic acts that seek to overcome this failure of fellow-feeling.” In a sense, each act of

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violence is a bid for sympathy but generates, instead, defensive imperviousness and more resistant boundaries. In the volume’s final part, “Viral Ideas,” contagion erupts in an assemblage or an event, or it emerges in exchanges or interfaces. Words and ideas, like viruses, can replicate themselves in the right conditions. In “The Hungry Meme and Political Contagion in Coriolanus,” Clifford Werier articulates how meme theory can help us understand the way ideas propagate and survive in political contexts. Drawing on scientific conceptions of gene replication, meme theory maintains that ideas fight it out with other ideas, striving for transmission to persons or things. In Coriolanus, plebeians and tribunes battle over the discourse that characterizes equitable food distribution: At the heart of the contest is whether the culturally resonant hunger memes will win out over the counter-memes of state control and patrician care. In Werier’s analysis, Shakespeare’s play stages how memes survive if the social climate supports its distribution and reproduction. Although a meme may mimic an infection, its power lies in its capacity to survive rather than corrupt. In “Hamlet’s Story /Stories of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Theater, the Plague, and Contagious Storytelling,” J. F. Bernard presents Hamlet in two viral modes: as a play about the contagion of stories and as a contagious story that circulates and recirculates through evolving public spheres. Bernard maintains that early modern theatrical publicity is entangled with the social understanding of contagion and that the dissemination of theatrical publicity mimics the contagion process. In the tragedy itself, Hamlet returns again and again to the infectious and invasive nature of stories, whether they be the ghost’s narrative, the players’ performances, or Hamlet’s own dying wishes. Bernard also underscores how the narrative potency of Shakespeare’s theater takes on new viral life with digital media. Embedded in the play are the seeds for public dissemination, and the online iterations of Hamlet memes, gifs, forums, posts, and games reproduce the tragedy into new forms and new publics. In “‘Nature Naturized’: Plague, Contagious Athiesm, and The Alchemist,” John Charles Estabillo tracks the ideological conflicts in early modern discussions of plague, which ranged from the spiritual to the purely materialistic. Radical reformists in the period worried over the dominance of natural explanations, which were often at the heart of the government’s attempts to contain an epidemic through quarantine or the shutting down of public gatherings. For the reformists, a material understanding of illness threatened to erode religious belief and foster atheism. Within this

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context, Estabillo shows how Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist simultaneously mocks reductive materialism and satirizes the Puritans’ flawed logic. The play “targets not only [the reformists’] theological and social contradictions but their keen awareness of the progress from the concept of natural contagion to atheism.” As Estabillo notes, most contagion discourse recognizes that sickness emerges when a mutable internal state intersects with a volatile environment. Much in the same way, Jonson’s places the “human constitution” at the “interface between material and moral causes.” In “Embedded in Shakespeare’s ‘Fair Verona,’” Rebecca Totaro establishes that contagion in the period is rarely assigned to a single cause, but emerges instead from an event or an imperfectly mixed set of causes. Her reading of Romeo and Juliet looks beyond the lovers’ story to consider how Verona and its environs functions as an “epidemic assemblage.” Reframing the play as an eco-system of human and non-human exchanges does not simply shed light on the period’s characterizations of disease; it also informs our understanding of causation and agency on a more global level. Shakespeare’s play (unlike Arthur Brooke’s version of the story) does not assign blame to individual people or things. Agency is distributive in fair Verona, where the plague, an earthquake, the stars, and Romeo’s prior love interests all conspire to produce unexpected and unmanageable outcomes. Totaro’s essay presents Verona as the site of contagion’s “many moving parts,” thus constructing a vision of the play and the culture that rewrites our favored narratives of love and death. Whether transmission proceeded by touch, proximity, miasmic air, fomites, species, sympathy, the senses, the imagination, theatricality, environmental factors, excessive passions, imitative behavior, suspect morality, spontaneous generation, demonic forces, or by an assemblage of such pathogenic conditions, this volume offers a wide-ranging glimpse into the richness and variety of thought about contagion in the early modern social imaginary. In moving the conversation beyond the plague and other similarly conceivable diseases from our post-bacteriological perspective to other kinds of pathogenic agency in this period, we hope to significantly broaden this still emerging field of study and to inspire more thorough and appropriately historicized considerations of pre-modern conceptions of contagion. Collectively, these essays provide new approaches and fresh insights into the efficacy and concerns of the early modern theater while simultaneously addressing a fundamental gap in our knowledge about how earlier cultures understood illness and disease in the absence of germ theory.

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Notes

1. Alongside Jennie Votava’s essay in this volume, for extended examinations of theater as a contagion in antitheatrical discourse, and drama’s potential response to this construction, see Darryl Chalk, “Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theater as Plague in Troilus and Cressida,” This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010): 75–101; “‘To Creep in at Mine Eyes’: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night,” Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, ed. Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 171–194. For the exploration of similar ideas, see Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2. William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters: Wherein Is Plainely Described the Manifold Vices and Spotted Enormities That Are Caused by the Infectious Sights of Playes, with the Description of the Subtile Slight of Sathan Making Them His Instruments (London, 1587), F1r. 3. The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543– 1664, ed. William Hazlitt (New York: Burt Franklin, 1869), 104. 4. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, the Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragoedie (London, 1633), 152. 5. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 431–432. 6. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 149. 7. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 500. 8. John Rainolds, Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599), X3v. 9. Rainolds, Th’Overthrow, D2v. 10. Rainolds, Th’Overthrow, E4v–F1r. 11. See Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005); Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, eds., Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). Extended readings of the significance of plague and other diseases as metaphor in early modern literature and drama also feature in Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2001); and Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 12. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), A2r–v.

18  D. CHALK AND M. FLOYD-WILSON 13. Lemnius, Secret Miracles, A2v. 14. Lemnius, Secret Miracles, A3r. 15. Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature & the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 32. 16. For a more thorough explanation of Fracastoro’s theory of contagion, see Isabelle Pantin, “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance,’” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 1–13. 17.  Margaret Pelling, “Contagion /Germ Theory /Specificity,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine: Volume 1, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 319. 18. See Pantin, “Fracastoro’s De Contagione,” 5–6. 19. Crane, Losing Touch with Nature, 32. Crane here quotes Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd rev. ed. (Basel: S. Karger, 1982), 131–32. 20.  Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23–24. 21. Pantin, “Fracastoro’s De Contagione,” 6–7. Mary Floyd-Wilson has taken such ideas significantly further, demonstrating that the notion of “sympathetic contagion” can explain not only the transmission of disease in the period but “the invisible penetration—from one body to another— of poisonous vapours, material spirits, and strong emotions” along with the “theater’s capacity to move or alter its spectators” (47). See Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially 47–73. See also Eric Langley, “‘Plagued by Kindness’: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama,” Medical Humanities 37 (2011): 103–109. 22. Pelling, “Contagion /Germ Theory /Specificity,” 311. 23. Pelling, “Contagion /Germ Theory /Specificity,” 311. 24. See Crane, Losing Touch with Nature, 26–31. 25. Benjamin Spencer, Vox Civitatis, or London’s Complaint Against Her Children in the Country (London, 1625), C1r–v. 26. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), B4v. Hereafter cited parenthetically in-text. 27. See Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague, H1v and L3r. 28. Harris calls it “Lodge’s pathological gumbo” (Sick Economies, 133) and Healy “an eclectic soup of competing and complementary narratives” (Fictions of Disease, 51). 29. Margaret Healy, “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 22–38.



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30. Thomas Cooper, Thesavrvs lingvae romanae & britannicae (London, 1578), sv, “Tango.” 31. Healy, “Anxious and Fatal Contacts,” 26. 32. Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (London: Early English Books Online, 1605), Mm2r. 33. Francis Bacon, Sylua Syluarum: Or, A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries (London: Early English Books Online, 1626), 242–243. 34. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1993), 118. 35. For a similarly broad-ranging consideration of pre-modern ideas about contagion, see Claire L. Carlin, ed., Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 36. This collection shares its interest in such matters with other recent volumes of essays in this still emerging field examining early modern drama/ literature in relation to ideas about affect, the body, and disease. See especially, Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson, eds., Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004); Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard, eds., Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Works Cited Bacon, Francis. Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane. London: Early English Books Online, 1605. ———. Sylua Syluarum: or, A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries. London: Early English Books Online, 1626. Carlin, Claire L. ed. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Chalk, Darryl. “Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theatre as Plague in Troilus and Cressida.” In This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham, 75–101. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. ———. “‘To Creep in at Mine Eyes’: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night.” In Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, edited by Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson, 171–194. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Cooper, Thomas. Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae. London: Early English Books Online, 1578. Craik, Katharine A., and Tanya Pollard, eds. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

20  D. CHALK AND M. FLOYD-WILSON Crane, Mary Thomas. Losing Touch with Nature: Literature & the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin, 1993. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Healy, Margaret. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2001. ———. “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch.” In Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 22–38. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Langley, Eric. “‘Plagued by Kindness’: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama.” Medical Humanities 37, no. 2 (2011): 103–109. Lemnius, Levinus. The Secret Miracles of Nature. London: Early English Books Online, 1658. Lodge, Thomas. A Treatise of the Plague. London: Early English Books Online, 1603. Moss, Stephanie, and Kaara L. Peterson, eds. Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Farnham: Ashgate, 2004. Munday, Anthony. “A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters.” In The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664, edited by William Hazlitt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1869. Pantin, Isabelle. “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance.’” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pelling, Margaret. “Contagion / Germ Theory / Specificity.” In Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine: Volume 1, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 309–334. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Pollard, Tanya. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Prynne, William. Histrio-Mastix, the Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragoedie. London, 1633. Rainolds, John. The Overthrow of Stage-Playes. London: Blackwell, 1599.

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Rankins, William. A Mirrour of Monsters: Wherein Is Plainely Described the Manifold Vices and Spotted Enormities That Are Caused by the Infectious Sights of Playes, with the Description of the Subtile Slight of Sathan Making Them His Instruments. London, 1587. Spencer, Benjamin. Vox Civitatis, or London’s Complaint Against Her Children in the Countrey. London, 1625. Totaro, Rebecca. Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005. Totaro, Rebecca, and Ernest B. Gilman, eds. Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. New York and London: Routledge, 2011.

PART I

Contagious Sensations

CHAPTER 2

Comedy, the Senses, and Social Contagion in Plays Confuted in Five Actions and The Comedy of Errors Jennie Votava

Although early modern theaters were frequently closed during plague time to prevent the spread of epidemic disease, according to the tenets of Galenic medicine, plays were also thought to offer at least one major health benefit: the act of enjoying oneself. Comedies in particular produced the feeling of mirth, which according to Robert Burton “purgeth the blood, confirms health, causeth a fresh, pleasing and fine color.”1 These ideas were clearly familiar to Shakespeare. In the frame narrative of The Taming of the Shrew, a servant tells Christopher Sly that his doctors have prescribed “a pleasant comedy” to cure his melancholy.2 However, another Shakespearean comedy from the same period, The Comedy of Errors, presents a quite different view of the relationship between theater, health, and disease. This play has more in common with the typical antitheatrical view of theater itself as a disease—as worked out

J. Votava (*)  Allegheny College, Meadville, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_2

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in painstaking detail in Stephen Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), penned about a decade previously.3 Many recent scholars agree that The Comedy of Errors is about material things: the product of a culture increasingly concerned with an emerging global market economy.4 Jonathan Gil Harris has noted intersections between the play’s representation of global commerce and the international infectious disease of syphilis.5 As parallels with Gosson’s tract help demonstrate, the play is also interested in its own potentially diseased materiality. Both Comedy of Errors and Plays Confuted in Five Actions mix new and traditional medical understandings to present theater, especially comedy, as a mode of sensory contagion that breaches the b ­ oundary between self and other. While for Gosson, this breach signifies a loss of moral and rational integrity, for Shakespeare, it is, paradoxically, a positive means of building community. For both writers, contagion is a way of understanding on a physiological level the power of theater to forge human connections through the five senses. While it is likely that Shakespeare was familiar with Gosson and thus in some ways directly responding to his views,6 it is more crucial to my argument that both authors participate in constructing an emergent discourse of sensory contagion where writings about the theater play as central a role as more straightforwardly “scientific” texts. More than “mere” metaphor, the early modern understanding of the sensory experience of theater as contagion has its roots in ancient physiological theories of the humors and pneuma, as well as classical rhetoric. According to Joseph Roach, the player’s “passions, irradiating the bodies of spectators through their eyes and ears, could literally transfer the contents of his heart to theirs, altering their moral natures.”7 While recent work has addressed the “affective contagion” of tragic emotions such as fear, vengefulness, and shame in early modern theater,8 I consider the contagious possibilities of comedy. Moreover, although the traditional theatrical senses of vision and hearing are important in this conversation, for both Gosson and Shakespeare the bawdiest and most bodily of the senses, the all-inclusive sense of touch, is most implicated in the transmission of this fundamentally social disease.

Causes, Effects, and Contagious Affect In Plays Confuted in Five Actions, a treatise that would lay the groundwork for decades of debate that followed, erudite playwright-turned-­ clergyman Stephen Gosson repeatedly conceptualizes theater as a moral

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plague and his own authorial role as that of a physician seeking to cure society of the playgoing epidemic.9 In an earlier tract, School of Abuse (1579), he first describes theater as an infection of all five senses: “There set they [dramatists] abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence; and wanton speache, to whet desire too inordinate lust.”10 By using the verbs “tickle,” “flatter” (the etymology of which means “to caress”) and “ravish,” Gosson connotes all five senses as varieties of touch—at worst, sexual touch.11 In this way, he demotes theatrical operations to the common denominator of what was classically construed as the “lowest” of the five bodily senses.12 Touch was also the sense associated most with contagion—from the Latin for “to touch together.”13 Through external orifices, theater manages to exert violent internal tactile effects and “with gunshot of affection gaule the minde, where reason and virtue should rule the roste.”14 The goal of Gosson’s Aristotelian framework in his more focused and polemical Plays Confuted in Five Actions is not only to ask the basic ontological question of what theater actually is but also to argue that plays should be outlawed “in a Christian commonweale.”15 Although its form is Aristotelian, its overarching argument is largely indebted to Plato’s Republic: “namely that mimesis was a degradation of reality, that theatrical personation encouraged unwholesome imitation in those beholding it and that fiction had no valid ontological status of its own, being in essence indistinguishable from lying.”16 Despite Jonah Barish’s dismissal of the literary worthiness of Gosson and his cohort as “free associative rambles,” more recent attention has been given to antitheatrical tracts both for what they reveal about attitudes toward theater during this period and as literary texts in their own right.17 Although the metaphor relating theater to plague and other diseases is rampant in these pamphlets, the structure of Plays Confuted is unique.18 The “five actions” are grouped into two larger sections. Actions one through four explore the “causes” of theater with reference to Aristotle’s theory of four causes—efficient, material, formal, and final.19 The “fifth” action then describes theater’s effects on its audience. By invoking Aristotle’s causes, Gosson establishes his weighty intellectual pedigree in a manner compatible with the paradigm of theater as disease, which possesses both an etiology (its cause or causes) and a pathophysiology (the resultant functional disturbances). Although he discusses both tragedy and comedy in this work, the focus of his analysis is on the latter: both in exposing what he sees as theater’s biggest threat to moral health

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and in confuting one of the primary defenses of theater, the supposed wholesomeness of mirth. In proposing an “efficient cause” for theater in his first action, Gosson makes his Christianization of this pagan paradigm clear. The external agency responsible for plays is the devil, who according to Tertullian “inuented these shewes… to enlarge his dominion and pull vs from God” (B5v). Like his source, Gosson borrows a phrase from Psalm 1.1 and dubs theater “the chair of pestilence,” which he defines as “the Assembly of wicked worldlings.” He elaborates, “But if we flocke to Theaters to gase vpon playes, we sit in the chaire of pestilence, because we thrust our selues into the companie of them, which being ouergorged with the preaching of the word, begin to lift at seuerer discipline, and worship the Deuill by falling backward” (B7r). “Chaire of pestilence” becomes a metonym for the theatergoing crowd, poised to infect one another with their worldly inclinations. The word “flock” highlights that both going to the theater and, by extension, play-gazing itself are communal acts. Seeing a play cannot be done in isolation; rather, one “thrusts” oneself into a larger company—a tactile verb that suggests the forceful physical contact that results from close proximity. The crowd becomes a vector of the devil’s infectious agency. In his second “action” on theater’s material cause—the substance out of which theater is made—Gosson’s specific concern with comedy emerges. Plays are comprised of two “material” elements: plot and poetic style. He begins by attacking the notion that comedic plots teach moral lessons—or, citing what he sees as Thomas Lodge’s misreading of Cicero, that “a Play is the Schoolmistresse of life” (C4r).20 Such an understanding of plays’ didactic function accords with Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, with which Gosson frequently engages.21 Sidney defines comedy as “an imitation of the common errors of our life,” which are represented “in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.” Thus, comedies teach a viewer self-knowledge: “nothing can more open his eyes than to find his own actions contemptibly set forth.”22 Gosson counters such theories with the following rhetorical question: “When the soule of your playes is either meere trifles, or Italian baudery, or wooing of gentlewomen, what are we taught?” (C6r). The “we” in that crucial phrase, “What are we taught?” is not as inclusive as it first appears. Further down, Gosson makes it clear that his concern over theater’s problematic pedagogy is primarily aimed at

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the “meaner sorte,” who are “so easily corrupted, that in the Theaters they generally take vp a wonderfull laughter, and shout altogether with one voyce” (D1v). These viewers are incapable of receiving moral instruction from the morally imperfect or frankly corrupt exemplars of Elizabethan comedy. Such an unruly mob typifies for Gosson the classical figure of the crowd as a “monster of many heades” (D1r), which had an “overdetermined association” with early modern fears about the bubonic plague.23 However, laughter, not plague, is the contagious disease afflicting Gosson’s hypothetical audience.24 Generally speaking, laughter is an important means of building and delimiting a community because it “excludes and includes, attacks and belittles but also evokes sympathy and understanding.”25 But in Gosson’s point of view, it builds a community that is little more than a mindless collective, responding reflexively, in analogy to tickling, to an external stimulus.26 This contagious laughter becomes a cornerstone of his attack on comedies, which “so tickle our senses with a pleasanter vaine, that they make vs louers of laughter, and pleasure, without any meane” (C6r). The tellingly tactile verb “to tickle” recurs in his discussion of drama’s second “material” element, that of poetic devices such as rhyme and meter: Because the sweete numbers of Poetrie flowing in verse, do wonderfully tickle the hearers eares, the deuill hath tyed this to most of our playes, that whatsoeuer he would haue sticke fast to our souls, might slippe downe in suger by this intisement. (E1v)

Gosson’s metaphors run the gamut of sensory experience but emphasize how poetic devices and plot alike stimulate the “lower,” more bodily senses of taste and, especially, touch: Thus when any matter of love is enterlarded though the thinge it selfe bee able to allure vs, yet it is so sette out with sweetnes of wordes…with Phrases, so pickt, so pure, so proper; with action, so smothe so liuely, so wanton; that the poyson creeping on secretly without griefe chookes vs at last, and hurleth vs down in a dead sleep. (E1v-r)

The words “tickle” and “smooth” connote tactile and sexual pleasure, the aural “sweetness” of rhyme and meter is directly linked to the enticing taste of sugar, and “matter[s] of love” become the dramatic equivalent of fat— to “interlard” is to “insert strips of fat into (lean meat) before cooking.”27

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Unlike the wholesome poetic delight that Sidney recommends to make a moral lesson more palatable,28 in this multifariously pleasurable guise, the final, detrimental effect of sin is an imperceptibly tactile one: a secret “creeping” that strangles and kills its victim. Touch, as a number of scholars have recently noted, is a uniquely hard-to-classify sense with respect to both its multiple objects (from heat and cold to pain to sexual touch) and its multiple potential recipient organs, variously localized as the hand, the heart, and the skin.29 In this passage, the undifferentiated nature of theatrical sensation parallels the collapse of separate audience members into a monstrous collective. Gosson’s exploration of the final cause of theater—or its ultimate purpose—likewise condemns the contaminating connections forged by comedy. The end point of theater’s emotional contagion is the undermining of individual rationality.30 Here, he takes a good deal of space to refute the potential objection that comedies might have a beneficial, even medicinal effect. His primary target is a now-lost allegorical drama called Play of Plays and Pastimes, where he summarizes the relevant plot as follows: “He [the unknown author] tyeth Life and Delight so fast together, that if Delight be restrained, Life presently perishes” (F2v). Such a bond between life and delight is “the piller of [plays’] credit,” and therefore precisely what Gosson seeks to refute (F3v). He does so by invoking the Galenic doctrine of contraries, or curing a disease of one quality with a remedy of the opposite quality: in this case, the disease of excessive sorrow with a remedy of excessive delight. Yet this supposedly medicinal delight is “carnal” rather than spiritual: by definition, an unhealthy indulgence of appetite, and “not to be sought, for feare of surfette” (F4r). To indulge such cravings is the first step in a vicious cycle: “So in Comedies delight beeing moued with varietie of shewes, of euentes, of musicke, the longer we gaze, the more we craue” (F6r). Assonance underscores the association between “gazing” and “craving”; rather than curing sorrow, watching comedies only increases the viewers’ state of unfulfilled desire. Worse, those stimulated emotions are “planted in that part of the minde that is common to vs with brute beastes” (G F1r). The seemingly human behavior of laughter is revealed to be a product of hybridization with the animal and hence of a truly monstrous community united in affective dysregulation. The primary source of that monstrosity, however, is the nature of theater itself. The “root of Gosson’s mimetic argument” is his third action on the formal cause of plays, which asserts that the essential shape

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or design that defines theater is the act of imitation.31 “By outwarde signes to shew them selues otherwise then they are,” actors fall “with in the compasse of a lye” (E5r). Acting, like lying, is therefore immoral by both pagan and Christian standards. Later, in his fifth action, Gosson directly connects imitation and contagion: …vice is learned with beholding, sense is tickled, desire pricked, and those impressions of mind are secretly conveyed over to the gazers, which the players do counterfeit on the stage. [….] And they that came honest to a play, may depart infected. Lactantius doubteth whether any corruption can be greater, than that which is daily bred by plays, because the expressing of vice by imitation, brings us by the shadow, to the substance of the same. (G4r–G5v)

Rather than helping viewers learn from the errors represented on stage, imitation merely begets more imitation as the audience goes on to mimic those sinful activities as well. In this passage, Gosson moves from etiology, or causation, to pathophysiology or the processes by which disease takes effect in the human body. An actor’s imitative performance is conveyed, via the linked senses of vision (“beholding”; “gazers”) and touch (“tickled,” “pricked”) to create “impressions of mind” in audience members. Words like “secretly” and “shadow” strongly suggest contemporaneous theories of “species,” invisible “material replicas” thought to “issue in all directions from visible bodies and enter the eye of an observer to produce visual sensation.” As David Lindberg notes, using a telling verb, “Vision, then, is reduced to a species of touch.”32 The passage likewise resonates with early modern theories of exogenous disease transmission. Girolamo Fracastoro’s influential 1546 plague treatise, De contagione, applied classical atomism, medieval theories on sensible species, as well as Galenic principles to suggest that certain diseases were caused by “seminaria contagiosium.” Fracastoro described these “seedlets” as “very small imperceptible particles,” which could be communicated either by direct contact, by contact with contaminated objects, or across a distance.33 In other words, sensation was thought to happen by a process that was both imitative and contagious, the production of shadow-like replicas that mediated the invasion of the body—and, by extension, the mind and soul—by substances from outside.

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For Gosson, all of these processes come together in the theater to produce their pathophysiological effects. In illustration of theater’s contagious potential, he cites a performance of the tale of Bacchus and Ariadne. Simply viewing sexualized gestures on stage inspired active lust in audience members, who, as soon as they can, dash home to bed their wives (if they have them). The moral of the anecdote follows: “As the stinge of Phalangion spreadeth her poyson through euery vaine, when no hurt is seene; so amorous gesture, strikes to the heart when no skinne is raced” (G G5r). The metaphor of poison by direct contact morphs into a powerful description of theatrical contagion at a distance. Although vision plays a central role in this anecdote,34 it is ­notable that Gosson uses mainly tactile verbs and imagery: “stinging,” “wounding,” “striking” to the heart, even “beholding” and the “razing” of the skin. As with imperceptible seminaria, visual evidence of the infectious process is frankly lacking: “no hurt is seene.” These choices implicitly call attention to the importance of touch in contagious theatrical transactions, in which audience members’ eyes are infected by the gestural “shadows” of sexual desire. Felt rather than seen, the sense of touch is, in the end, the locus of contagion’s breach of the body’s defensive barriers. Once again, moreover, contagious sensations cause the audience to morph from individual bodies to an aggregate organism, from “every man” to a singular “company”: “euery man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to houer ouer the praye, when they sware, the company sware, when they departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire…” As opposed to laughter, in this case communicable sensation results in a group activity that spreads beyond the confines of the theater to the spectators’ outside lives: “they that were married posted home to theire wiues; they that were single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded” (G5r). Gosson concludes by returning to the era’s standard conceptualization of individuals within a larger collective, the notion of the body politic “whose heade is the prince.” Theatrical imitation disrupts the stability of this hierarchy. The result is a disfiguration that is both chaotic and monstrous: “the feete woulde bee armes, the armes would be eyes; the guttes would be veines, the veines would be nerues; the muscles would be flesh, the flesh would be spirit, this confusion of order weakens the

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head” (G7r). The communal sickness of theater is transmitted both horizontally and vertically, finally threatening the well-being of both prince and polis.

The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors At least on the surface, Shakespeare’s early, Latinate comedy sticks closely to the socially regulatory definition of that genre that Gosson sought to confute: “the imitation of the common errors of our life… in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be,” which teaches us to live otherwise. The play’s title displays a self-consciousness of both the comedic genre and its relationship to error.35 Yet with its uneasy union of discourses and sub-genres, this is not entirely an ordinary comedy, and “the audience’s laughter seems something other than scornful or regulative.”36 In a world in which physical contagious disease is clearly a concern, The Comedy of Errors nonetheless deliberately embraces the socially contagious processes of human collectivity. Eschewing the metaphors of both the crowd as monster and the monarchy as governing intellect, the play examines the social connections forged in a public playhouse by appropriating the language of contagion so prevalent in antitheatrical literature. Typical of its era, the play presents a spectrum of maladies and pathophysiological models that can be difficult to extricate from one another. Galenic humoralism appears in references to the protagonists’ melancholic states; Antipholus of Syracuse even notes the medicinal effects of his servant’s “merry jests” (1.2.21). In addition to suffering from “moody and dull melancholy” (5.1.79), Antipholus of Ephesus is diagnosed with demonic possession: a more primitive model of exogenous disease transmission. Notions of syphilis as either a sexually transmitted infection or the result of humoral imbalance pervade both comic banter and more serious rhetoric in the play.37 Of note, Shakespeare’s first recorded use of the word “contagion” occurs when Adriana upbraids the man she thinks is her cheating husband: “For if we two be one, and thou play false, / I do digest the poison of thy flesh, / Being ­strumpeted by thy contagion” (2.2.141–143). The word invokes an understanding of disease as an invasion by external, foreign objects that was becoming

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increasingly prevalent at the time but proves conceptually far more ­inclusive than modern germ theory. Here, contagion is a matter of both spiritual and material contamination: of being reduced to both the moral and physical condition of a “strumpet.” The play’s interest in contagion more broadly construed is established much earlier, however, in Antipholus of Syracuse’s (hereafter “S. Antipholus”) opening “drop of water” soliloquy, which lays the groundwork for the play’s meditation on the precarious relationship between individual identity and community belonging38: He that commends me to mine own content Commends me to a thing I cannot get. I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself. So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. (1.2.33–40)

Such tensions appear immediately in the word “content,” which, from the Latin continere, bears the simultaneous meanings of “a thing contained” and “satisfaction.”39 Its early modern usage describes a satisfaction derived from “self-restraint”: “an affective state that holds the individual together” against the “potential for passionate self-dispersal.”40 “Mine own content” thus becomes an elusive state when the satisfaction sought depends on just such a dispersal, through making affective connections with others. This paradox pervades the soliloquy’s central analogy between the self in the world and a drop of water in the ocean. That analogy concerns the embeddedness of the subject in a variety of settings, from the Mediterranean world of global commerce, to its microcosmic representation in the theater. The latter is of special import, for the central issue in Comedy of Errors of mistaken identity is closely aligned with what Gosson identifies as the “formal cause” of plays, the act of impersonation.41 Mistaken identity is, of course, a characteristic conceit of comedy, which “underscores those broad resemblances which make it difficult to tell people apart.”42 With humorous irony, the existential angst of the soliloquy’s final line kicks off the comedy’s farcical plot, when Dromio of Ephesus enters and is mistaken for his double.

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The speaker’s “I” meets those other worlds and those who inhabit them with a highly aggressive form of physical contact, to the point of “confounding,” or indistinguishable merging, with the other. To “confound” is also “to destroy the purity of, to corrupt.”43 In other words, the drop of water analogy describes a form of exogenous infection but not one that operates at a distance. Rather, to place oneself too close to one’s fellow beings is to risk becoming a part of them. The acoustic and etymological resonances among the words “content,” “confound,” and later, “contagion” and “contaminate,” underscore their association and mimic this infectious merging on both poetic and semantic levels. Underlying this description of what I am calling “social contagion” is an understanding of sensory physiology that privileges the polymorphous sense of touch. Of the five senses, vision has received most attention in critical discussions of The Comedy of Errors. The theatrical trick of the paired identical twins, Barbara Freedman notes, “foregrounds visual appearance as a site of errors” and establishes comedy as genre characterized by its subversion of any “fixed perspective.”44 For Douglas Lanier, the true error is the characters’ mistaken assumption that visual markers are a stable locus of social status and identity; both he and Elizabeth Rivlin couple these concerns with contemporary antitheatrical anxieties about theater’s own destabilization of such markers.45 Indeed, the words “seek” and “inquisitive” position S. Antipholus as the viewer of the world around him; “unseen,” alternatively, situates him as the potential object of a viewer’s gaze, although, as Lanier reads the line, an anxious one, worried that he will not stand out enough to exist in the world’s collective eye.46 To my reading, however, the soliloquy evinces an essentially tactile understanding of the sense of vision. The subject’s invisibility is a matter of the obscuring of borders through aggressive physical contact; the reflexivity of the verb phrase “confounds himself” identifies the speaker as both subject and object in the act of confounding. Here, as always, touch is an inherently two-way action. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes, to touch is also to be touched. Additionally, for Merleau-Ponty, vision itself is a form of tactile interaction with the world: There is a “double and crossed situating of the visual in the tangible and the tangible in the visual.”47 His theory of the “chiasm” is readily made concrete in relation to the early modern understanding of palpable species making contact with the seeing eye; though the mechanism of contact may be invisible,

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one is nonetheless doubly implicated as subject and object in that which one sees. Contagion is likewise a “chiasmatic” or “reversible” ­interaction; mutually touching hands, and mutually seeing eye-beams, may also mutually infect.48 The apprehensive tone of this soliloquy demonstrates the speaker’s ambivalence about his quest, as well as a subtle correspondence with antitheatrical anxieties. And, indeed, S. Antipholus’s confusion over his conversation with the wrong Dromio leads to a second soliloquy, perhaps the most overtly antitheatrical moment in the play: They say this town is full of cozenage, As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguisèd cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many suchlike liberties of sin. (1.2.97–102)

The biblical allusion to witchcraft in Ephesus implicates the theater for its diabolical affiliations, as suggested by word choices from “disguisèd” to “liberties,” the latter of which calls attention to the location of early modern playhouses outside the jurisdiction of London’s civic government.49 The passage also echoes the Protestant anti-visual rhetoric of antitheatrical writers, for whom infection of the deceived eye is the first step down a pathophysiological path leading to unwelcome transformations of the mind, body, and soul.50 However, in the context of the play’s comedic plot, such anxieties are erroneous and even laughable. These antitheatrical leanings do not represent the play’s final take on its own genre. The plot trajectory establishes comedy’s self-healing power, which corrects the perceptual errors inflicted upon characters and audience alike. S. Antipholus’s role in this metatheatrical plot sequence changes over the course of the play. He enters as an outsider and visualizes Ephesus from the audience’s perspective: “I’ll view the manners of the town, / Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings…” (1.2.12–13). But in his later decision to “say as they say…” and pretend to be his brother, he joins the ranks of role players, with a twist (2.2.214). The actor/­ audience distinction breaks down entirely as S. Antipholus, “to [him]self disguised,” becomes both the subject and object of theatrical deception (2.2.213).

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One of those to whom he presents himself in this “disguise” is his brother’s wife. As is often noted, S. Antipholus’s drop of water speech pairs naturally with the imagery and themes of Adriana’s aforementioned speech on marital contagion, in which she expresses her perplexity at her apparent husband’s claim not to recognize her51: For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall A drop of water in the breaking gulf, And take unmingled thence that drop again Without addition or diminishing, As take from me thyself and not me too. (2.2.12–128)

Adriana imagines contagion as a process more fundamental and far-reaching than a single STD like syphilis, with which Jonathan Gil Harris identifies this speech.52 Clearly, marital union can be for good or ill. The repetition of the word “mingled” here and later, in the line “my blood is mingled with the crime of lust” (2.2.140), unites the salutary oneness of the wedded state with the potential for sexual and moral contamination. Adriana also goes considerably beyond her oft-cited allusion to Ephesians 5.31. Rather than the differentiated and static body of which the husband is head, in this metaphor husband and wife are as intermixed and motile as two drops in a larger, turbulent body of water. Of course, unbeknownst to the baffled woman, the self-estrangement she observes in her addressee is not a matter of infidelity but rather due to the fact that S. Antipholus is a man with whom she has had no previous relationship whatsoever. Her consternation parallels S. Antipholus’s perplexity at the end of 1.2. Neither character, it turns out, has suffered the loss he or she has imagined. Rather, both have fallen victim to a fictional, and I would argue, meta-dramatic, narrative: what the Abbess will ultimately conclude is “this sympathizèd one day’s error” under which “all that are assembled” in the play’s final scene “have suffered wrong” (5.1.397–399). Typically glossed as “shared,” the uncommon and historically loaded adjective “sympathizèd” demands a more careful reading.53 For Martine Van Elk, it signals the triumph of romance over farce, f­avoring “a spiritual order based on kinship and similarity.”54 This imagined community has been created, moreover, by a mode of theatrical contagion. That is, early modern sympathy could be understood as “a mysterious, involuntary, and even contagious emotional experience.”55 The contagious suffering of

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error has a prescribed comedic remedy: “Go to a gossips’ feast and go with me; / After so long grief, such festivity!” (5.1.406–407). Unlike the feast in question, as Gosson is all too aware, the effects of this contagion are not bounded by the stage. The phrase “all assembled” invites audience members, as well, both to enjoy empathetically the correction of the errors suffered by characters in the play and to admit their own complicity in the experience of theater as error—or, as Gosson would have it, as a “lye.”56 The Comedy of Errors ultimately adopts a middle perspective on the link between theater and disease: that comedic mirth is neither curative nor a fatal affliction in its own right. Contagion is the ever-present flipside of community, and while theater cannot protect one from contracting or dying of the plague or syphilis, it might provide some of the human connections that make an all-too-temporary life worthwhile.

Notes



1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), ii.119. 2. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2014), 115. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to this volume. 3. The relationship between theater and contagion has been worked out in detail by Darryl Chalk, who argues that Shakespeare’s theater “replicates and appropriates the antitheatrical identification of theater as plague” and that “theater as plague is inscribed into the language of early modern drama” as a parodic response to antitheatrical discourse. See “Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theater as Plague in Troilus and Cressida,” in This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); “‘To Creep in at Mine Eyes’: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night,” in Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, ed. Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 171–194. In addition, Mary Floyd-Wilson describes theater’s dependence upon secret, contagious sympathies “that coursed through the natural world” in Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1. 4.  For example, Douglas Lanier, “Stigmatical in Making: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays,

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39

ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Garland, 1997), 299–334, and Curtis Perry, “Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in The Comedy of Errors,” in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 39–51. 5. Jonathan Gil Harris, “Syphilis and Trade: Thomas Starkey, Thomas Smith, The Comedy of Errors,” in Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 29–51. 6. See Jennifer Waldron, “Gaping Upon Plays: Shakespeare, Gosson, and the Reformation of Vision,” Critical Matrix 12 (2001): 48–77. 7. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 27. 8. For instance, Allison P. Hobgood’s discussion of Macbeth, The Spanish Tragedy, and the Malvolio subplot of Twelfth Night in Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For “affective contagion,” see Katherine Rowe, “Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 176. 9. See William Ringer, Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942). 10. Stephen Gosson, Schoole of Abuse (London: 1579), B7v. 11. Carla Mazzio, “Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 178. 12. On Gosson and the degradation of vision in Reformation thought, see Waldron, “Gaping Upon Plays.” 13.  On the connections between contagion and touch in early modern thought, see Margaret Healy: “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch,” in Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 22–38. 14. Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, B7r. 15. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (London: 1582), F7r. Hereafter cited parenthetically in-text. 16.  Héloïse Sénéchal, “The Antitheatrical Criticism of Stephan Gosson,” Literature Compass 1 (2004). 17. Jonah Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 88. On modern scholarly prejudice against antitheatrical writings, see Sénéchal, “The Antitheatrical Criticism of Stephan Gosson,” 1, and Kent R. Lehnhof, “Ships That Do Not Sail: Antinauticalism, Antitheatricalism, and Irrationality in Stephen Gosson,” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 1 (2014), 92.

40  J. VOTAVA 18. For example, in Stubbes, Munday, and Prynne. See Chalk, “To Creep” and “Contagious Emulation.” 19. Aristotle, Physics II 3 and Metaphysics V 2. http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/aristotle-causality/. 20. A change from School of Abuse, which allowed for the morally educative benefits of some plays. Arthur Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1974), 55. 21.  On intersections between Sidney and Gosson, see Kent R. Lehnhof, “Profeminism in Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48, no. 1 (2008): 23–43. 22. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 229–230. 23. Ian Munro, The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 178. 24. On the contagiousness of laughter, see Matthew Steggle, Laughter and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 5–8. 25.  Albrecht Classen, ed., Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 3. 26. Waldron observes that Gosson’s “project of degrading vision (and the theater) consists in tying it to bodily pleasures suited only for the lower classes.” “Gaping upon Plays,” 6. 27.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v., “interlard, v.,” Oxford University Press, March 2018. 28. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 226. 29. For an overview of touch’s many complex significations in early modern culture, see Elizabeth Harvey, “Introduction: ‘The Sense of All Senses,’” in Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 1–21. 30. Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 86. 31. Ibid., 86. 32. David Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 3. 33. Girolamo Fracastoro, De Contagione (Verona: 1546), qtd. (in translation) in Robert Gaynes, Germ Theory: Medical Pioneers in Infectious Disease (Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2011), 55. On the link between seminaria and species, see Isabelle Pantin, “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance,’” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3–15. 34. Chalk, “‘To Creep,’” 12.

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35. As Arthur Kinney observes, “Shakespeare seems to signal his own design by putting ‘comedy’ in the title as he does nowhere else.” “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” in Miola, Critical Essays, 156. 36. Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to The Comedy of Errors, in The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), 687. On the play’s “disjunction of discourses,” see Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 56–82. 37. Harris expounds upon these matters in Sick Economies, 29–51. 38. For two early examples, see Harold F. Brooks, “Themes and Structures in The Comedy of Errors,” in Miola, Critical Essays, 74–75, as well as Harry Levin, “Introduction,” The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare (New York: Penguin, 1965), xxxvi–xxxvii. Martine Van Elk locates the source of this tension in the play’s intermixing of farce and romance. “‘This Sympathized One Day’s Error’: Genre, Representation, and Subjectivity in The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2009): 47–72. Curtis Perry traces the passage’s sense of “being at once isolated and part of a larger whole” to “the alienating pressures of mercantilism.” “Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia,” 40. Recent early modern scholarship replicates such tensions in the debate between exploring the emergence of the inward subject versus acknowledging the outward, social nature of early modern emotions; see Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, eds., “Introduction,” Reading the Early Modern Passions, 13. 39. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v., “content, n.1. and n.2.,” Oxford University Press, March 2018. 40. Paul Joseph Zajac, “The Politics of Contentment: The Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It,” Studies in Philology 113 (2016), 311–312. 41.  On the metatheatricality of this play’s construction of character, see Elizabeth Rivlin, “Theatrical Literacy in The Comedy of Errors and the ‘Gesta Grayorum’,” Critical Survey 14 (2002). 42. Levin, “Introduction,” xxvi. 43.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v., “confound, v.,” Oxford University Press, March 2018. 44. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 3, 6. 45. Lanier, “‘Stigmatical in Making’,” 303; Rivlin, “Theatrical Literacy,” 66. 46. Lanier, “‘Stigmatical in Making’,” 308. 47. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 133–134. 48. On the “chiasm,” see Harvey, “Introduction,” 7.

42  J. VOTAVA 49. Acts 19.12–16; 19. Stephen Greenblatt notes that the usage “liberties,” vs. “libertines,” is from the Folio, possibly in reference to this issue. Norton Shakespeare, 696n1. 50. William C. Carroll argues that “these transformations are akin to those of the theater itself.” The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 65. Richard Finkelstein connects this speech with antitheatrical, anti-visual rhetoric in “The Comedy of Errors and the Theology of Things,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 2 (2012): 330–331. See also Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Patricia Parker links such anxieties to “the emerging relation between the theater and the marketplace,” Shakespeare from the Margins, 81. 51. See, for example, Brooks, “Themes and Structure,” 75, and Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), 24–26. 52. Harris, Sick Economies, 45. 53. Bevington has “shared in by all equally.” 54. Van Elk, “‘This Sympathizèd One Day’s Error’,” 70. 55. Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 9. 56. Kinney identifies this breaking of the “fourth wall” with the audience’s immersion in what he sees as the play’s scriptural and liturgical basis, “like a divine comedy in which emotional experiences and intellectual reflections portrayed by the characters are shared simultaneously with the playgoers, despite their privileged knowledge” of the plot (164).

Works Cited Barish, Jonah. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Brooks, Harold F. “Themes and Structures in The Comedy of Errors.” In Miola, Critical Essays, 71–91. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Edited by Holbrook Jackson. New York: New York Review of Books, 2001. Carroll, William C. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Chalk, Darryl. “Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theater as Plague in Troilus and Cressida.” In This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham, 75–101. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. ———. “‘To Creep in at Mine Eyes’: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night.” In Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, edited by Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson, 171–194. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.

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Classen, Albrecht, ed. Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. Finkelstein, Richard. “The Comedy of Errors and the Theology of Things.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 52, no. 2 (2012): 325–344. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Gaynes, Robert. Germ Theory: Medical Pioneers in Infectious Disease. Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2011. Gosson, Stephen. Schoole of Abuse. London: 1579. ———. Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions. London: 1582. Greenblatt, Stephen. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, in The Norton Shakespeare, 687. General editor Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 1997. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Syphilis and Trade: Thomas Starkey, Thomas Smith, The Comedy of Errors.” In Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England, 29–51. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Harvey, Elizabeth, ed. Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ———. “Introduction: ‘The Sense of All Senses.’” In Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 1–21. Healy, Margaret. “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch.” In Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 22–38. Hobgood, Allison P. Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Kinney, Arthur. Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson. Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1974. ———. “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds” In Miola, Critical Essays, 155–181. Lanier, Douglas. “‘Stigmatical in Making: the Material Character of The Comedy of Errors.” In Miola, Critical Essays, 299–334. Lehnhof, Kent R. “Profeminism in Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48, no. 1 (2008): 23–43. ———. “Ships That Do Not Sail: Antinauticalism, Antitheatricalism, and Irrationality in Stephen Gosson.” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 1 (2014): 91–111. Levin, Harry. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, xxxvi–xxxvii. New York: Penguin, 1965. Lindberg, David. Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

44  J. VOTAVA Mazzio, Carla. “Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance.” In Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 159–186. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Miola, Robert S., ed. The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1997. Munro, Ian. The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Nevo, Ruth. Comic Transformations in Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1980. O’Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pantin, Isabelle. “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance.’” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 3–15. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Parker, Patricia. Shakespeare from the Margins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Perry, Curtis. “Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in The Comedy of Errors.” In Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, edited by Linda Woodbridge, 39–51. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pollard, Tanya. Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Ringer, William. Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942. Rivlin, Elizabeth. “Theatrical Literacy in The Comedy of Errors and the ‘Gesta Grayorum.’” Critical Survey 14, no. 1 (2002): 64–78. Roach, Joseph. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Rowe, Katherine. “Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth.” In Paster, Early Modern Passions, 169–191. Sénéchal, Héloïse. “The Antitheatrical Criticism of Stephan Gosson.” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1–4. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by David Bevington. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Sidney, Philip. The Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works. Edited by Katherine Duncan Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Steggle, Matthew. Laughter and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

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Van Elk, Martine. “‘This Sympathized One Day’s Error’: Genre, Representation, and Subjectivity in The Comedy of Errors.” Shakespeare Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2009): 47–72. Waldron, Jennifer. “Gaping Upon Plays: Shakespeare, Gosson, and the Reformation of Vision.” Critical Matrix 12 (March 31, 2001): 48–77. Zajac, Paul Joseph. “The Politics of Contentment: The Passions, Pastoral, and Community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Studies in Philology 113, no. 2 (2016), 306–336.

CHAPTER 3

“A Deal of Stinking Breath”: The Smell of Contagion in the Early Modern Playhouse Amy Kenny

Among Casca’s anxieties about the crowd’s overzealous praise of Julius Caesar is the unsavory smell that the plebeians emit. As he recalls Caesar refusing the crown three times, Casca tells Brutus, “I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air,” expressing fear that breathing the same air as the rabble could infect him (1.2.246–248). He even blames the crowd’s “deal of stinking breath” for choking Caesar (1.2.244). In describing the citizens as able to overcome Caesar with bad air, Casca implies that smell can challenge rank. The plebeians’ ability to infect the tribunes through their breath restructures the social hierarchy. By accentuating smell, Casca suggests the crowd can contaminate the tribunes through their prevailing stench. The crowd’s repulsive smells are mirrored in the material conditions of the playhouse’s smoky atmosphere and shared by the theater audience. As I shall argue, the odors of the playhouse merge with the A. Kenny (*)  University of California, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_3

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olfactory power of the play’s unruly mob. Since smells could infect the brain, according to pre-Cartesian medical models, the stench of the crowd suggests its ability to pollute the porous body. Filthy air, reeking breath, and noisome smells associated with the mob are socially coded in Julius Caesar, and these same forces dismantle the play’s social hierarchy—a dismantling aided by the playhouse’s own crowd smells.

Unwholesome Air Smell, perhaps more than the other bodily senses, has suffered from critical undervaluation due to a lack of archival material and concrete description.1 Recently, theater scholars and sensory historians have attempted to reconcile the ephemerality of smell with a historical approach, an endeavor fraught with our anachronistic coding of smells.2 As Jonathan Gil Harris has shown, the confusion over the multifaceted nature of smell is embodied in the word itself; both noun and verb, transitive and intransitive, and subject and object.3 Since our focus is often on the object or place we smell, critical engagement typically excludes the way a place—in this case, the theater—engages with and mutates the recipients of its odors. According to early modern theories of contagion, repulsive scents in the theater signified the air’s ability to infect the porous body with disease. In his Essaies on the five senses, Richard Brathwaite underscores a connection between smell and contagion: “Some are of opinion,” he states, “that this peculiar sense, is an occasion of more danger to the body than benefit, in that it receives crude and unwholesome vapors, foggy and corrupt exhalations, being subject to any infection.”4 Predating germ theory, medical accounts of infection held that that disease spread through miasmas, or polluted air. In his plague manual, practitioner Stephen Bradwell highlights how air is the medium of contagion: “I define infection or contagion to be that which infecteth another with his own quality by touching it, whether the medium of the touch be corporeal or spiritual, or an airy breath.”5 After someone inhaled, airy particles could “touch” the brain with infectious attributes and enable the nose to perceive the quality of the particulates. Smells were understood as “both immaterial forms that shaped the brain’s perception and physical entities that penetrated (and influenced) the body.”6 In a crowded space, as Holly Dugan shows, even sweet scents could signal disastrous effects for the recipient.7 Perfume lingering on the streets might mask

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polluted air, underscoring how all smells could signify illness to the early modern nose. Contagion was feared in public spaces because smells were thought to infect even without a visible source. The nose was identified as the sink of the brain, absorbing a v­ ariety of smells, before acting as a type of sewer system, ripe with disease.8 Epidemic outbreaks were blamed on foul-smelling air. Thomas Thayre’s A Treatise of the Plague contends that the “unclean keeping of the streets, yielding as it doth noisome and unsavory smells, is a means to increase the corruption of the air.”9 In his treatise on plague causes, William Austin wrote that the disease “strikes present death not by the sight, but smell,”10 emphasizing its transmissible potential. One pamphlet advises people to “purge and alter a corrupt and unwholesome air” through bonfires with oak and juniper.11 Another cautions, “though you should anoint the whole membrane with sweet oils, yet you shall have no perception of odors except you draw in the air by inspiration.”12 People heeded these recommendations, as Thomas Dekker noticed people stuffing “rue and wormwood […] in their ears and nostrils”13 to avoid breathing contagious air in London, and records show perfumes were in high demand during epidemics, suggesting smell and disease were inherently linked in the early modern mind.14 Since the humoral body was affected by its surrounding environment, people often feared transmission of the plague in public spaces such as the theater because it contained malodorous air.15

Vile Contagion Portia’s worry about Brutus breathing the night air epitomizes the play’s presentation of air as potentially harmful.16 She exclaims, “What, is Brutus sick, and will he steal out of his wholesome bed, to dare the vile contagion of the night and tempt the rheumy and unpurged air to add unto his sickness?” (2.1.263–267). In imagining the night as contagious, Portia juxtaposes the wholesome nature of the private bedchamber with the unpurged, public atmosphere outside. Air carries liquid properties latent in the word “rheumy,” suggesting its materiality as a physical exchange between toxic environment and absorbent body. Portia’s concern for her husband springs from contemporary notions of miasmas infecting the entire body after penetrating the nose. Public air is ripe with contagion since it is open to all ranks of society. Portia’s anxiety pinpoints communal space as the most dangerous.

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Bad-smelling air operates as a signifier of disease, and the Roman body politic is repeatedly imagined as physically ill in the play.17 Tribunes draw on classist notions to mock the play’s unruly mob. Although jokes are made at the citizens’ expense, the tribunes also imply that the plebeians’ foul breath gives them agency.18 Since the crowds’ breath is rendered contagious, the tribunes fear contamination when interacting with them. The plebeians’ smell connotes the threatening power of the citizens when expressed as a collective voice. The danger of the commoners in the opening scene lies in their ability to pollute simply by emitting offensive scents in public. Cassius echoes his friend’s insult of the citizens in proclaiming, “what trash is Rome, what rubbish and what offal, when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as Caesar!” (1.3.108–111). Comparing the rabble to trash and animal entrails obscures their threat as merely low matter. But the tribunes also fear their voices. When Flavius lambasts the plebeians as “basest metal” who “vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness,” he links their presence to what they could articulate (1.1.61–62). As much as it begrudges the senators to admit, the plebeians are crucial to the fate of the body politic. In fact, the play repeatedly demonstrates no character can rule without the commoners’ support. Casca admits Brutus is only involved in the conspiracy because “he sits high in all the people’s hearts” (1.3.157). After the murder, Cinna yells “Tyranny is dead! Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets” to gain popular backing (3.1.78–79). Cassius fears “the people may be moved by that which [Antony] will utter” if he is permitted to speak at the public funeral (3.1.234–235). Plebeians are elevated to a position of political influence beyond their low-class status because the tribunes recognize their voices have power. The implicit link between breath and disease gives the crowd’s voices a material power. When Antony correctly prophesizes that Caesar’s wounds will become “dumb mouths” that “beg the voice and utterance of my tongue” (3.1.260–261), he anticipates the crowd’s capacity for protest. His prediction manifests at the funeral, where he tells the crowd, “ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar that should move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny” (3.2.229–231). He seeks their vocal support through their breathy shouts. His rousing speech is effective in emboldening the plebeians to revolt, but part of the danger of that revolt lies in the breath itself, which spreads throughout the Capitol. An airborne contagion instigates a rebellion and murder, linking infectious breath with the power of the mob.

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Bad breath encapsulates the power struggle between the underprivileged crowds and affluent tribunes. When they voice their opinions, the crowd inevitably circulates infectious air. We can find the conflation of breath, air, and smell elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works: Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing observes that “foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome” (5.2.48–49). Gina Bloom has shown how “King John emphasizes breath not merely as metaphor for language […] but as the material ingredient that enables spoken words to be heard.”19 Her analysis of gendered breath in King John emphasizes how controlling one’s breath could signify social rank, part of what Gail Kern Paster labels the “pneumatics of power.”20 While the citizens’ odor is used to vilify them, it becomes a potent signifier of the agency they possess to voice their views, and ultimately, to impact the body politic. Since air is a corporeal medium of exchange, it is the force through which the crowd gains authority over the upper-class characters: They infect the public space with their reeking breath. Casca, Brutus, and Cassius draw on this ideology when they describe the crowd offering Caesar the crown. The audience learns the “people fell a-shouting” (1.2.221) with “tongue[s] shriller than all the music cry ‘Caesar’” (1.2.16–17). In response, Caesar “foamed at mouth, and was speechless” (1.2.251). While the crowd’s voice dominates, Caesar’s noiselessness marks his lack of authority. Breathy voices allow the plebeians to gain control of the narrative. When the horde uses its collective voice, it incapacitates Caesar. Their smell pollutes the air, not only disabling Caesar physically but also infecting the larger political body. Instead of watching the plebeians offer Caesar the crown, the theater audience hears from Casca that “the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands” (1.2.242). Although Casca controls the narrative, the crowds’ shouts punctuate Brutus and Cassius’s conversation. By limiting the theatrical audience’s perspective, Shakespeare disembodies the citizens, reducing them to their noisome breath. The use of diegesis edits the experience for the audience, emphasizing the smell and voice of the crowd over other attributes.

Steams of Strong Breath Acknowledging the infectiousness of the crowd forces the play’s audience to interpret the smells they encounter in the theater as contagious. Playwright Thomas Dekker claimed the playhouse “smoked every afternoon with stinkards who were so glued together in crowds with

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the steams of strong breath, that when they came forth, their faces looked as if they had been parboiled.”21 After visiting, Dekker reported, theatergoers’ “flesh will stink anon,”22 comparable to a rotting animal carcass. Dekker’s snapshot suggests the physical consequences of the theater on the body long after the play concluded. Robert Gould echoes this sentiment in his poem, “The Play-House. A Satyr,” describing the middle gallery as a place “where reeking punks like summer insects swarm” and is sure to note that the theater’s “scents cause apoplectic fits.”23 While our interpretation of the smells of the past may be clouded by our modern perceptions, the plethora of contemporary comments makes it clear that all levels of the playhouse were offensive to the early modern nose. Moreover, the emphasis on the olfactory atmosphere stresses the infectious risk of the theater. It is not merely the groundlings who invite censure, but all social classes, for smells permeate the lord’s room and middle gallery occupied by wealthier citizens. The smell of the theater erases class distinction; all playgoers emerge contaminated by the stench. The playhouse also produced noxious, impenetrable air when generating spectacle. Julius Caesar calls for “Thunder and lightning” (1.3.0) before noting one hundred lines later, “Thunder still” to interpose Casca and Cassius’s ominous plot to kill Caesar (1.3.100), and again when Calpurnia tells Caesar about her dream (2.2.1). Plebeians instruct one another, “go fetch fire” (3.2.258) and “firebrands” to riot (3.3.36). Brutus claims the “exhalations whizzing in the air give so much light” that he can read by them (2.1.44–45). While special effects undoubtedly add spectacle to the scene, the gunpowder used to create pyrotechnics produced smoky air in the theater. To make lightning, architect Sebastiano Serlio instructs: there must be a man placed behind the scene or scaffold, in a high place, with a box in his hand, the cover whereof must be full with holes, and in the middle of that place there shall be a burning candle placed, the box must be filled with powder of vernis or sulfur, and casting his hand with the box upwards the powder flying in the candle, will show as if it were lightning.24

Crucial to this technique is the smell that it emits: a sulfurous cloud over the audience. In The Mysteries of Nature and Art, John Bate’s recipe

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for fireworks calls for “saltpeter one pound, brimstone half a pound, gunpowder half a pound, charcoals two ounces,”25 and he stresses the importance of quality saltpeter found only in soil rich in urine and feces.26 Dramatizing lightning relied on pyrotechnics involving malodorous materials, which rendered playgoers vulnerable to the smoky air while watching a performance unfold. The “horrid sights” Calpurnia envisions of “fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds” are not just prophetical but also an account of what is happening in the theater during a performance (2.2.16, 19). Indeed, her note “heavens themselves blaze forth” sounds akin to the swevel used to create fireworks in the playhouse (2.2.31). The play’s language focuses the audience’s attention on the special effects featured in the dramaturgy. Cassius comments, “Most like this dreadful night, that thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars as doth the lion in the Capitol, a man no mightier than thyself or me in personal action, yet prodigious grown and fearful, as these strange eruptions are” (1.3.73–78). Cassius’s speech hints at the noxious impact of creating a storm in a theatrical space. Claiming his inciting actions are “prodigious,” Cassius signals an unfavorable sensory experience such as the smoke emitted from representing lightning on stage.27 His use of the word “eruptions” signifies bursts of flames discharged from the tiring house. Yet it also gestures toward an outbreak of disease at this time.28 Conflating the lightning with the contagion it manufactured points to the vulnerability of the theatergoers. Even Caesar’s death would stink to the audience, as calf or sheep’s blood was used in early modern playhouses.29 Brutus’s instructions to his fellow conspirators, “let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood up to the elbows, and besmear our swords,” would require an immense volume of animal blood to stage (3.1.106–107). Given the variety of smells at the playhouse, derived from a mixture of squibs, gunpowder residue, tobacco smoke, animal blood, bodily sweat, and even “the dung of beasts” to make explosives, early moderns would have associated the playhouse with infectious air.30 One playgoer describes the “flash choking squibs of absurd vanities into the nostrils”31 during a performance, while another remarks on the “sulfurous smoke”32 emanating from the theater. It is evident that the smell was bothersome to people frequenting the early modern playhouse. Since smell was indicative of disease—or the masking of that disease—the theater’s smoky air signified contagion during any performance of Julius Caesar.

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Clap and Hiss at Him Special effects recreate the miasmic air wafting through the play, providing a scented parallel between the playhouse audience and fictitious crowds. In performance, the audience is the crowd in the play because they offer the volume called for in the public streets. Acting companies typically comprised of only 12–15 players, compelling the on stage crowd to rely on absence, not presence. Since the entire mob cannot be simulated with the limited number of actors, the presentation of a riotous crowd relied on the audience for dramatic effect. In scenes marked by the absence of multitudes on stage, Shakespeare creates the sense of a riot by encouraging the audience to project themselves onto the Roman citizens. Riots are generally staged by showcasing one character who voices the collective’s concerns and then disappears once the communal impulse to revolt gains momentum. Julius Caesar is unique in that there is “no authoritative voice to emerge from the masses”33 as seen elsewhere in Shakespeare’s riots. Dramaturgically, the common people are emphasized, with citizens appearing in two-thirds of the play’s scenes, whereas the titular character only appears in five.34 The tragedy casts no legitimate villain either, situating the mob as antagonist to the tribunes’ desires and elevating their narrative importance. The play is self-consciously aware of its own audience, as Casca acknowledges “our lofty scene be acted over, in state unborn, and accents yet unknown” (3.1.111–113). Collapsing past and present emphasizes the metatheatricality of the moment, where characters acknowledge that they are performing before onlookers. Through subversively relying on playgoers to represent a forceful, smelly mob, the play demonstrates the infectious potential of the audience. Staging these scenes as contingent upon the audience’s identification with, and projection onto, the plebeians creates a tenuous parallel between the audience and crowds in the play. Casca draws on this link by making jokes at the audience’s expense: “if the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the theater, I am no true man” (1.2.256–259). Encouraging the audience to vicariously participate in the performance suggests that those watching the play are potentially contagious as well. Despite their infamously rowdy behavior, early modern audiences decided the success of a play through clapping, cheering, or censuring.

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After visiting the playhouse, William Fennor complained “the stinkards oft will hiss without a cause, and for a bawdy jest will give applause.”35 His grumbling links the crowd’s odor to their raucous behavior, suggesting the audience’s power resides in their smell. Both theater audience and illusory crowd act as a collective entity in their respective spaces, gaining power through their breath and odor to influence the success of politicians or playwrights. Shakespeare highlights the economic risk of drawing a correlation between the ruthless mob and his paying customers by dramatizing the authority the audience yields. It is only through theatrical representation that the mob develops credibility; however, in assigning such agency to his spectators, Shakespeare risks fostering a reallife mob in his groundlings, just as the Romans fear. Part of the excitement of the unruly throng surfaces from the implicit yet erratic power the audience develops in their ability to pollute the theater.

Foul Deed Shall Smell Antony realizes he must persuade the plebeians to revolt after witnessing the tribunes washing their hands in Caesar’s blood. Standing over Caesar’s body, Antony famously rages, “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war; that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial” (3.1.273–275). The future stench of decomposing bodies on the battlefield is connected to the “rankness” of Caesar’s blood, evoked by the animal blood used in the early modern playhouse (3.1.152). Surprisingly, the overpowering odor of a putrefying body adopts a positive value here, as Antony foreshadows how it will prompt repercussions for Caesar’s murderers. He suggests the scent of war can erase the social hierarchy among the Romans, providing the plebeians with agency to dismantle the current political authority. While problematic for the tribunes, the smell of the citizens equips them and eventually generates a healthy body politic. Yet, it is only once Antony takes Caesar’s “corse into the marketplace” and receives the crowd’s support that the riot ensues (3.1.291– 292). Since smells contaminated the air, a rotting corpse could infect the nose without warning. Exposing the crowd to Caesar’s mutilated body, Antony fulfills his own prophecy by infecting the public space with a putrid aroma, and in turn, encourages the crowd to use their breathy voices to reclaim Rome. Olfactory contagion pervades Antony’s rhetoric, connecting the plebeians’ response to the smell

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of a decaying corpse and the violence it precipitates. The mob instigated in this scene underscores the tremendous power of the commoners. Incensed at the death of their leader, the crowd rants, “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!” (3.2.205). In the next scene, the citizens rapidly attack Cinna the poet. The barbaric throng acts as an animalistic pack rather than individuals, ratifying the violence that the upper-class citizens have anticipated from them all along. By staging this gratuitous murder, the play solidifies the link between smell and contagious behavior. Tribunes become susceptible to the public, polluted air from the commoners’ reeking vocal expressions, while the citizens are affected by the odor of Caesar’s cadaver. The characters’ previous anxiety over the foul-smelling, contaminated air comes to fruition in this scene, as noxious smells infect the crowd and lead to Cinna’s death. Since filthy air permeates the body involuntarily, it erases the social hierarchy of power relations. Cinna’s death provides a metatheatrical commentary that accentuates the mob’s power instead of the poet’s words. The plebeians shout “tear him for his bad verses” before killing him (3.3.30). Shakespeare altered the source material to highlight the crowd’s awareness of Cinna’s profession, which is not mentioned in Plutarch’s Lives.36 This scene offers a microcosm of the potential agency the audience wields over the theatrical performance. While the political agenda and citizens’ lives hinge on the whims of the disorderly crowd, the drama relies on the audience’s desires. The parallel between audience and plebeian characters points up the connection between the illusory foul smells of the drama and the environment in the playhouse. With the audience in the theater acting as a surrogate for the crowd in the plays, Shakespeare implicitly emphasizes the stench of his own audience. Invoking contagion through olfactory rhetoric and actual smells underscores the dangers of the crowd’s breath.

Conclusions At Caesar’s funeral, Brutus beseeches the plebeians, “censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses that you may the better judge” (3.2.16–17). His plea elevates the senses as a source for interpreting events, just as the tribunes judged the plebeians for their scent. Yet, his plea also reinforces the power citizens wield over the upper-class Romans, as Brutus acknowledges their ability to “censure” him with

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their foul breaths. While the tribunes repeatedly denigrate the plebeians through a coding of smells, they paradoxically validate the commoners’ influence on the Roman body politic by showcasing the agency the citizens possess. Rotten breaths allow the plebeians to disrupt the play’s social hierarchy and enact a redistribution of pneumonic power. The parallel between the unruly crowd and playhouse audience offers an embodied legibility of the plebeians’ contagion and the cultural anxieties it generates. The language used to describe the stench of the playhouse highlights the symbiotic relationship between the smoky environment and the porous recipient: The nose is the susceptible orifice through which pollution spreads in a public space. Air and odor might evade the boundaries of historical representation, yet, our consideration of them helps us imagine the embodied experience of attending an early modern performance of Julius Caesar. All the smells in the playhouse— from dung, sweat, perfume, smoke, and animal blood—contribute to an interpretation of the play’s classist understanding of olfactory contagion.

Notes









1. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 100–105. 2. See Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 5; Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994). 3. Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Macbeth” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2007): 473. 4. Richard Brathwaite, Essaies vpon the fiue senses (London, 1620), 58–59. 5. Stephen Bradwell, Physick for the Sicknesse, Commonly Called the Plague (London, 1636), B4r. 6. Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume, 12. 7. Ibid., 98. 8.  Guy de Chauliac, The Questionary of Surgeries with the Formulary of Lytll Guydo in Surgery (London, 1542), C4r. See also Holly Dugan, “Coriolanus and the ‘Rank-Scented Meinie’: Smelling Rank in Early Modern London” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 139–159.

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9. Thomas Thayre, A Treatise of the Plague (London: Thomas Archer, 1625), B1r. 10. William Austin, Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence (London, 1666), 54. 11. Thomas Thayre, An Excellent and Best Approved Treatise of the Plague (London, 1625), 8. 12. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), 713. 13. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year (London, 1603), D3r. 14. Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 29. 15. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9. 16. Air is often polluted in Shakespeare. See 2 Henry VI 3.2.187–188, Much Ado About Nothing 1.4.74, Richard II 5.3.5, Timon of Athens 4.3.111– 112, 5.1.23, and The Winter’s Tale 5.1.169–170. 17. Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 182. 18. See smell in King John: “I am stifled with this smell of sin” (4.3.113); Hamlet: “O, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven” (3.3.36); The Winter’s Tale: “Are you earnest, sir? I smell the trick on’t” (4.4.638– 639); and Othello: “Foh! One may smell in such a will most rank” (3.3.230). In these instances, smell acts as an index for the (im)moral behavior of these characters. 19. Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 70. 20. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 231. 21.  Thomas Dekker, “Seven Deadly Sinnnes,” in Non-Dramatic Works (London, 1606), II:53. 22. Thomas Dekker, “Jests to Make You Merry,” in Non-Dramatic Works (London, 1607), II:292. 23. Robert Gould, “The Play-House. A Satyr,” in Poems, Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satirical Epistles (London, 1689), 162. 24. Sebastiano Serlio, A Book of Perspective and Geometry, Being the ABC, and First Degree of All Good Art (London: Printed by M. S. for Thomas Jenner, 1657), 30. 25. John Bate, The Mysteryes of Nature and Art (London, 1634), 63. 26. Ibid., 55. See also Stephen Bull, “Pearls from the Dungheap: English Saltpetre Production 1590–1640,” Journal of the Ordnance Society 2 (1990): 5–10.

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27. “prodigious, adj. (and int.) and adv.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 30 March 2016. 28. “eruption, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 30 March 2016. 29. The Battle of Alcazar plot calls for “3 vials of blood and a sheep’s gather” (marginalia, in Admiral’s Company plot, British Library Add. MS 10449, f.3r) and Reginald Scot recommends “blood must be of a calf or of a sheep, but in no wise of an ox or a cow, for that will be too thick” or “bullock’s blood” to look the most realistic in The Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1584), 288–290. 30. Peter Whithorne, Certain Ways for the Ordering of Souldoious in Battelray, and Setting of Battles, After Diverse Fashions with Their Manner of Marching (London, 1588), fol. 24r. 31. J. H. The World’s Folly (1615), B2v. 32. Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter (London: 1607), A2r. 33.  Jerald W. Spotswood, “‘We Are Undone Already’: Disarming the Multitude in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42, no. 1 (2000), 61. 34. Crowds are in 11/18 scenes in Julius Caesar. 35.  William Fennor, “The Description of a Poet” in Fennor’s Descriptions (London: Edward Griffin for George Gibbs, 1616), book 1. 36.  Plutarch’s Lives claims “a man who bore this same name of Cinna, and assuming this man was he, the crowd rushed upon him and tore him in pieces.” See Plutarch’s Lives, vol. VII, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 605.

Works Cited Anonymous playhouse scribe. The Plott of the Battell of Alcazar. First acted 1589, first published 1594. British Library Add MS 10449. Austin, William. Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence. London, 1666. Barnes, Barnabe. The Devil’s Charter. London, 1607. Bate, John. The Mysteryes of Nature and Art. London, 1634. Bloom, Gina. Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Bradwell, Stephen. Physick for the Sicknesse, Commonly Called the Plague. London, 1636. Brathwaite, Richard. Essaies vpon the fiue senses. London, 1620. Bull, Stephen. “Pearls from the Dungheap: English Saltpetre Production 1590– 1640.” Journal of the Ordnance Society 2 (1990): 5–10. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994.

60  A. KENNY Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man. London, 1615. de Chauliac, Guy. The Questionary of Surgeries with the Formulary of Lytll Guydo in Surgery. London, 1542. Dekker, Thomas. The Wonderful Year. London, 1603. Dobson, Mary J. Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dugan, Holly. “Coriolanus and the ‘Rank-Scented Meinie’: Smelling Rank in Early Modern London.” In Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, edited by Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, 139–160. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Fennor, William. Fennor’s Descriptions, or a True Relation of Certaine and Diuers Speeches Spoken Before the King and Queenes Most Excellent Majestie. London, 1616. Gould, Robert. “The Play-House: A Satyr.” In Poems, Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satirical Epistles. London: 1689. H., J. The World’s Folly. London, 1615. Hadfield, Andrew. Shakespeare and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “The Smell of Macbeth.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 465–486. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Web. Accessed 30 March 2016. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. The Body Embarrassed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Plutarch, Lucius Mestrius. Lives, volume VII, translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919. Scot, Reginald. The Discovery of Witchcraft. London, 1584. Serlio, Sebastiano. A Book of Perspective and Geometry, Being the ABC, and First Degree of All Good Art. London, 1657. Shakespeare, William. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. London: Arden, 2001. Spotswood, Jerald W. “‘We Are Undone Already’: Disarming the Multitude in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 42 (2000): 61–78.

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Strachey, James, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. vol. 21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Thayre, Thomas. An Excellent and Best Approved Treatise of the Plague. London, 1625. ———. A Treatise of the Plague. London, 1625. Whithorne, Peter. Certain Ways for the Ordering of Souldoious in Battelray, and Setting of Battles, After Diverse Fashions with Their Manner of Marching. London, 1588.

CHAPTER 4

“Go Touch His Life”: Contagious Malice and the Power of Touch in  The Witch of Edmonton Bronwyn Johnston

In The Witch of Edmonton, evil is quite literally infectious. When the devil creeps into the small, rural community in the form of a stray dog, he sets off a chain reaction of disastrous events culminating in the deaths of four people. With a subtle rub, the devil dog induces both physical and moral disease that is in turn transmitted to the next person his victim touches. In the play, witchcraft, revenge, pollution, vermin, disease, and moral degeneracy are all connected to, and disseminated by, the devil. As a walking, talking, corporeal pathogen, the devil’s material presence in Edmonton threatens every aspect of the community’s social order. The sequence of events follows a pattern of infection, treatment, and eradication, enacting a contamination that is dependent wholly on the physical contact from witch to devil, from devil to person, and from person to person. Whether out of hatred or affection, from seemingly harmless daily interactions to violent beatings, from chaste encounters to illicit sexual relationships, every transgression in The Witch of Edmonton is triggered by touch. B. Johnston (*)  London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_4

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The Witch of Edmonton is worthy of our attention not only because of its intricate portrayal of early modern witch persecution but also because it exhibits a complex model of contagion in which pollution and ­disease are linked inextricably with moral corruption, with the devil serving as the pathogenic transmitter of both. In giving agency to contagion, Dekker, Ford, and Rowley demonstrate how contemporary audiences made sense of infection. As the play exemplifies, occult explanations played a significant part in understanding contagion in the early ­modern world. Contamination in The Witch of Edmonton encompasses different etiological concepts and assimilates them, including theories of vermin, miasmic infection, and humoral imbalances. The spread of both evil and disease in the play follows a Frascatorian exogenous model of pathology with specific importance given to the role of touch in transmitting the witch’s corrupting influence. However, it does so within the bounds of an endogenous understanding rooted in the idea of Galenic humors. What is especially striking about The Witch of Edmonton is not the conflation of different theories of contagion, but the prominent role given to the devil as the medium through which different etiologies can work in the act of contagion. The devil in fact proves to be an unlikely compromise between different systems. He is an airborne and invisible species, darting from eye to eye or eye to body, rendering a change in one’s emotional or physical state. He is associated with miasmic foul odors polluting the town. He is also very visible to the audience, reveling in his physicality and contaminating his victims through contact. The exact form the devil takes—as a stray dog—also connects the spread of disease to animals, and in particular, to vermin. The devil’s entrance into the community triggers an infection of disease and depravity, but the devil is also instrumental in spreading the infection himself. The success of the contagion is dependent not only on the devil’s initial appearance but also on his continued material presence in disseminating vice. Dog’s influence must be quite literally rubbed into his victims. His touch both releases dormant evil within the body and infects it with that of others. His victims, in turn, contaminate each other through the same method, and every plot development hinges on such acts of contagion. More broadly, the devil’s function as a pathogen, as a sometimes invisible yet all too material disseminator of both vice and disease, demonstrates how the early moderns could understand different etiologies that operated alongside each other. In The Witch of Edmonton, the devil helps

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make sense of how such seemingly opposing ideas could coexist in a play world without apparent contradiction.

Origin The pattern of contagion in Edmonton begins not with the devil but with the witch, a woman hell-bent on wreaking havoc on her abusive neighbors. While the devil functions as the disseminator of disease and vice, the source itself is human, in the deformed and decrepit body of an angry old woman whose rage and vitriol have manifested materially in her physical being. Such a view serves not only to dehumanize the witch but to humanize the source of infection plaguing the community. The witch as a walking, talking miasma makes the source of contamination even more dangerous by giving it agency. This infection wants to infect and has every reason to. While the play is certainly sympathetic to the plight of the witch as it explores extensively the circumstances in which an old woman dependent on the goodwill of her neighbors might turn to witchcraft, it nevertheless presents her as unequivocally guilty of malicious intent. Mother Sawyer is culpable for, if not exactly capable of, the murders. From her first appearance, she makes it clear that if she had the means to kill her tormentors she would do so in a heartbeat: “would some power, good or bad, / Instruct me which way I might be revenged” (2.1.114–115). She subsequently embraces her identity as a witch and is unabashedly delighted to enact revenge on her accusers. Sawyer’s revenge is focused on enabling the devil to touch all he can with his corrupting influence, while Edmonton’s story is centered on restoring social order through eliminating the infection by isolating and killing the witch, and thus preventing the devil from transmitting her noxious influence to the rest of the village. From her first entrance, Mother Sawyer’s body is presented as the source of all things foul. The corrupting influence of the witch is tangible, concentrated in her body and especially in her blood. In Sawyer’s first scene, she articulates powerfully and with striking eloquence, how the village, not herself, has made her a witch. Using the language of dirt and pollution, she identifies her accusers as the source of her own corruption: “Must I for that be made a common sink / For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues / To fall and run into?” and “that my bad tongue, by their bad usage made so, / Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn, / Themselves, their servants, and their babes at

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nurse” (2.1. 6–7, 12–13).1 In using the word “sink,” she likens herself to a refuse pile from which miasma, the commonly believed source of infection, generates. Sawyer embodies Edmonton’s failings and corruption, exemplifying perfectly Mary Douglas’s model of dirt and impurity as anything that the town considered out of place in a conflation of sin and pollution.2 The witch is the embodiment of the town’s refuse pile, a noxious source of infection primed to contaminate all with whom she comes into contact. This association of witchcraft and disease was by no means unusual at the time. Both early modern demonologists and physicians associated witches with the spread of illness, focusing in particular on how witches infected the air around them. French demonologist Jean Bodin writes that they “attract the poison from the earth, and the infection from the air,” implying that witches were a concentration of the filth around them.3 This miasmic connection to witchcraft is best exemplified in Macbeth, in which the weird sisters “Hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.13).4 They are subsequently associated with “infected” air and foul air arising from the earth: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has / And these are of them” (1.3.77–78). In Edmonton, Mother Sawyer is similarly connected to the dirt and rotten refuse produced by the town, and she is blamed for the consequent infection. In her analysis of rats and contagion in the early modern world, Lucinda Cole identifies a correlation between climate changes, plague, and witch persecution, suggesting that “witches, rats, and plague became associated in the early modern imagination as part of a developing theory of contagion.”5 All three were associated with “fetid or otherwise corrupt air.”6 The witch, as the “filth and rubbish of men’s tongues” is treated as nothing more than a vengeful stink. Particular significance is given to her polluted blood as the source of unrest. Sawyer’s desire for revenge is concentrated in her veins, and her pact with Dog allows him to suck the blood out of her on a regular basis. In Henry Goodcole’s interview with the real Elizabeth Sawyer, she explains that the blood is “to nourish him.”7 The bloodsucking enables him to transmit her decayed corruption into whomever or whatever he brushes up against, and he makes the most of it, wandering through the play and touching everything he possibly can. The source of infection is limited and, once exhausted, the devil relinquishes the witch to her community. Sawyer’s frequent blood loss affects her temperament, which the playwrights connect to Galenic principles. Draining Sawyer’s blood

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inevitably affects her humoral balance. The more blood the devil takes, the more choleric the witch becomes, until, as she laments, she has nothing left to give him: “I am dried up / With cursing and with madness, and have yet / No blood moisten these sweet lips of thing” (4.1.167–169). Dog abandons her shortly afterward. In Goodcole’s pamphlet, he comments that Sawyer’s complexion was “pale and ghost-like without any blood at all.”8 Drained of her infectious blood, a concentration of both disease and vice, she is no longer useful to her canine pollutant. Sawyer’s blood-sucking bargain with the devil impacts Edmonton’s means of survival immediately. Just as they were associated with miasma and disease, witches were also commonly charged with damaging crops out of revenge. Sawyer curses her assailants with “Diseases, plagues, the curse of an old woman follow and fall upon you!” and “Rots and foul maladies eat up thee and thine” (4.1.26–27, 77–78). The devil soon brings these curses into fruition. The cattle and crops are “killed,” “mildewed,” and “spoiled,” the corn and fruit destroyed as part of Sawyer’s revenge. Old Banks links her to the sudden sickness of his horse, who “this morning runs piteously from the glanders” (4.1.1–2). At first glance, these acts appear nothing out of the ordinary, the typical activities of minor devils such as those exhibited by Pug in The Devil Is an Ass and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet in Edmonton, such upsets are hardly petty and are, in fact, life-threatening in an agricultural community dependent on the success of their crops. This dependence is magnified in the play, and the threat to them serious. The witch is a serious threat, not only to the moral well-being of the village but also to their survival. Unsurprisingly, the devil functions as a disseminator of vice as well as infection. The rots and mildews affecting the food supply are linked inextricably with diseased human behavior. In fact, the distinction between literal disease and moral decay is hard to distinguish at times. In Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England, Margaret Healy writes that “Spiritual and moral infection are caught from evil spirits and ‘wicked fiends’ in the same manner that pestilence is inhaled with ‘corrupt’ air and from infected people.”9 This conflation is exemplified perfectly in The Witch of Edmonton, where the demonic connection to contagion is indistinguishable from the devil’s traditional role of disseminating vice. In the opening of the fourth act, the irate villagers list Sawyer’s alleged crimes, mingling the agricultural disasters with the sinful indulgences of their womenfolk: “Our cattle fall, our wives fall, our daughters fall, and / maid-servants

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fall; and we ourselves shall not be able to stand / if this beast be suffered to graze amongst us” (4.1.15–18). Both are sourced from the witch and disseminated by the devil, both are spread through the act of touch, and both are regarded as equally threatening to the stability of the community. Dog himself connects disease to loose morals when he discusses with Cuddy Banks the different forms he takes in order to keep up with his busy agenda of spreading corruption and vice: “The carcass of some disease-slain strumpet / We varnish fresh, and wear at her first beauty” (5.1.150–1). Here, he associates disease explicitly with licentious behavior, covering up the presence of the disease in the body in order to spread it further. Such actions are paralleled in the Frank Thorney plot, in which hidden motives and dubious intentions are transmitted sexually. When contemplating his unscrupulous behavior, Frank likens his mind to a rotting marsh, a “fen in which this Hydra / of discontent grows rank,” his heart sucked by “poisonous leeches” (2.2.113–114, 116). His rotten thoughts, prompted into action by Dog, have harmful results.

Contamination The witch thus functions as the source of vice and infection, but she is dependent on the devil for its transmission. Contamination, both physical and moral, requires touch. In this respect, the play’s model of contagion is exopathic, with the devil acting as the carrier of the pathogens, infecting all those with whom he comes into contact. Such infection is reliant on a tangible connection between contaminant and contaminated, and in most cases, the devil functions as an intermediary between revenger and victim. The two murders committed in the play are the result of a complex chain of physical contact from human to devil, from devil to human, and from human to human, and both are linear progressions of immorality and deceit that, with a little help from the devil, culminate in death. In the first, the witch Elizabeth Sawyer feeds her blood to her devil, who then touches Anne Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is driven mad and kills herself. The murder of Susan Carter, though occurring through a more complicated sequence of events, nevertheless parallels the witch plot closely in terms of transmission via touch. Sir Arthur Clarington impregnates Winnifred, who sleeps with Frank Thorney and tells him the baby is his. Frank marries her in secret and is then forced by his father to marry Susan Carter, whom he then murders. Just as he is about to murder Susan, Dog appears, rubbing his leg to prompt the deed.

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The connection between touch and the spread of maleficium is explicit in the language itself. The seemingly innocuous words used to describe physical contact between human and human, or animal/devil and human all, in fact, prove malignant. An exopathic etiology is evident simply in the etymology of the word contagion which, as Donald Beecher points out, comes from tangere, that is, “touch.”10 The word “plague” carries similar tactile associations, Healy explains, “derived from the Latin word ‘plaga’ which actually means ‘a blow, a stroke, a wound.’”11 In Edmonton, both Sawyer and Dog use the word “touch” as a synonym for kill.12 Sawyer’s first command to Dog, “Go touch his life,” is to enact revenge on Old Banks to which Dog replies that he has “no power to touch” (II.i.160, 173). Sawyer later commands Dog to “touch” Anne Ratcliffe. Her command means, unequivocally, to kill. The word is also used in Doctor Faustus, when Mephistopheles tells Faustus he is incapable of harming the old man who pleads with Faustus to return to God: “I cannot touch his soul” (V.i.189).13 Dog himself acknowledges the power of his hellish touch, announcing that “one touch from me soon sets the body forward” (3.3.2–3). His role in the death of Susan is confirmed by the stage direction “Dog rubs him” (3.3.s.d). In fact, the abundance of stage directions for Dog indicates the physicality of the character, and the significant role that movement and physical presence have in his magic. The stage directions specify a particular type of contact each time: “Dog rubs him” (3.3.14.s.d); “he fawns and leaps upon her” (2.1.251.s.d.); “sucks” (2.1.153.s.d.) and “paw[s] softly at Frank” (4.2.108.s.d.). He is also called on to “pinch,” “touch,” “rub,” “tickle,” and “nip.” “Nip” is for the “sucking child” (4.1.175), while “tickle” signifies an overtly sexual action, and “pinch” and “touch” both denote killing, or an action leading to death. All of Dog’s contaminations, not just the deaths, are instigated by physical contact between infector and infected. Viewing the witch is also treated as a form of infectious touch. The very sight of Sawyer is considered harmful, a fear that exemplifies a contemporary understanding of vision as an act of physical contact between viewer and viewed. Vision in the play is rooted in an extramissive explanation of visual cognition in which the eyes receive beams of images or species emitted from that which they observed. Stuart Clark lays out the model in Vanities of the Eye: “objects in the visual field were said to produce species…which radiated out from these objects into the surrounding medium, usually the air, transmitting images of the qualities physically

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(that is, by alteration) through the medium of the eye.”14 This model of visual cognition, Carla Mazzio explains, “speaks to a material process of visualization at the most basic physiological level.”15 This carries with it the implication that to look on Sawyer is to make a tangible connection because it suggests a physical interaction between two people, even from a distance. The tangible connection of sight is explained in a more benevolent context elsewhere in the play when Cuddy Banks, the local simpleton, describes how he came to fall in love at first sight with Kate Carter: “I saw a little devil fly out of her eye like a burbolt, which sticks at this hour up to the feathers in my heart” (2.1.231–233). Cuddy’s explanation demonstrates how a person’s eyes rendered them especially vulnerable to influence. As Clark points out, “if the senses were windows on the soul they were also doors, allowing entrance to temptation, vice, and evil spirits.”16 A look from the witch is equivalent to an infectious touch, and Sawyer’s body is certainly characterized as infectious. In The Witch of Edmonton, the Renaissance fears of the decaying body of an old woman are magnified by her association with the devil. There is particular emphasis on the decrepitude of her body as rotten and dried up, a “ruined cottage ready to fall with age” (2.1.118). She describes herself as “poor, deformed, and ignorant, / And like a bow buckled and bent together” (2.1.3–4), a detail that comes directly from Goodcole, who notes that “Her body was crooked and deformed, even bending together.”17 Mother Sawyer’s ugliness signifies her internal corruption and the sight of her—and a look from her—can disturb. Her unsightly appearance causes the Morris dancers to “Exeunt in strange postures,” implying that her harmful gaze impairs their mobility (2.1.105.s.d.). One look at, or one look from, the witch can harm. The corrupting glare, and less than desirable appearance, was again something commonly associated with witchcraft. In The Devil Conjured (1596), Thomas Lodge demonstrates how the devil’s possession of a witch adopts the language of contagion: “the witches soule infected with malice, corrupteth the aire by her sight / and by yt means infecteth yong infants,” while in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), Heinrich Kramer writes that some witches could kill through “a touch and a glance, or simply a glance.”18 In this extramissive model, the diseased species from Sawyer’s eye contaminate the air and are transmitted to the beholder, entering the body and infecting it. Once the corrupted species or the rubbing influence of the devil has made their way into their victim’s body, they work to alter its internal state. Like witches, the devil was typically connected to the infliction of

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disease in early modern medical texts as well as in demonologies.19 Healy demonstrates that, even though Hippocrates and other ancient physicians typically ruled out the possibility of occult explanations in medical diagnosis, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the devil featured prominently in medical enquiry.20 But how does this work, exactly? In Compendium Maleficarum (1608), Francesco Maria Guazzo explains that “For the purpose of causing bodily infirmities he distils a spirituous substance from the blood itself, purifies it of all base matter, and uses it as the aptest, most efficacious and swiftest weapon against human life.”21 Since orthodox demonology mandated that the devil’s powers were restricted to manipulating natural processes, their ability to strike illness in people was, as Clark puts it, “nothing more than a complicated piece of physics,” based on a Galenic understanding of humoral harmony.22 Both demonologists and physicians alike wrote that the devil was able to induce any kind of illness in his human victims by altering their humoral imbalance: “In principle, diseases caused by devils were inflicted to demonic ends, yet were not different in kind from those brought on through the adustion of black bile.”23 No ailment was off limits. In the Malleus Maleficarum, for example, harmful magic could “inflict any kind of physical infirmity, even leprosy or epilepsy.”24 In his natural state, the devil was incorporeal, inhabiting an “airy” intangible body that lacked “flesh, blood, spirit, and bone.”25 As an airy spirit, he was capable of appearing visible or invisible. In this respect, the devil mimics the invisible, airborne species moving between people and affecting them accordingly. Dog is both invisible and visible, working on humoral imbalances but also infecting through external infection, and thus synthesizing exogenous and endogenous etiologies In terms of contagion, it is not the devil’s incorporeal qualities but his very material form that is essential to the spread of corruption in The Witch of Edmonton. While the animal form does not automatically link him with the spread of disease in an early modern understanding, his status as a devil in corporeal form does. As discussed above, rather than appearing in his natural, if oxymoronic, “incorporeal body,” in order to implement wicked effects in Edmonton, the devil takes corporeal form by possessing the body of a real animal. He does not bewitch from afar but is instead solidly present to perform the contamination in its entirety. Toward the end of the play, in a conversation with Cuddy Banks, Dog lists the forms he typically takes to interact with people. While devils can appear in “Any shape to blind such silly eyes as thine,” devils typically

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favor a particular kind of animal: “chiefly those coarse creatures, dog or cat, hare, ferret, frog, toad” (5.1.124–125). Dog’s list is congruent with the forms taken by witches’ familiars in other contemporary texts, such as Macbeth and The Late Lancashire Witches. James Serpell’s research on animal familiars reveals that a dog familiar in witchcraft cases was a common occurrence.26 As Cuddy informs the demon, this is not a particularly impressive range of forms: “It seems you devils have poor thin souls, that / You can bestow yourselves in such small bodies.” (5.1.128–129). Dog himself tells Cuddy that devils habitually possess the bodies of “Any poor vermin” (5.1.127). The devil’s influence is dependent on material contact, no matter how small or lowly the animal. The word “vermin” connects Dog to another aspect of contagion not quite understood at the time: the role of animals in the spread of disease. Dog’s own animalness is pertinent to a particular type. While he is teased about inhabiting such lowly forms, it might be a deliberate choice, considering that such animals were those not usually employed by humans. In “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England,” Mary Fissell suggests that “vermin” were defined both by their consumption of human food and grain and their lack of appeal to the human palate: “not only were vermin uncouth eaters who devoured their meat without ceremony. Vermin were also animals who were never transformed into meat.”27 There is no satisfactory explanation for why vermin were not consumed but, as Fissell suggests, the origins may be biblical. According to Leviticus: “These shall also be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.”28 In Daemonologie (1597), King James I asserts that the qualitie of these formes and effectes, is lesse or greater, according to the skil and art of the Magician. For as to the formes, to some of the baser sorte of them he oblishes him self to appeare at their calling upon them, either in likenes of a dog, a Catte, an Ape, or such-like other beast.29

Here, James suggests that the devils are concerned with separating themselves from humans, commonly assuming forms that ensure they will not be eaten. Possessing the body of an animal not likely to be eaten seems a highly practical choice for Dog, securing desirable proximity to humans without the threat of being eaten or employed. He is motivated not by

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human resources but by human souls and, like vermin, human prosperity is dependent on his eradication. While vermin were not yet connected explicitly to the spread of disease, they were nevertheless associated with dirt and contamination, as noted in Leviticus.30 While the early moderns did not understand the exact process by which animals transmitted disease, they certainly seemed to understand how the devil, in the form of vermin, could transmit both literal disease and moral disease, from body to body, from human to animal, from animal to animal, and from animal to crops. The repeated identification of the devil and the villagers as dogs shows how far the evil has spread. In rubbing Sawyer’s ill will into her assailants, Dog has imbued them with his own devilish qualities. In fact, everybody is compared to a dog at some stage in the play. Sawyer refers to Old Banks as “this black cur / That barks and bites, and sucks the very blood / Of me and of my credit,” while Sawyer herself is “a base hell-hound” (2.1.123–125, 4.1.103). She calls her accusers “None but base curs so bark at me” and claims “I am torn in pieces by a pack of curs,” echoing Dog’s earlier threat to “tear thy body in a thousand pieces” if she does not comply with his demands (4.1. 86–87, 164, 2.1.143–144). The village eventually destroys her in place of the devil. Rather than being dragged off stage when her pact expires, as in the A-text Faustus or torn to shreds by the devil as in the B-text Faustus, Mother Sawyer is instead killed by her neighbors. In a play that takes a lot from Marlowe’s, even paraphrasing it in several scenes, Sawyer’s neighbors take over the Mephistophelean role of collecting on the witch’s hellish debts. Mother Sawyer, the infector of the village body, must be cut out for the rest to return to physical and moral health.

Vulnerability The contamination of evil influence in Edmonton, however, is more complicated than the simple spread of moral infection from one person to another. Also present in The Witch of Edmonton is the idea of dormant sympathies that render someone susceptible to infection, a concept described in contemporary accounts of contamination. In his Treatise of the Plague, Lodge elucidates how some people are more susceptible to infection than others: Contagion, is an evil qualitie in a body, communicated unto an other by touch, engendring one and the same disposition in him to whom it

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Exopathic demonic infection, like contagious sympathy, “presupposes a latent likeness between the disease and the victim.”32 The same is true of the contamination in Edmonton. Dog refuses Sawyer’s request to kill Old Banks on the grounds that he is “loving to the world / And charitable to the poor” and thus lives “without compass of our reach” (2.1.166–167, 170). The devil, it seems, must locate an appropriate receiver. In this respect, the play recalls Calvinist convictions of predetermined capacity for evil. In The Witch of Edmonton, the model works especially well for the spread of moral corruption. Dekker, the probable author of the witch plot, was himself a militant Protestant, and he makes the connection between sin and pollution in his plague pamphlets.33 If we regard Sawyer’s determination to wreak havoc on her neighbors’ lives as revenge, we can understand that those who have wronged her in the past are ripe for demonic contamination because they have committed moral transgressions by denying charity, harming her possessions, and physically abusing her. In Edmonton, the affinity with the devil depends on the precondition of bad language and bad intention. Bad language plays a significant role in the play, which suggests that words themselves are infectious. Sawyer’s identity as a witch originates in her “bad tongue,” created by the “bad usage” of the village, and it is cursing that summons Dog to her in the first place. Why Dog can set forth in motion the actions that lead to Ratcliffe’s death but not Old Banks is puzzling, but it may be that Old Banks is better spoken than Anne. Dog explains to Sawyer that he cannot kill Banks directly unless he finds him “as I late found thee, /Cursing and swearing” (2.1.58). Anne, in contrast, is described as a “foul-tonged whore,” and thus a perfect candidate for demonic corruption (4.1.182). Anne’s death, while prompted by Dog’s touch at Sawyer’s behest, is indirect. Dog does not kill her outright. Instead his touch drives her mad so that she became “nothing but the miserable trunk of a wretched woman” with “nothing in her mouth being heard but ‘the devil, the witch, the witch, the devil’” (4.1.221–225). According to her husband, following her encounter with Sawyer, she “beat out her own brains and died” (4.1.225–226). Dog is thus able to trigger in Anne the impetus that will lead to her own death. Susan Carter, rather disturbingly,

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believes herself deserving of her death when Frank tells her that, as he is already married, she is “my whore. / No wife of mine,” and then, acknowledging the presence of the presumably invisible Dog, declares she has “dogged [her] own death” (3.3.30–31, 39). Frank himself effectively invites the devil in. When swearing to Winnifred that he will remain true to her in spite of his father’s wishes, Frank declares that if his affections stray from Winnifred then “let heaven / Inflict upon me some fearful ruin” (1.1.66–67). Acting on the desires of both Frank and Sawyer, Dog infects with intention, bringing out the malicious impulses that already lurk within his victims. When he chances on Sawyer herself, she has already voiced her desire to become a witch if only she had the means. Dog merely enables her. His toxic touch disrupts the balance of the recipients’ internal state, prompting them to act.

Immunity The idea that some characters are more susceptible to wicked influence than others is demonstrated not only by those who are infected by Dog but also by those who seem to resist it. In the play’s decidedly quirky third plot, Old Banks’s foolish son Cuddy strikes up an affectionate— and very tactile—friendship with Dog yet remains curiously impervious to his demonic charms. His child-like purity and innocence render him immune to Dog’s contamination. When Cuddy approaches Sawyer for help in wooing Kate Carter, the witch delights in the prospect of taking revenge on Old Banks: “Now the set’s half won. / The father’s wrong I’ll wreck upon the son,” even though Cuddy is the only character to express kindness to her in the play (2.1.288–289). Sawyer instructs Cuddy to pursue a likeness of Kate Carter, claiming that he need only “embrace her in thy arms and she is thine own” (2.1.283). Cuddy will win her affections only if he makes physical contact with her, in keeping with the pattern of contagion in the play. Of course, Sawyer issues these instructions to Cuddy with the intention that it will cause his death, and he almost drowns, but Cuddy resists infection, telling the devil “I entertained you ever as a dog, not as a devil” (5.1.117). Dog agrees that he used the fool “doggedly, not devilishly” and only “for sport to laugh at” (5.1.118–119). Cuddy’s lack of evil intention makes him of little use to Dog. The fool instead hopes that he will be able to influence Dog for the better, lecturing him on mending his wicked ways and advising him to “rub thy shoulder against a lawyer’s gown as thou passest by” (5.1.212).

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No matter how close Dog is able to get, he has no power to touch the young fool’s life because Cuddy exhibits no innate capacity for evil and consequently remains immune to both disease and moral corruption.

Antidote The villagers’ various attempts to stop the contamination of the community are also centered on touch in The Witch of Edmonton, implying that the antidote is affected through recontamination. The mad Anne Ratcliffe evokes an old folk remedy when she asks Sawyer if she can “scratch thy face” (4.1.198). Although it carried no weight in courts, witch scratching is a commonly cited practice that was employed both for relieving a witch’s victim of symptoms and identifying somebody as the guilty party. Striking her, specifically scratching her face, was also based on the idea of contagion through touch. In the many descriptions of witch scratching, there is a noted emphasis on drawing the witch’s blood. Orna Alyagon Darr explains that “the belief was that by scratching the suspect with the nails and drawing her blood, the bewitched victim could enjoy temporary relief of symptoms. Therefore, the victim’s relief after scratching a suspect confirmed the suspect’s guilt.”34 Scratching the witch in fact serves a variety of purposes. It was believed to reverse the symptoms of her victims, make the devil uncomfortable, drain the witch of her corrupt blood faster, and expedite her hellish fate, as Shakespeare suggests in 1 Henry VI: “Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee: / Blood will I draw on thee – thou art a witch – / And ­straightaway give thy soul to him thou serv’st” (1.5.5–7).35 In some sources, the practice offers instant relief, implying that the physical contact transfers the pain back to the witch. The drawing of blood prevents it from being sucked by the devil or helps to drain her of her malice and accelerate her death. Barbara Rosen also suggests the blood could draw the familiar back to the witch.36 Ultimately, the villagers stop the infection by destroying the witch through hanging. Like witch scratching, violence is met with violence to prevent further violence. If scratching the witch curtails her ability to inflict physical harm on her neighbors, the only way to stop the witch killing again is to kill her first. In drawing on a complex model of contagion dependent on both the innate tendencies of the victims and the material presence of an external infector, The Witch of Edmonton accounts for an infection of agricultural blight and licentiousness by giving agency to the contamination. It is

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tempting to view the play as a medical drama of small-scale germ warfare in which Sawyer contaminates the community, resulting in widespread social unrest and several deaths. The plague is finally stopped with the identification and destruction of patient zero, the witch, and the departure of the infector, the devil. An etiology that encompasses magic makes the play seem, paradoxically, quite modern. In the last two decades, historians of science have focused increasingly on how occult belief enabled, rather than hindered, the development of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and The Witch of Edmonton illustrates perfectly how supernatural convictions fit into rational explanations of natural disasters. Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s play demonstrates especially well how contemporary medical knowledge was fused with popular belief in order to make sense of otherwise inexplicable events in the early modern world. In Edmonton, the presence of the devil enables an exopathic understanding of infection. Dog in fact serves as an intermediary between traditional conventions and more recent scientific developments in understanding contagion. The witch’s demonic familiar functions as the carrier of all things harmful, transferring infection and evil influence from body to body, from human to animal, and from the animate to the inanimate. The Witch of Edmonton thus demonstrates unequivocally that the spread of both vice and disease occurs not merely through presence or proximity but through the physical act of contamination. Dog serves as a sort of prototype for the role of vermin and pathogens in an exopathic etiology. The blight on the town can only be explained if there is illintention at the root of the contamination. Any misfortune must have a malicious cause, and the stray dog spreading disease through touch conveniently lends agency to contagion. There are no random acts in The Witch of Edmonton. Those who succumb to moral or physical infection deserve it. Acting on the wronged woman’s desire for vengeance, the devil dog always infects with purpose.

Notes



1. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, Revels Student Editions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). All subsequent references are to this edition. 2. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

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3. Jean Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, ed. Jonathan L. Pearl, trans. Randy A. Scott (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 146. 4. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. Lucinda Cole, “Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 66. 6. Ibid. 7.  Henry Goodcole, “The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death,” in Dekker et al., The Witch of Edmonton, 144. 8. Ibid., 137. 9. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics (Houndmills; New York: Palgrave, 2001), 36. 10.  Donald Beecher, “Windows on Contagion,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 32. 11. Margaret Healy, “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 23. 12.  David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 456. Crystal and Crystal outline that “touch” does not exclusively refer to “kill,” but can mean: “threaten, danger, imperil,” “wound, hurt, injure,” or “stain, taint, infect.” 13. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 14. Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. 15. Carla Mazzio, “Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance,” in Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 171. 16. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 24. 17. Goodcole, 137. 18. Thomas Lodge, The Devil Conjured (London, 1596) 15; Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. P. G. MaxwellStuart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 171. 19. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 188. 20. Healy, 35.

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21.  Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, ed. Montague Summers (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 106. 22. Clark, 187. 23.  Donald Beecher, “Witches, the Possessed, and the Diseases of the Imagination,” in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Diseases in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011), 112. 24. Kramer et al., 163. 25. Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson, trans. James Freake (Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 1993), 40 and Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, eds. Benjamin G. Kohl and George Mora, trans. John Shea (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1991), 85. 26. The others were (in order of frequency of appearance in witch trials from highest to lowest): cats, dogs, toads, mouse, mole, domesticated fowl, wild birds, rat, cow/bull, ferret, bees/wasps/hornets, fly, rabbit, and snail. James A. Serpell, “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530–1712,” in The Human/Animal Boundary: Historical Perspectives, eds. Angela Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 167. 27.  Mary Fissell, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999), 63. Fissell explains that: “Vermin were defined legally in Elizabethan and Henrician statures which authorized parishes to provide payments for the killing of vermin injurious to grain… while the Henrician statute focused closely on birds that ate grain or spoiled fruit trees, the Elizabethan one also included foxes, stoats, weasels, hedgehogs, and a host of other ‘four-footed beasts’ who damaged or ate human food,” 86. 28. Leviticus 11:29–30, qtd in Fissell, 87. 29.  James VI and I, “Demonology,” in King James VI and I: Selected Writings, eds. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 163. 30. While rats were not explicitly connected to plague, it seems that dogs were. Frank Percy Wilson notes in The Plague in Shakespeare’s London that several measures were taken between 1543 and 1625 to eradicate the presence of dogs, both domestic and stray, from London, and to prevent the careless disposal of carcasses, especially during times of plague. The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 36–39. 31. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), sig. B2v.



80  B. JOHNSTON 32. Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25. 33. Healy, 121. 34. Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 173. 35. William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 36. Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1969), 18. Rosen also suggests that “Beating a lunatic made the patient’s body uncomfortable for the possessing devil, so that he would leave; Perhaps her indwelling evil power deserted the scratched witch for the same reason,” 18.

Works Cited Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Edited by Donald Tyson. Translated by James Freake. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 1993. Beecher, Donald. “Windows on Contagion.” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 32-46. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. “Witches, the Possessed, and the Diseases of the Imagination.” In Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Diseases in the Early Modern Period, edited by Yasmin Haskell, 103–138. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011. Bodin, Jean. On the Demon-mania of Witches. Edited by Jonathan L. Pearl. Translated by Randy A. Scott. Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2001. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Cole, Lucinda. “Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 65–84. Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Darr, Orna Alyagon. Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Dekker, Thomas, John Ford, and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton. Edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. Revels Student Editions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

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Fissell, Mary. “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England.” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 1–29. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goodcole, Henry. “The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death.” In Dekker, et al., The Witch of Edmonton, 135–149. Guazzo, Francesco Maria. Compendium Maleficarum. Edited by Montague Summers. New York: Dover Publications, 1988. Harvey, Elizabeth, ed. Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Healy, Margaret. “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch.” In Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 22–38. ———. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2001. James VI and I. “Demonology.” In King James VI and I: Selected Writings, edited by Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall, 149–198. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Kramer, Heinrich, and Jakob Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Lodge, Thomas. The Devil Conjured. London, 1596. ———. A Treatise of the Plague. London, 1603. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus: A- and B- Texts (1604, 1616). Edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Mazzio, Carla. “Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance.” In Harvey, Sensible Flesh, 159–186. Rosen, Barbara. Witchcraft. London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1969. Serpell, James A. “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530–1712.” In The Human/Animal Boundary: Historical Perspectives, edited by Angela Creager and William Chester Jordan, 157–190. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Shakespeare, William. The First Part of King Henry VI. Edited by Michael Hattaway. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. Macbeth. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Weyer, Johann. Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum. Edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and George Mora. Translated by John Shea. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Text & Studies, 1991. Wilson, Frank Percy. The Plague in Shakespeare’s London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927.

CHAPTER 5

Kisses and Contagion in Troilus and Cressida Jennifer Forsyth

Modern notions of contagion, as shaped by the development and articulation of germ theory in the mid-nineteenth century, are so ingrained that it can be difficult to imagine a time when the prospect of kissing was not accompanied by at least some anxiety regarding the intimate contact. This fear has been further reinforced by the pervasiveness of the femme fatale type inherited from Gothic and Romantic literature, which often identified an ability to corrupt and control men’s souls through her dangerous kisses. Yet in early modern England numerous examples of kisses, both historical and fictional, demonstrate a relative lack of concern with contagion or other negative effects despite physical and metaphysical factors that could have contributed to osculatory anxiety. According to the Galenic theory prevalent in early modern England, people’s bodies were porous and permeable, constantly in flux as they participated in numerous circuits of exchange with the environment. In this view, “spirit” was contained in the breath, which would circulate throughout their body and, through exhalation and inhalation, both influence and J. Forsyth (*)  Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, Kutztown, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_5

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be influenced by the air outside the body.1 Because breath, and therefore spirit, is exchanged in kissing, the kiss logically should become a critical locus of interchange and an occasion of vulnerability. With concern over the ways in which bodies were under siege pervading dramatic texts during the early modern period, kissing constitutes an important and overlooked exception to traditional narratives of contagion. Evidence suggests that kissing retained strong cultural associations with sanctity, which placed it outside of, and even reversed, normal narratives of the humoral body, so that a kiss was considered far more likely to heal than to harm. Ultimately, I argue that this attitude derives from lingering medieval precedents portraying kisses primarily as both spiritually and physiologically beneficial, though a tendency among critics to treat kissing as a mere adjunct to sexual intercourse often obscures this position. Despite the tradition identifying Cressida—like women in general—with corruption and contagion, the discourse surrounding kissing in William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida undercuts the early modern dichotomy between the spiritual male and the base female.

English Kissing and Affective Contagion Readings in the twenty-first century can underestimate both the prevalence of kissing in England and its positive cultural significance. In fact, England’s reputation in the late medieval and early modern periods as a nation whose inhabitants of all classes routinely kissed upon a variety of occasions is well documented. By all accounts, kissing in early modern England was ubiquitous and enthusiastic, to the surprise—and delight— of foreign visitors. “There is, besides, one custom here which can never be commended too highly,” Erasmus wrote to a friend during a visit in 1499: When you arrive anywhere, you are received with kisses on all sides, and when you take your leave they speed you on your way with kisses. The kisses are renewed when you come back. When guests come to your house, their arrival is pledged with kisses; and when they leave, kisses are shared once again. If you should happen to meet, then kisses are given profusely. In a word, wherever you turn, the world is full of kisses.2

The kiss of hospitality to which Erasmus refers perhaps attracted the most commentary, but kisses could signify “love, affection, peace, respect

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and friendship,”3 including, among other kinds, the medieval kiss of fealty between a man and his feudal lord (appearing in the early modern period in the common epistolary formulation “I kiss your hand”), a kiss to seal a contract,4 a benedictory kiss from a parent or religious leader to a literal or figurative child, and the kiss of peace between two members of a congregation, in addition to platonic or erotic kisses between friends or lovers. Kissing’s unusual status as a form of social contact with so many possible meanings does render it susceptible to misinterpretation upon occasion even for inhabitants of the period, but it is nevertheless inappropriate to associate kissing too readily with eroticism instead of seeing it as a culturally significant gesture in its own right. Contemporary testimony indicates that from the English perspective, kissing was not considered first and foremost as a sexual practice, which would have been subject to social censure for inchastity; continental observers comment with amazement not only on the frequency with which social kissing occurred but on the nonchalant English attitude toward this behavior. One visitor registers his surprise at Englishmen’s actions and attitudes, reporting that they “display great simplicity and absence of jealousy in their usage towards females. For not only do those who are of the same family and household kiss them on the mouth with salutations and embraces, but even those too who have never seen them.”5 Given the belief in the contagious potential of emotions, this absence of jealousy is significant.6 Literary texts from the period tend to mock people who suspect their partners of infidelity as a result of seeing them kissing other people, marking kisses as distinct from sexual contact and not subject to the same negative responses. Rarely would authors represent incidents of jealousy relating to a kiss, and these cases tend to serve as cautionary tales against boorish conduct rather than as genuine critiques. For instance, in Robert Armin’s A Nest of Ninnies, a servant’s violent response to seeing his master’s wife kiss another man renders the servant the butt of humor for his inability to understand courteous behavior.7 Only very occasionally, as in Westward for Smelts, does an episode verge upon acknowledging that social kissing could indeed be a front for illicit sexually-motivated behavior. In this tale, the report of the villain’s (unsuccessful) attempt to seduce a woman begins when he “at last … espied her in the fields, to whom he went and kissed her–a thing no modest woman can deny.”8 Here, though, while the antagonist’s corrupt intentions expose how the social convention could be abused,

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the woman’s utter innocence supports the narrative’s explicit judgment that her behavior is appropriate and chaste, and reinforces the conclusion that kissing itself is not objectionable. Instead of being the default motivation for kissing, then, erotic intent generally requires special signaling in a text, and unless a kiss is explicitly marked as lustful, kisses are not typically subject to the same constellation of adverse associations as sexual interaction. In fact, so far are the English from automatically associating kissing with lust that Richard Brathwaite inveighs against women who attempt to make themselves appear more chaste by insisting upon being kissed on the cheek instead of on the mouth, in contravention to “that freedome of Curtsie, which civill custome exacts of them…as if they renounced antiquity”; what Brathwaite describes as their feigned modesty is blameworthy in its vainglory and unnecessary in imagining potential negative judgment against kissing where none exists.9 In short, early modern texts use kisses to signify lust far less routinely than we might imagine, and without the fear of jealousy, the potential for contagion diminishes or vanishes. Nor do kisses seem to generate significant negative affective responses in addition to jealousy or fear of lust. Tellingly, the typical anxiety mentioned by observers is the fear of inadvertent rudeness, as when the Constable of Castile writes in 1604 that he had kissed twenty of Queen Anne’s ladies of honor “according to the custom of the country… any neglect of which is taken as an affront.”10

Spiritual Contagion and Kissing As a physical gesture, the kiss naturally engages the body, its senses, and its susceptibility to contagion and external influences; involving breath, the kiss is also consistently perceived as spiritual. On the one hand, breath alone could pose a threat to body and soul. As Brenda Gardenour Walter describes the medieval doctrine that informed early modern attitudes, “internal air might be influenced by the divine or the demonic, and … the toxic pneuma of the spiritually corrupt might infect the air and bodies of those surrounding them.”11 On the other hand, the Christian belief that all life derived from God and that the divine soul within the body sought reunion with other elements of the divine, whether in God himself or in others, was demonstrated by the numerous occasions upon which kisses were included as part of religious as well as lay rituals in Catholic medieval England,12 and these positive associations

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with kisses persisted even after the English Reformation brought about the rejection of other aspects of Catholic ceremony. For Renaissance authors, the Bible offers ample authority of the spiritual quality of the kiss.13 The Song of Solomon opens substantively with the verse, “Let him kisse mee with the kisses of his mouth, for thy Love is better then wine” (1:2).14 The Puritan Francis Rous articulates this implicit religious metaphor as follows: In order to join one’s soul to God, one should “bee still gazing on him, & still calling on him; Kisse me with the kisses of thy mouth; Yea kisse my soule with such a kisse of thy spirit, that they may be no longer two, but one spirit: say to him whom have I in heaven but thee, and whom have I desired on earth besides thee? My soule thirsteth, and panteth for thee the living God.”15 While following a well-established tradition of using erotic rhetoric appropriate to describing a more earthly marriage,16 Rous’s emphasis falls squarely on a spiritual union rather than a physical one. At the same time, the French author Théodore de Bèze demonstrates more awareness that although a kiss ought to be spiritual in nature, spirits housed in bodies that are earthly and base could lead to corruption; and while he laments the fact that the kiss of peace exchanged between congregants before communion, betokening union with God, had been generally eliminated from church services, he acknowledges that the practice had been “villanously and filthily abused” and even admits that “it is a very hard thing to use it holyly and sincerely.”17 Baldassare Castiglione also wrestles with the conundrum in a passage from The Courtier, though he ultimately defends kissing: Sins a kisse is a knitting together both of body and soule, it is to be feared, least the sensuall lover will be more inclined to the part of the bodye, then of the soule: but the reasonable lover … hath a delite to joigne hys mouth with the womans beloved with a kysse: not to stirr him to anye unhonest desire, but bicause he feeleth that, that bonde is the openynge of an entrey to the soules…. Wherupon a kisse may be said to be rather a cooplinge together of the soule, then of the bodye.18

Here, Castiglione relies upon the reader understanding the different kinds of “spirit.” The “sensual” spirit common to animals would certainly be more inclined to the physical aspect of kissing, but the “reasonable lover” is not one who simply uses his judgment in love but one who possesses and is motivated by the most elevated form of spirit,

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the intellectual, which is exclusive to humans. Thus, his description of the “cooplinge together of the soule” relies literally, as much as metaphorically, upon the exchange of spirit through kissing. Castiglione’s glossing over fears of the “sensuall lover” is, as a result, less a refusal to consider the possibility of lust than an optimistic inclination that true lovers, like idealized friends, will be motivated by higher impulses.19 Yet even within England, some authors did argue that kisses, especially stage kisses, bore unmitigated moral or spiritual danger. The anti-­ theatricalist John Rainolds critiques the theater for allowing men to kiss boys, pointing out that “When Critobulus kissed the sonne of Alcibiades, a beautifull boy, Socrates saide he had done amisse and very dangerously: because, as certaine spiders, if they doe but touch men onely with their mouth, they put them to wonderfull paine and make them madde: so beautifull boyes by kissing doe sting and powre secretly in a kinde of poyson, the poyson of incontinencie.” He also expresses concern for the audience’s susceptibility to simply seeing such kisses, asking whether there is any doubt that “men are made adulterers and enemies of all chastitie by comming to such playes? that senses are mooved, affections are delited, heartes though strong and constant are vanquished by such players? that an effeminate stage-player, while hee faineth love, imprinteth wounds of love?”20 Even so, while attacks on the contagious and morally corrupting power of the theater were relatively common, examples situating the danger specifically in kisses are scarce.

Physical Contagion and Kissing The kiss’s potential as morally corrupting, as Rainolds alleges, constitutes only part of its danger; its identity as a physical threat for spreading illness became less equivocal as medical lore developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.21 Numerous medical sources agreed that cases of syphilis in particular could be transmitted not only through sexual contact but also through “repeated kissing” or sharing dishes with a contagious person.22 In one of Erasmus’s colloquies, “Unequal Marriage,” two men debate what a society’s responsibility should be for containing the disease when a person has the pox; one observes that it is not enough to castrate men to keep them from spreading the contagion because it is not “convey’d by one Way only, but by a Kiss, by Discourse, by a Touch, or by drinking with an infected Party.”23 Since contagion did not require contact but could occur simply through speaking with a friend, breathing itself was dangerous. Holly Dugan explores contemporary disputes

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over how precisely the miasmic theory of contagious air functioned24; still, both the Galenic and the miasmic theories of contagion agree on the importance of breath in governing overall health, for “One needed to purge foul-smelling effluvia, but, once released, such effluvia created profound environmental hazards.”25 Given the belief that bad air, including other people’s diseased exhalations, transmitted disease, an obvious corollary should have been that people would be circumspect or even apprehensive about kissing as a means of contagion, but, in practice, this does not seem to have been considered problematic. To a significant extent, this attitude seems to have been inherited from older cultural notions equating kissing with sanctity. Medieval narratives testify that instead of a kiss being a vector for transmitting infection from a sick person to a healthy person, the kiss of a healthy and virtuous person could be powerful enough to overcome and cure even the most disgusting and contagious illnesses (as they thought), such as leprosy. In one anecdote, the French saint Martin of Tours kisses a leper, blessing him, and the leper is instantly cured.26 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, likewise kissed lepers when he cared for them, though it is said that he considered the act of humility implicit in the kiss more likely to benefit his soul than to cure the body of the leper.27 In early modern English drama, the idea of a healing kiss follows these precedents; even if it is not taken as a literal prescription for medical practice, the trope indicates a residual tradition that shapes discourse if not medical procedure. In the same vein, the persistent belief in the “royal touch”—the monarch’s divinely bestowed ability to heal scrofula by the laying on of hands—illustrates a theory in which certain healthy bodies coming into contact with contagious ones could cure them instead of becoming infected themselves.28 These positive constructions of kissing help to explain the lack of fear of physical and moral contagion, which was largely displaced onto different forms of erotic interplay, such as exchanging glances and engaging in sexual intercourse. Simultaneously, belief in medically therapeutic kissing undercut the misogyny that led to the customary interpretation of all male contact with women as dangerous.

Kisses and Contagion in Troilus and Cressida A concern with contagion and disease, particularly relating to erotic love, pervades Troilus and Cressida. As Valerie Traub notes, “‘Diseases’ is the final word of Troilus and Cressida, and metaphors of disease are invoked to describe all the major problems in the play,” including “Troilus’s

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characterisation of his love for Cressida as ‘the open ulcer of my heart’ (1.1.55).”29 According to one count, 61 references to syphilis alone appear in Troilus and Cressida.30 Jonathan Gil Harris refers to Troilus and Cressida as “the most disease-ridden” of the problem plays and catalogs some of the references: “ulcer of my heart” (1.1.54), “plague” (1.1.94, 1.3.96, 3.3.264, etc.), “jaundies” (1.3.2), “biles” (2.1.2), “botchy core” (2.1.6), “red murrion” (2.1.19), “scab” (2.1.29), “colic” (4.5.9), “tisick” (5.3.101), and in one nonpareil of Thersitean virulence alone, “rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads a’gravel in the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, whissing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, lime-kills i’ th’ palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivell’d fee-simple of the tetter” (5.1.1)31

Although not all of these diseases are communicable, many are, and, as Eric S. Mallin has pointed out, contagion pervades the play thematically as well, including affective contagion as Achilles’s refusal to participate in the war spreads from him to other Greek warriors.32 Not coincidentally, Troilus and Cressida also contains more explicit references to kissing than any other play by Shakespeare. Unlike many of Shakespeare’s other plays, however, where kisses tend to be romanticized, the kisses in Troilus and Cressida more closely resemble the infectious temptations to lust that Rainolds had identified as dangerous and, at first, seem to counter the narrative that kisses are spiritual and therefore pure.33 However, it is vital to distinguish the way that the men in the play generally use a corporeally-oriented vocabulary, with its connotations of base physicality and disease, in dialogue surrounding kissing Cressida, from the way that Cressida herself uses a more transcendent spiritual language. This reversal of the gendered dichotomy contrasts the stereotypes holding that men alone were capable of true love because of their refined spirits, while women were fundamentally impure as they were governed by their carnal desires and their sensual spirits. The most notorious kissing scene in Troilus and Cressida is that in which Cressida arrives in the Greek camp after the single night when she and Troilus consummate their relationship. In many interpretations of Cressida’s character, this scene is considered crucial, whether it is taken to indicate that Cressida is a quintessentially sexual being or that she is a victim of the men.34 In this passage, Shakespeare inverts many

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expectations regarding male and female, soul and body. Whereas the English custom is for hostesses to welcome men to their homes with polite kisses, the Greeks assault Cressida with theirs. In a mirror image of the travelers’ reports where one man was kissed in welcome by multiple women in order to comply with local customs, six Greek men attempt to kiss Cressida, with Cressida escaping the kisses of Menelaus and Ulysses, despite their machinations. Thwarted of his apparent efforts to kiss Cressida, Ulysses retaliates immediately with a diatribe of hateful accusations that shift attention from the potential sharing of breath to the transactions of a body: Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip— Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. Oh, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give a coasting welcome ere it comes And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every tickling reader. Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game. (4.5.53–62)35

From “fie,” meaning “shame,” to “daughters of the game,” a notvery-oblique reference to prostitutes, Ulysses upends Cressida’s arrival and turns her from a guest deserving of courteous reception to a hostess whose body would “give a coasting welcome ere it comes.” Her supposedly “wanton spirits” cannot be contained, expressing themselves through her body language; her spirits do not appropriately receive a welcome but rudely demand it. Ironically, of course, Ulysses punningly projects onto Cressida the behavior of the Greek men, who have accosted Cressida rather than welcoming her. Even Ulysses’s reference to her “every joint” connotes sexuality. Physiologically, joints suggest motion, and within the scene’s context, Ulysses characterizes the motion as alluring; but “joint” also indicates Ulysses’s identification of Cressida as one who had joined herself to somebody else and invokes the wedding ceremony’s familiar language, “Those whom God hath joyned together, let no man put asunder.”36 As Ulysses is in the midst of calling her a prostitute, the matrimonial implications are scathing. Finally, in terms of contagion, joint pain is one of the primary symptoms of syphilis, as

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would have been common knowledge to the Elizabethan audience. Through this cruel reversal of Cressida’s true status, and by Ulysses’s portrayal of Cressida as a sexual being linked with corruption and disease, Shakespeare locates sensuality and nuances of corruption in the breath containing men’s speech rather than in women’s bodies. Nor is this attitude limited to the Greeks. Mary Ellen Rickey comments that Troilus’s relationship with Cressida is “exclusively physical, and therefore diseased.”37 Certainly, he invokes bodily figures far more than spiritual ones. Even before the two lovers encounter each other for the first time in the play, Cressida’s symptoms are represented as related to breath, whereas Troilus’s concern the body. When Pandarus recounts how Cressida is breathing shallowly and rapidly (as a patient suffering from a fever would), using the words “wind,” “spirit,”38 and “breath” (3.2.29–31), Troilus responds, “Even such a passion doth embrace my bosom” and elaborates, “My heart beats thicker than a feverous pulse” (3.2.33–34). By likening his state to Cressida’s, Troilus notes that they share symptoms indicative of a common illness and thus potentially the result of contagion, but the physical symptoms described here shift the conventional signs of potential for contagion from Cressida to Troilus. Pandarus reaffirms Cressida’s physical and spiritual innocence with another reference to her breath after Troilus and Cressida first kiss when he tells Troilus, “Build there, carpenter; the air is sweet” (3.2.48), invoking the notion that sweet breath attested to purity. Given Pandarus’s notoriety as the father of panders, it is little surprise that he had bawdily exhorted Troilus to “rub on, and kiss the mistress” (3.2.46–47), but Troilus continues in this vein as well. When Cressida begins to speak about her wishes but breaks off suddenly, he asks, “What too curious dreg espies my sweet lady in the fountain of our love?” (3.2.61–62). Dregs may be solids which normally precipitate out of liquids, or, as the editors of the Norton Shakespeare gloss it, a “speck of dirt,”39 but “dreg” is also a euphemism for fecal matter, and the singular word form hints at the latter definition. In either case, whether by a speck of dirt or by fecal matter, any contamination of the water raises the specter of the disease-bearing miasmas thought to be both produced and carried by the foul-smelling air arising from foul water.40 As a result, even as the scene overtly predicts Troilus’s greater fidelity, his language undermines his identity as an ideal lover by demonstrating his concern with corrupting and corruptible matter.

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Cressida, meanwhile, employs the image of souls unified through a kiss, used most frequently to portray the idealized friendship between two men. Having urged Troilus to “stop [her] mouth” (3.2.123), a euphemism for kissing, and being ashamed of having appeared forward in making this request, she tells Troilus, “I have a kind of self resides with you, / But an unkind self that itself will leave / To be another’s fool” (3.2.135–137). In the context of their recent kiss, the “self” that stays with Troilus is the part of her spirit exchanged in their kiss, as incomplete and unequal as that exchange may turn out to have been. In leaving Troilus, she suggests, she is leaving part of herself; he will inevitably breathe out this “self” of Cressida, which will then be inhaled in turn by somebody else.41 While the connotations of the passage foreshadow the death of their relationship, Cressida’s metaphysical concern with the outcome of sharing a soul through the breath in a kiss, in contrast to Troilus’s emphasis on the physical, challenges the easy assumption that Cressida’s character epitomizes lust and contagion. The disjunction between Troilus’s physical imagery and Cressida’s more spiritual and emotional language continues in their parting scene. Much of Troilus’s rhetoric in his first substantial farewell speech to Cressida invokes a ferocious physical encounter where “injury… Puts back” their farewells, “jostles roughly,” “rudely beguiles,” “forcibly prevents,” and “strangles” their “dear vows” as though they were infants killed at birth, personifying time as “Injurious…with a robber’s haste” (4.4.32–41). The emphasis on disrupted breath and kisses throughout the speech, with a subtext of violence, reinforces Troilus’s concern with the finite, fragile human body. He singles out the corporeal farewell kisses and embraces they will lose before finally mentioning their spiritual “dear vows” (4.4.36); furthermore, the connotations of disease already pervade his speech, pointing to what he sees as Cressida’s frail and corruptible nature.42 In his reference to the “single famished kiss” (4.4.46), the primary sense romantically seems to imply that the lovers, hungry for each other, will starve upon the single, insufficient kiss they are allowed, but the word “famished” further invokes the idea of fasting, associated with bad breath and thus ill health and immorality; the description of the single, tear-seasoned kiss’s description as “distast[ed]” (4.4.47) connotes nausea through the notion of disordered taste, another symptom of illness. Troilus’s words paint his love as physically sickening.

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Cressida’s language likewise references taste and consumption, but while she grieves for their parting like Troilus, she denies the obvious conclusion that an understanding of Galenic humoral balance would indicate—that she should moderate her grief—and insists instead upon the pure health of her present state: Why tell you me of moderation? The grief is fine, full, perfect that I taste, And no less in a sense as strong As that which causeth it. How can I moderate it? If I could temporize with my affection, Or brew it to a weak and colder palate, The like allayment could I give my grief. My love admits no qualifying dross, No more my grief in such a precious loss. (4.4.2–10)

Her grief is “fine, full, perfect” (4.4.3) in that it perfectly balances the great love that generates it. Were she to moderate her grief, this would require her love to have diminished as well. Just as she is unable to “temporize with [her] affection,” she is unable to allay her grief. In Galenic terms, to be balanced is to be healthy. Far from communicating any physical or emotional contagion to anyone else, Cressida represents a fully integral self. Her grief is not a sign of disease that needs to be corrected in order for her to be whole again but a warrant of the authenticity of her emotions, past and present. She polices the integrity of her own experience, insisting that her love is pure and “admits no qualifying dross.” Certainly, Cressida is not perfect, but despite the increasing references to Cressida as a loose woman or even as a prostitute throughout the play, Shakespeare’s Cressida embodies more elements of purity than of contagion.

Last Words After Troilus ignores Cressida’s pleas and sends her to the Greek camp with Diomedes, and he later watches as she subsequently vacillates over whether to accept Diomedes as a lover, Cressida finally seems to fulfill the expectations the men have held for her from the beginning: Troilus, farewell. One eye yet looks on thee, But with my heart the other eye doth see. Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find:

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The error of our eye directs our mind. What error leads must err—oh, then conclude: Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude. (5.2.107–112)

Her language is suggestive of physical infidelity as she contemplates leaving Troilus: her divided loyalty; the insistence upon “error”—repeated twice, followed by a single iteration of the word “err”; and the final impression of “turpitude” at first appears incontrovertibly damning. And yet although Thersites concludes that “A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she say, ‘My mind is now turned whore’” (5.2.113–114) and Troilus shares this view, Cressida’s lines are not, in fact, proof that she chooses infidelity. To recognize the fallacy of judging by one’s eyes and then to “conclude: / Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude” is not to embrace that course of action enthusiastically. Were her lines not immediately interpreted decisively by the men on stage, their ambivalence might be more clear, and Cressida’s character might appear less tarnished. But these lines of Cressida’s are not her final words: She sends Troilus a letter, which he dismisses as “Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart” (5.3.107–108). He tells Pandarus that he will read them, but it is unclear whether he does; conventionally, letters appearing on the early modern stage are read out loud, unless—like the one Julia tears in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and perhaps Cressida’s letter here— they are torn to pieces first. Troilus rejects these words as “wind,” portraying the breath contained in her written speech as the kind of noxious miasma believed to spread contagion: “Go, wind, to wind, there turn and change together” (5.3.109). Whether she is innocent or guilty, Cressida cannot win. The men around her can instantly corrupt her meaning through their interpretations, and Shakespeare repeatedly shows how men construe, or misconstrue, Cressida in conformity with their expectations for women. Without access to the words that Troilus spreads upon the wind, the audience cannot judge Cressida’s guilt or innocence any more accurately than the men on stage, for we never hear her explanation. All we have seen Cressida voluntarily give Diomedes is words, and Troilus destroys her letter to replace her words with his own. The spirit contained in breath emerges both in kisses and in words. Even if kisses do not carry contagion, words do, and Shakespeare illustrates how men’s words constitute a dangerous source of contagion in this society.

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Notes







1.  Followers of Galen identified three different kinds of spirit—natural, vital, and animal—which circulated through the humoral body; see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 61, e.g., Here, however, I refer to an understanding that blends the physiological spirits with the Aquinian immortal soul, believed to be present in and carried by the spirits, as discussed in Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9–10. 2. Desiderius Erasmus, “To Fausto Andrelini 1499,” in The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1 to 141, 1484–1500, ed. Douglas F. S. Thomson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 193. 3. In Karen Harvey, Introduction to The Kiss in History, ed. Karen Harvey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1. 4. See, e.g., J. Russell Major, “Bastard Feudalism and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (1987): 509–535. 5. Nicander Nucius, The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius, of Corcyra, ed. J. A. Cramer (London: Camden Society, 1841), 10. 6. For useful discussions on affective contagion, see, inter alia, Jaecheol Kim, “The Plague and Immunity in Othello,” Comparative Drama 51, no. 1 (2017): 23–42; Gayle Allan, “Seized by the Mirth-Marring Monster: Old and New Theories of Jealousy in Othello,” and Darryl Chalk, “‘To Creep in at Mine Eyes’: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night,” both in Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, ed. Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 31–47 and 171–193 respectively; Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 7. Robert Armin, A Nest of Ninnies (London, 1608), B1r. 8. Kind Kit of Kingston, Westward for Smelts (London, 1620), B4v. 9. In Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), 114. I have preserved the old spelling for most non-dramatic quotes while regularizing i/j and u/v.

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10.  William Brenchley Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (London: John Russell Smith, 1865), 261. 11.  Brenda Gardenour Walter, “Corrupt Air, Poisonous Places, and the Toxic Breath of Witches in Late Medieval Medicine and Theology,” in Toxic Airs: Body, Place, Planet in Historical Perspective, ed. James Rodger Fleming and Ann Johnson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 7. 12.  See, e.g., Craig Koslofsky, “The Kiss of Peace in the German Reformation,” in The Kiss in History, ed. Harvey, 18–28. 13. Targoff identifies an “ancient Greek fragment” as the earliest instance recording the exchange of souls via the kiss: “Kissing Kate / At the gate / Of my lips my soul hovers /While the poor thing endeavours / To Kate / To migrate” (25); whether early modern scholars were generally familiar with this verse or not, Biblical precedent predominated in commentary. 14.  The Holy Bible, 1611, King James Version, in King James Bible Online, 2016. 15. Francis Rous, The Mystical Marriage: Experimentall Discoveries of the Heavenly Marriage Betweene a Soule and Her Saviour (London, 1631), 15. 16. See, for instance, Belden C. Lane, “Two Schools of Desire: Nature and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Puritanism,” Church History 69, no. 2 (2000): 372–402. 17. Théodore de Bèze, Master Bezaes Sermons upon the Three Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles (Oxford, 1587), 18. 18. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio (London, 1561), Vv.iiii v. 19. This passage draws upon the Aristotelian notion of the “organic soul”— that spirits or souls could be of three different kinds, determined by and located in their physical organs—the vegetative (pertaining to the attributes of life typical of plants not dependent on will, like growth, nutrition, and reproduction); the sensual (pertaining to the aspects of life typical of animals such as movement, emotion, and the senses, as well as the vegetative attributes); and the rational, with only humans partaking of the rational, which comprised both of the previous kinds as well as “intellect, intellective memory (memory of concepts, as opposed of sense images) and will.” Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jilly Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 467, quoted in Garrett Sullivan, “Vampirism in the Bower of Bliss,” in Gothic Renaissance: A Reassessment, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014),

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169. The contradictions inherent between the Aristotelian organic soul and the Christian immortal soul are usefully discussed by James J. Lee, “Crowded Subjects” (Doctoral diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012). 20. John Rainolds, Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, by the Way of Controversie Betwixt D. Gager and D. Rainoldes (Middelburg, 1600), 18. 21. Isolating the kiss as a potential source of contagion is complicated by the fact that love is itself a sickness, according to many an early modern commentator, aligning it with “the movements of soul or the emotions,” and grouping it “with other affective conditions such as sadness, worry, and anger.” See Elena Carrera, Introduction to Emotions and Health, 1200– 1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 7 and Robert R. Solomon, “Non-Natural Love: Coitus, Desire and Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” in the same work, 147. 22. Guy Poirier, “A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities: Syphilis During the French Renaissance,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (London: Palgrave, 2005), 159. 23. Desiderius Erasmus, “Unequal Marriage,” in The Colloquies of Erasmus, vol. 2, ed. E. Johnson, trans. N. Bailey (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878), 163. 24. Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 100. 25. Dugan, 105–106. 26. Julie Orlemanski, “How to Kiss a Leper,” Postmedieval 3 (2012): 142–157, esp. 152. 27. George Gresley Perry, The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln (London: John Murray, 1879), 231. 28. See, e.g., Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1971). 29. Valerie Traub, “Invading Bodies/Bawdy Exchanges: Disease, Desire, and Representation,” in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Simon Barker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 179. 30.  John Ross, “Shakespeare’s Chancre: Did the Bard Have Syphilis?” Clinical Infectious Diseases 40, no. 3 (2005): 399. 31. Jonathan Gil Harris, “‘The Enterprise Is Sick’: Pathologies of Value and Transnationality in Troilus and Cressida,” Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 4. 32. Eric S. Mallin, “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations 29 (1990): 151.

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33. M. M. Burns cogently documents the critical history of interpretations treating Cressida as corrupting Troilus’ noble and loyal love and the evidence against this double standard. See “Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds,” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 105–130. 34. Claire M. Tylee argues that this scene would have been considered shocking to an Elizabethan audience, as “earlier versions of the story still current, such as Caxton’s, took pains to indicate how respectful the Greeks were toward Cressida, promising to ‘hold her as dear as their daughter.’” In “The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, Act IV Scene V,” Atlantis 11, nos. 1–2 (1989): 60. Carolyn Asp imbues Cressida with some attributes of sexual being and victim: “Her encounter with the contemptuous Ulysses, however, subjects her to his mockery and emphasizes her weakness in this masculine world. As she is passed from man to man, he informs her that he will not kiss her until Helen is a maid again, i.e., never, asserting his scorn for her physical attractions and shaking her confidence in herself even as an object of sensual desire.” In “In Defense of Cressida,” Studies in Philology 74, no. 4 (1977): 413. 35.  All quotations from the play follow Troilus and Cressida, ed. Walter Cohen, The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). 36. “The Forme of Solemnization of Matrimony,” Book of Common Prayer (London, 1559). 37. Mary Ellen Rickey, “’Twixt the Dangerous Shores: Troilus and Cressida Again,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1964): 11. 38. Although Pandarus uses “spirit” in the sense of “ghost,” here, the word’s connotations are significant. 39. Cohen, Troilus and Cressida, 2030. 40.  See Dugan, 108, for a representative summary of the connection between miasmas and impure water, and Richard Palmer, “In Bad Odour,” Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61–68, for more in-depth discussions. 41. This metaphysical conceit upon the logical consequences of the belief that souls are shared in kisses parallels one John Donne plays upon in “The Expiration.” See John Donne, “The Expiration,” in John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Donald R. Dickson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 114. 42.  It is also possible that rather than noticing an absolute fact about Cressida, Troilus shapes her nature; the role of imagination in disease in the Renaissance is well established. See, for example, the Introduction of Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, and Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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Works Cited Allan, Gayle. “Seized by the Mirth-Marring Monster: Old and New Theories of Jealousy in Othello.” In Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, edited by Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson, 31–47. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Armin, Robert. A Nest of Ninnies. London, 1608. Asp, Carolyn. “In Defense of Cressida.” Studies in Philology 74, no. 4 (1977): 406–417. Brathwaite, Richard. The English Gentlewoman. London, 1631. Burns, M. M. “Troilus and Cressida: The Worst of Both Worlds.” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 105–130. Carlin, Claire L. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. London: Palgrave, 2005. Carrera, Elena. Emotions and Health, 1200–1700. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio. London, 1561. Chalk, Darryl. “‘To Creep in at Mine Eyes’: Theatre and Secret Contagion in Twelfth Night.” In Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, edited by Darryl Chalk and Laurie Johnson, 171–193. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Chalk, Darryl, and Laurie Johnson, eds. Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Craik, Katharine A., and Tanya Pollard, eds. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. de Bèze, Théodore. Master Bezaes Sermons upon the Three Chapters of the Canticle of Canticles. Oxford, 1587. Donne, John. “The Expiration.” In John Donne’s Poetry, edited by Donald R. Dickson, 114. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Dugan, Holly. The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Erasmus, Desiderius. “To Fausto Andrelini 1499.” In The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1 to 141, 1484–1500, edited by Douglas F. S. Thomson, 193. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. ———. “Unequal Marriage.” In Vol. 2 of The Colloquies of Erasmus, edited by E. Johnson and translated by N. Bailey, 153–166. London: Reeves and Turner, 1878. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. “The Forme of Solemnization of Matrimony.” In The Book of Common Prayer. London, 1559.

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Harris, Jonathan Gil. “‘The Enterprise Is Sick’: Pathologies of Value and Transnationality in Troilus and Cressida.” Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 3–37. Harvey, Karen, ed. The Kiss in History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Kim, Jaecheol. “The Plague and Immunity in Othello.” Comparative Drama 51, no. 1 (2017): 23–42. Kind Kit of Kingston. Westward for Smelts. London, 1620. Koslofsky, Craig. “The Kiss of Peace in the German Reformation.” In The Kiss in History, edited by Karen Harvey, 18–28. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Lane, Belden C. “Two Schools of Desire: Nature and Marriage in SeventeenthCentury Puritanism.” Church History 69, no. 2 (2000): 372–402. Lee, James J. “Crowded Subjects.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012. Major, J. Russell. “Bastard Feudalism and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (1987): 509–535. Mallin, Eric S. “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida.” Representations 29 (1990): 145–179. Nucius, Nicander. The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius, of Corcyra. Edited by J. A. Cramer. London: Camden Society, 1841. Orlemanski, Julie. “How to Kiss a Leper.” Postmedieval 3 (2012): 142–157. Palmer, Richard. “In Bad Odour.” In Medicine and the Five Senses, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 61–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Paster, Gail Kern, Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Perry, George Gresley. The Life of St. Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln. London: John Murray, 1879. Poirier, Guy. “A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities: Syphilis During the French Renaissance.” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 157–176. London: Palgrave, 2005. Rainolds, John. Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, by the Way of Controversie Betwixt D. Gager and D. Rainoldes. Middelburg, 1600. Rickey, Mary Ellen. “’Twixt the Dangerous Shores: Troilus and Cressida Again.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1964): 3–13. Ross, John. “Shakespeare’s Chancre: Did the Bard Have Syphilis?” Clinical Infectious Diseases 40, no. 3 (2005): 399–404.

102  J. FORSYTH Rous, Francis. The Mystical Marriage: Experimentall Discoveries of the Heavenly Marriage Betweene a Soule and Her Saviour. London: John Wright, 1631. Rye, William Brenchley. England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First. London: John Russell Smith, 1865. Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., edited by Walter Cohen. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Solomon, Robert R. “Non-natural Love: Coitus, Desire and Hygiene in Medieval and Early Modern Spain.” In Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, edited by Elena Carrera, 147–158. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Sullivan, Garrett. “Vampirism in the Bower of Bliss.” In Gothic Renaissance: A Reassessment, edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Beate Neumeier, 167–179. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Targoff, Ramie. John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 1971. Traub, Valerie. “Invading Bodies/Bawdy Exchanges: Disease, Desire, and Representation.” In Shakespeare’s Problem Plays: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, edited by Simon Barker, 177–198. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Tylee, Claire M. “The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, Act IV Scene V.” Atlantis 11, nos. 1–2 (1989): 53–69. Walter, Brenda Gardenour. “Corrupt Air, Poisonous Places, and the Toxic Breath of Witches in Late Medieval Medicine and Theology.” In Toxic Airs: Body, Place, Planet in Historical Perspective, edited by James Rodger Fleming and Ann Johnson, 1–22. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

PART II

Spreading Abjection

CHAPTER 6

“Search This Ulcer Soundly”: Sex as Contagion in The Changeling and Othello Emily Weissbourd

This essay examines two plays that dramatize the dangerous consequences of contagion at the level of the individual body and the nation alike: Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) and Shakespeare’s Othello (1604). Both plays begin by describing sites secured against an external threat but end with a betrayal from within: The female body, putatively polluted by illegitimate sexual contact, ultimately takes center stage as a site of contamination. Here, I focus on the imagery of infection that surrounds representations of adulterous sexuality in the context of the plays’ evocations of the specter of miscegenation. Ultimately, I suggest both Othello and The Changeling expose a fundamental anxiety: that all heterosexual relations are a form of contaminating mixture. My analysis reads early modern representations of contamination and infection through the lens of kinship theory, beginning with Judith Butler’s discussion of marriage alliances in “Is Kinship Always-Already E. Weissbourd (*)  Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_6

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Heterosexual?” before turning to close readings of The Changeling and Othello. I focus in particular on how Butler positions both licit and prohibited alliances as existing along a continuum, with heterosexual marriage occupying a permitted space between incest on one end and miscegenation on the other. Both of the plays under consideration use metaphors of pollution, infection, and contamination to describe alliances that test prohibited boundaries of race, class, and national identity. Drawing on kinship theory allows us to see how representations of such prohibited alliances also expose the ways that all marriage may pose a threat to patriarchal fantasies of self-replication.

I Judith Butler’s reflections on contemporary French debates surrounding same-sex couples and parentage are not the first place one might turn for a discussion of sex and contagion in The Changeling and Othello. Nonetheless, the analysis of the relationship between the policing of the boundaries of the family and those of national identity in Butler’s “Is Kinship Always-Already Heterosexual?” resonates with these English plays’ investments in situating adulterous alliances outside of England. The Changeling is set in Spain, and Othello is set in Venice (and filled with references to Spain). As Butler notes of the present day, “recent debates in France targeted certain U.S. views on the social construction and variability of gender relations as portending a perilous ‘Americanization’ of kinship relations (filiation) in France.” She uses this French position as an example of the ways in which “the kinship dilemmas of first-world nations often provide one another with allegories of their own worries about the disruptive effects of kinship variability on their respective national projects.”1 Spain and Venice serve a similar purpose in The Changeling and Othello to that occupied by the U.S.A. in the French polemic that Butler describes. Indeed, a number of other critics have already addressed the ways in which early modern English texts turn to the Mediterranean as model, mirror or opposite, in discussions of English national identity.2 Reading these two plays in light of Butler’s analysis demonstrates more specifically the relationship between such nation-defining projects and the representation of marriage and kinship. Indeed, debates about kinship speak to “the very unity and transmissibility of the nation” (21). And as we shall see, fear about the unity and

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transmissibility of the nation in these plays is often articulated as fear of the poisonous potential inherent in the female body. Drawing on Lévi Strauss, Butler emphasizes the significance of kinship exchange and the traffic in women as a way to create the fantasy of reproducing in “kind”; in other words, an alliance that reproduces the cultural identity of the “man from here” through the conduit of the “woman from elsewhere’s” body without imagining (or naming) her as a contributor to her offspring’s identity or culture: Marriage must take place outside the clan. There must be exogamy. But there must also be a limit to exogamy; that is, marriage must be outside the clan but not outside a certain racial self-understanding or racial commonality. So the incest taboo mandates exogamy, but the taboo against miscegenation limits the exogamy that the incest taboo mandates. Cornered, then, between a compulsory heterosexuality and a prohibited miscegenation, something called culture, saturated with the anxiety and identity of dominant European whiteness, reproduces itself in and as universality itself. (33)

Butler’s discussion identifies the uncomfortable fiction that underlies patriarchal models of kinship exchange as well as fantasies of patrilineal descent: that it is possible to reproduce a “pure” family, culture, and nation without introducing contaminating foreignness through marriage and reproduction. The Changeling and Othello address precisely this issue through staging the female body as a site of contagion. The plays do so in part by staging alliances that cross the boundary of acceptable exogamy into what Butler refers to as a “prohibited miscegenation”: Desdemona elopes with a “stranger/ Of here and everywhere” (1.1.133–134) and Beatrice-Joanna commits adultery with a servant. In both instances, the threat of adulteration is further exacerbated by staging the union of a woman from “here” with a man from “elsewhere.” Nonetheless, the relentless and repeated descriptions of Beatrice-Joanna and Desdemona as both contaminated and contaminating exceed the illegitimacy of these particular alliances.3 Both plays betray an anxious awareness that the fantasy of reproduction without contamination is, indeed, merely fantasy. It is not only adulterous or too-exogamous alliances that produce a degenerating mixing that erodes the possibility of self-replication, but it is also that reproduction itself is always a form of contamination.

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To represent this threat of impurity, both plays draw on imagery of poison and infection. While the word contagion does not appear in either The Changeling or Othello, nor does its adjectival form contagious, I have used the term to discuss the shared effects of such imagery. In present-day medical discourse, contamination induced by poison and contagion are clearly distinct; most simply, the former comes from a sub­ stance or object (e.g., a drug), and the latter from germs spread from one person to another. In early modern discussions of disease and the body, however, such distinctions are not so clear. Natural antipathies might render one person poisonous to another, making the interaction between the two of them “contagious” in a limited fashion (a phenomenon discussed in The Changeling, as we shall see). Theories of disease that draw on factors such as humoral imbalance or miasmic contagion can also blur the boundaries between contamination-as-contagion, “caught” from another person, and as a poison introduced to the body through the natural world.4 This essay situates Othello and The Changeling in the midst of such contradictions, examining how both plays draw on imagery of poison and infection to underline the impossibility of fantasies of bodily and national purity alike.

II By and large, discussions of the rhetoric of contaminated bodies and those of the Spanish setting of The Changeling have remained separate. When discussing references to Spain in the play, critics often focus on the setting as an indication of an encoded political message, making the tragedy serve as a warning against the proposed Spanish Match between Charles I and the Infanta of Spain.5 Nonetheless, the play’s Spanish setting is connected not only to its political context but also to its persistent rhetoric of corrupted blood and contaminated bodies. Indeed, as Carol Thomas Neely has discussed, early modern geo humoral theory presented natives of Mediterranean regions as particularly “hot blooded,” and thus especially susceptible to lasciviousness.6 Further, the play’s preoccupation with impure blood echoes the rhetoric of the “black legend,” which branded Spaniards as rapacious imperialists, whose cruelty was derived in part from their impure bloodlines, tainted by intermarriage with Moors and Jews.7 The convergence of the play’s evocation of Spain and its rhetoric of infected blood reveals how a discourse of tainted or

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corrupted blood functions to cast prohibited sexual alliances as producing contamination.8 The Changeling announces its Spanish setting in its first scene. For the reader, a note is appended to the dramatis personae labeling the setting “Alicant.”9 Beatrice-Joanna’s father, Vermandero, pressed by her to show her would-be suitor, Alsemero, his castle, first asks his “country,” fearful of revealing “secrets” within to strangers. When Alsemero labels himself as “Valencian,” Vermandero replies, “That’s native” (1.1.56, 59, 60). Their connection proves closer still, as Vermandero learns that he and Alsemero’s father were friends in their youth. The play’s references to Spain proliferate, as Vermandero wishes Alsemero’s stay was longer “with us in Alicant” (1.1.198) and then praises Piracquo, his intended future son-in-law: “I would not change him for a son-in-law/For any he in Spain, the proudest he – / And we have great ones, that you know” (1.1.208–210). While Spain is not as consistently marked in The Changeling as it is in several of Middleton’s other plays from the period (specifically The Spanish Gypsy and A Game at Chess), the opening scene establishes its significance. It also asks us to think of this Spanish setting in several specific ways. First, it sets up a tension between “native” and “stranger,” specifically in reference to the integrity of Vermandero’s castle. That tension remains a persistent undercurrent throughout the text, despite the fact that all of the play’s characters are in fact “native.” Second, it reminds us that Alicante (Alicant) and Valencia are part of the same country, to be read as sharing a single native people. And finally, it establishes a link between Vermandero and Alsemero based on an entirely male sphere of connections: Vermandero’s friendship with Alsemero’s father inclines him toward friendship with Alsemero himself. Similarly, Vermandero represents Piracquo’s marriage with Beatrice-Joanna as his own acquisition of a son-in-law; at this moment, Beatrice-Joanna disappears from the equation. This Spanish setting, as a number of critics have discussed, is hardly incidental.10 The play was licensed for performance on May 7, 1622, when tensions about the proposed “Spanish match” between Charles I and the Infanta of Spain were at their peak. The play has been read as a “hieroglyph of England,” filled with veiled allusions to the dangers of Spanish alliance, which are reinforced by its references to the murder trial of Frances Howard.11 In this context, it is not surprising that The Changeling is preoccupied with corrupted blood, transgression

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of class boundaries, sexual violation, and compounds and mixing, all of which are hallmarks of early modern “black legend” anti-Spanish propaganda. As Eric Griffin has detailed, the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century witnessed a transformation from negative depictions of a Spanish “ethos” (a cultural tendency toward cruelty, rapaciousness, pride, and boundless imperial ambition) to an “ethnos,” a racializing discourse which attributed such behaviors to the vices inherent in Spanish “blood,” irredeemably tainted by “mixture” with Jews, Moors, and Goths.12 In anti-Spanish propaganda as well as in The Changeling, miscegenation or mixing of “bloods” is figured as infection. So, for example, Robert Ashley’s 1590 translation of a French anti-Spanish tract, Antoine Arnauld’s The Coppie of the Anti-Spaniard, describes Spaniards as “the sinke, the puddle, and filthie heap of the most loathsome, infected and slavish people that yet lived on earth.”13 De Flores, the villain, is also the play’s primary site of contamination. A self-proclaimed “gentleman” whose “hard fate has thrust [him] out to servitude” (2.1.49, 48), his uncontrollable desire for Beatrice-Joanna drives his actions throughout the play. His appearance—he is repeatedly described as hideously ugly, with infected skin—marks him visually as a corrupting influence. The infectious nature of his alliance with Beatrice-Joanna arises primarily from its transgression of class boundaries and patriarchal control; he is a servant, and their sexual relationship is conducted outside of marriage and without the knowledge of BeatriceJoanna’s father. He is also, though, the play’s most identifiably Spanish character (although all characters are nominally Spanish), and this adds a particular potency to his poisonous influence.14 His behavior echoes the image of the Spaniard as a violator of women and class boundaries alike. His deformed appearance also sets him apart from the play’s less aggressively Hispanized characters, and may even, as Lara Bovilsky has argued, racialize him.15 De Flores’s poisonous nature is initially described not as absolute and inherent but as relative to Beatrice-Joanna, who has a specific antipathy to him16: “Your pardon, sir, ’tis my infirmity / Nor can I other reason render you / Than his or hers of some particular thing /They must abandon as a deadly poison, / Which to a thousand other tastes were welcome” (1.1.104–107). Later, though, when she describes her intention to use De Flores to kill her betrothed, Piracquo, she imagines De Flores as one poison that will be used to “expel another,” i.e., her unwanted marriage (2.2.46–47). After De Flores has killed Piracquo,

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Piracquo’s brother, Tomazo—before knowing that De Flores is the killer—takes an instinctive dislike to him: I find a contrariety in nature Betwixt that face and me: the least occasion Would give me game upon him; yet he’s so foul One would scarce touch him with a sword he loved And made account of; so most deadly venomous, He would go near to poison any weapon That should draw blood on him - one must resolve Never to use that sword again in fight, In way of honest manhood, that strikes him Some river must devour it … (5.2.13–22)

Tomazo begins by describing De Flores, as Beatrice-Joanna does, in the language of antipathy: “a contrariety of nature / betwixt that face and me.” As the passage continues, however, he recasts De Flores as venomous to all he comes near—so poisonous, indeed, that the weapon used to cut him must be “devoured” by a river, never to be used again (5.2.22–23). De Flores is so “venomous” that even the residue of his blood would infect anyone struck by the sword thereafter. Although De Flores is marked as poisonous, he only becomes infectious through his sexual alliance with Beatrice-Joanna. Beatrice-Joanna ends the play with an apology to her father, Vermandero, for her misdeeds: “O come not near me, sir, I shall defile you: / I am that of your blood was taken from you / For your better health; look no more upon’t, /But cast it to the ground regardlessly, / Let the common sewer take it from distinction” (5.3.149–153). In an incisive reading of this passage, Gail Kern Paster observes: “By implication, she was never the self-authorizing container of her own blood but merely carried an originally pure portion of the patriarchal blood which has come to differ vilely from itself.”17 Paster here focuses on the moment of putative cure for the disease—bloodletting—and on how drawing on such language circumscribes Beatrice-Joanna’s identity as a subject in her own right. But the passage, and Paster’s reading of it, also suggests that Beatrice-Joanna is the conduit through which De Flores is able to infect Vermandero. This model of contamination does not precisely align with a logic of miscegenation, in which one might expect a parent’s alliance with

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someone of tainted blood to infect future generations. This latter model appears in the anti-Spanish tract A Comparison of the English and Spanish Nations, translated from French into English in 1589: “For even as waters which run out of sulphur springs, have alwayes a taste of brimstone, so men have alwaies imprinted in their manners the vertuous or vitious qualitie of their ancestors …” The tract goes on to describe Spaniards as a “mongrell generation.”18 In The Changeling, contamination travels in the opposite direction: The child infects the parent’s blood. This model becomes more legible if we place it in the context of reputation rather than descent: Beatrice-Joanna’s behavior—both her assistance in the murder of Piracquo and her adulterous alliance with De Flores—has sullied Vermandero’s name. Indeed, he articulates precisely this anxiety: “Oh my name is entered now in that record, / Where till this fateful hour ‘twas never read” (5.3.180–181). Nonetheless, the play’s preoccupation with images of the body, infection, and medicine, especially given its Spanish setting, asks us to read its discussion of “blood” as more than just a metaphor for reputation. An earlier scene, in which De Flores asserts his right to rape Beatrice-Joanna, demonstrates the extent to which behavior and blood are intertwined in the play. When De Flores first demands that Beatrice-Joanna rewards him for murdering Piracquo with her virginity, she refuses: “Think but upon the distance that creation / Set ‘twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there” (3.3.130–131). In his reply, De Flores redefines the value of her blood: Push! Fly not to your birth, but settle you Into what the act has made you, you’re no more now; You must forget your parentage to me – You’re the deed’s creature: by that name You lost your first condition; and I challenge you, As peace and innocency has turned you out And made you one with me. (3.3.134–140)

This passage opens Beatrice-Joanna’s infected blood to multiple interpretations. She will become irreversibly tainted through her loss of chastity, as the play’s staging of virginity tests makes clear, especially since De Flores himself is loathsome and poisonous. But De Flores argues that the damage has already been done: She has become “the deed’s creature” and in so doing becomes “one” with him. The passage demonstrates

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the flexibility of vocabularies of “blood” in the period. In calling on the value of her noble “blood,” Beatrice-Joanna presumes its unchanging essence; “creation” itself has placed her at the top of a hierarchy. De Flores insists, by contrast, that her actions have the power to change the condition of her blood. Beatrice-Joanna ceases to be her father’s daughter and becomes instead the “deed’s creature.” Infection by deed is an odd sort of contamination. It resonates, of course, with tropes of religious conversion (another motif in the play’s imagery).19 It also, just as the ending does, subsumes Beatrice-Joanna’s individuality, reducing her to a part of (“one with”) De Flores. De Flores’s claim to Beatrice-Joanna appears as a sort of travesty of marriage. In marrying, a woman gives up her parentage to become “one flesh” with her husband, subsuming herself into his family and reproducing his lineage. In plotting to commit murder with De Flores, Beatrice becomes one with him—and in so doing degenerates from the noble condition in which she was born. Here the effect of the “deed” (murder, not sex) makes Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores “one,” an act that has the power to change the condition of her blood and unite her with De Flores. The play’s ending reinforces the connection between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores as a blood tie, as Alsemero refers to them as “twins/ Of mischief” (5.3.142–143). Brought together by a deed (or “mischief”), the relationship between the two is reinscribed as a blood relation: They are lovers, but also twins. In The Changeling, anxieties about the permeability of blood—its capacity for degeneration through sexual reproduction and behavior alike—are projected onto the female body. The play ends with a peculiarly bloodless representation of kinship. Vermandero’s infected blood has been purged with the death of Beatrice-Joanna, and his son-in-law Alsemero effectively offers to stand in her stead as Vermandero’s child: “Sir, you have yet a son’s duty living / Please you, accept it; let that sorrow / as it goes from your eye, go from your heart” (5.3.215–216). A few lines prior, Alsemero makes clear that his marriage with BeatriceJoanna was never consummated; the connection between the two men thus excludes her body entirely. Piracquo’s brother Tomazo makes peace with Vermandero when he learns that those responsible for his (blood) brother’s murder are dead. The play ends with declarations of mutual loyalty among these three men, and with Alsemero urging Vermandero to “blot” out the name and memory of Beatrice-Joanna since she has been justly punished. As Frank Whigham observes, this act too appears

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as a bodily excretion, as the shedding of a tear mimics the purging of Vermandero’s tainted blood through Beatrice-Joanna’s death: “as it goes from your eye, go from your heart.”20 Even as the play reduces Beatrice-Joanna to an appendage of the male body (whether her father’s or De Flores’s), it holds on to her significance as a site of contamination. The expulsion of Beatrice-Joanna at the end of the play, her reduction to waste blood to be disposed of in the “common sewer,” expresses a more radical anxiety: that all reproduction is itself a form of degenerating mixture. Beatrice-Joanna is necessary to the father–son relationship that the play establishes between Vermandero and Alsemero even as the potential her body presents to adulterate patrilineal descent must be contained with her death. While I have focused thus far on the play’s central tragic narrative, the comic storyline offers an unexpected counterpoint. As in the central tragic story, a guarded space (here an asylum) suffers an unexpected breach from within. Alibius, the asylum-keeper, is so jealous of his wife that he forbids her from leaving the asylum, but two would-be suitors manage to disguise themselves as a madman and a fool and attempt to seduce his wife Isabella at the asylum, where Alibius believes she is as safely kept as his ward. But Isabella, unlike Beatrice-Joanna, nimbly hoodwinks her would-be seducers and keeps her chastity intact. In the play’s closing lines, as the main characters step forth to announce how they have transformed, the faithful wife tells her husband: “your change is still behind [i.e. yet to come] … you are a jealous coxcomb” (5.3. 209, 211). The contrite Alibius promises to “change now / into a better husband” (5.3.212–213). While Beatrice-Joanna’s fall from grace suggests that no father or husband is invulnerable, Alibius ends the play repentant because he has been overzealous in safeguarding his wife’s chastity. How might we reconcile these seemingly contradictory representations of the female body as a site of contamination? The simplest answer to this question is that the two plots likely had different authors: Most critics concur that Middleton was primarily responsible for the tragic plot, and Rowley the comic one.21 But the play’s setting and imagery suggests another possibility. Curiously, although the asylum is in the same city as Vermandero’s castle (presumably Alicante), no references in the comic plot point to Spain. They are, instead, unambiguously English, with mentions of Bedlam (1.2.189) and a comic bit about a Welshman whose love of cheese has driven him to madness (1.2.191–194).22

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And while the asylum setting, unsurprisingly, gives rise to mentions of transformation, animalization, and medicine, poison and infection do not figure in the imagery employed by characters in these scenes. The comic plot, then, may offer a comforting vision of an implicitly English setting that is, while topsy-turvy (filled with fools and madmen) still free from the specter of contaminating miscegenation. The absence of references to Spain in this comic plot reinforces the connection between Spanish blood and infection in the tragic plot.23 Reading Spanish blood as a site of infection in The Changeling via the conduit of the female body leads to two—in some ways opposing— interpretations. On the one hand, we might privilege a political reading of the play: The downfall of Beatrice-Joanna serves as a warning against the dangers of “mixing” with Spaniards at a moment when the English crown is considering a “Spanish Match.” Order is restored at the end via the less Hispanized (though nominally Spanish) Vermandero, who regains control of his honor, castle, and body through the deaths of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores. On the other, we might align this reading of corrupted Spanish blood with interpretations of the play focused on gender and the female body, which have emphasized the restoration of patriarchy and the subsuming of Beatrice-Joanna’s agency, as she becomes not an actor in her own right but merely a waste product expelled from her father’s body.24 But, in fact, these two readings—and the two sets of anxieties they expose—are mutually reinforcing. Adultery becomes adulteration, and vice versa. Vermandero can gain a “son” only through sleight of hand, as—counterintuitively—Alsemero’s fitness as Vermandero’s heir is demonstrated by the fact that he has not “compounded” with Vermandero’s daughter. And this bloodless form of descent is a fantasy of male autonomy and national purity alike.25

III A similar vision of bloodless male kinship appears in Shakespeare’s Othello. This is not surprising, as Middleton and Rowley clearly had the earlier play in mind as they were writing.26 Othello’s influence can be felt in many aspects of The Changeling: its emphasis on securing the boundaries of a fort or citadel, its preoccupation with rank and class mobility, and with the threatening female body, and of course its allusions to Spain.27 But whereas The Changeling looks at kinship in the context of lineal descent, with Alsemero replacing Beatrice-Joanna as Vermandero’s

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child without the contaminating interference of the female body, Othello enacts the undoing of horizontal homosocial alliances (specifically the “band of brothers” of the Venetian army) in the aftermath of its protagonist’s marriage. The central parallel between The Changeling and Othello is De Flores’s resemblance to Iago: both characters resent their positions in a social hierarchy (Iago resenting Cassio’s promotion and De Flores his position in service despite having “tumbled into th’world a gentleman” [2.1.49]), both are linked to imagery of poison, and both are agents of destruction. References to “honest De Flores” (4.2.36, 5.2.9) in The Changeling are mostly likely a deliberate nod to Othello’s “honest Iago.” But while De Flores, as we have seen, is described as inherently poisonous, Iago merely deals in and dispenses poison, from the first scene when he instructs Roderigo to rouse Brabantio and “poison his delight” (1.1.65) to his smug assertion as he begins to convince Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity, “the Moor already changes with my poison / Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons” (3.3.1997–1998).28 While Beatrice-Joanna describes herself as her father’s infected blood, purged from him by his better health, Desdemona primarily appears as the site of her husband’s contamination (although Brabantio does describe her elopement, it is worth noting, as a “treason of the blood” [1.1.166]). Finally convinced of her betrayal by Iago, Othello describes what he imagines his fate to be: But there where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up; to be discarded thence, Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads, To knot and gender in! … (4.2.59–64)

In these lines, Desdemona is both the place where Othello stores his heart and his site of origin—the fountain from which his current runs. Read in this light, the image puts Desdemona in the place of Othello’s ancestors, conflating the tainted blood of miscegenated ancestry and the infected blood of adultery. The passage thus resembles the anti-­Spanish propaganda cited above, which compares the miscegenated blood of Spaniards to water that comes from a sulfurous source, the flavor of which betrays its impure origins. But we should also read the passage

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as looking forward in time: Othello’s “current” becomes the identity he would hope to replicate in his offspring through reproduction. This process is now tainted.29 At the beginning of the play, Othello describes himself as having descended from “men of royal siege” (1.2.22, emphasis mine). In describing his union with Desdemona as a “cistern for foul toads to knot and gender in,” Othello disrupts his earlier description of unbroken patrilineal descent with the interference of a polluted female body.30 The reference to “foul toads,” while opaque to present-day readers, would have evoked a host of unpleasant associations for an early modern playgoer. In early modern England, toads were associated with filth and lust; a number of medieval and early modern images represent lust as a naked figure accompanied with a toad.31 This is so in part because toads were believed to be the product of spontaneous generation, bred from mud rather than through sexual reproduction; similarly, maggots and flies were believed to emerge from rotting carcasses. Mentions of toads in early modern drama signal lust and debasement. Indeed in The Changeling, Beatrice-Joanna describes De Flores as a “standing toad pool” (2.1.59).32 This passage associates Desdemona with an infectious sexuality, rendering her capable of robbing Othello of his place (“Othello’s occupation’s gone” [3.3.358]) and indeed even of his identity (“that’s he that was Othello” [5.2.289]).33 In Othello’s paranoid imaginings, his union with Desdemona is capable of unsettling the very boundaries of his identity and of his alliance with the men he leads. While Desdemona does not in fact betray Othello, her willingness to marry against her father’s will and outside of the Venetian community leaves her especially vulnerable to such accusations. Here, as in The Changeling, a woman becomes a conduit for relationships between men but, while The Changeling creates kinship between Vermandero and Alsemero without the corrupting influence of the female body, the presumed sharing of Desdemona’s body with Cassio disrupts the homosocial alliance among soldiers and takes from Othello his “occupation.” Spontaneous generation also, though, serves as an apt metaphor for Iago’s ability to coax life out of lies and fantasies. Jealousy, like toads forming from polluted matter, is “a monster / Begot upon itself, born of itself” (3.4.157–158), and Iago himself describes his machinations as a form of conception and birth.34 Othello’s imagination, like summer flies in the shambles, quickens with Iago’s blowing. Iago’s power lies

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in his ability to fix his own conceptions on Desdemona’s body. If The Changeling presents us with a fantasy of bloodless male descent, Othello offers us a nightmare of mistakenly identifying the source of poison.

IV There is a crucial difference between Othello’s and The Changeling’s representations of sex as a site of contamination. In Othello, this perspective is voiced most frequently and persuasively by Iago, the play’s villain. Desdemona is not in fact unchaste, and Othello’s conversion to Iago’s characterization of Desdemona leads to disaster. The play might even be read as an indictment of Iago’s feverish imaginings of Desdemona’s body as corrupted and infectious. In this reading, the most dangerous conceptions are the product not of Desdemona’s body but rather Iago’s mind. But turning to the play’s ending opens the possibility of a more ambivalent reading. In the play’s final speech, Lodovico instructs Iago: Look on the tragic loading of this bed: This is thy work. The object poisons sight; Let it be hid. Gratiano, keep the house, And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor, For they succeed on you… (5.2.368–372)

In his essay “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery and the Hideous in Othello,” Michael Neill observes, “The object that ‘poisons sight’ is nothing less than a mirror for the obscene desires and fears that Othello arouses in its audiences – monsters that the play at once invents and naturalizes, declaring them unproper, even as it implies that they were always ‘naturally’ there.”35 Neill makes this observation in the context of racism, noting that the play does not (as some critics have suggested) oppose racism, but rather that it exposes how racist ideologies take shape. A comparable dynamic emerges in the play’s depiction of the possibly polluting interference of the female body in discourses of kinship exchange—indeed, the two are intimately related; or, more accurately, they are two different facets of the play’s multivalent engagement with the borders of the body, the family, race, and nation. It is no coincidence that the play’s next lines turn to another form of bloodless inheritance from one man to another, as Lodovico informs Gratiano that Othello’s house and fortunes “succeed” to him.

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Both Othello and The Changeling offer up fantasies of male kinship without women, which appear to be unadulterated as relationships mediated through the female body cannot be. But while Othello unpicks the workings of such fantasies, holding them up for our (perhaps voyeuristic) scrutiny, The Changeling endorses the cleansing of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores’s impure alliance as a return to stability, imagined as a kinship that bypasses the interference of the female body. It is not surprising that this latter fantasy emerges in the context of the Spanish Match, at a moment when English playgoers feared the perils of a transnational alliance.36 By focusing on the relationship between anxieties about the boundaries of national or racial identity and the impossibility of self-­replication at the level of the single family, we can better understand the depth and pernicious staying power of Iago’s vicious imagination as well as The Changeling’s excoriation of Beatrice-Joanna’s impurity. While keeping in mind the vast historical difference between early modern England and the U.S.A. in the present day, it still seems important to note that we are in the midst of a cultural moment in which women’s bodies and reproduction as well as national and cultural boundaries are subjected to increasing scrutiny. This reading of The Changeling’s and Othello’s explorations of the impossibility of avoiding contamination is—unfortunately— all too timely.

Notes



1. Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual,” Differences 13 (2002): 16. Further references to this article will be cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 2. The central text for this argument is Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and European Identities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3. I am by no means attempting to minimize the importance of Othello’s blackness and centrality of representations of race in the play overall, in spite of my current focus on sex and reproduction. I have treated questions of race in Othello in detail in “I Have Done the State Some Service: Reading Slavery in Othello Through Juan Latino,” Comparative Drama 47 (2013): 529–551. 4.  On the complex interplay of early modern theories of disease, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

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Press, 2004), 13–21 and passim. On theories of sympathies and antipathies, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 5. See, for example, A. A. Bromham and Zara Bruzzi, The Changeling and the Years of Crisis, 1619–1624: A Hieroglyph of Britain (London and New York: Pinter Pub Ltd, 1990). See also note 8 below. 6.  Carol Thomas Neely, “Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts,” in Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (2004; reprinted, New York: Routledge, 2016), 55–68. 7.  For an overview of this phenomenon, see Margaret Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in Spain and Its Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 8. Unsurprisingly, given the centrality of the topic, there are a number of studies that discuss the significance of metaphors of blood in early modern Europe. As the introduction to one recent collection noted, “blood touches and is codified by every area of human experience.” Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, eds., Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2. On anxieties about the contamination of noble blood through prohibited sexual alliance, see the Introduction and “Part I: Race and Stock,” in The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900, ed. Kimberley Ann Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also Ariane M. Balizet, Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2014) and Margaret Healy, “Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Myth in Early Modern England,” in National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Cross-Cultural Context, ed. Michael Worton and Nana Wilson Tagoe (London: UCL Press, 2004). 9. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. Michael Neill (New York: New Mermaids, 2006), 3. All further citations are from this text and are cited parenthetically in the body of the essay. 10. For a detailed analysis of the play’s setting in relationship to the Spanish Match, see Bromham and Bruzzi, The Changeling and the Years of Crisis, 1619–1624 and Cristina Malcomson, “‘As Tame as the Ladies’: Politics and Gender in The Changeling,” English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990): 320–339. Barbara Fuchs provides a broader overview of critical engagements with the play’s Spanish setting in “Middleton and Spain,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 404–416.

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11. Bromham and Bruzzi, The Changeling and the Years of Crisis, 1619–1624. 12.  Eric J. Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), esp. 27–48. 13. The Coppie of the Anti-Spaniard Made at Paris by a French Man, a Catholique. Wherein Is Directly Proued How the Spanish King Is the Onely Cause of All the Troubles in France. Translated Out of French into English (London, 1590). 14. Barbara Fuchs observes, “In production, it is striking to note how the villain’s name, De Flores, which is insistently repeated, is also the one most clearly recognizable as Spanish.” The Poetics of Piracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 68. 15. She states: “The play’s connections between De Flores’s inferior, infected blood, ‘foul’ appearance, villainy and lasciviousness lead, unsurprisingly, to his racialization.” Bovilsky does not, however, mark this racialization as specifically Spanish. Lara Bovilsky, Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 142. 16. On the play’s relationship to early modern theories of sympathy and antipathy, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 91–109, esp. 100–105. 17. Gail Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 89. 18. A Comparison of the English and Spanish Nation: Composed by a French Gentleman Against Those of the League in Fraunce, Which Went About to Perswade the King to Breake His Alliance with England, and to Confirme It with Spaine. By Occasion Whereof, the Nature of Both Nations Is Liuely Decyphered. Faithfully Translated, Out of French by R.A. (London, 1589), 19–20. 19. One of the play’s central religious motifs is that of the Fall. Numerous readings have discussed Beatrice-Joanna as evoking Eve, with De Flores as the serpent leading her into disobedience. While I do not discuss this aspect of the play here for reasons of space, its resonance for the issues of purity and contamination discussed here is evident. See, among others, Judith Haber, “‘It Could Not Choose but Follow’: Erotic Logic in The Changeling,” Representations 81 (2003): 79–98, esp. 85–86; Michael Neill, “Hidden Malady: Death, Discovery and Distinction in The Changeling,” Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 95–121, esp. 104–105; and Jennifer Panek, “Shame and Pleasure in The Changeling,” Renaissance Drama 42 (2014): 202–203, esp. n. 35. 20. Frank Whigham, “Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama,” ELH 55, no. 2 (July 1, 1988): 343. 21. Rowley may also have had a hand in the opening and closing scenes. See David Nicol, Middleton and Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012), 3–35.

122  E. WEISSBOURD 22. See Michael Neill’s notes to The Changeling, 29. 23.  Carol Thomas Neely describes the two plots as a juxtaposition of Mediterranean tragedy and English city comedy, arguing that they teach audiences to “imagine lascivious Spanish bodies as the opposite of chaste English ones.” In “Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts,” 65. 24. See, among others, Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 88–90; Lisa Hopkins, “Beguiling the Master of the Mystery: Form and Power in The Changeling,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 149–161; Cristina Malcolmson, “‘As Tame as the Ladies’”; and Kay Stockholder, “The Aristocratic Woman as Scapegoat: Romantic Love and Class Antagonism in The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling,” in The Elizabethan Theater XIV, ed. A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1996), 127–151. 25. As Patricia Crawford has observed, the language of blood links representations of familial and national identity: “‘Blood’ Was Also a Metaphor Linking Paternity, Families and Nation,” Blood, Bodies, and Families in Early Modern England (2004; reprinted, New York: Routledge, 2014), 2. 26. Michael Neill, introduction to The Changeling, xiii. 27. I do not address Othello’s engagement with Spain in detail here since that topic has already been treated extensively elsewhere. See Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and Barbara Everett, “Spanish Othello: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.), 64–81. For Othello’s relationship to The Changeling, see Michael Neill, “Hidden Malady: Death, Discovery and Distinction in The Changeling,” Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 95–121. 28. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Edward Pechter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). All further citations are taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 29. On blood and paternity, see Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England, 113–139. 30.  On the play’s anxieties about the female body, see Patricia Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying and the Secret Place of Women,” Representations 44 (1993): 60–95. 31. See Karl P. Wentersdorf, “Animal Symbolism in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Imagery of Sex Nausea,” Comparative Drama 17 (1983): 369–371. 32.  Similarly, the lecherous (and Hispanized) Cardinal in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is described: “The spring in his face is nothing but the engendering of toads” (1.1.150–151). John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, ed. René Weiss (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1996).

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33.  On the significance of Othello’s place, see Michael Neill, “Changing Places in Othello,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 115–131. 34.  See Janet Adelman, who argues, “Iago plainly needs an Othello who can carry the burden of his own contamination; and to some extent the play makes us complicit in the process, as it makes Othello in effect into Iago’s monstrous creation, carrying out Iago’s ‘conception’ as he murders Desdemona on her wedding bed, enacting a perverse version of the childbirth that might have taken place there.” “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race and Projection in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 141–142 and passim. 35.  Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383–412. 36. Carol Thomas Neely makes a similar point about how the two plays represent the implications of geo-humoralism for their Mediterranean subjects: “In Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, first performed sixteen years after Othello, [Othello’s] non-essentialized and individualized continuum of humoral and climatological difference is used to construct a sharply binaristic and hierarchical difference between Spanish Catholic lasciviousness and English Protestant chastity.” In “Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts,” 62.

Works Cited Adelman, Jane. “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race and Projection in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1997): 125–144. Balizet, Ariane M. Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Early Modern Stage. New York: Routledge, 2014. Bovilsky, Lara. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Bromham, A. A., and Zara Bruzzi. The Changeling and the Years of Crisis, 1619– 1624: A Hieroglyph of Britain. London and New York: Pinter Pub Ltd, 1990. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always-Already Heterosexual.” Differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44. Coles, Kimberley Ann, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson, eds. The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. A Comparison of the English and Spanish Nation: Composed by a French Gentleman Against Those of the League in Fraunce, Which Went About to Perswade the King to Breake His Alliance with England, and to Confirme It with Spaine. By Occasion Whereof, the Nature of Both Nations Is Liuely Decyphered. Faithfully Translated, Out of French by R.A. London, 1589.

124  E. WEISSBOURD The Coppie of the Anti-Spaniard Made at Paris by a French Man, a Catholique. Wherein Is Directly Proued How the Spanish King Is the Onely Cause of All the Troubles in France. Translated Out of French into English. London, 1590. Crawford, Patricia. Blood, Bodies, and Families in Early Modern England. 2004; Reprinted. New York: Routledge, 2014. Everett, Barbara. “Spanish Othello: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor.” In Shakespeare and Race, edited by Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells, 64–81. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Fuchs, Barbara. “Middleton and Spain.” In The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, 404–416. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ———. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and European Identities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. The Poetics of Piracy Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Greer, Margaret, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in Spain and Its Empires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Griffin, Eric J. English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Haber, Judith. “‘It Could Not Choose but Follow:’ Erotic Logic in The Changeling.” Representations 81 (2003): 79–98. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Healy, Margaret. “Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Myth in Early Modern England.” In National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Cross-Cultural Context, edited by Michael Worton and Nana Wilson Tagoe, 83–95. London: UCL Press, 2004. Hopkins, Lisa. “Beguiling the Master of the Mystery: Form and Power in The Changeling.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 149–161. Johnson, Bonnie Lander, and Eleanor DeCamp, eds. Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Malcomson, Cristina. “‘As Tame as the Ladies’: Politics and Gender in The Changeling.” English Literary Renaissance 20, no. 2 (1990): 320–339. Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley. The Changeling. Edited by Michael Neill. New York: New Mermaids, 2006. Neely, Carol Thomas. “Hot Blood: Estranging Mediterranean Bodies in Early Modern Medical and Dramatic Texts.” In Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson, 55–68. 2004; Reprinted. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Neill, Michael. “Changing Places in Othello.” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 115–131. ———. “Hidden Malady: Death, Discovery and Distinction in The Changeling.” Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 95–121. ———. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery and the Hideous in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 383–412. Nicol, David. Middleton and Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012. Panek, Jennifer. “Shame and Pleasure in The Changeling.” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 2 (2014): 191–215. Parker, Patricia. “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying and the Secret Place of Women.” Representations 44 (1993): 60–95. Paster, Gail. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Edited by Edward Pechter. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Stockholder, Kay. “The Aristocratic Woman as Scapegoat: Romantic Love and Class Antagonism in The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling.” In The Elizabethan Theater XIV, edited by A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee, 127–151. Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1996. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays. Edited by René Weiss. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1996. Weissbourd, Emily. “I Have Done the State Some Service: Reading Slavery in Othello Through Juan Latino.” Comparative Drama 47 (2013): 529–551. Wentersdorf, Karl P. “Animal Symbolism in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Imagery of Sex Nausea.” Comparative Drama 17, no. 4 (1983): 348–382. Whigham, Frank. “Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama.” English Literary History 55, no. 2 (July 1, 1988): 333–350.

CHAPTER 7

“Amend Thy Face”: Contagion and Disgust in the Henriad Ariane M. Balizet

What’s wrong with Bardolph? A lowly associate of Prince Hal, the character’s red face is described variously, from blushing to hellfire. His nose is memorably scarlet, and his complexion is scarred with pocks and pustules. Whatever his ailment, it does not prohibit him from lasting long enough to appear in four of Shakespeare’s plays—a distinction afforded only three other named characters in the entire canon.1 Bardolph is a minor character in Shakespeare’s histories, dwelling for the most part in Sir John Falstaff’s shadow as part of the rough company of friends who come to signify the everyday world of pleasure and mischief that the young prince must conspicuously reject to become king. In the first part of Henry IV, Prince Hal famously acknowledges his absorption into this world as a shrewd strategy: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, A. M. Balizet (*)  Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_7

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128  A. M. BALIZET That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. (1 Henry IV 1.2.172–178)2

This rejection is usually understood as culminating in the dismissal of Falstaff shortly after King Henry V’s coronation at the end of Henry IV, Part 2. I propose, however, that it is the “foul and ugly” contagion represented by Bardolph—manifested most vividly at his death—that occasions the fullest expression of Henry V’s “wondrous” royal power. The audience is invited to share in other characters’ disgust toward Bardolph, supporting the politically expedient notion that the moral plagues of vice, villainy, and prodigality associated with Prince Hal’s youth can be emblematized in a diseased, contagious character and extinguished by a good and just king. Bardolph’s death is thus a sacrifice that sanitizes King Henry’s political persona and enforces his royal power. In addition to his ubiquity in the tetralogy, Bardolph’s only other distinguishing characteristic is his face, which inspires a derisive remark nearly every time he appears onstage. Shakespeare’s original name for the character, Russell, means “little red,” suggesting that Bardolph’s redness is intrinsic to his character.3 We learn early on that Bardolph’s face—and not his hair, as the name Russell might imply—is remarkably red, when Prince Hal describes him as perpetually blushing and metonymically aligns his face with fire (1 HIV 2.4.285–288). In addition to his pronounced facial redness, Bardolph also suffers from skin lesions, scars, or sores, described in early portions of the tetralogy as “meteors” and “exhalations” (1 HIV 2.4.289–290) and at his death as “bubuncles and whelks and knobs and flames o’fire” (HV 3.7.92–93). Scholars have attributed Bardolph’s disgusting appearance to various afflictions: alcoholism, rosacea, rhinophyma, syphilis, and a sin-blackened soul.4 All seem plausible; as a heavy drinker and frequenter of London brothels, Bardolph may easily be an alcoholic or a syphilitic. The brightness of the imagery used to describe his face—Falstaff calls him “the Knight of the Burning Lamp … a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light!” (1 HIV 3.3.22–36)—suggests that his face is not just occasionally flushed but consistently red, similar to the symptoms of a skin condition like rosacea. Repeated references to his nose imply it is noticeably disfigured, perhaps redder than the rest of his face due to excess of alcohol, swollen with severe acne, or bulbous, hardened, and cracked like sufferers of

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rhinophyma. Bardolph’s face may thus serve as a site of shame (in that his disfigurement is caused by excess of alcohol or venereal disease) or a site of injustice (in that he was born with a skin condition that he cannot control). Yet Bardolph’s role in the Henriad does not seem to be (only) an indictment of drinking and lechery. We have a more compelling example of that, after all, in Falstaff. Nor does he exemplify any kind of noble suffering in the face of prejudice. Instead, Bardolph’s strikingly red face is by turns attributed to alcoholism, a skin condition like rosacea, leprosy, syphilis, and plague—generally in that order, although at times concurrently. Over the course of the plays in which he appears, the harmless Bardolph is depicted as an intensifying and increasingly contagious moral threat against Henry V’s royal power. When he is first introduced, Bardolph sparks disgust in his peers because of his slovenly behavior and appearance; at worst, his vices do not befit the company of a royal prince. By the time of his execution, however, Bardolph’s body is emblematic of the plague itself, terrifying in its potential to infect, indiscriminately, the bodies of those around him: officer or “popular” (HV 4.1.38) soldier, French or English, King or commoner. Bardolph’s execution represents the triumph of royal power over the tyrannous indifference of contagion, and this victory asserts discrimination in physical, moral, and spiritual hierarchies as a royal prerogative. Henry V’s sanctioning of the execution of his old friend exemplifies a victory over contagion through the political application of disgust. Although both terms evoke fundamentally unpleasant experiences, disgust and contagion operate rather differently. Disgust is tied directly to the senses and emotion; contagion is an invisible, unknowable hazard. Disgust is always personal, individual, and particular; contagion is terrifying precisely because it is indiscriminate in its destruction. It is perhaps no surprise that the term contagion and ideas of contagiousness are strongly associated in the early modern imagination with descriptions of plague, which operates both literally and figuratively without regard for order, class, station, or merit. William Bullein’s 1564 Dialogue bothe pleasaunte and pietifull wherein is a goodly regimente against the feuer pestilence, for example, includes a conversation on the indifference of plague initiated by the character Civis, who asks to be delivered from the “pestilence,” “for if it do continue God knoweth, it will not only take away a number of poor people, but many wealthy and lusty merchants also.”5 Thomas Lodge describes the plague as “a pernicious Epidemie, that is to say, a common and popular sickness, which is both contagious & mortal.”6

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John Davies, in The Triumph of Death, imagines plague as an instant leveler of all living creatures: “For, ere the breath of this Contagion, / Could fully touch the flesh of Man, or Beast, / They on the sudden sink, and straight are gone, / So, instantly, by thousands, are decreased!”7 This language persists for several decades, as when the French physician Ambroise Paré reiterates in 1630, “The Plague is a cruel and contagious Disease, which everywhere, like a common Disease, invading Man and Beast, kills very many.”8 The plague is contagious because it is “common” and “popular”; it erases distinctions not only between “poor” and “wealthy” but even between “Man and Beast.” These glimpses of life and death in plague-time illustrate René Girard’s assertions that plague “is universally presented as a process of undifferentiation, a destruction of specificities… The distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.”9 While not exclusive to descriptions of the plague, the idea of contagion was best captured, in early modern England, by the plague’s indiscriminate potency. In contrast, disgust resists generalization. Whether triggered by the smell of garbage, the texture of unfamiliar cuisine, or the sight of a swollen and pockmarked face, the disgust response is particular, unpredictable, and, in many cases, ineffable. The word disgust did not appear in English until roughly halfway through Shakespeare’s career, and the word does not appear in any of his plays. As Benedict Robinson has suggested, however, the earliest years of the seventeenth century demanded “the invention of disgust” and heralded “the emergence of a social world in which the work of producing and maintaining social boundaries was increasingly performed by forms of cultural competence, a socioaesthetics in which the visceral judgment of the sense is linked to other forms of boundary-drawing.”10 Thus, while the word may have been new to Shakespeare’s audiences, the concept was crucially linked to this moment in time, in which Robinson’s “visceral judgment” became a means of expressing (or dismissing) larger systems of power and difference. At stake in the present consideration of early modern disgust is how affective response could be shaped by, and channeled into, political power. When we look at the Henriad in terms of Bardolph, we see the potency of individual disgust abstracted and extrapolated into a generalized moral threat on a national scale. As I will show, depictions of Bardolph’s face consistently draw attention to his unfitness for keeping company with the king, as though his unpleasant visage overrides any mutual fondness the two share and naturalizes the king’s separation from the friends of his “wilder days” (HV 1.2.268).

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Of course, Shakespeare incorporated the idea of repugnance into his sonnets and plays of all genres, usually referring to the dynamic of rejecting something that was once deeply desired. Many of Shakespeare’s most enduring characters inspire disgust, usually in the service of making a crucial point about the attractiveness of that which is taboo, forbidden, and morally or culturally unacceptable. Falstaff’s greasy, flatulent grotesqueness is loveable; Richard III’s self-avowed hideousness highlights his thrilling abilities of seduction. The gust in disgust invokes the process of ingesting and consuming something unpleasant even as it describes one’s trenchant refusal to do so, and so the most disgusting characters within the Shakespearean canon very often follow a narrative in which they are initially deeply compelling (to protagonists and audiences alike) but are ultimately—necessarily, summarily—rejected. Viewed in this light, the ignoble ends of both Falstaff and Richard III confirm Robert DouglasFairhurst’s assertion that disgust “reflects our desire for classification and our anxiety about what threatens classification.”11 In our disgust toward Falstaff’s sweating or Richard III’s villainy, we recognize both our wonder that such figures could become so powerful (or beloved of the powerful) and our relief that their physical and moral transgressions are finally corrected in the course of the plays. With disgusting characters, their ­defiance of classification (as good or bad, desirable or repugnant, attractive or threatening, clean or unsanitary) must be clarified definitively for us to feel satisfied that our disgust was well founded. Since disgust is an emotion rooted in our attention to those personal and social boundaries with which we most closely identify, the definitive solution for such boundary-crossing characters is death. Fundamentally, disgust asserts those qualities of differentiation, distinctiveness, and specificity obliterated by plague; in literature, disgusting characters can, ultimately, operate as Girardian scapegoats, whose sacrifice cleanses the larger community of contagion.12 It is Bardolph, I propose, that serves this purpose in Shakespeare’s histories, and unlike Falstaff, his depiction in terms of contagion serves to underscore King Henry V’s political power—even in wartime—as cleansing and curative of the body politic. Bardolph first appears as an associate of Falstaff’s in Henry IV, Part 1, assisting his benefactor in staging a robbery by drawing blood from his own nose and smearing it over his face and clothes. Bardolph reappears at Falstaff’s side in Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part 2 and follows his king into battle—without Falstaff, of course—in Henry V. Minor character that he is, Bardolph’s

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drinking, petty theft, cowardice, and general benevolence even toward those who are rude to him lend a richness to the world of Eastcheap that confirms both its attractiveness and danger to the future King Henry V. Again, the newly crowned King’s renunciation of Falstaff is typically recognized as his separation from the life of crime and pleasure these characters represent. But Bardolph lingers on, outliving Falstaff only to die at the hands of his fellow soldiers when he is executed in France for theft halfway through Henry V. Bardolph’s death may be his most memorable contribution to the tetralogy, although in Shakespeare’s play the execution itself is not staged. When Henry is told of Bardolph’s execution, the king’s transformation from prodigal prince to divine monarch is finally complete; he responds to the death of his old friend with indifference, and, in using the occasion to make an example of the condemned—“We would have all such offenders so cut off” (3.7.96)—asserts his clear and profound rejection of what he once so fully enjoyed. Bardolph’s death is foretold at his first appearance onstage, when he and the prince discuss his red, splotchy face. Admitting his complicity in Falstaff’s feigned attack, Bardolph swears that his role in the deception makes him blush, and the prince teases Bardolph for thinking he could blush at all. In the discussion that follows, the two compare explanations for his redness: Bardolph. I did that I did not this seven year before—I blushed to hear his monstrous devices. Prince. O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen years ago, and wert taken with the manner, and ever since thou has blushed extempore. Thou hadst fire and sword on thy side, and yet thou rannest away; what instinct hadst thou for it? Bardolph. My lord, do you see these meteors? Do you behold these exhalations? Prince. I do. Bardolph. What think you they portend? Prince. Hot livers and cold purses. Bardolph. Choler, my lord, if rightly taken. Prince. No, if rightly taken, halter. (2.4.283–295)

When Bardolph claims to have blushed at Falstaff’s “monstrous devices,” Prince Hal’s response is incredulous; he counters by asserting that Bardolph’s theft of a cup of wine nearly two decades ago was the cause

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of his blushing “ever since.” No incidental embarrassment could raise a deeper blush on Bardolph’s red cheek, the prince suggests, and he insists in the next line that his face is a “fire” as dangerous as the weapon he carries. Even this gentle mocking of Bardolph is vague on the origins of his facial redness. The prince’s insult implies that an incident 18 years ago caused Bardolph to blush out of shame for being caught in the act of theft, and he blushes still from perpetual drunkenness, wherein “the manner” with which he was “taken” is alcoholism.13 Oblivious to the fact that the prince is making fun of his drunkenness and cowardice (or perhaps simply used to it), Bardolph asks the prince to divine meaning from his face, imagining that the splotches are atmospheric “meteors” and “exhalations.” The prince claims that the “portents” in his face indicate the results of excess drinking: an empty (“cold”) purse and a temperament quick to anger (“hot livers”). Bardolph argues that his red face and short temper are due to a humoral imbalance: “Choler, my lord.” The prince—still joking, rather cruelly—concludes by punning on choler/collar, foretelling Bardolph’s death, by hanging (“halter”) after being “rightly taken” for theft. Bardolph’s first appearance in the tetralogy, of course, includes all the elements of his last.14 Here, he debates the reasons for his “blushing”— theft, drinking, theft to support his drinking, humoral composition, and a destiny to die a criminal’s death—with the man who will issue the order that ultimately condemns him. If his death at the future king’s command is foreshadowed here, the repugnance inspired by his face plays a significant role in explaining his path toward condemnation. Bardolph’s redness and criminal activity are presented here as related; he steals to support his drinking, or he drinks because he is a thief with few morals. Whether we view his actions and appearance humorally, as Bardolph does, or through modern epistemologies of addiction, this scene encourages us to accept that Bardolph may not be fully to blame for his derelict behaviors. That the future king can so easily jest of a gallows’ death for his red-faced friend, however, only emphasizes the impression that Bardolph’s vices are no small matter. His blushing betrays his guilt and shame, and stealing to support his excessive drinking will result in his death. Even if the redness of his face serves as an index of vice, our sympathies for Bardolph deepen as other characters increase their mockery of him. Falstaff launches into a tirade against Bardolph’s appearance later in Henry IV, Part 1 that seems nothing if not excessive. This exchange

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begins innocuously when Bardolph insults Falstaff’s size and the usually good-humored Falstaff responds with showstopping vitriol: Bardolph. Why, you are so fat, Sir John, that you must needs be out of all compass, out of all reasonable compass, Sir John. Falstaff. Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life. Thou art our admiral, thou bearest the lantern in the poop, but ’tis in the nose of thee. Thou art the Knight of the Burning Lamp. Bardolph. Why, Sir John, my face does you no harm. (3.3.18–24)

Falstaff’s witty retort—“Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life”—gives way to an ironic caricature of Bardolph as a lamp-bearing knight, carrying fire in his red-hot nose. In defending his own moral shortcomings (“my life”) by comparing them to Bardolph’s physical appearance (“thy face”), Falstaff implies that neither can be “amended,” improved, healed, or reformed by choice. Falstaff can no sooner change his lifestyle, he snaps, than Bardolph could his ruddy face. After Bardolph interrupts his friend to point out that his face does no harm, Falstaff changes tack, associating the red face before him with disease, death, and damnation: No, I’ll be sworn, I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s head, or a memento mori. I never see thy face but I think upon hellfire and Dives that lived in purple: for there he is in his robes, burning, burning. If thou wert any way given to virtue, I would swear by thy face; my oath should be “By this fire, that’s God’s angel.” But thou art altogether given over, and wert indeed, but for the light in thy face, the son of utter darkness. (3.3.25–32)

Bardolph’s face conjures more than just death—within the scarlet visage Falstaff sees the fires of hell. Dives, the rich man punished in hell after refusing to help the leper Lazarus, endures eternal “burning,” mirroring the earthly torment of leprotic sores in the early modern imagination. “Burning” also suggests that Bardolph is himself suffering from a painful, scarring venereal disease such as syphilis, rendered here as punishment for his abandonment of “virtue” as the “son of utter darkness” (I will return to the interconnectedness of communicable diseases such as leprosy and syphilis below). In this passage, Bardolph is not portrayed as suffering from an innocuous condition like rosacea or a self-destructive

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overindulgence in alcohol; his red face is instead associated with communicable diseases and, by extension, both sin and its punishment. According to Falstaff’s rant, Bardolph’s face is both demonically blackened and miraculously bright. Falstaff describes this “son of utter darkness” as a vision of brightness: When thou rann’st up Gad’s Hill in the night to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus or a ball of wildfire, there’s no purchase in money. (3.3.32–35)

Both “ignis fatuus” (“foolish fire”) and “wildfire” describe the natural phenomenon of the will-o’-the-wisps, in which flammable gases ignite and glow above marshy ground. The notion that such phenomena were attributable to mischievous fairies seeking to mislead or delude travelers in dark places was popular during this period, emphasizing the “foolish” or false hope represented in this kind of light.15 The brightness of Bardolph’s face is not a true or clarifying light but an emblem of temptation and even malice. Falstaff concludes by praising Bardolph’s face as indispensable to his own drinking: Falstaff. Oh, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light! Thou has saved me a thousand marks in links and torches walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern. But the sack that thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandler’s in Europe. I have maintained that salamander of yours with fire any time this two-and-thirty years, God reward me for it. Bardolph. ’Sblood, I would my face were in your belly! Falstaff. God-a-mercy! So should I be sure to be heartburned. (3.3.35–44)

Bardolph’s face is here a “perpetual triumph,” a miracle that enables and supports Falstaff’s vices. The “everlasting bonfire-light” issuing from his burning face has saved Falstaff a fortune on candles and torches as he stumbles from tavern to tavern in the night. Bardolph interjects twice, first out of reason and then out of anger, but Falstaff’s disgust is undeterred. To some degree, the imagery of “perpetual,” “everlasting,” and hellish fires suggests that Bardolph was ever thus; he was born (and/or cursed) with a flushed, reddish face like that caused by rosacea or rhinophyma. This unrelenting mockery of a friend for something he cannot help (and which, indeed, does Falstaff no harm) seems particularly

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cruel.16 Falstaff’s persistent connections between Bardolph’s supernatural redness and their career of drinking, however, suggest that Bardolph’s face is the product of alcohol, thereby placing significant blame on Bardolph for his disgusting appearance. Given the speaker, of course, this is no small criticism. Finally, the imagery of sin, “burning” flesh, and death throughout this exchange implies that Bardolph’s disfigurement could be due to a sexually transmitted infection, ratcheting up the potency of Falstaff’s disgust by raising the specter of infectivity. I include this passage at length to illustrate the multiple indictments against Bardolph registered in his displeasing face: Falstaff is just as happy to imply his friend was cursed with a reddish complexion as he is to assert Bardolph’s “burning” face is a symptom of a communicable disease. Falstaff’s personal disgust here is leveraged into a characterization of Bardolph as a moral and, now, material threat to others. Bardolph endures several more epithets about his “red face” (MWW 1.1.147) in Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part 2, and by the end of the latter play the origins of his disgusting visage are more trenchantly associated with sexual impropriety and damnation. The character Poins returns to the “blushing” motif to mock Bardolph’s redness as a response to sexual activity: “Come, you virtuous ass, you bashful fool, must you be blushing? Wherefore blush you now? What a maidenly man-at-arms are you become? Is’t such a matter to get a pottle-pot’s maidenhead?” (2 HIV 2.2.66–69). Poins is ridiculing Bardolph’s appearance by imagining him “deflowering” a bottle of wine, but his disgust has the effect of painting Bardolph as a man blushing at unremarkable sexual exploits. This particular form of derision is soon adopted by the unnamed boy that serves these men, who describes Bardolph’s face as indistinguishable from red lattice-work over a window or a red piece of cloth: ’A calls me e’en now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could discern no part of his face from the window. At last I spied his eyes, and methought he had made two holes in the ale-wife’s red petticoat, and so peeped through. (2 HIV 2.2.70–73)

Again, in the service of humiliating Bardolph for his red face, the boy describes him in a position of sexual arousal or transgression. Looking in through an alehouse window or “peeping” through a woman’s red petticoat, Bardolph’s redness is here figured as a sexual response and not an entirely drunken one.

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The sexually transmitted infection that most closely resembles these depictions of Bardolph is syphilis—the “French Pox”—which spread dramatically, with devastating consequences, throughout the sixteenth century.17 Its symptoms included a “burning” rash, sores, and hair loss; nasal lesions could collapse or destroy the nose completely. Confusion of various diseases including leprosy, gonorrhea, and syphilis meant that nearly any condition perceived as both disfiguring and communicable through touch might be diagnosed as the French Pox, and, conversely, a reported “leper” might in fact be a person suffering from syphilis.18 The foreignness of the French Pox served a particular political purpose in the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII’s campaign against “pocky” (that is, syphilitic) priests drew clear boundaries between English and “other” standards of religious piety, morality, and hygiene. Syphilis and other diseases transmitted through sexual contact became crucial markers on the early modern index of disgust: embodied, infective disease was metonymically associated with an abstract notion of national identity defined by religious difference. Again, Bardolph’s patronage of London brothels would certainly put him at risk for contracting a sexually transmitted infection, and this moment in Henry IV, Part 2 is evocative of the French Pox, in the sense that Bardolph’s red, disfigured face is directly connected to his sex life. Although earlier (and later) descriptions of his redness are completely uninterested in Bardolph’s sexual exploits, here Bardolph’s face is construed as one symptom of a communicable disease. Since it was believed that one could contract syphilis by drinking from the same cup or sleeping in the same sheets as an infected person,19 the moral and physical wellness of the prince’s bedfellows is of a higher concern at this moment than in earlier points in the Henriad. Bardolph’s diagnosis has fundamentally shifted; as the hour of King Henry IV’s death approaches, the depravity represented by Prince Hal’s old friends has taken a more dangerous form. A few scenes later, the prince demands of Falstaff whether “honest” Bardolph, “whose zeal burns in his nose, [is] of the wicked?” (2 HIV 2.4.298–299). To this, Falstaff replies, “The fiend hath pricked down Bardolph irrevocable, and his face is Lucifer’s privy kitchen, where he doth nothing but roast malt-worms” (2 HIV 2.4.301–303). Here, Bardolph’s redness is a demonic flame, and his presence at the dawning of the new king’s reign represents a broader and more generalized threat of sin and moral contagion.

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Bardolph’s face is depicted as no less than the product of plague by the time King Henry V leads his men into France. Bardolph’s last appearance onstage is rather unremarkable in its brevity and tone (he cheers his fellows into the breach at Harfleur in 3.2). Just after he leaves the stage, a boy delivers a lengthy monologue on Bardolph’s theft and cowardice. We do not see Bardolph again but learn from Pistol that he has been “given the doom of death / For pax of little price” (HV 3.7.40–41). As Prince Hal predicted, Bardolph dies by “halter” for robbing a church. But here, when describing Bardolph’s face, Fluellen uses language specifically reserved for plague victims: His face is all bubuncles, and whelks, and knobs and flames o’fire, and his lips blows at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes plue and sometimes red. But his nose is executed, and his fire’s out. (HV 3.7.91–95)

Although some modern film versions of Henry V show Bardolph’s execution (or at least his hanging body) to raise the emotional stakes for the young king at this moment, Shakespeare tellingly does not show Bardolph’s body onstage once we learn of his imminent death.20 Instead, Fluellen describes his face as memorably disgusting, but only “sometimes red”: Fluellen focuses on the blemishes on Bardolph’s face, calling them “bubuncles,” “whelks,” “knobs,” and “flames o’fire.” Whatever affliction may cause the pocks or scars Fluellen describes as “whelks,” his new coinage, bubuncles, conflates the “carbuncle”—an infected, red pimple—and “bubo”—the swollen mass associated with bubonic plague.21 In other words, Bardolph’s face still has the capacity to inspire disgust, but that disgust is framed specifically in terms of the threat a contagious disease poses to the king and/or his fellow soldiers. Bardolph, once considered merely ugly and harmless, is now a potent agent of contagion that must be eradicated. The pax he is convicted of stealing, furthermore, would have added to this perception, as it connected him materially to both the Roman Catholic Church and the possibility of mass contamination. The pax—a small tablet depicting the crucifixion and fitted with a handle—was passed around during the mass to be kissed by the congregation. The thought of such an object in the hands of a plague victim would have been particularly alarming, since it functionally replicates the transmission of disease from one to many. Thus, when King Henry welcomes Bardolph’s execution in France, the king is “cutting off” a diseased and

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dangerous member of his company. Ultimately, Bardolph is not condemned for theft; he is condemned for a displeasing—that is, disgusting—face, and the anxieties of profligacy, dissolution, and contagion that face represents. Crucially, it is the acknowledgment and destruction of this contagious body that emblematizes King Henry at the very height of his power. Shakespeare’s Henry plays revolve around the thrilling notion that the prince is a man capable of caring deeply for a friend as ugly and ill-mannered as Bardolph, but they conclude by asserting the king is a man capable of eliminating his most cherished friends to legitimize his throne and seek glory for England. Bardolph’s trajectory from merely disgusting to dangerously contagious reflects the evolution from individual to collective responsibility placed on Henry V. It is worth noting, however, that Shakespeare gives us little evidence that Bardolph is actually afflicted with the plague; he would be unable to march through the French countryside and pilfer sacred objects from churches if he were. Indeed, the very fact of Bardolph’s reappearance in these plays runs contrary to most of the diagnoses suggested by his peers. Even though his red, splotchy face is presented in terms of communicable diseases such as leprosy, syphilis, and plague, Bardolph does not die feverish and bedridden (like Falstaff). Strictly speaking, Bardolph does not actually exhibit most of the signs of a communicable disease. The contagion represented by the character of Bardolph, though depicted in the material terms of plague, is more properly understood figuratively as an extension of his slovenly, thieving behavior. The king ruthlessly dismisses the execution of his old friend as a necessary means of protecting the nation he seeks to conquer from his own men. King Henry’s indifference to friend or foe when “cutting off” offenders, furthermore, resembles another conquering force marching through England during Shakespeare’s career: the plague itself. Plague treatises often compared the disease to a tyrant, destroying civic order, triumphing in cities and towns with bodies of men, women, and children at his feet. For Thomas Dekker, the “only blot of dishonor that stuck upon this invader, being this, that he played the tyrant, not the conqueror… he did very much hurt, yet some say he did very much good.”22 Davies calls the plague “Great Monarch of Earth’s ample world” and asserts, “though he reigns, just is his regiment. / Our sins (foul blots) corrupt the Earth and Air; / Our sins (souls’ botches) all this all defile.”23 The ambivalence of contemporary accounts of the plague—as an indifferent tyrant and God’s righteous scourge—reflects the political repercussions

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of ruling during an epidemic, according to Rebecca Totaro, whose “portrait of plague-time England is one we might recognize more readily through a Foucauldian lens of the disciplined body: each monarch dreaming of plague in order to increase his or her control, the reverse of the festival-time of liberty.”24 Royal recognition of contagion is itself an expression of political power; under the guise of protecting all members of the body politic, monarchs had the ability to consolidate power during the emergency of plague season. Henry V’s directive at the news of Bardolph’s death that “there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language” (HV 3.7.97–100) is taken as a measure of his willingness to sacrifice his own (common) soldiers to buy the trust of French subjects. When he hears of York and Suffolk’s deaths, however, his grief and anger prompt him to order “every soldier [to] kill his prisoners” (HV 4.6.37). Henry reserves the right to discriminate between common and noble, French and English, comrade and condemned. Recognizing and fully eliminating moral contagion thus becomes a potent and dazzling expression of political power. Earlier, I argued that Bardolph’s two most prominent features are his red, disfigured face and his persistence throughout the Henry plays. To that end, we glimpse a ghostly image of Bardolph in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (All Is True).25 The play concludes with the birth of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, which occasions a lengthy monologue by Thomas Cranmer prophesizing the magnificent reign of Queen Elizabeth I. One of the play’s final scenes features a porter and his associate, breathlessly recounting their attempts to hold back the press of subjects clamoring to see the new princess. Among the horde of people barging in, the porter’s man singles out one: There is a fellow somewhat near the door, he should be a brazier by his face, for, o’ my conscience, twenty of the dog-days now reign in’s nose; all that stand about him are under the line, they need no other penance: that fire-drake did I hit three times on the head, and three times was his nose discharged against me; he stands there, like a mortar-piece, to blow us. (HVIII 5.3.36–42)

This character is not named and does not speak; he is merely described in terms of his red face and large, leaky nose. Distinguishable only by the disgust he inspires in the porter’s man, this fellow’s redness may be due

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to a profession as a metalworker as the word “brazier” would imply. Or, since “twenty of the dog-days” reign in his nose, perhaps the redness is indicative of something more threatening, since the oppressive dog days of summer were seen as unwholesome, unhealthy, and the most likely time for outbreaks of plague. The crowds around him “need no other penance,” as they endure the purgative heat of his face and nose. The OED, citing this instance, includes a definition of “fire-drake” as a person with a red nose, but other definitions in use at the time describe a person whose profession has to do with fire (i.e., a brazier), a meteor, or a dragon.26 That this figure represents some threat to the queen and new princess is further emphasized by the way in which his face becomes a weapon: His nose is “discharged” against the speaker—presumably, by sneezing—and he is like a “mortar-piece,” waiting to explode. This man’s unpleasant visage suggests the potential danger of this mob without doing or saying anything. His primary offense, like the rest of the crowd, is his forcible attempt to cross a guarded boundary. That the boundary in question separates royal bodies (and thus, royal power) from the subjects over which they rule heightens the threat of contagion represented by this moment. In the next scene, at Elizabeth’s christening, Cranmer waxes prophetic about the princess’s long, peaceful, and prosperous reign. A successor will emerge, “Who from the sacred ashes of her honor / Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was” (HVIII 5.4.45–46). After generating disgust and fear of contagion in the mob scene, the play swiftly moves to a grand proclamation of royal power, concluding with no less than the birth of the Stuart dynasty. The “fire-drake’s” proximity to the infant princess juxtaposed with the christening scene’s lofty image of Elizabeth as the “maiden phoenix” (HVIII 5.4.40) suggests that royal power entails and is sustained by the acknowledgment and rejection of contagion. Not only does this unnamed figure resemble Bardolph, he serves precisely the same function that Bardolph does in the Henriad. The disgust sparked by both red-faced figures is rooted within the immediate, visceral apprehension of contamination in crowds and near royal persons. The “fire-drake’s” red face and leaky nose inspire disgust in the characters onstage and, by extension, in the audience. We do not see this figure onstage in Henry VIII, but we fear for the princess’s safety all the same, anticipating the violent transgression of his body into her chamber, like his contagious bodily fluids into the air. The disgust motivated

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by his presence serves as a necessary premise, however, for Cranmer’s transcendent prophecy in the next scene, in which he describes the Stuart dynasty rising from Elizabeth’s virgin ashes. The same is true of Bardolph’s corpse, which—hanging from a makeshift gallows in France—marks the “cutting off” of Henry V’s wilder and more unstable ways. The disgust response, alongside the fear of and transcendence over contagion, is thus imbricated with the triumphs of two of England’s most celebrated wartime monarchs. In both cases, the threat of contagion throws into relief the power of the monarchy at its most visible moments of transition: the conquering of a foreign nation and production of an heir. What’s wrong with Bardolph? The answer may be, simply, nothing much: He’s a lowlife who happens to have a ruddy complexion. While his character takes on dire and foreboding characteristics over the course of the Henriad, the study of Bardolph does not, ultimately, teach us much about the actual experience of fearing contagion and surviving epidemics in the early modern period. Instead, Bardolph emblematizes the figurative potency of contagion as a moral threat within the dramatization of a new king’s ascension. By recasting individual disgust in terms of large-scale contagion, the plays demonstrate how even the most personal and immediate of human emotions can be mobilized to validate and authorize political power. It is through this depiction of the red-faced Bardolph as a source of contagion that King Henry is able to “amend” his life and secure his reign.

Notes



1.  According to Jeffrey Wilson, the characters that appear in four of Shakespeare’s plays are Bardolph, Margaret of Anjou, and the brothers of King Henry V: John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, first Duke of Gloucester and first Earl of Pembroke. “Stigma in Shakespeare” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2012), 223. See also Charles L. Draper, “Falstaff’s Bardolph,” Neophilologus 33, no. 1 (1949): 222. 2. William Shakespeare, The First Part of Henry the Fourth, in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). All subsequent references to Shakespeare’s work refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

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3. See Jean Howard, introduction to 1 Henry V, in The Norton Shakespeare, 1172. 4. See Draper, 225–226; Jeffrey Kahan, “Bardolph and ‘Carry Coals’: A New Reading for Henry V 3.2.45,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 14, no. 3 (2001): 14–15; and Wilson, 218–238. 5. William Bullein, A Dialogue Bothe Pleasaunte and Pietifull Wherein Is a Goodly Regimente Against the Feuer Pestilence with a Consolacion and Comfort Against Death (London, 1564), A4r. 6. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), Bv. 7. John Davies, Humours Heau’n on Earth with the Ciuille Warres of Death and Fortune. As Also the Triumph of Death: Or, the Picture of the Plague, According to the Life, as It Was in Anno Domini. 1603 (London, 1609), 222. 8. Ambroise Paré, A Treatise of the Plague Contayning the Causes, Signes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure Thereof (London, 1630), 1. 9.  René Girard, “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15, no. 5 (1974): 833–834. 10. Benedict Robinson, “Disgust c. 1600,” ELH 81, no. 2 (2014): 555. 11.  Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, “Tragedy and Disgust,” in Tragedy in Transition, ed. Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 64. 12. Girard, 841. 13. Hamlet laments that the Danish are seen as heavy drinkers, which he describes as “the manner” to which he was born (Hamlet 1.4.15). On the other hand, Bardolph being “taken with the manner” is often glossed as “caught in the act of stealing,” which makes sense given that he is, of course, a thief. 14. Wilson also notes the tragic elegance of Bardolph’s trajectory. See “Stigma in Shakespeare,” 218–238. 15.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Ignis Fatuus,” accessed June 29, 2016. 16. Contrary to popular belief, alcoholism does not cause rosacea or rhinophyma; alcohol may trigger flare-ups in some sufferers, but alcohol is not the root cause of either disease. 17. Louis F. Qualtiere and William W. E. Slights, “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox,” Literature and Medicine 22, no. 1 (2003): 2–3. 18. See Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (London, UK, and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd., 1994), 3, 5. The conflation of leprosy with a “burning” affliction in Falstaff’s version of the Lazarus story registers this understanding toward communicable diseases during the period.



144  A. M. BALIZET 19. Fabricius, 20. 20. Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film version of the play shows Henry consenting to and watching the entire execution, while the 2012 PBS Hollow Crown series version depicts the king coming upon Bardolph’s hanged corpse. For more discussion on cinematic approaches to Bardolph’s death, see Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 153–154 and “The Death of Bardolph: Branagh and Olivier Rewrite Henry V,” in Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad, ed. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008), 157–168. 21. Sujata Iyengar, Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary (New York: Continuum, 2011), 49, 54. 22. Thomas Dekker, 1603—The Wonderful Year: Wherein Is Shewed the Picture of London Lying Sicke of the Plague (London, 1603), Dv. 23. Davies, 245. 24. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, eds., Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 13. 25. I am grateful to Paul Budra, who first drew my attention to this scene. 26.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Fire-Drake,” accessed June 29, 2016.



Works Cited Bullein, William. A Dialogue Bothe Pleasaunte and Pietifull Wherein Is a Goodly Regimente Against the Feuer Pestilence with a Consolacion and Comfort Against Death. London: Kingston, 1564. Chernaik, Warren. The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. “The Death of Bardolph: Branagh and Olivier Rewrite Henry V.” In Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad, edited by Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, 157–168. Rouen: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008. Davies, John. Humours Heau’n on Earth with the Ciuille Warres of Death and Fortune. As Also the Triumph of Death: Or, the Picture of the Plague, According to the Life, as It Was in Anno Domini 1603. London, 1609. Dekker, Thomas. 1603—The Wonderful Year: Wherein Is Shewed the Picture of London Lying Sicke of the Plague. London, 1603. Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. “Tragedy and Disgust.” In Tragedy in Transition, edited by Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone, 58–77. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

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Draper, Charles L. “Falstaff’s Bardolph.” Neophilologus 33, no. 1 (1949): 222–226. Fabricus, Johannes. Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England. London, UK and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd., 1994. Girard, René. “The Plague in Literature and Myth.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15, no. 5 (1974): 833–850. Iyengar, Sujata. Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary. New York: Continuum, 2011. Kahan, Jeffrey. “Bardolph and ‘Carry Coals’: A New Reading for Henry V 3.2.45.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 14, no. 3 (2001): 14–15. Lodge, Thomas. A Treatise of the Plague. London, 1603. Paré, Ambroise. A Treatise of the Plague Contayning the Causes, Signes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure Thereof. London, 1630. Qualtiere, Louis F., and William W. E. Slights. “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox.” Literature and Medicine 22, no. 1 (2003): 1–24. Robinson, Benedict. “Disgust c. 1600.” ELH 81, no. 2 (2014): 553–583. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt (general editor), with Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. ———. All Is True (Henry VIII). In Norton Shakespeare, 3269–3352. ———. Hamlet. In Norton Shakespeare, 1751–1853. ———. Henry IV, Part 1. In Norton Shakespeare, 1165–1243. ———. Henry IV, Part 2. In Norton Shakespeare, 1245–1326. ———. Henry V. In Norton Shakespeare, 1533–1611. ———. The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Norton Shakespeare, 1463–1531. Totaro, Rebecca, and Ernest B. Gilman, eds. Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. Wilson, Jeffrey Robert. “Stigma in Shakespeare.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2012.

CHAPTER 8

Bad Dancing and Contagious Embarrassment in More Dissemblers Besides Women Jennifer Panek

To illustrate the “peculiarly contagious” nature of shame, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick used to ask her students to imagine a dishevelled man wandering into their lecture hall, urinating, and wandering out again: “I pictured the excruciation of everyone else in the room,” she writes, “each looking down, wishing to be anywhere else yet conscious of the inexorable fate of being exactly there, inside the individual skin of which each was burningly aware; at the same time, though, unable to stanch the hemorrhage of painful identification with the misbehaving man.” For anyone susceptible to shame—a category that includes many, if not most of us—to witness “someone else’s embarrassment, stigma, debility, bad smell, or strange behaviour” is to be flooded with a sensation “whose very suffusiveness seems to delineate [one’s] precise, individual outlines in the most isolating way imaginable.”1 Might shame have been similarly contagious in the early modern theatre? As the current “affective turn” J. Panek (*)  University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_8

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makes itself felt in the study of early modern drama, questions about the circulation of affect between stage and spectators, the passions embodied by actors and the passionate bodies that paid for the pleasure of being moved by them, are expanding and revitalizing historicist critical practice.2 Shame, so far, has proven one of the thornier affects for such investigation. One goes to the theatre—then, as now—to laugh or to weep, to be thrilled with fear or with admiration; one does not go, presumably, to feel ashamed. If shame is on the theatrical menu, one might go, according to Alison Hobgood’s recent analysis of audience participation in the shaming of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, to join the shamers in their privileged position of knowledge and gleeful scorn towards the shamed; one thus enjoys the spectacle of someone else’s shame, all the while resisting any admission of one’s “own bodily potential for embarrassing, humoral exposure.”3 Or one might go, as Natalie Bainter suggests, to empathize with the shamed Anne Frankford in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, a play that requires its audience to evaluate the justice of the repentant adulteress’s deathbed blush (99).4 What Bainter discusses as “empathy,” however, is more accurately “sympathy”: compassion and concern for what another is feeling, not a mirroring of that feeling in oneself.5 In what circumstances, then, might an audience “catch” a character’s—or an actor’s—shame? And how might a playwright deploy the effects of such contagion? The scene this essay will use to explore the circulation of shame in the theatre has attracted far less critical attention than either the shaming of Malvolio or the shame-induced death of Anne Frankford: it is a peculiarly humiliating dance performance in More Dissemblers Besides Women (c. 1614), one of Thomas Middleton’s lesser-known comedies for the King’s Men. The dance is the climax of a subplot involving the Page, a young woman seduced and then discarded by a man who keeps her around as a cross-dressed servant, hiding her advanced pregnancy under male disguise. Transferred to the service of the Duchess of Milan, the Page is obliged to take singing and dancing lessons, during which she finds herself faced with an excruciatingly shame-ridden dilemma: either she risks revealing her true sex and unwed pregnancy by attempting the athletic masculine dance steps demanded by the dancing master, who believes her to be an incompetent boy, or else she has her sex quite literally exposed for all to see, since if she refuses, the teacher will punish her by pulling down her hose. Choosing the risk of exposure over the certainty, she attempts the dance and collapses in labour,

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“meeting [her] shame … in a coranto” (5.1.234–235).6 On one level, the humiliation of Middleton’s Page can be read as conforming to the pattern laid out by Gail Kern Paster’s seminal work on early modern shame, which reveals a culture in which high-status men displace anxieties over their own unruly humoral bodies onto the bleeding, birthing, lactating, leaking, and thus endlessly shameful bodies of women.7 Characterized by the leaky, feminine permeability coded in her frequent weeping (e.g. 1.2.152; 3.1.22 s.d.; 3.1.132–136), the Page suffers first her body’s failure to enact the disciplined self-mastery reserved for courtly young men, and then compounds that failure through the ultimate bodily uncontrol of the birthing process, typically shrouded in an “aura … of concealment and shame.”8 The Page’s ordeal could easily be read as a kind of moralizing poetic justice against her sexual transgression, as John Jowett suggests in his introduction to the Oxford edition of the play: “As so often in Middleton, the physical body reproves and betrays the person’s moral failings.”9 When we attend, however, to the circulation of affect produced by this scene—looking past the gendered shame of the character’s female body to the embodied emotions of the boy actor playing the Page and the audience’s susceptibility to the phenomenon of “empathic embarrassment”—what becomes visible is not misogyny or moralizing, but an affective experience that breaks down the assumption that some bodies are more shameful than others. How does empathic embarrassment function, and how might it apply to the early modern theatre? Before we get to “empathic,” it is worth taking a moment to consider “embarrassment,” a word that did not acquire its modern sense until the eighteenth century. Early moderns could feel “ashamed,” or “abashed,” or be put “out of countenance,” but “embarrassed” was still in the early stages of its semantic journey from “hampered or impeded,” through “confused or perplexed,” to “awkward and self-conscious.”10 The relationship between embarrassment and shame is a source of debate for modern psychologists: Silvan Tomkins, whose work on shame has become influential (via Sedgwick) in cultural and literary studies, considers them to be essentially the same emotion, part of the “shame-humiliation” affect.11 Other, more recent research, while acknowledging important similarities, attempts to distinguish embarrassment, which stems from “violations of social conventions that increase social exposure,” from shame, which follows serious moral transgressions signalling “the failure to live up to expectations . . . that define the ‘core self’.” Shame is “defined by the sense of being a bad,

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immoral person, long-lasting anger and disgust at the self, the feeling of isolation from others, and the inclination to apologize.” In embarrassment, by contrast, one feels “awkward, foolish, nervous, surprised, and self-conscious”; embarrassment is also correlated with amusement, both in the flustered smile or laugh of the embarrassed subject and in the reaction of onlookers.12 Evidence suggests, unsurprisingly, that early modern subjects did experience feelings that correspond closely to the latter description and described them with various terms. Embarrassment’s association with laughter, for instance, brings to mind the early modern English phrase “to laugh [someone] out of countenance,” and its resultant affect: a state of feeling awkward and foolish as a result of ridicule, without significant moral shading. “Abashed” can describe a similar state, as in Thomas Wilson’s account, in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), of a witty speaker quelling dissent with pointed humour: “we se that men are full oft abashed, and putte out of countenaunce, by suche tauntynge meanes, and those that have so doen, are compted to be fine men, and pleasaunt felowes.”13 We are also firmly in the territory of “awkward, foolish, nervous, surprised, and self-conscious” with “bashful” in such contexts as when Tim Yellowhammer, in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, finds himself in a room full of older women whom he’ll have to kiss in greeting: “He’s so bashful, that’s the spoil of youth,” explains his mother (3.2.115).14 Tim does not name (beyond “monstrous absurdity!”) what he feels as his mother infantilizes him before her friends—feeding him sweets, threatening him with whippings, and reminiscing about his schoolroom failures—but his protests enact a desperate attempt to save face; as Steven Mullaney reminds us, “The power of words is not to reduce feeling to a specific term, to affix a label to it, but to trace and enact the syntax of a feeling.”15 Even “shame” and its variations, however, are used for social discomforts as well as moral transgressions. What Beatrice-Joanna, indicted for murder and adultery, feels as “shame” in her last lines of The Changeling—“Forgive me Alsemero, all forgive: / ’Tis time to die when ’tis a shame to live” (5.3.178–179)—is clearly different from what Win Littlewit in Bartholomew Fair feels—along with the need to pee— when she murmurs to her husband about “a thing I am ashamed to tell you” (4.2.104), or what Kate feels when she tells Petruccio that she is “ashamed to kiss” (5.1.127) in the public street.16 While it could certainly be argued that these shames share a single root in the exposure of the unruly sexual body, and thus exist on the same morally based spectrum, it would be hard to argue that they felt the same.17

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My point is not that the feelings of Wilson’s abashed auditor, or Tim Yellowhammer—let alone Kate or Win—can be mapped exactly onto modern embarrassment, but rather that accounting for this lighter, less morally inflected form of shame allows us to complicate the assumption that shame scenarios must involve a division, or at least a strenuous attempt to create a division, between the “shamer” and the “shamed.” Embarrassment, in significant part through the workings of contagion, would seem to do precisely the opposite. Sedgwick, following Tomkins, describes shame as “a form of communication,” in that the downcast, blushing face broadcasts not only distress, but also “a desire to reconstitute the interpersonal bridge.”18 Where shame aims to reconstitute that bridge—shame marking the disruption of a previously established flow of positive affect between the wrongdoer and others—embarrassment appears to build such a bridge, even between strangers. Witnessing another’s embarrassment, according to numerous modern studies, produces “high levels of affiliative emotions such as amusement and sympathy … which increase interpersonal liking and forgiveness”: the studies’ participants chose embarrassed political candidates over unembarrassed ones, forgave embarrassed drug dealers, volunteered extra hours to help embarrassed students, and took more condoms from embarrassed condom-use advocates.19 Moreover, witnessing another’s embarrassment—or even a situation in which “relevant norms of social conduct” decree that one should be embarrassed—is likely to embarrass the onlooker, suggesting that the “affiliative emotions” awakened by the spectacle of embarrassment are experienced alongside the contagion of embarrassment itself. Participants who watched as a co-participant performed embarrassing tasks displayed levels of physiological arousal that corresponded more strongly to their self-ratings of empathic embarrassment—feeling embarrassed with the co-participant—than they did to other reported feelings such as sympathy or “sorriness.”20 The precise mechanism by which affect is “caught” by one individual from another remains the subject of debate: the hypothesis that involuntary facial, gestural, and vocal mimicry produces emotional convergence has been superseded, to some extent, by claims for the primacy of mirror neurons, but these claims themselves are a matter of dispute.21 There is still something mysterious in how the body responds to others’ embarrassment with embarrassment. “The body,” of course, is problematic. Whose body? Can the empathic embarrassment of twentieth-century laboratory subjects tell us anything about the affective experience of early modern English theater audiences?

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The authors of the studies cited above make no claims for the universality of the effects they observed: Rowland S. Miller concludes, for instance, that “some cultures may make empathic embarrassment more likely than others. As a state based on knowledge of normative social conduct and experience with past social transgressions, empathic embarrassment is no doubt fundamentally influenced by a person’s enculturation.”22 The early modern belief in the contagious nature of the passions, however, has been convincingly documented in recent scholarship: rather than gestural mimicry or mirror neurons, contemporary scientific discourse posited imperceptible but material “spirits” that emanated from the passionate individual to be absorbed by the onlooker. Susceptibility to contagion, as routinely observed in treatises on the plague, also required a kind of compatibility or affinity between the infectious agent and the victim, an idea that recent scholarship on sympathetic contagion plausibly extends beyond the transmission of disease to the moral and affective realm. “Catching” another’s passion would thus indicate, in itself, the interpersonal affiliation that modern psychologists see as the effect, rather than the cause, of emotional contagion.23 In the specific case of embarrassment, one might speculate that the familiarity of early modern English subjects with a panoply of judicial shame punishments—from public whippings to sermon-time penances for white-sheeted fornicators—may have offered a certain immunity to the humiliations of their peers, disposing them to derision rather than to fellowfeeling. However, while individual responses undoubtedly depended on a wide variety of factors, including one’s relationship to the shamed individual and whether one felt the punishment was deserved, it is worth noting that the re-integrative interpersonal function of shame was explicitly propounded by the ecclesiastical courts: “by these outward tokens of humility and submission, [the offender] testifieth his inward sorrow and grief for the sin, and as it were thereby craveth (in pity and compassion) to be received again, into the Christian fellowship.”24 That this “pity and compassion” may have been grounded in empathy—the contagion of the penitent’s shame—as well as sympathy is, I think, entirely probable: such would have been the experience of Richard Brathwaite’s ideal English Gentlewoman, who “though shee be not conscious of any conceit, that might beget in her face a shamefaste blush; out of a modest Compassion shee will not sticke to blush, when she observes ought in another, deserving blame.”25 Indeed, “compassion” here—and perhaps in the first passage as well—would appear to be used in the now-obsolete

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sense closest to its etymology, “suffering together with another”: the modest woman feels the wrongdoer’s shame and blushes along with her (or, if the latter is brazen, on her behalf).26 And according to the early modern humoral explanation for why shame causes blood to rush to the face, blushing itself works to restore the circulation of positive affect by repairing others’ good estimation of the blusher. In A Discourse of Civill Life (1606), Lodowick Bryskett explains that “the minde … seeketh to hide the fault committed, and to avoide the reproch thereof, by setting that colour on our face as a maske to defend us withall. And albeit that shamefasteness or blushing seem to be a certaine still confession of the fault, yet it carieth with it such a grace, as passeth not without commendation.”27 While the blush would seem to be a peculiarly ineffective mask, betraying the actor behind it by revealing to all the shamed subject’s “confession of the fault,” it nonetheless does “defend us withall,” as it covers the face “with such a grace”—the word suggesting both beauty and moral compunction—that its witnesses are moved to temper their blame with approval. By calling the blush a “maske,” Bryskett evokes the theatre to describe, paradoxically, a performance that is effective precisely because it is involuntary and thus sincere. The question of how “actual”—as opposed to fictive—shame may function in the theatre has been the subject of some important recent work in performance studies. Where analyses of audience response to early modern theatrical shame scenarios, like Hobgood’s and Bainter’s, foreground the characters’ experience of shame within the fiction of the narrative, the actor’s potential for shame and the bonds with the audience established through its contagion are the subject of Robin Bernstein’s illuminating essay on what she terms the “shame contract” of live theatre.28 Citing Sedgwick on the “uncontrollable relationality” that shame produces, Bernstein starts from the phenomenon of “excruciatingly bad acting” and expands this dynamic to the theatrical experience as a whole: This phrase—cliché even—not only constitutes a negative aesthetic judgment but also reflects shame’s contagious nature. … When one names the emotional or physical pain of watching whatever one considers to be bad acting, then, one describes the common experience of an audience member viscerally ‘catching’ an actor’s shame. To attend live theatre is to risk this agony, to sign on to what might be understood as a shame-contract. Actors agree to be vulnerable onstage, to expose their bodies in acts,

154  J. PANEK such as crying, kissing, or sword-swallowing, that they might not otherwise perform publicly.… To be an audience member is to accept shame, to agree to risk being mortified for and with the performers if things go wrong, and to risk sharing intimacy and vulnerability with them if things go right.

Bernstein is writing about contemporary theatre, and some of the shames she discusses, such as an actor’s failure to provide “authentic” emotional self-exposure, are specific to twentieth-century techniques of method acting, as parodied in the 2008 avant-garde play The Method Gun; in fact, her interest in this play is as an archive of “historically located feelings.”29 Other aspects of the theatre’s potential for producing shame in its participants, however, were undoubtedly also part of the “historically located feelings” of the early seventeenth century: Hippolyta’s declared discomfort at having to watch “wretchedness o’ercharged” in a play where the comic value supposedly lies in the untrained actors’ incompetence (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.85); the cringing misery of the “dull actor” who has “forgot [his] part” and is “out /­ Even to a full disgrace” (Coriolanus 5.3.40–42); or the frisson of unease when “in a theatre, the eyes of men / After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next, / Thinking his prattle to be tedious” (Richard II 5.2.23–26). And yet others must have been magnified by the conditions of early modern theatre, from the opportunities for embarrassing mutual scrutiny in moments of direct audience address, afforded by what Nicholas Ridout, in his exploration of audience embarrassment, calls “doing it with the lights on,” to the ways in which contemporary antitheatrical accusations of idleness, not to mention sin, could have influenced an early modern version of what Bernstein describes as “the always-lurking, shameful suspicion that [theatre] might not be worth it, that the ratio of labor-to-reward is ridiculous, and makes all involved with theatre ridiculous.”30 It is for this facet of the theatrical experience—the circulation of shame between actors and audiences that goes beyond a character’s experience of shame in the fictional narrative of the play—that I want to return to act five, scene one of More Dissemblers Beside Women, looking beyond the Page’s unwed pregnancy, through to an adolescent boy’s disastrous dancing lesson, and then further, to the affective potential of a mortified actor. Fittingly, albeit unverifiably, the single extant comment on an early modern production of More Dissemblers evokes the possibility

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of an entire cast of mortified actors, plagued by that shameful suspicion that what they were up to was not worth it: as a last-minute replacement in the court festivities for Twelfth Night in 1624, performed for an audience who had been looking forward to a Jonsonian masque, the production went down in the records of the Master of the Revels as “the worst play that e’er I saw.”31 The play Middleton wrote, as opposed to whatever happened during the 1624 court performance, is not as much of an embarrassment to its author as some modern critics would make it out to be. Skiles Howard unkindly calls it “a congealing dish of Italianate comic devices and hoary theatrical set pieces,” but reading it with an eye to shame brings the plot and subplot together in a series of strategies through which its characters try unsuccessfully to deflect the humiliations inherent to desire.32 In the main plot, the widowed Duchess of Milan uses the stratagem of feigning love for the Cardinal’s nephew so as to unashamedly re-enter the erotic world after seven years as the Cardinal’s showpiece of chastity, and then a second ruse to evade the shame of declaring her love for Andrugio, the general of her army. Having commissioned a sexually audacious letter to herself in his handwriting, she calls him before her in feigned indignation and obliges him to read it aloud to her, to his growing consternation, until she suddenly “accepts” the advances he has not made. The Duchess is unaware that Andrugio is faithfully in love with another woman; Andrugio knows nothing except that his mouth has been co-opted for passionate declarations that first strike him as shamefully inappropriate, and then, even more alarmingly, betroth him to a woman he does not want but cannot refuse. Neither character is blameworthy; both nonetheless entangle themselves in a faux pas of squirm-inducing proportions. The end of this scene, ripe with the invitation to empathic embarrassment, leads the audience into act five, scene one and the humiliating dance of the Page. For the sake of clarity in what follows, I will use the term “embarrassment” for shame that lacks the component of moral transgression, and “shame” for shame that foregrounds it: a distinction in terms that would be unfamiliar to Middleton and his audience, but a difference nonetheless present on the level of affective experience. This distinction is necessary because I want to suggest that the affective response the scene prompts is achieved through empathic embarrassment’s ability to encroach upon the audience’s self-protective distance from the shameful revelation of the Page’s permeable, unchastely pregnant, female—and all the more shameful because secretly female—body. The Page’s shame

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in fact occurs within a scene of intense embarrassment—an embarrassment scenario, moreover, that has remained so reliable over the centuries that it seems to be all but inherent to the activity itself: bad dancing. Contemporary psychologists routinely produce embarrassment under laboratory conditions, as I was delighted to learn, by making their subjects dance solo to recorded pop music.33 The mortifications of modern lab dancing—making a spectacle of oneself in a lonely, constrained, and joyless iteration of an activity meant to be collective, spontaneous, and festive—are clearly different from those risked by inept dancers in the early modern period, where formal footwork, challenging leaps (for men), and anxieties over the appropriate performance of social status and gender offered a whole other minefield to navigate.34 An awareness, however, of the potential for embarrassment is not hard to find in the period’s discussions of dance: the dancers of a round, for instance, risked “with often tourning … to catch a fall. And so they end the daunce with shame, that was begonne but in sport.”35 Such is the case of Guido in The Insatiate Countess, who falls into the bride’s lap while dancing “a lavolta, or a galliard” in a wedding masque; despite “straight leap[ing] up and danc[ing] it out,” he feels he has incurred “a disgrace / Of an eternal memory” and tries to sneak away with his identity still obscured by his mask.36 The risks were no less for those who managed to stay on their feet. “Which of you is it that laugheth not,” comes the rhetorical question in Castiglione’s famous discussion of sprezzatura, “when our M. Peterpaul daunseth after his own facion with such fine skippes and on tipto without moving his head, as though he were all of wood, so heedfullie, that truely a man would weene he counted his paces.” Richard Brathwaite mocks stiff dancers as looking “as if they were made up in a sute of Wainscot [oak]” and ones who are too “pliable in their joynts” as “Tumblers” and “Iacke-an-Apes”; James Cleland makes fun of those who “appeare to be druncke in their legs.” The social outcome of inept dancing is clear: “When you go to Daunce in anie Honourable companie,” warns Cleland, “take heede that your qualitie, your Raiment, and your skil go al three togither: if you faile in anie of those three, you wilbe derided.”37 Such advice was unfortunately not heeded by one Montbron, as described in the Duke of Saint-Simon’s memoirs of the court of Versailles, in an anecdote almost painful to read: having vaunted his skill at a wedding ball in 1692, the young man fell into confusion after the first bow, “lost step at once,” and misguidedly “tried to divert

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attention from his mistake by affected attitudes and carrying his arms high; but this made him only more ridiculous, and excited bursts of laughter.” Nor did Montbron have the good sense to lie low after this performance, but, ascribing his failure to being nervous before the king, got up to dance at a second ball: at that point, how he danced scarcely mattered, since the moment he began, everyone stood up to watch, laughing and clapping. After that he did flee the court, “and did not show himself again for a long time.” “He was one of my friends,” adds Saint-Simon, regretfully, “And I felt for him.”38 When Middleton’s Page is obliged to dance, then, the audience “knows” it is looking at a shame-laden female body, but what it literally sees on stage is an embarrassed male one: an adolescent boy, newly in training in an aristocratic household, who, under the gaze of a dancing master, an usher, and the Duchess’s waiting-woman, “makes curtsy like a chamber-maid,” corrects it with “a beastly leg,” and dances a ludicrous cinquepace with his knees pressed together, all the while subjected to a torrent of criticism: “Open thy knees, wider, wider, wider, wider! Did you ever see a boy dance clenched up? He needs a pick-lock. Out upon thee for an arrant ass, an arrant ass! … Come on, sir, now; cast thy leg out from thee, lift it aloft, boy. A pox, his knees are soldered together. … Who taught you to dance, boy?” (5.1.190–204). So bad is the boy’s dancing that it becomes the teacher’s own embarrassment: “By this light, he will shame me. … I shall get more disgrace by this little monkey now than by all the ladies that I ever taught” (5.1.178–179, 195–196). At the level of the narrative fiction, what the audience is watching is a textbook case of the gendering of shame along the lines of Gail Kern Paster’s paradigm in The Body Embarrassed: what is supposed to be a classical, courtly male body is unable to perform the display of virtuoso self-control exemplified by these difficult masculine dance steps, precisely because it is “really” a grotesque, permeable, pregnant female body.39 The Page’s shameful exposure as female and unchaste is thus a marker of this difference as well as a punishment for her illicit sexual activity. However, the Page’s disguise, in conjunction with the boy actor beneath, produces the embarrassment scenario, one particularly likely to hit home for an early modern male spectator: on the level of the fiction-within-thefiction, which is underscored by the actual male body on stage, what we have is a young boy being publicly humiliated by his teacher for failing at a lesson. If this body is effeminate, weak, and uncontrolled, it is so in its

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awkward youth, its student misery, and its need for the very training that the teacher is providing: in other words, the kind of body that even high-status males can remember as having once been their own.40 Compounding the embarrassments of the scene is the fact that in the act of dancing, the body of the (male) character can easily become indistinguishable from the body of the actor, as “it takes extraordinary skill and precision to convincingly perform a specimen of bad dancing, in a way that signals to the audience that the ineptitude is the character’s rather than the performer’s.”41 Given how often More Dissemblers calls attention to the Page’s size—for instance, as “a little titmouse page … good for nothing but to carry toothpicks” (3.1.78–79)—what is being staged at this moment appears to be the smallest, probably youngest, and possibly most inexperienced boy actor of the King’s Men being required by his role to get up and dance as if he is incapable of acquiring the skills that a boy his age needs to dance like a man.42 “Extraordinary skill and precision,” let alone the kind of reputation as a virtuoso dancer that would prevent the performance of bad dancing from collapsing into the appearance of the real thing, are unlikely to be in the little actor’s repertoire to protect him from a genuinely humiliating few minutes of apparent incompetence. Middleton may thus provide his audience with an experience of embarrassment similar to one Bernstein singles out in The Method Gun to illustrate the empathic bond between actor and audience created by the theatrical “shame contract”—a moment not of excruciating acting, but of excruciating dancing, when a character interrupts himself in the midst of a lecture, declares his desire to dance, and proceeds to do so alone, without music, and extremely badly. At a performance Bernstein attended, the audience’s tension was evident in their nervous laughter, until the dance unexpectedly morphed into a series of expertly controlled hip-hop moves, whereupon they “not only clapped but cheered—for Carl [the character] and his dance, and for Graves [the actor], who brought audience members to the edge of shame, but then seemed to deliver them from it with feats of physical virtuosity.”43 The audience’s delivery in More Dissemblers is from the embarrassment of bad dancing into the shame of a “delivery” of a different kind, as the forced attempt at a “lofty trick” brings the Page crashing to the ground, calling for a midwife. However, the experience of empathic embarrassment may well colour the audience’s affective response to this shame, forestalling judgmental distance and assimilating the character’s gendered, moral shame to the affiliative affect of embarrassment. If the Page’s plot ends

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with a “return to a safely gendered and moralized reality,” the extent to which it fails to contain what the audience has witnessed—and felt— might be measured by the comic reaction of the dancing master, who, perhaps like the playgoers, has been for the moment rendered unable to think in conventionally gendered terms44: By this light, the boy’s with child! A miracle! Some woman is the father. The world’s turned upside down. Sure if men breed, Women must get; one never could do both yet. No marv’l you danced close-kneed the cinquepace. Put up my fiddle; here’s a stranger case. (51.1223–226)

The “stranger case”—vaginal pun obviously intended—of Middleton’s Page is one that works not by estranging its audience, male or female, from the shame of bodily uncontrol, but by making them feel, through contagious embarrassment, that that “case” is also their own. One can think of scenes of bad dancing on the early modern stage unlikely to produce empathic embarrassment: for instance, a character established as a comic simpleton, like Andrew Aguecheek cutting a caper near the start of Twelfth Night, might exhibit himself to nothing but laughter, especially since he remains unabashedly convinced that his dancing is impeccable. Conversely, a dancer who is unembarrassed because his ludicrous dance is part of a deliberate campaign against social codes of honour and shame—as in the peculiar case of Lepet in Middleton’s The Nice Valour—may go so far into shame as to come out, along with the audience, on the other side.45 And the kind of affect circulating at the Duke’s banquet in Middleton’s Women Beware Women, when the Ward “ridiculously imitates [the previous dancer] Hippolito” (3.3.237 s.d.), would depend on whether the Ward’s imitation was staged as mocking parody or failed emulation: the text leaves it open, as the Ward is aggressive enough for the former and stupid enough for the latter. The dance lesson in More Dissemblers, then, tells us less about audience responses to bad dancing per se than it does about how early modern embarrassment—as distinct from shame—may spark the recognition of similitude where there might seem to be only alterity: when the high-status male spectator catches the embarrassment of the boy actor through a shared commitment to the demanding etiquette of dance, the affiliative effects of that experience may qualitatively change

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the spectator’s affective response to the otherwise “distanced” shame of unwed pregnancy. Moreover, in thinking about contagious embarrassment, modern and early modern converge in a similitude of their own. Where the early modern experience of catching another’s passion reminded the “infected” of his or her inherent likeness to the transmitter, the modern experience of empathic embarrassment, recognized by psychologists and performance theorists to affiliate onlookers to embarrassed subjects, takes us by different means to a similar place: a place where our shared weaknesses, shared dread of others’ evaluations, and shared investment in social codes, however arbitrary and trivial, come to the forefront, and differences are at least momentarily minimized. Insofar as our scientific hypotheses of gestural mimicry or mirror neurons have not yet provided a definitive etiology of how we involuntarily take on others’ emotional states—and we still think of this process as contagion— we are reminded of the distance we have not yet travelled from our early modern counterparts.46

Notes





1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 36–37. 2. Recent work concerned with audience affect in the early modern English theatre includes, Steven Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Katharine A. Craik, and Tanya Pollard, eds., Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing, 157. Hobgood’s reading of Malvolio’s shame is indebted to Gail Kern Paster’s, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), which, as I discuss below, analyses the dynamics of resisting shame by displacing it onto others. 4. Natalie Bainter, “An Exercise in Shame: The Blush in A Woman Killed with Kindness,” in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 91–102.

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5. For this useful distinction between sympathy and empathy, see Rowland S. Miller, “Empathic Embarrassment: Situational and Personal Determinants of Reactions to the Embarrassment of Another,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, no. 6 (1987): 1062. Bainter refers briefly to the audience being “shamed” or “humiliated” (100, 102), but the essay as a whole is concerned with questions of sympathy, not affective contagion. 6. All references to More Dissemblers Besides Women are to John Jowett’s edition in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 1034–1073. 7. See especially Chapters 1 and 2 of The Body Embarrassed, on urine and blood, respectively. 8. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 189. 9.  John Jowett, Introduction to More Dissemblers Besides Women, in Middleton, Collected Works, 1036–1037. 10.  The Oxford English Dictionary Online, “embarrass” 1.a.; 2.a.; 3.a. The earliest citation for the first meaning is 1578; the second, 1656; the third, 1751. 11. Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 133. An illuminating meditation on shame versus embarrassment, with reference to Tomkins, is in Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81–85. Paster, in The Body Embarrassed, 3, terms embarrassment the “somewhat diminished variant” of shame. 12.  Dacher Keltner and Brenda N. Buswell, “Embarrassment: Its Distinct Forms and Appeasement Functions,” Psychological Bulletin 122, no. 3 (1997): 254. On the lack of consensus on whether embarrassment and shame constitute different emotions, see 250–252. 13. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553) fol. 75v. Other early modern inflections of “abashed” are discussed by Theresa M. Krier, “‘All suddeinly abasht she chaunged hew’: Abashedness in The Faerie Queene,” Modern Philology 84, no. 2 (1986): 130. 14. Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in Middleton, The Collected Works, 907–958. 15. Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions, 33–34. 16. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, in Middleton, The Collected Works, 1632–1678; Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, eds. G. R. Hibbard and Alexander Leggatt (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); and William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 133–201.



162  J. PANEK 17. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 38–39, connects Win’s urinary urgency with her subsequent sexual availability; on Beatrice-Joanna’s shame as rooted in her body’s rebellion against her will, see Jennifer Panek, “Shame and Pleasure in The Changeling,” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 2 (2014), 191–215. 18. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 36. 19. Keltner and Buswell, “Embarrassment,” 262. 20. Miller, “Empathic Embarrassment,” 1065. 21.  For the “mimicry” hypothesis of emotional contagion, see Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); the role of mirror neurons in empathy is discussed in Chapter 8, “Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience,” of Alvin I. Goldman, Joint Ventures: Mindreading, Mirroring, and Embodied Congnition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 198–217. In a theatrical context, mirror neurons are credited for audience empathy in Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 70–75. However, for a scientific critique of the current popularity of mirror-neuron-based hypotheses, see Gregory Hickok, The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition (New York: Norton, 2014). 22. Miller, “Empathic Embarrassment,” 1068. 23. On sympathetic contagion, see Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 53–55; Eric Langley, “Plagued by kindness: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama,” Medical Humanities 37 (2011), 103–109. The contagious nature of early modern passions is also discussed in Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 27, 44–45; Katherine Rowe, “Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, eds. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 176–177; Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing, 10, 14–15. 24. Richard Cosin, An Apologie for Sundrie Proceedings by Jurisdiction Ecclesiasticall (London, 1593), quoted in Martin Ingram, “Shame Punishments, Penance, and Charivari in Early Modern England,” Shame Between Punishment and Penance: The Social Uses of Shame in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, eds. Bénédicte Sère and Jörg Wettlaufer (Firenze: Sismel, 2013), 297. 25. Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), 168. In a modern context, Miller, “Empathic Embarrassment,” 1062, notes

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that a person in embarrassing circumstances provokes empathic embarrassment whether or not that person is actually embarrassed. The matter is further studied by Skyler T. Hawk, Agneta H. Fischer, and Gerben A. Van Kleef, “Taking Your Place or Matching Your Face: Two Paths to Empathic Embarrassment,” Emotion 11, no. 3 (2011): 502–513. 26.  The Oxford English Dictionary Online, “Compassion” no. 1; the latest example given for its use in this sense is 1625. 27. Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life (London, 1606), 238–239. A similar explanation appears in Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601, repr., New York: Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim, 1973), 55. On the paradoxical logic of such formulations, see Brian Cummings, “Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World,” At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Birds, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, eds. Erica Fudge, Susan Wiserman, and Ruth Gilbert (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999), 30–31. I discuss these passages at greater length in “The Nice Valour’s Anatomy of Shame,” English Literary Renaissance 48, no. 3 (2018): 343. 28. Robin Bernstein, “Toward the Integration of Theatre History and Affect Studies: Shame and the Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 2 (2012), 221. See also Bainter, “An Exercise,” 93. 29. Bernstein, “Toward the Integration,” 220–221, 217. 30. Ridout, Stage Fright, 70; Bernstein, “Toward the Integration,” 219. Ridout’s chapter on audience embarrassment, 70–95, takes its inspiration from a “white box” theatre production of Shakespeare’s Richard II in which Samuel West, playing Richard, addressed a line directly to him. 31. Jowett, introduction, 1034. The masque, Neptune’s Triumph, was to have celebrated the breakdown of royal marriage negotiations with Spain; it was cancelled for diplomatic reasons. Jowett notes, though, that the play “held its place in the King’s Men’s repertoire,” appearing in a 1641 list of plays protected against publication. 32. Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 144. 33.  Miller, “Empathic Embarrassment,” 1063; see also Hawk, Fischer, and Van Kleef, “Taking Your Place,” 504. Keltner and Buswell, “Embarrassment,” 255, mention a study that detected embarrassment in two-year-olds who danced before strangers. 34.  See Emily Winerock, “‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor in Early Modern England,” Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd, eds. Kim Kippen and Lori Woods (Toronto: Centre of Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 449–473; Howard, The Politics of

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Courtly Dancing, 23–25. Barbara Ravelhofer describes a fine line between graceful skill and unseemly virtuosity for dancers of the gentry and nobility in The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 19, 67–70. 35. Barnabe Rich, Rich’s Farewell to Military Profession (London, 1594), A2v; quoted in Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (London: Macmillan, 1981), 10. 36. John Marston and others, The Insatiate Countess, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 2.1.154 s.d.; 2.1.169–170. 37. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, 1561; repr., London: David Nutt, 1900; repr., New York: AMS, 1967), 59 ; Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (London, 1630), 204; James Cleland, The Instruction of a Young Nobleman (London, 1612), 226. All are cited in Winerock, “‘Performing’ Gender and Status,” 458–464. 38.  Quoted in Jennifer Nevile, “Dance in Europe 1250–1750,” Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, 1250–1750, ed. Jennifer Nevile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 35. 39. See also Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing, 153, who reads the contrast between the Page’s “open” female body and the “trim and dexterous” male body the lesson demands as satirical, anti-court commentary. 40. See Bernstein, “Toward the Integration,” 220, on how memories of studenthood can be exploited to produce shame. 41. Gary Taylor and Andrew J. Sabol, “Middleton, Music, and Dancing,” Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 133. The performance under discussion is the Ward’s dance in Women Beware Women. 42. The youngest players would have been about 12, according to David Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005), 220. References to the Page’s “diminutive stature” are enumerated by Susan Zimmerman, “Disruptive Desire: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy,” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52–53. My reading of this moment, following Bernstein, proposes an exception to Paster’s claim that the early modern actor’s body, even when performing acts that would be “transgressive or embarrassing in actual behavior,” would have offered the spectator a masterful image of “behavioral completeness, significance, and desirability.” See Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 20. 43. Bernstein, “Toward the Integration,” 222 (original italics).

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44.  Jowett, introduction, 1037; as Jowett observes, this return is “only achieved by passing through the dizzying collapse of apparent gender identity.” 45.  See Jennifer Panek, “The Nice Valour’s Anatomy of Shame,” English Literary Renaissance 48, no. 3 (2018): 339–367. 46. Donald Beecher, “An Afterword on Contagion,” Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005), 247.

Works Cited Bainter, Natalie. “An Exercise in Shame: The Blush in A Woman Killed with Kindness.” In Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, edited by Nicola Shaughnessy, 91–102. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Beecher, Donald. “An Afterword on Contagion.” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 243–260. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005. Bernstein, Robin. “Toward the Integration of Theatre History and Affect Studies: Shame and the Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun.” Theatre Journal 64, no. 2 (2012), 213–230. Brathwaite, Richard. The English Gentleman. London, 1630. ———. The English Gentlewoman. London, 1631. Brissenden, Alan. Shakespeare and the Dance. London: Macmillan, 1981. Bryskett, Lodowick. A Discourse of Civill Life. London, 1606. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Courtier. Translated by Thomas Hoby. Reprint, New York: AMS, 1967. Cleland, James. The Instruction of a Young Nobleman. London, 1612. Craik, Katharine A., and Tanya Pollard, eds. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cummings, Brian. “Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World.” In At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Birds, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, edited by Erica Fudge, Susan Wiserman, and Ruth Gilbert, 26–50. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Goldman, Alvin I. Joint Ventures: Mindreading, Mirroring, and Embodied Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

166  J. PANEK Hawk, Skyler T., Agneta H. Fischer, and Gerben A. Van Kleef. “Taking Your Place or Matching Your Face: Two Paths to Empathic Embarrassment.” Emotion 11, no. 3 (2011): 502–513. Hickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition. New York: Norton, 2014. Hobgood, Allison P. Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Howard, Skiles. The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Ingram, Martin. “Shame Punishments, Penance, and Charivari in Early Modern England.” In Shame Between Punishment and Penance: The Social Uses of Shame in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, edited by Bénédicte Sère and Jörg Wettlaufer, 285–308. Firenze: Sismel, 2013. Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. Edited by G. R. Hibbard and Alexander Leggatt. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Jowett, John. Introduction to More Dissemblers Besides Women. In Middleton, The Collected Works, 1036–1037. Kathman, David. “How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 220–246. Keltner, Dacher and Brenda N. Buswell. “Embarrassment: Its Distinct Forms and Appeasement Functions.” Psychological Bulletin 122, no. 3 (1997): 250–270. Krier, Theresa M. “‘All suddeinly abasht she chaunged hew’: Abashedness in The Faerie Queene.” Modern Philology 84, no. 2 (1986): 130–143. Langley, Eric. “Plagued by Kindness: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama.” Medical Humanities 37 (2011), 103–109. Marston, John, Lewis Machin, and William Barksted. The Insatiate Countess. Edited by Giorgio Melchiori. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Middleton, Thomas. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007. ———. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In Middleton, The Collected Works, 907–958. ———. More Dissemblers Besides Women. In Middleton, The Collected Works, 1034–1073. Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley. The Changeling. In Middleton, The Collected Works, 1632–1678. Miller, Rowland S. “Empathic Embarrassment: Situational and Personal Determinants of Reactions to the Embarrassment of Another.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, no. 6 (1987): 1061–1069.

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Mullaney, Steven. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Nevile, Jennifer. “Dance in Europe 1250–1750.” In Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, 1250–1750, edited by Jennifer Nevile, 7–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Panek, Jennifer. “The Nice Valour’s Anatomy of Shame.” English Literary Renaissance 48, no. 3 (2018), 339–367. ———. “Shame and Pleasure in The Changeling.” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 2 (2014): 191–215. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pollard, Tanya. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Roach, Joseph. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Rowe, Katherine. “Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth.” In Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, 169–191. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 133–201. New York: Norton, 1997. Steggle, Matthew. Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Taylor, Gary, and Andrew J. Sabol. “Middleton, Music, and Dancing.” In Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique. London, 1553. Winerock, Emily. “‘Performing’ Gender and Status on the Dance Floor in Early Modern England.” In Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd, edited by Kim Kippen and Lori Woods, 449–473. Toronto: Centre of Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011.

168  J. PANEK Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde. Reprint, New York: Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim, 1973. Zimmerman, Susan. “Disruptive Desire: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy.” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, edited by Susan Zimmerman, 39–63. New York: Routledge, 1992.

CHAPTER 9

Contagious Pity: Cultural Difference and the Language of Contagion in Titus Andronicus Jennifer Feather

In the current age of Ebola and HIV, the language of contagion serves as a potent metaphor for phenomena as disparate as the proliferation of political movements, the spread of violence, and the consequences of economic crises.1 Popular newspapers and magazines are full of descriptions of “social,” “political,” and “economic” contagion. The contagiousness of these situations, we are told, relies in part on the increasing vulnerability of previously secure spaces to invasion by foreign bodies. Authors reach for metaphors of disease in the face of a frightening feeling of permeability that frequently raises issues of both national boundaries and personal agency. Early modern playwrights also used metaphors of disease to articulate and interrogate anxiety about the frightening susceptibility of the self and the kingdom.2 Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus worries continuously over political boundaries and personal sovereignty, and as many scholars have pointed out, it frequently does so in terms of J. Feather (*)  University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_9

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bodily integrity and health. However, the metaphor of contagion, particularly in early modern models that see communicability of disease as founded in natural sympathies and humoral imbalance, has another more positive side. This essay looks beyond the language of infectious disease most familiar to modern readers and highlights a pre-modern discourse of illness that presumes likeness or sympathy between infecting agent and infected body, recognizing the language of contagion in Titus, a play that uses comparatively little language of disease. Understanding how this pre-modern language of contagion operates in Titus Andronicus resituates the play in its multicultural context, demonstrating how contagion might serve not simply as a source of anxiety but as a metaphor for the fraught operation of pity. Titus Andronicus, with its concerns over invasion from without, tempts us to ascribe bodily metaphors of infection to social circumstances. The first act compulsively delineates boundaries between civilized and barbarous behavior. Marcus proclaims that Titus returns from “weary wars against the barbarous Goths” (1.1.28); Chiron exclaims “was never Scythia half so barbarous” (1.1.134); Demetrius replies “Oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome” (1.1.135); Marcus pleads with his brother “Thou art a Roman; Be not barbarous” (1.1.381). Tamora confounds these distinctions, claiming “Titus, I am incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted happily” (1.1.464–465).3 This barbarian presence could easily be understood as a contagion that disrupts and unsettles Roman integrity until Tamora is finally purged by Lucius’s command. Given the concern over ethnic purity suggested by the preoccupation with distinguishing barbarism, Lucius’s demand to “throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey” (5.3.197) seems to be purifying the body politic of a contaminating agent. Such a reading fits well into a modern discourse of disease and national difference, in which outsiders figure as a form of contagion.4 In contrast, I understand the violence of the play as a failed form of pity that builds the idea of contagion as invasion over the course of the drama. Early modern ideas of contagion rely on a different kind of communicability, one created through natural sympathies and humoral flux. The transmission of disease in many early modern medical texts requires an inherent similarity between infecting agent and infected body. In early modern accounts, this sympathy is often surprising and frequently found where no obvious likeness exists: A wild bull might have sympathy with a fig tree, and an elephant might have a natural hatred for the

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swallow.5 Contagion, thus, does not operate through a foreign invader wholly different from the person, it invades but through a sympathetic reaction that confuses bodily boundaries. Titus Andronicus, which notoriously challenges sharp distinctions between Roman and Goth, relies on this pre-modern idea of contagion to describe the operation of emotion. While humoral and occult accounts of disease are distinct, both suggest a sameness at the root of susceptibility, even when such likeness is obscure or runs counter to obvious affinities. Though the natural sympathies central to this early modern understanding of contagion are separate from the modern affective use of the term,6 this essay dwells on the relationship between the natural sympathies of contagion and the operation of emotions to understand how the play figures relationships across lines of cultural difference. I consider not the specific implications of occult sympathies as Mary Floyd-Wilson does but the consequences of an idea of contagion that, whether based on humoral flux or occult sympathies, relies on likeness rather than difference. If the language of disease in early modern drama does not correspond simply to modern ideas of the pathogenic, the forms of emotion it describes are equally rooted in pre-modern notions of shared feeling. What modern readers might call “sympathy,” Shakespeare more frequently calls “pity.” Indeed, while Shakespeare uses a wide range of terms like “mercy,” “compassion,” and “sympathy,” “pity” is his preferred term for shared grief.7 Modern understandings of the term “pity,” like modern ideas of pathogens, are likely to evoke social distance rather than shared feeling. This sense of pity is more closely aligned with “clemency” in the early modern period.8 Understanding pity as distancing is anachronistic in a sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century context, as is the notion of contagion as invasion. Both humoral and occult accounts of contagion elucidate involuntary emotional responses that confound social distinctions (and distinctions of kind more broadly). The distinction between moral and physiological contagion in the period is difficult to maintain as the terms for shared feeling become embedded in physiological accounts.9 I, therefore, use the term “pity” to denote forms of shared feelings that undo rather than create difference and the term “sympathy” to denote psychophysiological forces that, in early modern accounts, frequently entail involuntary emotion. Despite the ease with which one can read the Goths as an invading contagion, the language of sickness appears more frequently in Shakespeare’s other Roman works. In humoral terms, Titus’s revenge can be seen as a bloodletting that restores humoral balance in Rome.

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However, other Roman works, such as the “Rape of Lucrece,” have proved more amenable to such readings.10 Louise Noble points to only a handful of direct references to disease and medicine.11 In fact, the play neither directly nor obviously speaks about contagion in the way that Shakespeare’s other Roman plays do. However, Noble frequently resorts to the language of contagion, calling the violence of the play polluting and its revenge contaminating. Similarly, borrowing from modern accounts of secondary trauma, Deborah Willis suggests “if not the contagiousness of Lavinia’s pain, its fluidity.”12 Despite using these metaphors, critics have thought of the play more frequently in terms of wholeness and fragmentation rather than in terms of contamination and purification.13 The play’s attention to both fragmentation and modern notions of disease as a threatening invasion from without obscures the understanding of communicable infection and pity operating in the play. Eric Langley describes this shift in medical thinking as the process whereby “Transmission models that allowed a sense of mutual shared identity are superseded by a sense that identity is that which is under threat, liable to be an invasion and open to the manipulative operations of a contagious and hostile environment.”14 The play’s movement toward, and instantiation of, ideas of national purity mirror this movement toward transmission models that do not admit a sense of shared, mutual identity. This essay seeks to uncover the idea of contagion as shared feeling that this later transmission model ultimately displaces. Julius Caesar uses the language of illness familiar to modern ears but it does so to describe the operation of contagion based on likeness and susceptibility. It thereby offers a means of elucidating the language of sympathetic contagion otherwise obscured by the discourse of fragmentation and invasion that Titus ultimately establishes. Though Titus would seem amenable to modern metaphors of disease because of the threat posed by non-Roman figures, Julius Caesar, whose characters are all Roman, contains the most persistent references to disease, sickness, and contagion of all Shakespeare’s Roman works, highlighting the importance of this language for imagining scenarios other than invasion, and for imagining likeness rather than difference. The characters in this play use the terms of sickness not to describe foreign invasion—attacks from invading pathogens that threaten to infect an otherwise healthy body—but to describe bodily weakness that betrays secret and involuntary affinities.

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This latter conception is more embedded in Galenic theories of miasma and Paracelsian ideas of sympathy than modern ideas of infecting germs. Thus, Julius Caesar uses the terms we might expect—“contagion,” “sickness,” “unpurged”—to describe a set of issues—those of individual autonomy and moral weakness—only implicitly of concern in the modern preoccupation with contagion, while Titus Andronicus obsesses over purity and difference but does not use a modern language of contagion in this context where, accustomed to infection caused by invading microorganisms, we might instinctually look for it. Julius Caesar develops a language of sickness concerned not so much with national and ethnic purity but with ideals of integrity and sovereignty. Attending to this language as it appears in Titus Andronicus can help rethink how the play manages pity within a multicultural context outside of a modern discourse of national purity and infectious disease. In contrast to Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar defines Romanness explicitly in terms of invulnerability to disease and sickness. However, it shares with Titus Andronicus a pre-modern understanding of contagion prevalent before germ theory completely developed.15 Portia asks Brutus if he is sick (2.1.261). Cassius says Caesar behaves “as a sick girl” (1.2.128). Calpurnia suggests that Caesar should not go to the Senate but “say he is sick” (2.2.64). In each instance, a character questions the physical or psychological integrity of one of the men in the play while at the same time intentionally or inadvertently impugning his masculine virtue. Sickness is less the cause of the loss of Roman virtue than it is its primary sign. Accordingly, various characters attempt to reassert their Romanness by declaring their physical invulnerability. For instance, Cassius proclaims his invulnerability to the ominous meteorological events that pervade the first act, saying “For my part, I have walked about the streets, / Submitting me to the perilous night; / and thus unbracéd, Casca, as you see, / Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone” (1.3.46–49). Cassius’s assertion connects heavenly disturbances and physical illness in a way commensurate with Galenic understandings of physiology.16 Cassius presents disease as the body’s failure to maintain its own integrity. He resists the vulnerability to disease that might indicate a lack of moral autonomy, a susceptibility to the feelings of others. The play directly connects the sort of bodily and moral integrity it describes as health to the integrity of Rome. While he is plotting overthrowing Caesar, Brutus ruminates that between imagination and action: “The genius and the mortal instruments / Are … in counsel, and the

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state of man, / Like to a little kingdom, suffers then / The nature of an insurrection” (2.1.66–69). This passage invokes a commonplace analogy between his own person and the body politic at the very moment he is contemplating assassinating Caesar, explicitly relating bodily disorder and social disorder. Moreover, these passions, which threaten to overthrow reason, are contagious. As Antony remarks upon seeing a servant crying for Caesar, “Thy heart is big. Get thee apart and weep / Passion, I see, is catching, for mine eyes, / Seeing those beads of sorrow stand in thine, / Began to water …” (3.1.284–287). Antony concerned about his own integrity in the face of the servant’s grief commands him to take his sorrow elsewhere. Roman virtue is threatened by contagious passions. This virtue can equally be understood as a lack of pity, a refusal to be vulnerable to the experience of others. This sense of Roman identity is so strong that Russell Hillier remarks, “Roman piety precludes and excludes pity.”17 Disease is caused not by an invading infection, a separate substance or organism that asserts its own identity, but by a dangerous form of sympathy in which the self cannot maintain its own boundaries and becomes susceptible to external influences. Julius Caesar understands this dangerous sympathy in terms of spreading disease. Disease, then, is not so much about invasion but about sympathy.18 Titus Andronicus features just the sort of external threat to Rome that makes it amenable to readings that understand the body politic as infected by outside invaders. Moreover, these external invaders are eventually expelled in bodily ways, and the play struggles persistently to draw the kinds of boundaries that make such an expulsion possible.19 However, this external threat is never talked about explicitly in terms of contagion or illness. Rather, the play understands disease, as Julius Caesar does, as operating based on likeness, rather than as a set of invading pathogens. The play uses a language of fluidity to talk about communicability. This language opens up the possibility of pity even as the play ultimately solidifies rather than overcomes cultural boundaries. As Emily Bartels has suggested, a deeply embodied distinction between Roman and Goth and Roman and Moor is built over the course of the play.20 The sense of Roman integrity built on the distinction between pure Roman and invading other is not the assumption with which the play begins, and the play wrestles with how a community might accommodate difference in terms of contagion as sympathy rather than contagion as invasion. The play begins with the idea that bodies and bodies politic are susceptible to, and even accommodating of, difference and only establishes the idea of bodily integrity secured by rigid

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boundaries over the course of the play. In what follows, I dwell on this moment of contagion as a form of pity and its implications for understanding the multicultural context of the play, focusing on how difference is negotiated in the absence of rigidly enforced boundaries. If Roman purity is built over the course of the play alongside a sense of invading contagion, the play wrestles with how multiple cultures with varying relationships to authority relate in an empire that requires the submission of some if not their cooperation. Examining sympathetic notions of contagion, particularly those based on humoral fluidity and occult sympathies, illuminates these relationships by bringing to the fore the bodily metaphors that enable and thwart the kinds of pity requisite for functioning in an imperial society marked by conquest. In particular, the play explores the dangers and possibilities posed by bodily fluidity understood as a kind of contagious pity. As the play opens, the Roman conquest of the Goths and the cross-cultural engagement it necessitates produces a sense of anxiety registered in the bodily terms associated with the tomb of the Andronici. When Titus commits his fallen sons to burial in the first act, he remarks “Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells, / Here grow no damnéd drugs; here are no storms, / No noise, but silence and eternal sleep. / In peace and honor rest you here, my sons” (1.1.156–159). While Titus certainly meditates on the peacefulness of death, he also sees the tomb as a place of honor. Its integrity and its freedom from the vicissitudes of life, particularly a life of politics and battle, are intimately connected. In the tomb, the Andronici are not only enshrined as virtuous Roman warriors but also freed from the passionate turmoil that attends living. This turmoil includes both the treason and envy that are inevitably a part of Roman politics but also drugs and storms. The latter two disturbances are specifically connected to the body. Many cures that would be understood as “drugs” were thought to work because of hidden sympathies, and storms are frequently used both in medical literature and in early modern drama to describe the humoral imbalance associated with illness and emotional volatility.21 Though the play does not speak directly in terms of invulnerability to illness here, Titus’s language associates the freedom the tomb offers from bodily disruption with a sense of Roman integrity. The tomb can thus be understood not only as a sign of Roman virtue but also as a figure for Roman invulnerability to disease. It becomes an idealized image of bodily and civic integrity and health. Reading instances such as this one in terms of Julius Caesar’s conception of disease and health provides a sense of the dominant ideology

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of both bodily susceptibility and pity with which the play begins. From this moment forward, the play obsessively explores deeply passionate states that contravene the image of integrity that the tomb of the Andronici represents. Lavinia offers her obsequies with “tributary tears” (1.1.16); Titus slays Mutius “In zeal to [Saturninus], and highly moved to wrath” (1.1.421). Titus proclaims that Saturninus’s words are “razors to my wounded heart” (1.1.317); Quintus remarks that Titus “is not with himself” (1.1.371); Tamora instructs Saturninus to “dissemble all your griefs and discontents” (1.1.445). And all of these overwhelming passions are merely a prelude to the fears, griefs, and lusts of acts two and three. Specific references to these states in terms of illness are rare in the play, but metaphors of contagion are especially fruitful in thinking about them. While the extreme bloodiness of Titus Andronicus invites meditations on sacrifice, mimesis, and substitution that illuminate its concern with purity and corruption, civilization and barbarism,22 scholars of the tragedy find its violence “contaminating” and the remedies of revenge that run throughout it “polluting.” However, understanding the violence of the play in terms of this modern language of disease obscures the miasmic idea of disease that understands communicability in terms of likeness rather than in terms of the invasion of bounded bodies. Rather than seeing the violence of the play as polluting, I understand it as a failed form of pity and examine how the terms of emotional contagion prevalent in the early modern period enable forms of pity. The characters in Titus Andronicus attempt to understand suffering in terms that beg for bodily metaphors but ultimately receive none. Contagion as a metaphor implies a kind of bodily vulnerability but also a sharing of experience that the characters in the play desperately desire. This compassion, however, is made impossible by boundaries at once bodily and cultural that separate the characters from one another. Ultimately, the play uses a language of bodily susceptibility, associated in other contexts with disease, to invite the audience to overcome these boundaries in the figure of the Goths. The play infamously begins with a failed plea for mutual understanding. Pleading with Titus as a parent, Tamora passionately reminds him of the equal valor of combatants claiming “if to fight for king and commonweal / Were piety in thine, it is in these” (1.1.117–118), highlighting their likeness. Of course, this plea utterly fails, and Titus insists upon a sacrificial act that draws sharp dividing lines between Goths and Romans. This sacrifice begins the process

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whereby the play replaces an idea of contagion as operating through likeness with an idea of infection as contaminating invasion. Refusing Tamora’s pleas and sacrificing Alarbus, Titus denies pity but also sets into motion a series of mimetic acts that seek to overcome this failure of fellow-feeling through acts of revenge. The sacrifice of Alarbus is meant as reparative, appeasing “their groaning shadows that are gone” (1.1.129). As René Girard elucidates it, the sacrificial victim must be at once a mimetic substitute for what has been lost—hence, Lucius’s desire for “the proudest prisoner of the Goths” (1.1.99)—and one set apart without ties to the community.23 Indeed, the failure to meet this latter criterion explains the inability of Alarbus’s sacrifice to alleviate the mimetic cycle of vengeance. While Titus’s act of sacrifice may be intended to draw a strict distinction between Goths and Romans, this distinction fails, especially in the face not only of Tamora’s impassioned plea but also of her becoming Empress of Rome. The vengeful cycle that ensues because of this failure forever seeks commonality through escalating acts of bodily mutilation, attempting to produce shared feeling by inflicting suffering. Lavinia’s rape and mutilation most obviously serve this function. Like Tamora, she pleads for her life based on the commonalities between them. Begging Tamora “O Tamora, thou bearest a woman’s face” (2.3.136), she invokes their shared womanhood and then, just as Tamora pleaded for Titus to come near to the gods in mercy, Lavinia appeals to Tamora to “be called gentle queen” (2.3.168). These pleas mirror Tamora’s entreaties to Titus and call for pity on the basis of likeness but, ultimately, these calls for shared feeling fail. In response to this failure, the acts of violence in the play seek redress by attempting to compel sympathy. However, this strategy also repeatedly fails. Not only does Tamora ignore Lavinia’s supplications, she explicitly denies the common feeling on which they are based. Demetrius encourages his mother to “let it be your glory / To see her tears, but be your heart to them / As unrelenting flint to drops of rain” (2.3.139–141). Tamora’s vengeance lies specifically in precluding pity, and she affirms her sons’ understanding of her position, saying: Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain To save your brother from sacrifice, But fierce Andronicus would not relent. Therefore away with her, and use her as you will. The worse to her, the better loved of me. (2.3.163–167)

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In her command to her sons, she recalls Titus’s unwillingness to hear her appeals for common feeling and remembers Titus’s imperviousness to her tears. Tamora’s revenge against Lavinia is intended to force Titus to feel what she has felt—the stubborn unwillingness to share common feelings that are the basis of pity. This revenge, then, should create the pity, the common feeling, that Titus denied Tamora in sacrificing Alarbus. Indeed, it does produce a set of feelings that closely mimic Tamora’s experience. Moreover, these feelings are understood in terms of a set of metaphors of fluidity, as they were in the image of the rain against unrelenting flint that Demetrius invoked. Such metaphors are associated in this play and in early modern literature more broadly with both humoral volatility and contagion. Marcus’s speech upon first encountering Lavinia, famous for its aestheticization of bodily degradation, contrasts the shocking flow of blood and the inability to communicate.24 Lavinia’s mouth issues forth a “crimson river of warm blood, / Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with the wind” (2.4.22–23). The humoral excess associated with female volubility here produces not a superfluity of expression but a dearth. Though blood flows freely “as from a conduit with three issuing spouts” (2.4.30), her “Sorrow concealéd, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is” (2.4.36–37). The fluids that ordinarily literally communicate the passions by producing a similar bodily response in others fail here to be expressive. By remarking upon the failure of Lavinia’s blood to share her internal state, Marcus response to Lavinia’s mutilation indirectly elucidates the contours of a bodily logic where excess is expressive, transferring emotion from one individual to another. This logic gets reinstated at the end of the speech as Marcus imagines the blinding tears Titus will shed upon seeing Lavinia. As he asks, “One hour’s storm will drown fragrant meads; / What will whole months of tears thy father’s eyes?” (2.4.54–55). Returning to a fluid metaphor, Marcus imagines the blinding overflow of tears that the bubbling fountain of Lavinia’s blood will provoke. Thus, the fluid excess of Lavinia’s blood triggers Titus’s immoderate tears. The communicability of the passions is imagined here neither as a foreign invasion nor as a simple mirroring of another’s state but as a chain reaction where each overflow produces another flood. Shared experience is found in communicable passions not in mimetic forms for revenge. It is not the same but sympathetic; that is, it does not reproduce the feeling but triggers a commensurate response.

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The characters in Titus Andronicus turn to mimetic forms of revenge to produce pity precisely because of the anxiety posed by the sense of vulnerability implicit in the idea of sympathy as a form of contagion. However, the forms of fellow-feeling enabled by a sympathetic idea of contagion consistently push against this strategy for producing shared experience. The ongoing tension between these two models of contagion in the play mirrors the tension between alienation caused by cultural difference and pity invoked by a shared sense of suffering that is one of the play’s primary concerns. Many of the direct references to sickness in the play center on Titus’s mental state. Saturninus wonders what if “his sorrows have so overwhelmed his wits” (4.4.10), but Titus’s nephew Publius promises to “attend him carefully, / And feed his humor kindly as we may, / Till time beget some careful remedy” (4.3.28–30). These two perceptions of Titus’s mental state conceive of it first in terms of invasion and secondarily in terms of humoral imbalance. Saturninus understands Titus’s wits as being overwhelmed by an unconquerable force, whereas Publius suggests a remedy fully in line with humoral ideas that sickness must be fed rather than deterred. Extreme distress and psychological malady are treated in these two ways throughout the text. Whereas Young Lucius cannot explain his aunt Lavinia’s desperate attempt to reveal her tormentors “Unless some fit or frenzy do possess her” (4.1.17), Tamora demands of Chiron and Demetrius, “Whate’er I forge to feed his brainsick humors, / Do uphold and maintain in your speeches” (5.2.71–72). The aberrant behavior caused by suffering is understood either in terms of possession or in terms of humoral excess. These opposed metaphors not only offer differing modes of understanding human suffering but also, by invoking a language of contagion as either invasive or sympathetic, position their bearers to begin to conceive relationships with others in particular ways. One of the moments of greatest pity in the play relies on Titus’s embracing fluid boundaries between himself and Lavinia, using the same sorts of metaphors found in medical texts of the period to describe contagion. Titus describes his and Lavinia’s shared grief, wailing: When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, Threat’ning the welkin with his big-swoll’n face? And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth flow!

180  J. FEATHER She is the weeping welkin, I the earth. Then must my sea be movéd with her sighs; Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned, Forwhy my bowels cannot hide her woes But like a drunkard must I vomit them. (3.1.220–230)

Whereas elsewhere in the play Titus’s Roman integrity prevents what might be understood as true sympathy with Lavinia, he comes closest to suffering with her in this moment. This moment of compassion is understood completely in the fluid terms associated with miasmic ideas of contagion. Describing himself alternatively as the sea and the earth and Lavinia as the winds and the weeping heavens, he indicates in natural terms the inevitability of his being moved by Lavinia’s sorrow. Her tears call forth his tears. The metaphorical exchange of fluid serves as a potent metaphor for the way suffering can be contagious, can move from one body to another. Moreover, whereas in his initial metaphor Titus is the sea moved by the winds, in the second description he is the earth flooded by Lavinia’s tears. Both figures are fluid at different moments, and each person’s suffering overwhelms his or her bounds, causing another to be moved. Unlike the metaphors of mimetic revenge, these produce a visceral response in both parties. The same excess that causes shared suffering also causes Titus to be overwhelmed, vomiting up sorrow like a drunkard. These fluid metaphors mark a contagious overflow of emotion producing sympathy. In humoral terms, overflow affects the temperamental balance of another. In occult terms, Titus highlights a sympathetic response between separate bodies. Of course, sympathy between Titus and Lavinia is much more easily established than sympathy across cultural lines, even as the cultural differences are not wholly solidified until the end of the play. This sympathy is forged in fluid terms precisely because of the contagiousness that they imply. In describing his captivity with the Goths, Lucius says he was … unkindly banished, The gates shut on me, and, turned weeping, out, To beg relief among Rome’s enemies, Who drowned their enmity in my true tears, And oped their arms to embrace me as a friend. (5.3.103–108)

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Their enmity is drowned in tears. This ability to overcome difference can be read either as a humoral influence or as the result of secret sympathies. In either case, the contagiousness of Lucius’s sorrow relies on likeness rather than difference. Though he turns to an image of bodily invasion in the lines that follow, he meditates initially on contagiousness as reproducing likeness. Approaching the relationships in Titus Andronicus with the metaphor of sympathetic contagion rather than solely with the metaphor of contagion as invasion allows us to pause not only over the boundary-making projects of the play but also over its attempts at producing sympathy. As I have claimed, its endless acts of revenge are attempts at creating common understanding, but these attempts fail because while they replicate experiences of suffering, they do not invite the kinds of boundary transgression that Titus’s response to Lavinia’s suffering does. Similarly, Lucius finds that the enmity between himself and the Goths is drowned by his “true tears” presumably by causing an emotional response in the Goths. Only in this image of corporeal limitations overwhelmed is shared experience produced. Indeed, the acts of revenge reinforce the sense of a bounded body, invulnerable to invading contagion. Demetrius demands that Tamora’s heart must be impervious to Lavinia’s tears “as unrelenting flint to drops of rain” (2.3.141) even as Tamora recalls how she “poured forth tears in vain” to “fierce Andronicus [who] would not relent” (2.3.163, 165). The reparative acts of revenge require a pitiless imperviousness to the excess of tears that produce a sympathetic response. The play, then, narrates the failure of pity and the building of boundaries. The sympathetic moments that do occur are the result of a release from the rigid sense of bodily difference central to the construction of Roman identity. Lavinia’s violated body is one occasion for such a release in which a certain formulation of Roman identity as impenetrable is lost. However, such a release is also occasioned by Lucius’s exile among the Goths, and both instances lead to a renewed sense of Roman identity that at least somewhat incorporates “barbarian” values. The play negotiates its construction of identity through these metaphors of bodily fluidity that rely upon likeness. The underlying language of contagion as sympathy in this play highlights the deep ambivalence involved in the kinds of cross-cultural encounters implicit in empire. It illuminates both the longing for pity and the obstacles to creating it, specifically the loss of boundedness it entails. The characters in the play pose various solutions to this problem, seeking

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fellow-feeling without the loss of self that it occasions, but these ultimately fail at producing true pity. However, the play continues to imagine the possibility, perhaps even the probability, of such pity. When Lucius sentences Aaron to death, he imagines and forbids the pity that people may feel for him saying, “If any one relieves or pities him, / For the offence he dies” (5.3.180–181). There is the suggestion here that despite the purported justice of the punishment, people might be inclined to feel pity for Aaron. However, the regime of Roman purity Lucius firmly establishes punishes such fellow-feeling. The play leaves unanswered why the fate of this character, who becomes little more than a caricature of the Moorish villain by the end of the play, seems so likely to incite compassion. We can infer that he might prompt pity because his feelings for his offspring put himself at risk, the kind of risk Titus takes when he sympathizes with Lavinia or because the cruelty of his punishment might prompt such compassion. However, the play leaves this question open. Earlier in the play, Aaron offers yet another fluid metaphor for his own identity in the face of cultural assimilation. Aaron demands that Chiron and Demetrius sympathize with his child as their “brother.” When they refuse, Aaron draws the absolute distinction between himself and his child on the one hand and Chiron and Demetrius on the other. Chiron and Demetrius are “white-limed walls” (4.2.97), and he and his child are a “coal-black” that “scorns to bear another hue; / For all the water in the ocean / Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, / Although she lave them hourly in the flood” (4.2.99–102). Much has been said about the construction of racial identity in this passage and about the commonplace Aaron uses. However, looking at this moment from the perspective of fluid metaphors of sympathetic contagion, Aaron imagines here an identity that, while drowned in the ocean, maintains its own character. Thus, while the Romans and the Goths are fighting to assimilate one another and failing, Aaron suggests that he fully inhabits an alien system without losing his particular identity. He implies in some ways that he is resistant to infection and can put himself in the place of others while not being threatened by assimilation. The play thus explores the possibility of compassion in the face of assimilation but does not fully resolve how one might risk pity and maintain a sense of self. Understanding the production of fellow-feeling as a kind of contagion at once threatening and healing shifts our perspective on cross-cultural interactions away from the universally threatening model of invasion, or an equally inaccurate model of easy harmony, recognizing the complexity of the world of empire.

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Notes







1.  See Stephen M. Walt, “Fads, Fevers, and Firestorms,” Foreign Policy, November 2000, 34 and James Alan Fox, “Fueling a Contagion of Campus Bloodshed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 February 2008, A36. Financial behaviors are frequently discussed in terms of contagion. See, for example, Michael Schuman, “Ragin’ Contagion,” Time, 17 May 2010, 18. Similarly, the possible ripple effect caused by the English referendum on leaving the European Union (“Brexit”) has been called a kind of contagion. Matthew Holehouse, “The Brexit Contagion: How France, Italy and the Netherlands Now Want Their Referendum Too,” The Telegraph, 23 June 2016. The fear of Ebola has also been understood as a kind of contagion: Sherry Towers et al. “Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America.” PLoS One 10, no. 6 (June 2015): 1–13. 2. Margaret Healy notes that between the years 1486 and 1604 twenty-three books exclusively concerned with plague were published, registering a large collective anxiety about disease. “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern England, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 22–38. 3. All citations to Shakespeare’s plays refer to The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2015). 4. This formulation appears in the rhetoric of a figure such as the conservative author Hal Lindsey (http://www.hallindsey.com/ww-9-11-2015/, accessed 3 May 2016), but also more subtly but nonetheless pervasively in social science research about transnational migration. See, for example, Alex Braithwaite, “Resisting Infection: How State Capacity Conditions Conflict Contagion,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 3 (May 2010): 311–319; Erika Forsberg, “Transnational Transmitters: Ethnic Kinship Ties and Conflict Contagion 1946–2009,” International Interactions 40, no. 2 (April 2014): 143–165; Kyle Beardsley, “Peacekeeping and the Contagion of Armed Conflict,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 (October 2011): 1051–1064. 5. Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7. 6.  “Sympathy, n.”. OED Online. June 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/196271?rskey=B1fZQj&result= 1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 29 June 2016). 7.  Heather James, “Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2001): 360–382, esp. 372–373. 8. Russell M. Hillier, “‘Valour Will Weep’: The Ethics of Valor, Anger, and Pity in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” Studies in Philology 113, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 358–396, esp. 383.



184  J. FEATHER 9. Floyd-Wilson, 53. 10. Catherine Belling, “Infectious Rape, Therapeutic Revenge: Bloodletting and the Health of Rome’s Body,” Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, eds. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 113–132. 11.  Louise Noble, “‘And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads’: Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus,” ELH 70, no. 3 (2003): 677–708. 12. Deborah Willis, “‘The gnawing vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 21–52. 13.  See for instance, Carolyn Lamb, “Physical Trauma and (Adaptability) in Titus Andronicus,” Critical Survey 22, no. 1 (2010): 41–57 and Katherine Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1994): 279–303. 14.  Eric Langley, “Plagued by Kindness: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama,” Medical Humanities 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 103–109, especially 105. 15. For discussions of the competing notions of contagion in the period, see Isabelle Pantin, “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourses on Contagion,” Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire Carlin (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 3–15 and Stephanie Moss, “Transformation and Degeneration: The Paracelsan/Galenic Body in Othello,” Moss and Peterson, Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure, 151–170. 16. For a discussion of the influence of the heavens in early modern conceptions of physiology see Claude Gagnon, “The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages,” Carlin, Imagining Contagion, 16–32. 17. Russell Hillier, 382. See also, Patrick Gray, “Shakespeare and the Other Virgil: Pity and Imperium in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2016): 46–57. 18.  The language of contagion as sympathy prevalent in Julius Caesar runs throughout Shakespeare’s Roman works. For a few examples see Coriolanus, 1.3.99–100 and 1.1.169, Cymbeline, 1.6.117–118, and Antony and Cleopatra, 3.2.57. 19.  For discussions of setting boundaries through exclusion Sara Hanna, “Tamora’s Rome: Raising Babel and Inferno in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Yearbook 3 (1992): 11–29 and John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (New York: Cambridge, 1994). 20.  Emily Bartels, “‘Incorporate in Rome’: Titus Andronicus and the Consequence of Conquest” in Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 65–99.

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21. Floyd-Wilson, 12–14. For further discussion of the storm as a metaphor for mental and physiological disturbance, see Suparna Roychoudhury, “Mental Tempests, Seas of Trouble: The Perturbations of Shakespeare’s Pericles,” ELH 82, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 1013–1039. 22. Danielle A. St. Hilaire, “Allusion and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 49, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 311–331. 23. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 24.  Marcus’s response to Lavinia’s suffering is usually understood as distancing him from her experience. See, for example, William W. Weber, “‘Worse Than Philomel’: Violence, Revenge, and Meta-Allusion in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in Philology, 112, no. 4 (2015): 698–717.

Works Cited Bartels, Emily. “‘Incorporate in Rome’: Titus Andronicus and the Consequence of Conquest.” In Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello, 65–99. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Beardsley, Kyle. “Peacekeeping and the Contagion of Armed Conflict.” Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 (October 2011): 1051–1064. Belling, Catherine. “Infectious Rape, Therapeutic Revenge: Bloodletting and the Health of Rome’s Body.” In Moss and Peterson, Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure, 113–132. Braithwaite, Alex. “Resisting Infection: How State Capacity Conditions Conflict Contagion.” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 3 (May 2010): 311–319. Carlin, Claire, ed. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Forsberg, Erika. “Transnational Transmitters: Ethnic Kinship Ties and Conflict Contagion 1946–2009.” International Interactions 40, no. 2 (April 2014): 143–165. Fox, James Alan. “Fueling a Contagion of Campus Bloodshed.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 29 February 2008. Gagnon, Claude. “The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages.” Carlin, Imagining Contagion, 16–32. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. New York: Cambridge, 1994. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Gray, Patrick. “Shakespeare and the Other Virgil: Pity and Imperium in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2016): 46–57.

186  J. FEATHER Hanna, Sara. “Tamora’s Rome: Raising Babel and Inferno in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Yearbook 3 (1992): 11–29. Healy, Margaret. “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch.” In Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern England, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 22–38. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Hillier, Russell M. “‘Valour Will Weep’: The Ethics of Valor, Anger, and Pity in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.” Studies in Philology 113, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 358–396. Holehouse, Matthew. “The Brexit Contagion: How France, Italy and the Netherlands Now Want Their Referendum Too.” The Telegraph. 23 June 2016. James, Heather. “Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2001): 360–382. Lamb, Carolyn. “Physical Trauma and (Adaptability) in Titus Andronicus.” Critical Survey 22, no. 1 (2010): 41–57. Langley, Eric. “Plagued by Kindness: Contagious Sympathy in Shakespearean Drama.” Medical Humanities 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 103–109. Moss, Stephanie. “Transformation and Degeneration: The Paracelsan/Galenic Body in Othello.” In Moss and Peterson, Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure, 151–170. Moss, Stephanie, and Kaara L. Peterson, eds. Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Noble, Louise. “‘And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads’: Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus.” ELH 70, no. 3 (2003): 677–708. Pantin, Isabelle. “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourses on Contagion.” In Carlin, Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, 3–15. Rowe, Katherine. “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1994): 279–303. Roychoudhury, Suparna. “Mental Tempests, Seas of Trouble: The Perturbations of Shakespeare’s Pericles.” ELH 82, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 1013–1039. Schuman, Michael, “Ragin’ Contagion.” Time. 17 May 2010. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Gordon McMullan, and Suzanne Gossett. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2015. St. Hilaire, Danielle A. “Allusion and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 49, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 311–331. Towers, Sherry, Shehzad Afzal, Gilbert Bernal, Nadya Bliss, Shala Brown, Baltazar Espinoza, Jasmine Jackson, Julia Judson-Garcia, Maryam Khan, Michael Lin, Robert Mamada, Victor M. Moreno, Fereshteh Nazari,

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Kamaldeen Okuneye, Mary L. Ross, Claudia Rodriguez, Jan Medlock, David Ebert, and Carlos Castillo-Chavez. “Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America.” PLoS One 10, no. 6 (June 2015): 1–13. Walt, Stephen M. “Fads, Fevers, and Firestorms.” Foreign Policy. November 2000. Weber, William W. “‘Worse Than Philomel’: Violence, Revenge, and MetaAllusion in Titus Andronicus.” Studies in Philology 112, no. 4 (2015): 698–717. Willis, Deborah. “‘The Gnawing Vulture’: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 21–52.

PART III

Viral Ideas

CHAPTER 10

The Hungry Meme and Political Contagion in Coriolanus Clifford Werier

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins invented a concept which is now ubiquitous: the meme.1 Though Internet memes have come to be associated with clever captions attached to images distributed on social networks, the original theory of memes was based on a largely forgotten argument linking genetic replication of DNA with analogous units of cultural transmission.2 Meme theory argues that strong ideas, like genes, possess a selfish momentum which propels them to survive in human minds and associated cultural encodings if the conditions are favorable and to mutate or lose their power if the conditions are not. In other iterations, the meme is likened to a virus, having a parasitic effect on human hosts who are assailed by the competitive contagion of the memosphere. However we define the complex relation between memes and minds— and, as I will later describe, the theory is controversial—memes can be used to understand the propagation and survival of ideas in challenging political and social contexts. For this reason, meme theory seems ideally suited to a consideration of contagious ideas in Shakespeare’s most C. Werier (*)  Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_10

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politically volatile play, Coriolanus,3 especially where memes cross the barrier between dramatic and public spheres.4 This permeability is especially acute when considering the food riots that open Coriolanus and how such depictions may have converged with the audience’s personal experiences of hunger or memories of contemporary social disturbances linked to food shortages, such as the Midland Riots of 1607. In this chapter, I argue that memes related to a more equitable distribution of food were active both in the play’s fictional Rome and in English life beyond the stage, and that such active memes were still vying for survival against counter-memes of authority and associated consequences. In a play that continually emphasizes problems of embodiment,5 the potential for human hosts to be assailed by contagious ideological agents augments the play’s other depictions of vulnerability and infection. Meme theory, therefore, offers a way of understanding the circulation and survivability of ideas in discrete populations, but it can also be linked to early modern antitheatrical rhetoric concerning spectators who risk moral, spiritual, and physical contagion by attending plays. I begin with a consideration of the history, key assumptions, and criticisms of meme theory, recognizing that such a bio-critical approach requires Shakespeare scholars to enter disciplines which are not traditionally associated with literary criticism: in this case, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and the sometimes esoteric application of genetics to processes of cultural replication. Second, I observe the political contexts of Coriolanus, focusing on the 1607 Midlands uprisings and situating memes related to the distribution of food and associated political agency as a type of ideological contagion. Finally, I observe the operation of memes in the opening scene of Coriolanus, analyzing the interrupted transmission of memes related to plebeian demands for more equitable food distribution by counter-memes of state control and patrician care. The application of meme theory to Coriolanus emphasizes the primary impetus of the meme to replicate, both within the dramatic fiction of characters’ minds and on the other side of the stage, where the early modern audience would have contended with identical memes that were actively circulating.

Memes and the “Meme” Meme Matt Ridley argues that “before The Selfish Gene, scientists wrote books for each other, or for laymen, but rarely for both.”6 In this, he is highlighting the appeal of Richard Dawkins’s book to both lay and

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professional readers. It must be emphasized, however, that memes are secondary to Dawkins’s main consideration of the power of genes to replicate, moved by a “selfish” evolutionary impetus for survival. In fact, Dawkins only develops the concept of memes in a short, twelvepage chapter near the end of the book, “Memes: the New Replicators.” Here, he describes memes as units of cultural transmission, which, like genes, “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”7 Dawkins calls the meme a “new kind of replicator” which is “achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.” He offers examples of memes such as “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” and suggests that a “fertile meme,” when planted in the mind, has the potential to “parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” Dawkins emphasizes that he is not proposing a metaphor to explain how cultural ideas are transmitted, but that an idea like “‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous system of individual men the world over.”8 Once Dawkins invented the meme, his concept took on a life of its own, replicating and mutating in various interdisciplinary realms. Daniel Dennett, responding to Dawkins, insists that meme theory is not just a playful metaphor demonstrating an analogy between biology and culture but that the meme’s generation and survival are real processes through which potent ideas circulate: “Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, not just a process that can be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly.”9 According to Dennett, memes do not exist outside of the human realm but circulate within individual and collective consciousness: “each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is a considerable competition among memes for entry into as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere.”10 Likewise, Susan Blackmore argues that memes are not simply a cultural analogue that describes the transmission of powerful ideas, but like DNA, they carry information by means of replication.11 Robert Aunger summarizes the two foundational analogies of meme theory: the first “sees memes as microbes,” and in this light, the discipline of memetics, the formal study of memes, becomes “the cultural analogue to the study of how disease-causing

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pathogens diffuse through populations,” and the second grounds its arguments more firmly in the language of genetics.12 In his 1997 essay, “Viruses of the Mind,”13 Dawkins expanded his meme thesis by describing the contagious function of memes and how “mind parasites” mutate in the presence of supportive ideas which “flourish in one another’s presence, ideas that mutually support one another just as genes do.” Dawkins’s conclusion is worth noting: “What matters is that minds are friendly environments to parasitic, self-­ replicating ideas or information, and that minds are typically massively infected.”14 The genetic explanation, on the other hand, centers on the notion of replication and imitation—hence the origin of the word meme in the idea of memesis. Susan Blackmore argues that “everything that you have learned by imitation from someone else is a meme,” the key point being that “something must have been copied.” She asserts that “memes do not care; they are selfish like genes and will simply spread if they can” as “successful memes are the ones that get copied and spread, while unsuccessful ones do not.”15 In fact, the meme itself is one of the best examples of how memes spread. Jeremy Burman sees the origin of memes as “a thought experiment: a rhetorical device intended to illuminate Dawkins’s argument that the replicator ought to replace the gene in the scientific understanding of what drives evolutionary change,” arguing that it was not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of how all cultural transmission operates.16 Burman suggests that the meme was such an attractive concept that it seemingly took on a life of its own. The transmission and mutation of the meme idea would seem to support Dawkins’s original contention—that memes will replicate and survive if conditions are favorable. Adam Kuper, however, considers meme theory to be an over-simplification, and as an anthropologist, he emphasizes the complex forces which create cultural objects and beliefs, concluding that “the analogy between memes and genes is fanciful and flawed.”17 This skepticism is echoed by Dan Sperber who argues that memeticists have not produced “empirical evidence to support the claim that, in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties from other elements of culture that they replicate.”18 No matter how much credence one gives to specific interpretations of meme theory, the meme participates in a larger cultural discourse related to the contagious power of ideas and emotions. Peta Mitchell, for example, observes the ubiquitous presence of the meme of contagion in

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popular culture: “Contagion today is everywhere—it is in the financial markets, on the streets and in our computers. It characterizes our use of social networking and the way ideas spread through society.”19 But contagion also moves through literary studies, where in the early 2000s, according to Mitchell, “a distinctive, interdisciplinary, cultural studies of contagion appeared, which attempted to draw together strands of cultural, historical, literary and sociological analyses.”20 Mitchell suggests that the acceptance of the meme and virality is based on our need to understand the rapid dissemination of ideas in a massively connected culture, becoming, by the late 1990s, something of a “self-fulfilling prophecy: the meme meme.”21

The Hungry Meme Although meme theory is a recent phenomenon, it seems particularly applicable to Coriolanus, where viral ideas and metaphors linked to hunger replicate explicitly, especially in the opening scene.22 Commentators have described the link between the depiction of food riots in 1.1 and contemporary accounts of hunger, food scarcity, and rebellious social action.23 As Ayesha Mukherjee points out, the 1590s were “notorious dearth years.”24 Nate Eastman also describes the urban experience of dearth in 1593–1597 and the social conflicts which it generated in London: “What he [Shakespeare] was moving towards was, I think, nothing less than a foundational rearticulation of political relationships whose principal anxieties included the distribution of food.”25 Likewise, Chris Fitter considers the social strains of London in the 1590s in his reading of street quarrels in Romeo and Juliet, concluding that the “context of dearth and citizen violence, erupting in riot after riot has never hitherto been noted in criticism” of the play.26 David George concurs, asserting that “Dearth in Tudor and Stuart England was not unusual” and that “Shakespeare lived through grain shortages in 1563-4, 1573-4, 1586-7, and 1595-7, all years when harvests were bad and grain prices jumped.”27 In particular, George identifies the summer of 1608 as difficult, and he argues that “for Coriolanus to have the effective first scene it does, the dearth of autumn 1608 had to have begun.” Shakespeare’s personal contact with dearth and uprising, as both Londoner and Stratford resident, must have contributed to the depictions in the first scene. Peter Holland mentions Shakespeare’s likely attendance at the wedding of “his daughter Susanna to John Hall on 5 June 1607 at the time when the

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Midlands Revolt was at its height,”28 and as a Warwickshire man and landholder, he would have had a personal stake in the proximate rebellion, its outcome, and presumably, a keen interest in its consequences. From a neo-Darwinian perspective, there is nothing more powerful than the need to secure food in order to survive. Thus, meme theory, applied to Coriolanus and its contexts, begins with the identification of primal ideas linked to problematic food access, associated agricultural and distributive practices, and human sustainability in 1607–1608,29 dates associated with Coriolanus’s composition and performance.30 The resulting social disturbances were motivated by the hunger of individuals who expressed their desire to reverse the escalating enclosures of common land in order to secure more equitable access to food. This “more equitable food distribution meme” (MEFDM) subsequently spread from mind to mind in the processes of its further replication. Likewise, a counter-meme encoding the state’s response to such insurrection was also in circulation, as the two competing memes participated in a competitive dialectic which vied for a place in citizens’ minds. Turning to Coriolanus and its contexts, the hungry people who rioted for more equitable food distribution in 1607 and 1608 were motivated by the need to secure food for survival but also by their contention that agricultural practices had created dire conditions that needed to be redressed, and their protests created opportunities for memes to be exchanged and imitated. Likewise, the state’s response included a counter-memetic strategy that seeded competing memes in the population through print, speech, and legal statute. The dramatized riots which open Coriolanus imitate the memetic competition of the real riots, as in both cases the MEFDM is expressed, communicated, and countered by state-sanctioned counter-memes. In “Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607,” Steve Hindle structures an imaginary colloquium between commentators from four estates (John Reynolds, rebel leader; James I, King; Robert Wilkinson, clergyman; and Sir Francis Bacon, statesman) which demonstrates how memetic replication operates in a variety of competing texts.31 Focusing on the connection between the play and its contexts, I will consider three of Hindle’s meme generators: John Reynolds, King James, and Robert Wilkinson. Hindle links Reynolds, also known as Captain Pouch, with the anonymous digger broadside, “The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers” which circulated in manuscript in 1607.32 The accusations of

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the diggers against the “incroaching Tirants” are pointed and eloquent: “They have depopulated and ouerthrown whole townes, and made therof sheep pastures, nothing profitable for our Commonwealth, ffor the comon ffields being layd open, yeeld as much comodity, besides the increase of Corne, on which stands our life.” The extreme consequences of the diggers’ resistance is expressed in their willingness to die for their cause, rather than submit passively to famine: “for better it were in such case wee manfully dye, then hereafter to be pined to death for want of that which these deuouring encroachers do serue theyr fatt hogges and sheep withall,” bringing to mind the question of the First Citizen to the mob that opens Coriolanus: “You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?” (1.1.3–4).33 Robert Wilkinson’s sermon, preached “at the sessions convened at Northampton on 21 June 1607 to try the Midland rebels”34 and published three weeks later, uses Matthew 4:4, “Man shall not live by bread alone” as its central text.35 Hindle emphasizes the equivocal position of Wilkinson, who must condemn insurrection while acknowledging the culpability of some landlords.36 Wilkinson emphasizes the threat of hunger, while extolling the need for the hungry to exercise the same patience that Jesus displayed when he was fasting in the desert: “For it is said before, that Christ fasted, meaning a religious fast, as few do now, and it is saide likewise, that he was hungry, and no marvell, for he was in a place, where was neither bred nor corn, as may be now.”37 In Wilkinson’s closing arguments, he “weighs the sins of his protagonists [landlords and rebels] against one another,” concluding that “the offences committed by the rebels were significantly more heinous”38: “And if any yet remaine whom the poison of this conspiracie hath infected; I will not use many reasons to diswade him.”39 The notion of “infection” here is significant because the meme has the power to occupy the minds of hungry people who may not even realize that they have been poisoned until they utter their last words before execution. Hindle emphasizes the rhetorical power of allusions to bread, pointing to “the physical hunger of the rioters, who were implicitly portrayed as victims both of enclosure and dearth.”40 Three royal proclamations issued in May, June, and July of 1607 address the MEFDM by commenting on enclosures and associated rebellions, structuring a counter-meme of royal authority in an attempt to quell future insurrection.41 Unlike Menenius’s placating rhetoric in 1.1, King James’s counter-meme invokes the harsh rule of law mitigated by

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a softer power which attends to some of the rioters’ charges. The first proclamation seeks to manage insurrection “by vse of sharper remedies” than “the ordinary proceedings of the Commissioners of the Peace.” James stresses legal consequences, particularly to those “who chuse rather to trust their own pride and rashnes, then to the care and prouidence of their Souereigne” and who will “answere the contrarie at their perill.” The second proclamation continues the rhetoric of law, obedience, and punishment, suggesting that even in late June 1607, there was a need to disseminate a counter-meme of royal authority. The proclamation identifies those who “assemble themselues rioutously in multitudes” who “stood out obstinately, and in open fielde rebelliously resisted such forces as in Our name, and by Our authoritie came to represse them” and declares that the King will “forget our natural clemency by pursuing them with all seuerity for their so hainous Treasons.” In the third proclamation, James addresses the grievances directly by establishing a royal commission “to investigate the scale of illegal enclosure and depopulation across the Midlands” motivated by “love of Justice” and “Christian compassion.”42 In addition, the King offers a “pardon vnto them their sayd Ofences, and all paines of Death or other punishment” if lawbreakers acknowledge their offenses before authorities. According to Hindle, “despite James’s scepticism about the nature and scale of dearth, he nonetheless thought it imperative to temper justice with mercy.”43 In these examples, meme theory helps to isolate key ideas about food access and its consequences, expressed in broadsides, sermons (spoken and printed), and royal proclamations. Even in an early modern treatise “of empirical research into the causes of possible prevention of dearth,”44 Arthur Standish’s The Commons Complaint (1611), the popular language of virulent mental infection, is explicitly referenced: “too oft ariseth discontentments, and mutinies among the common sort, as appeared of late by a grievance taken onely for the dearth of Corne in Warwick-shire, Northampton-shire, and other places, about which time the mindes of many were molested.”45 Standish’s identification of “discontentments,” “mutinies,” and “grievances” related to “the dearth of Corne” expresses his fear of the memetic molestation of hungry minds. Although references to the infectious power of memes related to food distribution are numerous, it is clear that such memes were not exclusive to the late Tudor and early Stuart period and that human history is replete with examples of political negotiations between common people

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and rulers over access to land and agricultural resources. The MEFDM has a long and complex history of replication in various populations, and thus, its manifestation in Coriolanus and its contexts are part of a continuing pattern of transmission and mutation.

Make Rome Great Again While the notion that minds are susceptible hosts grounds meme theory’s genetic and pathogenic explanations, a similar understanding of ideological contagion can be found in early modern antitheatrical tracts, which describe how infectious ideas threaten the moral and spiritual life of spectators. Robert Ormsby’s comprehensive examination of the antitheatrical writings of Stephen Gosson, Anthony Munday, William Rankins, Philip Stubbes, and I.G. emphasizes the power of contagious ideas to spread from stage to audience: “antitheatrical rhetoric of the era is ‘pathological’ not simply to the degree that it portrays the actor’s body infected by unclean performance, but also in its depictions of audiences diseased by the spectacles they witness.”46 Ormsby cites I.G.’s 1612 tract, A Refutation of the Apologie for Actors, as an example of the rhetoric of ideological disease transmission that circulated throughout the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods: These goodly pageants being done, euery one sorteth to his mate, each bring another homeward of their way: then begin they to repeat the lascivious acts and speeches they have heard, and thereby infect their minde with wicked passions so that in their secret conclaues they play the Sodomits, or worse.47

According to this model, once the “acts and speeches” have been heard, the mind cannot avoid infection by the “wicked passions” which have been communicated by the theatrical experience, and such contagion will be repeated and spread by imitations of the immoral stage behavior that has been witnessed. Thus, the early modern antitheatrical pathogenic model, with its emphasis on the dangerous repetition of “lascivious acts and speeches” after the theatrical event concludes, seems to anticipate the ideological replication that is at the heart of meme theory, structuring a proto-memetic explanation of how contagious ideas survive and propagate. While the early modern pathogenic model implies that spiritual and moral infection seemingly has no cure and may spread

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from person to person like a plague, the memetic model emphasizes the meme’s capacity to survive only if conditions support its replication. Although not conversant with Dawkins or meme theory, Shakespeare must have understood the enduring power of something like the MEFDM and its potential to replicate in the minds of both his hungry plebian characters and the audience members who could be “infected” by contact with a volatile ideological agent, and this interaction is especially acute in the chaotic call-and-response exchange between the First Citizen and the mob that opens Coriolanus48: 1 CITIZEN Before we proceed any further, hear me speak ALL Speak, speak. 1 CITIZEN You are all resolved rather to die than to famish? ALL Resolved, resolved. 1 CITIZEN First, you know Caius Martius is chief enemy to the people. ALL We know’t, we know’t. 1 CITIZEN Let us kill him, and we’ll have corn at our own price. Is’t a verdict? ALL No more talking on’t. Let it be done. Away, away. (1–8)

The stakes are high, as the citizens contemplate a stark choice between dying as a consequence of revolutionary conflict and dying of hunger. The mock street trial concludes with a “verdict” which indicts Martius, sentencing him to death, and moves the people to attempt control of the food supply. Although the First Citizen is the mouthpiece of this group, he solicits the crowd’s consent and is eventually carried “away” by the momentum of their support for his clearly articulated ideas about access to corn and the removal of the “chief enemy of the people.” Thus, at the beginning of the play, a meme is structured and replicated, and by the end of the exchange, it appears that the infection has spread beyond the possibility of containment. As examples in the previous section suggest, versions of the MEFDM must have occupied the minds of English men and women who had lived through the 1590s and the recent cycles of dearth in 1607–1608, and the First Citizen reflects this active meme back to the audience in a reciprocal cycle of meme generation, imitation, and transmission. According to this model, the meme moves from its hungry origins in English life, replicates in Shakespeare’s imagination, is re-activated in the Citizens’ dialogue on stage, and finds a place in the minds of audience

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members, some of whom may have been hungry while they watched the play. Shakespeare manages the conflict by demonstrating the mechanics of memetic contagion and the ways in which ideological energy builds and is dissipated. Although the opening scene shows a keen awareness of the recent political contexts of dearth, riot, and the state’s response, the Roman mob is not a stand-in for Warwickshire diggers; otherwise, the scene would not have survived the censor’s pen. Instead, the play focuses on the MEFDM and its ability to survive in the face of a counter-meme that possesses the same adaptive tendencies. According to this reading, Shakespeare is more interested in staging the mechanics of memetic contention—the parasitic power of the meme to find supportive hosts—than in the potentially dangerous ideological charge that the memes hold. In other words, the play stages both the viability of the MEFDM under particular conditions and the ways in which memes may flourish momentarily before being replaced by other, more potent counter-memes or mutations. Throughout the play, Shakespeare demonstrates the fickleness of the mob and its tendency to be swayed by the last rhetorical act or argument. Memes and counter-memes enter the minds of auditors through oratory and competitive debate, whether in the contention about food and patrician authority that opens the play or in the ongoing conversations about Coriolanus’s suitability for consulship. The potential for the meme to be communicated through speech is emphasized by repeated references to speaking in the opening two lines, where “speak” is repeated three times and where anaphora creates an echoing effect. While motifs of eating, feeding, disease, and stinking breath have been noted by many critics,49 less emphasis has been placed on the figurative power of the mouth and especially the tongue as the source of words, the organs of meme replication. David Cressy in Dangerous Talk devotes an entire chapter to the “Sins of the Tongue,” as he investigates such perils in early modern tracts and sermons.50 Cressy cites Edward Nisbet, writing in 1601 on the subject of seditious words, which functioning “like a contagious disease, do infect others, therefore are they more to be abhorred” than the more private “seditious thoughts,” which are only “hurtful” to the individual heart.51 Likewise, Darryl Chalk considers the mutable mind’s susceptibility to contagious ideas, which function like poisonous miasmas associated with disease transmission, concluding that “The atmosphere in Coriolanus is suffused with just such a ‘plaguey’ air.”52

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Although the mob is positioned by the stage directions in 1.1 as explicitly violent and subversive, a “company of mutinous Citizens with staves, clubs and other weapons,” the conversation between the First and Second Citizens is measured and intelligent: they are not just violent club-wielders. Instead, the First Citizen offers a sophisticated and rhetorically complex rendering of class relations, morality, and the unequal distribution of food, featuring language grounded in a contrast between the poor, hungry masses, and the inhumane response of the surfeiting authorities: We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely. But they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge. (1.1.13–23)

Cressy reminds us that “seditious words were dangerous because they shredded the bonds of allegiance and abraded the social fabric,”53 and thus had these words been uttered as a public act of political agitation for agrarian reform, the criminal repercussions could have been severe. But on stage, in an imagined insurrection, the consequences are different. The passage expresses the First Citizen’s contention with the same clarity and pathos as the digger manifesto. Patrician “surfeit,” “superfluity,” and “abundance” are wasteful conditions when contrasted with the “poor” “leanness” of the people. What is worse, this “sufferance is a gain to them,” as the “good” patricians take advantage of their privilege and thrive by the perverse starvation of citizens. The First Citizen’s conclusion that he speaks more “in hunger” than in “revenge” establishes the moral weight and embodied necessity of his argument. After an ad hominem exchange between the First and Second Citizens about the justifications for killing Martius, Menenius enters and tries to diffuse an explosive situation. Menenius, described by the Second Citizen as an honest patrician who “hath always loved the people” (47), is grudgingly accepted by the First Citizen, and his presence immediately counters the rebellion that was threatening to create an uncontainable mass action. A debate ensues between Menenius and the Second

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Citizen, who exchange polarized views about the power and motivations of the patricians toward the plebeians. Again the civility of the debate contrasts strongly with its violent context: one moment the Citizens are calling for the death of Martius and the next moment they are exchanging political theories with a leading senator. Menenius’s opening gambit is to solicit friendship by emphasizing the patricians’ compassionate duty: “I tell you, friends, most charitable care / Have the patricians of you” (1.1.60–61), structuring his counter-meme of paternal responsibility by noting that the patricians “care for you [plebeians] like fathers” (1.1. 72). Menenius offers two main pillars to support his counter-meme, which mirror the arguments of both King James and Wilkinson: (1) the Roman state, “whose course will on / The way it takes,” is unassailable by puny plebeian violence; and (2) the cause and alleviation of dearth are made by “The gods, not the patricians” (68), and therefore, the plebeians would be better off supplicating the gods than assailing their compassionate “friends.” The Second Citizen does not fall for this, especially Menenius’s appeal to patrician care: “Care for us? True, indeed, they ne’er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain” (74–76). At a point when it seems as if the hungry meme is in ascendance and might prevail in the battle of words, Menenius shifts the escalating rhetoric of violence and hunger by offering his “pretty tale” of the belly—a wall of famously long-winded words that effectively marks the end of this phase of the citizens’ revolt. Menenius’s parable of the “body’s members” rebelling “against the belly” concludes with a detailed explanation of his allegory: The senators of Rome are this good belly, And you the mutinous members. For examine Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly, Touching the weal o’th’ common, you shall find No public benefit which you receive But it proceeds or comes from them to you, And no way from yourselves. (1.1.143–149)

Patrician “care” is emphatically invoked as part of a symbiotic cycle in which the source of power for all members of the body politic is beneficially produced by the senators through a crucial distributive mechanism. This counter-meme of patrician centrality directly addresses the narrative

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of mutinous members previously accusing the lazy, selfish belly of “Still cupboarding the viand,” a direct allusion to the Citizens’ charges of patrician food hoarding. The belly emphasizes its vital role in distributing nutritional energy: “I send it through the rivers of your blood / Even to the court, the heart, to th’seat o’th’brain” (130–131). The Second Citizen occasionally questions and interrupts Menenius, even mocking his rhetorical designs, but he is given no opportunity to counter Menenius’s argument, except to complain that he is “long about it.” Finally, after the body politic narrative runs its course, the many-headed monster of plebian citizens that threatened patrician food control in Rome becomes drained of its virulence and is transformed into the smallest and least effective appendage, becoming in Menenius’s words, a “great toe.” Menenius’s public persona, the compassionate patrician who cares for the hungry plebeians and wants only to exercise paternal love for his unruly children, is part of a shrewd political act, as he will later emerge as a spin doctor who attempts to groom Coriolanus into a less volatile exponent of consular stewardship. Menenius wields the meme of patrician care through addresses to his plebeian “friends” and through a fairytale allegory, the kind of story that one might tell to children or utilize when rendering a complex political idea into a simple analogy, such as in a televised political speech that requires a sound bite for the nightly news or a meme that can be circulated on the Internet. One can imagine Menenius in a ball cap emblazoned with the words, “Make Rome Great Again,” as he appeals to agricultural protectionism, state indivisibility, class hierarchies, and parables of power that have sustained the Roman state and its status quo. The meme of Rome is constructed by a delicate but unequal symbiotic balance in which the belly paradoxically serves and rules the members. Or so it seems at this point in the play, before the tribunes are introduced and what seems to be the prevailing meme of patrician care and authority is temporarily undermined by a new and unsuccessful division of political power.54 Once Martius enters and begins to rail against the plebeians’ meme, he alters Menenius’s strategically placating counter-meme by insisting that the lowly plebeians’ claim for corn access is unjustified because their opinions are notoriously mutable: “Trust ye? / With every minute you do change a mind / And call him noble that was now your hate” (1.1. 176–178). Although these words are prescient, they also demonstrate the polarized nature of Martius’s inflexible world view. As a counter-memetic strategy, it lacks sophistication. Immediately, Menenius

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explains to Martius, how the “passing cowardly” plebeians are “almost thoroughly persuaded” because “abundantly they lack discretion” (196–198). Martius angrily describes how the troop on the other side of the city has already had success in forwarding the hungry meme, as the election of five tribunes demonstrates. However, on this side of the city, the memetic charge has seemingly been dissipated by Menenius’s competitive rhetoric. Despite Martius’s invective and news of the Volscian uprising, the stage direction, “Citizens steal away,” indicates that, for the time being, the hungry meme appears to have lost its replicating power. The contrast between Martius’s explosive diatribe and Menenius’s sophisticated mimetic deployments further complicates the ideological contentions that shape the play’s dramatic design. Unlike the hungry mob who speaks out of desperation or Martius who speaks out a reflex of anger, Menenius demonstrates a keen understanding of mimetic virulence, as he attempts to plant a counter-meme in the minds of the rioters in order to inoculate them against the power of the MEFDM and its potential to undermine the old structures of Roman society. His memetic parable functions like an extended Tweet that will circulate and replicate if the conditions are favorable. Later in the play, Sicinius and Brutus demonstrate an equally sophisticated ability to deploy memes strategically in the minds of plebeians, such as the meme of Coriolanus’s unsuitability to be consul or even to remain in Rome. Meme theory is particularly suited to the observation of political contagion, as it accounts for ways in which sometimes outrageous and extreme memes can survive and flourish if they are structured carefully and let loose upon vulnerable populations. Aware of theatrical censorship and the consequences of dangerous words, Shakespeare’s equivocal depiction of memetic replication and counter-memetic response does not favor either party: the citizens’ demand for food is distracted by war and civil conflict and ceases to be a factor in the rest of the play, except as a recurring metaphor. Either the citizens are no longer hungry because they are being fed, or the invention of the tribunate and the ability to wield power over the consulship have distracted them from their previous demands. However, in 1.1, the stakes are high, as the hungry meme faces the test of ideological natural selection. The meme participates in a circulation of virulence that has its source in actual hunger and associated political discontent, and it is imitated in Shakespeare’s dramatic art through the medium of the play and its characters; it enters the minds of audiences who may carry this

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meme into worlds beyond the playhouse. Unlike the pathogenic rheto­ric of the antitheatricalists, meme theory positions “infection” not as a morally corrupting idea but as a replicating ideological mutation that competes for survival in the minds of receptive hosts. As such, meme theory offers a fresh way of observing the many places where memes and counter-memes, both fictional and real, cross and re-cross the permeable barriers of stage and life.

Notes





1. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 2. See Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 18. 3. See David G. Hale, “Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1971): 197–202. Hale nicely summarizes the two main critical approaches to Coriolanus: “The initial difficulty in approaching Coriolanus has been deciding whether the play is essentially political—perhaps a demonstration of the need for civic order—or personal—the exhibition of the fall of a noble but deeply flawed hero.” See also W. Gordon Zeeveld, “Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics,” Modern Language Review 57, no. 3 (1962): 321–334; Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” ELH 59, no. 1 (1992): 53–75; Ann Kaegi, “‘How Apply You This?’ Conflict and Consensus in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare 4, no. 4 (December 2008): 362–378; James Kuzner, “Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2007): 174–199; and T. F. Kaouk, “Homo Faber, Action Hero Manque: Crafting the State in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2015): 409–439. 4. See Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (2006): 276–277. 5.  See Cynthia Marshall, “Wound-man: Coriolanus, Gender and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94. “With its plot involving hungry multitudes and its hero extraordinarily interested in martial valor, it is little wonder that Coriolanus insists on the inescapability of the body.” 6. Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley, Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 266.

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7. Dawkins, 192. 8. Ibid., 192. 9. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 202. 10. Ibid., 206. 11. Susan J. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236. 12. Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think (New York: The Free Press, 2002), 17–18. 13. Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind,” in Dennett and His Critics, ed. Bo Dahlbom (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 1–26. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Blackmore, 7. 16.  Jeremy Burman, “The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999,” Perspectives on Science 20, no. 1 (2012): 81. 17. Adam Kuper, “If Memes Are the Answer, What Is the Question?” in Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, ed. Robert Aunger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 187. 18. Dan Sperber, “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture,” in Darwinizing Culture, ed. Aunger, 173. 19. Peta Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 1. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid., 109. 22.  For a recent application of meme theory to Shakespeare studies, see Kristin N. Denslow, “Guest Starring Hamlet: The Proliferation of the Shakespeare Meme on American Television,” in Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, ed. Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 97–110. 23.  See Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); E. C. Pettet, “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1966), 34–42; and Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 24. Ayesha Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2015), 1. 25. Nate Eastman, “The Rumbling Belly Politic: Metaphorical Location and Metaphorical Government in Coriolanus,” Early Modern Literary Studies 13 (2007): para. 3. 26. Chris Fitter, “‘The Quarrel Is between Our Masters and Us Their Men’: Romeo and Juliet, Dearth, and the London Riots,” English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 2 (2000): 155.

208  C. WERIER 27. David George, “Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 112. 28.  Peter Holland, Introduction to Coriolanus, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 68. 29. Arthur Riss. “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” ELH 59, no. 1 (1992): 53–75. Riss provides a detailed description of the “conflict between a communal and private organization of property,” 55. 30. See Holland, 49–71 for a comprehensive discussion of the play’s dating. 31. Steve Hindle. “Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607,” History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 21–61. 32. “The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers” 787/11, Harleian Collection, British Library, London. Thanks to Steve Hindle for generously supplying a transcript. 33. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Peter Holland, ed., The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). All quotations refer to this edition. 34. Hindle, 33. 35. Robert Wilkinson, A sermon preached at North-Hampton the 21. of Iune last past, before the Lord Lieutenant of the county, and the rest of the commissioners there assembled vpon occasion of the late rebellion and riots in those parts committed. (London, 1607). 36. Hindle, 33. 37. Wilkinson, B2v. 38. Hindle, 35. 39. Wilkinson, G1v. 40. Hindle, 36. 41. James VI and I, By the King whereas some of the meaner sort of our people did of late assemble themselues in riotous and tumultuous maner within our countie of Northampton (London, 1607) (Given 30 May); By the King it is a thing notorious that many of the meanest sort of our people in diuers parts of our kingdome… haue presumed lately to assemble themselues riotously in multitudes… (London, 1607) (Given 28 June); By the King in calling to our princely remembrance, that in the late rebellion vpon pretence of depopulation and vnlawfull inclosures, the greatest number of the offenders have not beene proceeded with according to iustice and their traiterous deseruings… (London, 1607). 42. Hindle, 31. 43. Ibid., 32. 44. Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135. 45. Qtd. in McRae, 135.

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46. Robert Ormsby, “Coriolanus, Antitheatricalism, and Audience Response,” Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 1 (2008): 47. 47. Qtd. in Ormsby, 49. 48. For a discussion of monstrous depictions of the crowd in Coriolanus, see “From the ‘Body Politic’ to the ‘Many-Headed Monster’: Coriolanus,” in Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare, ed. Kai Wiegandt (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 49. See Stanley Cavell, “‘Who Does the Wolf Love?’ Reading Coriolanus,” Representations 3, no. 1 (1983): 1–20; Janet Adelman, “‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature: Shakespeare Criticism in Honor of America’s Bicentennial, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 108–204. 50. David Cressey, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 51. Ibid., 10. 52.  Darryl Chalk, “‘Here’s a Strange Alteration’: Contagion and the Mutable Mind in Coriolanus,” in Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Martin Rocházka, Andreas Hoefele, Hanna Scolnicov, and Michael Dobson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014), 70. 53. Cressy, 42. 54. Hale, 200.

Works Cited Adelman, Janet. “‘Anger’s My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus.” In Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature: Shakespeare Criticism in Honor of America’s Bicentennial, edited by David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, 108–204. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978. Aunger, Robert, ed. Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. New York: Free Press, 2002. Blackmore, Susan J. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Burman, Jeremy. “The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999.” Perspectives on Science 20, no. 1 (2012): 75–104. Cavell, Stanley. “‘Who Does the Wolf Love?’ Reading Coriolanus.” Representations 3, no. 1 (1983): 1–20. Chalk, Darryl. “‘Here’s a Strange Alteration’: Contagion and the Mutable Mind in Coriolanus.” In Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, edited by Martin

210  C. WERIER Rocházka, Andreas Hoefele, Hanna Scolnicov, and Michael Dobson, 68–76. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014. Cressy, David. Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. “Viruses of the Mind.” In Dennett and His Critics, edited by Bo Dahlbom, 1–26. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993. Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. Denslow, Kristin N. “Guest Starring Hamlet: The Proliferation of the Shakespeare Meme on American Television.” In Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, edited by Christy Desmet, Natalie Loper, and Jim Casey, 97–110. New York: Palgrave, 2017. Eastman, Nate. “The Rumbling Belly Politic: Metaphorical Location and Metaphorical Government in Coriolanus.” Early Modern Literary Studies 13 (2007). Fitter, Chris. “‘The Quarrel Is Between Our Masters and Us Their Men’: Romeo and Juliet, Dearth, and the London Riots.” English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 2 (2000): 154–183. George, David. “Plutarch, Insurrection, and Dearth in Coriolanus.” In Shakespeare and Politics, edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander, 110–129. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Grafen, Alan, and Mark Ridley. Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hale, David G. “Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1971): 197–202. Harleian Collection, British Library. London. Hindle, Steve. “Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607.” History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 21–61. James VI and I. By the King in calling to our princely remembrance, that in the late rebellion vpon pretence of depopulation and vnlawfull inclosures, the greatest number of the offenders have not beene proceeded with according to iustice and their traiterous deseruings.... London, 1607. ———. By the King it is a thing notorious that many of the meanest sort of our people in diuers parts of our kingdome... haue presumed lately to assemble themselues riotously in multitudes.... London, 1607. ———. By the King whereas some of the meaner sort of our people did of late assemble themselues in riotous and tumultuous maner within our countie of Northampton. London, 1607. Kaegi, Ann. “‘How Apply You This?’ Conflict and Consensus in Coriolanus.” Shakespeare 4, no. 4 (December 2008): 362–378.

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Kaouk, T. F. “Homo Faber, Action Hero Manque: Crafting the State in Coriolanus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2015): 409–439. Kuper, Adam. “If Memes Are the Answer, What Is the Question?” In Darwinizing Culture, edited by Robert Aunger, 175–188. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kuzner, James. “Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2007): 174–199. Lake, Peter, and Steve Pincus. “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (2006): 270–292. Manning, Roger B. Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Marshall, Cynthia. “Wound-man: Coriolanus, Gender and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority.” In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 93–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McRae, Andrew. God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mitchell, Peta. Contagious Metaphor. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Mukherjee, Ayesha. Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2015. Ormsby, Robert. “Coriolanus, Antitheatricalism, and Audience Response.” Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 1 (2008): 47. Pettet, E. C. “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607.” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1966): 34–42. Riss, Arthur. “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language.” ELH 59, no. 1 (1992): 53–75. Shakespeare, William. Coriolanus. Edited by Peter Holland. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Sperber, Dan. “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture.” In Darwinizing Culture, edited by Robert Aunger, 163–174. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wiegandt, Kai. Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Wilkinson, Robert. A sermon preached at North-Hampton the 21. of Iune last past, before the Lord Lieutenant of the county, and the rest of the commissioners there assembled vpon occasion of the late rebellion and riots in those parts committed. London, 1607. Zeeveld, W. Gordon. “Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics.” Modern Language Review 57, no. 3 (1962): 321–334.

CHAPTER 11

Hamlet’s Story/Stories of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s Theater, the Plague, and Contagious Storytelling J. F. Bernard

Toward the end of The Simpsons’ Hamlet, Claudius (bartender Moe Szyslak) plots to kill Hamlet (Bart Simpson) by any means necessary. “Just in case you don’t kill [him],” he informs Laertes, “I put some poison on the food, on the drapes … even on RosenCarl and GuildenLenny here.”1 The seven-minute skit offers a remarkably accurate impression of the play and its catastrophic sequence of deaths; at its climax, Hamlet conveys the impression that poison has contaminated everything and everyone. Though Moe’s demise is more comical than Claudius’s—“You sure you don’t want a nice piece of fish,” he asks Hamlet as the latter advances on him, menacingly, “or to finger the drapes a little?”—the fact remains that, by act five, the stage itself appears ill, and the notion of ­poison has morphed into something reminiscent of a ubiquitous disease that has relentlessly spread out throughout the tale. The Simpsons validates Caroline Spurgeon’s epitomic assertion that “in Hamlet, we find J. F. Bernard (*)  Champlain College, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_11

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in the ‘sickness’ images a feeling of horror, disgust and even helplessness not met before … and the general sense of inward and unseen corruption of the man helplessly succumbing to a deadly and ‘foul disease.’”2 This essay is not concerned with actual poison in the play, nor is it seeking to rehash previous connections between its protagonist and disease metaphors, or echo critical claims as to the contagious nature of theater itself within the play, where a performance can capture the conscience of a king.3 Rather, it builds on such scholarship to consider the ways in which imagery associated with the plague and contagion more generally provides a direct reflection of Hamlet’s relationship with the audience. What is central here, I suggest, is not so much that allusions to sickness are rampant in Hamlet, but that Shakespeare relies on the vernacular of contagion to fashion metaphors of theatrical publicity. Such a notion implies an understanding of theatrical publicity and disease imagery as the underpinnings of a narrative structure in Shakespearean drama, one built on nascent parallels between the business of early modern theater and what I term the social knowledge about contagion; what was imagined or theorized about it culturally, more so than scientifically. I suggest that, in striving to ensure its subsistence, popular theater mimics the contagion process by constantly seeking to infect new carriers with its stories. Shakespeare’s plays essentially went viral before “going viral” became the expression du jour for digital dissemination, and Hamlet proves consciously reflective of this fact. There has been sustained critical attention to questions of narrative in Hamlet, but seldom has the character’s literary, cultural, and critical iconicity been thought to mirror the play’s own status as a primary agent of Shakespearean storytelling, as I suggest here.4 The very idea of theater, its physical, social, and architectural embodiments, enjoyed an ill-conceived yet widespread reputation as hotbeds for the proliferation of actual diseases such as syphilis or the bubonic plague, as well as a corrupting force against morality. My conflation of sickness and theater echoes this conception but recuperates the association by thinking of it in terms of publicity and narrative dissemination. Broadly speaking, the business of early modern theater was built on a model similar to that of contagion, one that required repeated dissemination in a public setting. Much in the way that a disease exists as long as it can reach carriers, theater must constantly draw audiences and, in order to do so, must infect the public dimensions of life. Consider this description Stanley Wells provides regarding the advertisement for the very first performances of Hamlet:

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Early one morning in 1600 or 1601, boys ran around London sticking up bills announcing that if you went to the Globe playhouse on the south bank of the River Thames that afternoon you could see a new play called Hamlet. They pasted the bills on the doors of taverns and houses, and on the pissing posts provided for the convenience of those who walked the streets. The lads pulled down out-of-date bills announcing earlier performances and chucked them away.5

The passage is not concerned with diseases, yet contagion appears inherent: The “carriers” go around town spreading information regarding theatrical performances. The description hints at the intricate connection between disease, theater, and public spaces by emphasizing the impingement of theater onto spaces of daily activities and rituals. Wells illustrates the functioning of what amounts to early modern viral marketing through repeated exposure: the transmission of knowledge about a specific, new story (Hamlet), predicated on previous knowledge and appreciation of similar occurrences (out-of-date playbills). My interpretation of such notions suggests a post-Habermasian understanding of publicity, arguing for a multiplicity of available spheres, whose purposes of existence are, as Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson write, “founded in voluntary groupings and built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals.”6 Thus, an explicit focus on theatrical publics (as large gatherings of individuals in a confined space that bear witness to repeated disseminations) underlines their prime disposition to not only circulate but produce stories as well, through what Steven Mullaney defines as early modern theater’s “inhabited affective technology … a complex cognitive and affective space for playwrights, players, and audiences to occupy and experience … designed to resonate with an audience newly uncertain of its individual or collective identities, and thus to sound out the gaps that had opened up in the heart of the Elizabethan social body.”7 Hamlet provides an ideal test case for an argumentative claim pertaining to the long-term polity of Shakespeare’s art within an overarching allegory of contagion. As the representational figurehead of an emerging sense of publicity both in and out of the play, Hamlet embodies Antonin Artaud’s description of the plague as at once “victorious and vengeful,”8 a harbinger of horrific tragedy nevertheless destined for lasting celebrity. Hamlet’s story and the story of Hamlet thus become intrinsic components of the burgeoning narrative potency associated with Shakespeare’s theater.

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Amidst a veritable cornucopia of contagious ailments lurking in every corner of early modern existence, the black plague held dominion over illnesses such as the sweating sickness or smallpox due to its fundamentally public nature. As Eric Mallin maintains, “because of its enormous scale and the randomness with which it spread death, bubonic plague differed fundamentally from even the most disfiguring and agonizing illnesses such as syphilis and leprosy, which were generally regarded as unfortunate but individual afflictions.”9 Though attitudes toward the ailment were not altogether concordant with medical facts, they were nevertheless profoundly influential in shaping public perceptions of the disease. In “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” René Girard provides what is perhaps the most concise expression of this idea when he declares that medical aspects of the plague “always played a minor role, serving mostly as a disguise for an even more terrible threat that no science has ever been able to conquer.”10 Girard refers to the plague’s capacity for indiscriminate annihilation. For him, the disease is best understood as “a process of undifferentiation [and] a destruction of specificities, which reinforces its affinity for the public space of theater which performs a similar leveling task in assembling people in a given location.”11 This understanding echoes that of Thomas Dekker, whose pamphlets detailing the damage of a plague outbreak in seventeenth-century London underscores the illness’ supremacy over other ailments. Dekker writes that the plague hath for the singularity of the Terrors waiting vpon it, This title; THE SICKNESSE. It hath a Preheminence aboue all others: And none being able to match it, for Violence, Strenght, Incertainty, Suttely, Catching, Vniuersality, and Desolation, it is called the Sicknesse. As it were, the onely Sicknesse, or the Sicknesse of Sicknesses, as it is indeed.12

“The Wonderfull Yeare” grants considerable agency to the disease by depicting it as the General of Death’s armies which has “pitcht his tents … in the sinfully-polluted Suburbes” of London. “The Plague,” Dekker writes, “is Muster-maister and Marshall of the field: Burning Feauers, Boyles, Blaines and Carbunkles, the Leaders, Lieutenants, Serieants, and Corporalls.”13 Dekker’s pamphlets hint at a providential understanding of the plague (symptomatic of immoral behavior on a large scale) but mainly the vivid imagery presenting it as orchestrating a military assault on London, unleashing its pestilence and physical marks onto

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an unsuspecting and helpless populace, suggests that the disease exerts a greater impact once it is wrested away from strictly medical (or religious) considerations and resituated in the literary historical and the socio-metaphorical. Given the potency of its social dimension, it is not surprising that the plague’s dramatic incarnation eclipses that of other literary forms. The plague’s relationship to early modern theater was as fraught as it was fruitful. Pragmatically, the plague was bad for business. Outbreaks threatened to shut down playhouses indeterminately and played a decisive factor in fashioning the ill-repute of public theater as a breeding ground for infectious diseases. On the other hand, the relative familiarity of audiences with the disease provided playwrights with an ideal vehicle to convey ideas of contagion on stage. In Every Man in his Humour, the merchant Kitely, struggling to describe the jealousy that afflicts him, remarks that: it may well be call’d poor mortals’ plague; For, like a pestilence, it doth infect The houses of the brain. First, it begins Solely to work upon the phantasy, Filling her seat with such pestiferous air, As soon corrupts the judgement; and from thence Sends like contagion to the memory: Still each to other giving the infection. Which as a subtle vapour spreads itself Confusedly through every sensive part, Till not a thought or motion in the mind Be free from the black poison of suspect. (II, i. 222–239)14

Here, Jonson relies on the audience’s built-in understanding of the plague’s modus operandi (infectious pestilence, corrupt air, totalizing effect) to convey his humoral critique, using the trope of infection to explain how humors affect and eventually overwhelm the body. The passage’s casual name-dropping of the disease is symptomatic of a larger dramatic trend in the period, where the lexical field associated with plague reaches ubiquitous proportions. There are over a hundred and twenty utterances of the word “plague” in Shakespeare, the frequency and variety of which suggesting that, theatrically, “plague” became dramatic shorthand for contagion. There are seldom plays about the plague itself, and yet, the disease was a versatile early

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modern plot device. Thus, Friar John cannot deliver Friar Lawrence’s ­message in Romeo and Juliet because he is quarantined in Mantua due to a plague outbreak. Face and Subtle have the run of the house in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, since the master is hiding from the plague in the English countryside. Marlowe’s Faustus, contemplating immortality, ponders the power “whereby whole cities have escaped the plague” (I, i. 47). Just like a handkerchief, a pound of flesh, or a jester’s skull, the black plague offered itself as an easily recognizable dramatic trope. As Hamlet suggests, however, it proved far more productive in the imaginary realm. Contagion and communication are inexorably linked throughout history, and any scientific effort to understand and theorize contagion invariably tilts toward the metaphorical. Among these, the dominant theoretical model was that of invisible airborne seeds spreading diseases from one individual to another which, as Vivian Nutton demonstrates, reaches as far back as pre-Socratic philosophy. The philosopher Anaxagoras maintained that “all creation sprang from globules containing the ‘seeds of all living things.’”15 This conception was embraced by various thinkers, such as Theophrastus in botany and, most notably, Galen in medicine, who develops his idea of human tissue partly from it. It is from such a rich heritage that Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro elaborated the seminal theory of contagion in the sixteenth century. De Contagione essentially synthesizes the various discourses on invisible seeds in an attempt to explain the problem of contagion as a natural phenomenon. According to Fracastoro, infection occurred when invisible airborne seeds (semina or seminaria) passed from one body to another. Fracastoro’s model hinged primarily on the notion of sympathy, on the idea that there needed to be a harmonious relationship between agent and subject in order for one to impress onto the other and for contagion to successfully transpire. Building on the medieval theory of species,16 Fracastoro suggested that “contagion did not merely consist of the transmission of a putrefaction, it [also] involved the generation of the seeds of the disease in other bodies.”17 Thus, contagion was not understood as inevitable, but rather, as the result of a combination of factors under optimal circumstances that did not end in the infected body but rather moved through it. As Louis Qualtiere and William Slights explain, the thought that individuals could “carry” ailments with them from one space to another would have been somewhat familiar to early moderns,

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as a derivative of Fracastoro’s theory. “By the time of Shakespeare,” they write, “the general populace in England had a functional, if not entirely accurate, understanding of contagious maladies. The germ theory of disease transmission was still centuries off, but the idea was firmly established that those already infected were in some sense responsible for spreading the [disease] to the healthy.”18 The notion of “carriers” proves crucial to a parallel between contagion and early modern theatrical publicity, both on and off the stage. Hamlet’s critical history is laden with examinations of its rampant allusions to sickness, contagion, and corruption, epitomized by Marcellus’s oft quoted exclamation that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I, iv. 90).19 For many critics, Shakespeare’s engagement with the concept of disease reaches an apex in Hamlet¸ and its protagonist’s revenge spree through Elsinore parallels the contagion process by suggesting, as Mallin writes, “that a single influence, effectively transmitted, can permeate and radically discompose the consciousness of an entire culture.”20 My interest in the matter draws from such scholarship but lies elsewhere, away from such well-trodden paths, vested in the idea that the play and its history underscore the success of Shakespeare’s theater in going viral. The rest of this essay thus concerns itself with a twofold consideration of this notion. First, I pose the claim that Hamlet’s story (what transpires in the play) demonstrates a sustained engagement with publicity, a meticulous oscillation between private and public life, between monarchy and commonality, between life on and off the stage. Beyond revenge plots, madness, and ghostly apparitions, the play, its characters, and its audience all contribute to positioning Hamlet as the figurehead of this drive for publicity, which Shakespeare achieves by drawing on early modern sociocultural understandings of contagion. Secondly, I consider how the story of Hamlet (how the play is received, shared, and appropriated) reorients this idea in terms of the ongoing cultural production of the Shakespearean oeuvre and the dissemination (and mutation) of its stories over time.

Hamlet’s Story The first act, bathed in anxieties surrounding death, contagion, and supernatural threats, proves synecdochic of the play’s larger preoccupation with storytelling and communication. The play opens with a shared

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concern for the spatiality of several characters, as the men standing guard interrogate one another as to their identities and location. The discussion rapidly shifts toward the ghostly apparition that has been haunting the castle’s grounds and Bernardo entreats his friends to Sit down awhile, And let us once again assail your ears That are so fortified against our story With what we have two nights seen. (I, i. 36–39)

Bernardo’s request hints at the inherent power of stories to infiltrate its listeners. The military language, recalling Dekker, presents narratives as a disease which, through repeated dissemination, overtakes the senses. Bernardo’s invitation extends to the audience as well; the story of Hamlet will likewise be an assault on their senses and the transmission begins with the watchmen’s nervous chatter concerning acts of narration. Members of the watch entreat the Ghost to speak his tale on several occasions (in vain) before offering two stories of their own that further emphasize anxious communication. Bernardo relates previous encounters with the Ghost, while Horatio answers Marcellus’s query as to the nature of their watch by describing their king’s victory over Fortinbras of Norway and the imminent threat of military ­retaliation by young Fortinbras. The play conflates ideas of contagion and storytelling by having characters communicate angsts and troubling information to each other and to audience members. There is a need to share whatever is rotten in Denmark with those who will ­listen. The scene ends with Horatio suggesting that they “impart what we have seen tonight / Unto young Hamlet” (I, i. 184–185) in hopes that he might compel the Ghost to speak. This marks the first of many moments in the play designed to bond audiences with the character of Hamlet through ideas of narratives, contagion, and theatrical publicity. The audience has been privy to Bernardo and Horatio’s stories, but, like the watchmen, has been frustrated by the Ghost’s silence. The scene ends with an assurance that young Hamlet can rectify the situation, positioning him at the center of the play’s contagious storytelling. Hamlet caters to such a role by furthering the parallel with contagion himself. His response to his mother’s request to forego his somber garments introduces this idea:

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’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of griefs, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passes show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I, ii. 77–87)

The assertion signals interiority, but does so with a strong sense of acrimony that calls attention to what transpires within Hamlet’s body. The focus of his answer shifts progressively inward, as Hamlet evokes, in turn, his clothing, physical expressions of emotional turmoil, and, finally, “that within which passes show.” While it attempts to justify his sorrowful demeanor as a genuine trait, his reply also alludes to the fact that he is the bearer of a disposition that his mother could not possibly comprehend. What he is declaring to her—and everyone else—is that there is something inside of him, which people cannot see and which he refuses to divulge; a refusal to share his story reminiscent of his father’s ghost in the previous scene. “That within which passes show” conveys the idea that there is something invisible deep inside Hamlet which could potentially break out, an image not altogether different from Fracastoro’s seed-carrying model. Hamlet’s concealment alarms other characters. Claudius later tells Polonius that There’s something in his soul O’er which his melancholy sits on brood, And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose Will be some danger. (III, i. 167–170)

The passage acknowledges Hamlet’s infamous penchant for melancholy, but it draws attention to something else his humor is hatching and, more precisely, to a fear of it breaking out and endangering the kingdom. The play itself conflates Hamlet with contagion and the spatial and disseminative anxieties it fosters. Beyond his own culpability, Claudius alludes to the paradoxical uneasiness that Hamlet creates in Elsinore; people wishing to keep away from him obsess over his whereabouts and motives and such fears gradually translate into efforts to contain him. Claudius refers

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to Gertrude and himself in relation to Hamlet as “the owner of a foul disease, / [who] to keep it from divulging, let it feed / Even on the pith of life” (IV, i. 20–22). For other characters, Hamlet is the carrier of something troublesome, an undivulged narrative whose very unknowability renders it harmful. Such concerns are magnified following Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost. This scene has often been interpreted as the murdered King “infecting” Hamlet before unleashing him onto the play, an idea concordant with a reading that combines storytelling and epidemic diseases. However, much like Girard’s subversion of the medical by the socio-­metaphorical, the scene’s allusion to plague conjures up the ailment’s force through a dovetailing of Hamlet’s revenge with ideas of narrative and theatrical publicity. Hamlet’s answer to his father establishes a direct connection between them centered on the Ghost’s repeated command to mark and remember him, to which Hamlet replies: Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. (I, v. 100–105)

The passage is reminiscent of Kitely’s description of jealousy in Jonson. The metaphorical permutation of Hamlet’s brain into a paper volume stresses the totalizing power of stories, as the prince vows to erase all contents of his memory save for the story his father has just communicated to him. By doing so, he becomes (along with the audience) its sole carrier and teller. As the revenge plot progresses, Hamlet verges closer and closer to Artaud’s understanding of the plague as “a total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an extreme purification.”21 The prince becomes, in Artaud’s words, “something both victorious and vengeful… a social disaster so far-reaching, a state which is nevertheless characterized by extreme strength and in which all the powers of nature are freshly discovered at the moment when something essential is going

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to be accomplished.”22 This model undoubtedly applies to the play’s climax, which brings about the near-annihilation of Denmark’s monarchy, with Queen, King, and Prince successively killed off. Avenging his father supplies Hamlet with an appropriate (if not inviting) channel through which to produce and disseminate his own story. While other characters are threatened by Hamlet, audiences, being privy to his most inner thoughts, engage in a sympathetic relationship with the character that ensures the transmission of his story. Throughout the first act, anxious narratives have been shared with deliberate caution until all of them have reached Hamlet, who becomes their focal point moving forward. The prince’s contagiousness is understood as a productive theatrical feature; the play connects him with the audience and invites them to willingly expose themselves to his infectious narratives. Undoubtedly, Hamlet is an actor in the Artaudian sense of a man “who invents himself personages he could never have imagined without the plague, creating them in the midst of an audience of corpses and delirious lunatics.”23 This attitude resonates with his longing for theatrical exposure once he encounters the players performing The Mousetrap. After asking one of the actors to recite a few lines that he wrote during their performance (II, ii. 540–544)—a clear attempt to insert himself within the public sphere of theater—Hamlet gives way to a sudden outburst of jealousy toward the players, decrying how an actor In a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! (II, ii. 551–557)

Hamlet deplores the fact that an actor enjoys access to a public forum to express what he perceives to be counterfeit emotions, whereas he, assailed by genuine torment, must stand by and “say nothing” (II, ii. 569). Interestingly, the speech’s progression, from the soul to an outward conceit, is the reverse of the one expressed earlier to his mother. If the play opened with anxieties surrounding the internal concealment of narratives, Hamlet’s interaction with the players shifts the focus to their external dissemination to theatrical audiences. He goes on to imagine that, should the actor experience the woes that trouble him, he would

224  J. F. BERNARD Drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. (II, ii, 562–566)

Hamlet does not wish to become the player but to transmit his woes through him, so that the actor can perform them on stage and communicate them to the eyes and ears watching and listening. The conscious preoccupation with theatrical spatiality found in Hamlet, and the sympathetic relationship he enjoys with the audience, offers him this opportunity.

Stories of Hamlet Hamlet subordinates sociopolitical metaphors of sickness and corruption to that of contagious storytelling and in doing so redirects Fredric Jameson’s conception of literature as “social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact”24 explicitly toward the public space of theater. The spread of contagious stories in Hamlet (and by Hamlet) suggests that Shakespeare ascribes a dual cultural significance to the concept of disease in which the dramatic function yields to its disseminative capacity, both during and in the aftermath of what Jameson terms the “immediate performance situation.”25 Elsinore castle and the public playhouse can be understood as dovetailing sites of containment that restrict-cumencourage the dissemination of Hamlet’s story. There is no play without Hamlet, nor is there one if the social disease of theater fails to adequately transmit his story, both within the play and once the audience leaves the playhouse and reintegrates into the larger community. Shakespeare’s contagious storytelling bridges the gap between the play’s performance, what Brian Richardson, in his theory of dramatic narrative, defines as “stage time”26 and the dissemination of its stories beyond the walls of the early modern playhouse, what Ricoeur terms the “public time” of narrativity, a time at which “through its recitation, a story is incorporated into a community which it gathers together.”27 Indeed, the communal act of repetition found at the core of Ricoeur’s historicizing process strikes an arresting parallel with the idea that Shakespearean drama disseminates stories through repeated performances. Ricoeur writes that

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Narrative time is public time in the same sense that within-time-ness is, before it is levelled off by ordinary time. Moreover, the art of storytelling retains this public character of time while keeping it from falling into anonymity … the narrative has a second relationship to public time: external public time or, we might say, the time of the public. Now a story’s public is its audience.28

The play’s amazing circulation through literary, cultural, and social spheres over time, the incursion into “public time” by stories of Hamlet, renders it an iconic representation of publicity through virality. Hamlet’s drive for publicity strikes a chord with audiences who share his attempts at becoming public. As Paul Yachnin writes, the play resonates strongly with ideas of publicity in early modernity since “Hamlet in the playhouse is a man who is always already fully public, even and especially about his innermost thoughts … The spectators feel for him and they think with him, but they also want to feel like him and they are invited to emulate his princely pathos and tragic heroism.”29 For Yachnin, the play validates the claim that the very act of going to the theater proved essential to the creation of public spheres in London since “publics in early modernity could augment and refashion the public sphere because they were able to introduce increasing numbers of ‘private’ persons into public space, speech, and action by inviting them to take part in forms of association that were both public and not public.”30 Conversely, theatergoers are also capable of carrying Hamlet’s story with them and introducing it to different spheres. The play closes with the hope that spectators will uphold this bond and tell his story. As Yachnin writes, they evidently did as “audience members no doubt shared their affective and cognitive experience of the play with friends and family members who had not seen it, providing others with some knowledge and feeling about the play and engaging them in conversations about both its thematic content and the quality of the performance.”31 The cycle is indeed, plaguelike: the story of Hamlet leaps off the stage, spreads through the bawdy playhouse, and escapes the sinful suburbs to finally reach the homes of unsuspecting relatives who fall victim to the invisible narratives that theatergoers carried home with them. Theater’s survival rests on its capacity to successfully communicate its stories to audiences that can disseminate them beyond its walls and manages to do so by appealing to the human need for storytelling, fusing past memories of narratives with new dramatic iterations to produce

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something new and familiar. From Gesta Danorum to Kyd’s mythical UrHamlet (to say nothing of the ghostly bad quarto version of the play), the story of Hamlet does not find its inception with Shakespeare, yet the play catalyzes the narrative going forward, relying on the audience’s purported familiarity with the narrative yet presenting it as something original that becomes the de facto story moving forward. This rhetoric of mutability allows us to further envision the networks of stories that early modern theater creates within the period and beyond. Hamlet’s incursion into the increasingly digital world of literary and cultural production stands as the latest proof that the adaptability of Shakespearean drama and the stories it tells have never been in doubt, and that any new incarnation of such a process inevitably confirms Michael Bristol’s assertion that “Shakespeare’s radically disembodied and culturally promiscuous character” ensures a continuous process of dissemination that transcends epochs, media, and containment efforts.32 Given the plethora of YouTube channels, memes, gifs, tumblrs, and Twitter feeds available, the viral quality of Shakespeare’s stories has never been more apparent. If Hamlet in the playhouse stood as the figurehead of the early modern drive toward publicity, Hamlet on the Internet perfects the contagion process, finally achieving the plague’s capacity for “flawless communicability.”33 The play’s digital afterlife, to borrow from Ricoeur, firmly belongs to the time of the public, who takes control of the storytelling and its disseminative strategies. The Facebook Hamlet, written by Sarah Schmelling for the Web site McSweeney’s, is a clever way to retell the prince’s story, where Shakespearean characterization mingles with social media jargon: Hamlet becomes a fan of daggers, Ophelia joins the group Maidens who don’t float, while Polonius goes “offline” after hiding behind a curtain.34 The end result offers a twofold spectrum of appreciation that can satisfy the layman as well as the initiated of each medium. The process is once again predicated on a sense of novel familiarity, relying on readers’ vague knowledge of the play as an opportunity to retell Hamlet’s story. One finds similar attempts in various iterations of Hamlet’s Twitter and Instagram feeds. Most of these conflations of Hamlet with the digital serve a similar function to that of a performance in the early modern playhouse: They either introduce the play to an audience unfamiliar with it or perform a cyber-pastiche that will hopefully delight the connoisseurs. Of greater resonance to ideas of narrative and virality are instances where online publics mutate the stories through their own interpretative efforts. The multitude

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of Hamlet-related tumblrs offer forums where people engage with the prince figure and uproot him from Shakespeare’s story, such as the aptly named “ask-emo-Hamlet,” which includes posts reimagining the play as the diary of a high schooler (and actually contains a “send asks” section).35 Appropriations such as this one help to pursue the dissemination of his story, but fundamentally alter it as well, seeking to provide answers to questions that Shakespeare seemingly did not intend us to have vis-à-vis his play. Likewise, gifs and memes offering humorous takes on the play, or linking it to everyday situations, also further transform Hamlet’s stories, using the prince (in most cases) as a mouthpiece for twenty-first-century hipster cynicism and pop culture displays of wit. Would Hamlet be comfortable as such a spokesperson? He might appreciate the attention but would likely complain of the medium itself, deeming it yet another prison where “all the uses of this world” (I, ii. 134) are trapping him. Digital media does not reinvent the practice, but it perfects the dissemination of Hamlet’s stories through extraordinary speed and the ability to create publics while no longer relying on physical spatiality. Within the monstrous flux of information circulating online, Hamlet’s story no longer needs Horatio to ensure its survival. Shakespeare’s play has truly gone viral and should continue to do so in whatever forms literary and cultural production evolve into next. The digital assault of and on Hamlet’s stories is nothing new under the sun, particularly as far as cultural conceptions of Shakespeare are concerned. It is the new shiny toy in a long lineage of amalgamations of Shakespearean tropes forming skewed visual representations of a given story. Images such as the ones depicting Hamlet (or even Shakespeare) holding a skull and delivering the mistakenly located “to be or not to be” soliloquy will make any scholar cringe, but I suspect they will look (or sound) accurate to most people vaguely familiar with Shakespeare or Hamlet as cultural icons from a distant past. Twitter feeds and Instagram prove a far cry from Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century text, but the fact remains that the play is astutely conscious of the contagion process in developing its exploration of storytelling and theatrical publicity. At death’s door, Hamlet enlists Horatio to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied [and] tell my story” (V, ii. 341–342). This final insistence on narration, which Horatio fulfills almost immediately by recounting the play’s broad strokes to a conquering Fortinbras, also takes aims at theatergoers now acquainted with Hamlet’s story through their sympathetic relationship with the prince. As the curtain draws, the “immediate performance situation” of

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Hamlet’s story comes to a close but its circulation endures. If anything, with actual contagions seemingly threatening their existence at every turn, the narrative and theatrical contagion offered in Hamlet must have seem like the safer, more entertaining option.

Notes













1. “Tales from the Public Domain,” The Simpsons: The Complete Thirteenth Season, written by Andrew Kreisberg, Josh Lieb, and Matt Warburton, directed by Mark. B. Anderson (FOX, 2002). 2. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 133. 3.  See Eric S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for discussions of Hamlet and the plague. 4.  See Catherine Belsey, “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories,” Shakespeare Quarterly 6, no. 1 (2001): 1–27 and David Lucking, “Hamlet and the Narrative Construction of Reality,” English Studies 89, no. 2 (2008): 152–165. 5. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and Other Players in His Story (New York: Allen Lane, 2006), 1. 6. Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson, “Introduction,” in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson (London: Routledge, 2010), 1. 7.  Steve Mullaney, “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 74. 8. Antonin Artaud, “Theatre and the Plague,” in Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), 27. 9. Mallin, 98. 10. René Girard, “The Plague in Literature and Myth,” in ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 148. 11. Girard, 136. 12.  Thomas Dekker, “London Looke Backe,” in The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. Frank Percy Wilson (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 181.

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13.  Thomas Dekker, “The Wonderfull Yeare,” in Dekker, The Plague Pamphlets, 31. 14. Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, ed. Robert S. Miola (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 15.  Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History 27 (1983): 2. 16. The medieval theory of species, advanced by the likes of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, finds its roots in Neoplatonic ideas of light emanation and geometrical and physical discourses on optics. It conceived of the universe as being made up of an infinite number of rays (species) emanating from and toward everything, carrying with them the essence of their source (agents) in an effort to express them onto suitable receivers. 17. Isabelle Pantin, “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse on Contagion,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9. 18. Louis F. Qualtiere and William W. E. Slights, “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox,” Literature and Medicine 22, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 5. 19.  This and all subsequent quotations from Hamlet are taken from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, updated 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1997). 20. Mallin, 63. 21. Artaud, 31. For further discussion of Artaud and contagion, see Stanton B. Garner, “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theater of Contagion,” Theater Journal 58, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–14. 22. Artaud, 27. 23. Ibid., 25. 24. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 2002), 92. 25. Jameson, 93. 26. Brian Richardson, “‘Time Is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama,” Poetics Today 8, no. 2 (1987): 308. 27.  Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 176. 28. Ricoeur, 175. 29. Paul Yachnin, “Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England,” in Making Publics, ed. Yachnin and Wilson, 85. 30. Yachnin and Wilson, 8. 31. Yachnin, 87.

230  J. F. BERNARD 32. Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90. 33. Mallin, 82. 34. Sarah Schmelling, “Hamlet (Facebook Newsfeed Edition),” McSweeney’s, 30 July 2018, mcsweeneys.net/articles/hamlet-facebook-news-feed-edition. Attesting to the merciless speed of mutation and virality, Schmelling’s piece, written in 2008, already appears dated in its usage of terminology no longer relevant to the latest Facebook interface. 35. Ask-emo-hamlet. http://ask-emo-hamlet.tumblr.com/, accessed 6 June 2018. Another tumblr, by a user named crystallizedtwilight, offers original artwork such as a comparison of Hamlet and Romeo on the basis of their aptitudes as boyfriends, as well as Juliet and Ophelia discussing their respective love interests over coffee. Crystallizedtwilight. Love, Equality, Kindness, http://crystallizedtwilight.tumblr.com/, accessed 6 June 2018.

Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. “Theatre and the Plague.” In Theatre and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, 15–31. New York: Grove, 1958. Belsey, Catherine. “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories.” Shakespeare Quarterly 6, no. 1 (2010): 1–27. Bristol, Michael D. Big-Time Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 1996. Dekker, Thomas. The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker. Edited by Frank Percy Wilson. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. ———. “London Looke Backe.” In Dekker, The Plague Pamphlets, 174–196. ———. “The Wonderfull Yeare.” In Dekker, The Plague Pamphlets, 1–62. Garner, Stanton B. “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theater of Contagion.” Theater Journal 58, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–14. Girard, René. “The Plague in Literature and Myth.” In ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 136–154. London: Oxford University Press, 1978. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 2002. Jonson, Ben. Every Man in His Humour. Edited by Robert S. Miola. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Lucking, David. “Hamlet and the Narrative Construction of Reality.” English Studies 89, no. 2 (2008): 152–165. Mallin, Eric S. Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

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Mullaney, Steven. “Affective Technologies: Toward an Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage.” In Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, 71–89. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Nutton, Vivian. “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance.” Medical History 27 (1983): 1–34. Pantin, Isabelle. “Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse on Contagion.” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 3–15. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Qualtiere, Louis F., and William W. E. Slights. “Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England: The Case of the French Pox.” Literature and Medicine 22, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–24. Richardson, Brian. “‘Time Is Out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama.” Poetics Today 8, no. 2 (1987): 299–309. Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 169–190. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by David Bevington. Updated 4th ed. New York: Longman, 1997. Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare and Co: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story. New York: Allen Lane, 2006. Yachnin, Paul. “Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England.” In Yachnin and Wilson, eds., Making Publics, 81–95. Yachnin, Paul, and Bronwen Wilson, eds. Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2010. Yachnin, Paul, and Bronwen Wilson. “Introduction.” In Yachnin and Wilson, eds., Making Publics, 1–21.

CHAPTER 12

“Nature Naturized”: Plague, Contagious Atheism, and The Alchemist John Charles Estabillo

In A Treatise of the Plague, the dramatist, wit, and physician Thomas Lodge describes in great detail a variety of causes for the spread of disease from “ill smelling vapours” to “creatures as are engendered of putrification,” laboring to provide his readers with an exhaustive account of the natural signifiers and external factors that appear to accompany or influence the presence of the plague.1 Conversely, the radical reformist preacher Henoch Clapham unequivocally asserts divine agency as the force “who commaunds or forbids, sends out, or stayes the course and operation” of disease, and aligns naturalistic accounts with the dangerous views of “atheists.”2 The difference between these two views on the spread of disease—both printed in 1603, a year when 3000 people died of plague in London—registers the ideological tensions inherent within explanations of contagion in early modern English culture.3 Investigations into the causality of disease led, by extension, to questions about the nature and extent of God’s will in the world, and especially in J. Charles Estabillo (*)  Records of Early English Drama (REED), University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_12

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the lived experience of the human body. The established parameters of Paracelsian and Galenic medicine could not provide a clear explanation of how or why the disease spread, and yet resignation to providential accounts provided little recompense for the trauma that consumed the city. The strategy of government was tacitly materialist in its expediency, amounting to a combination of official orders against social behaviors associated with the spread of the disease and the house arrest of those confirmed to be infected; the de facto public response was the flight of those with means away from the city of London.4 The upheaval that followed threatened to—and often did—destabilize established orders from social hierarchies to consensus about the origins and ends of the cosmos. The chaotic and seemingly irrepressible effects of the plague defied placement within the intact worldviews of its witnesses, and to those most committed to maintaining fundamental Christian orthodoxies, looking too far into its depths threatened the potential of another contagious state—the erosion of belief into atheism. Historical conceptions of atheism have long been frustrated by its elusive place in the topography of early modern devotional categories.5 Naming someone an atheist in the first century of its use in the English language could imply anything from doctrinal heresy to excessive learning and Italianism.6 Rather than mere speciousness, however, the porous exchange between multiple states under the umbrella of atheism suggests its pertinence to many familiar elements of early modern culture, including conceptions of contagion. Proximity between the concept of contagion and conventionally atheist pagan philosophies, for example, extends to their respective English lexical histories. An early Latin-English grammar pairs “Contagium” with its English transliteration and a series of apposite phrases, describing it as “A contagion: an infectuous sicknesse: an infection: a touching,” and paraphrasing a passage from Book III of Lucretius’s De rerum natura for its usage: “Morbi contagia penetrant in aliquem. The infection pearceth him.”7 In subtle recognition of the connection between the antique origins of the word and an attendant materialist causality, the dictionary entry supplements “aliquem” for the more specific and doctrinally charged “animum” of the source passage, which refers to the vulnerability of the soul to physical disease and its ultimate mortality alongside the body: “quare animum quoque dissolui fateare necessest, quandoquidem penetrant in eum contagia morbi,” translated by H. A. J. Munro as “Therefore you must admit that the mind [animum] too dissolves, since the infection of disease [contagia morbi] reaches

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to it.”8 As part of a text that is itself haunted by the experience of the plagued city, Lucretius’s use of contagia describes the charged “touch” so central to the word, but also a causality of disease that penetrates the sanctified space of mind and soul. If the transfer and dissolution of qualities in pathological states, rendered so palpably to early modern readers by Lucretius’s penetrant and contagia morbi, are central to the idea of physical contagion, atheism is perhaps best understood as an outcome of its ideological counterpart: the susceptibility of the believing subject to internal and external forms of subversion and corruption, including the very concept of contagion itself. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, the imagery and language of criminality, natural philosophy, pseudoscientific alchemy, and fragmented social distinction refigure the physis of the corruptible body into the matter of drama. These discourses appear against the barely spoken background of the plague, a force that not only makes the events of the play possible but also establishes the ideological terms of its satire. Jonson’s world of rogues and cony-catchers settles on the problem of discerning material and moral causes, including the nature of contagion, as the pressing question of London’s plague time, even though the play depicts neither the physical symptoms of the plague nor the event of its transmission. Instead, its narrative emerges from proximate confrontations between a providential world and the bare experience of contagious pathology. The terrible puzzle of discerning the nature of a seemingly unstoppable disease—whether through transcendent or material origins—is sublimated into the humoral preoccupations and idiosyncrasies of the play’s subjects. If the causa sui of the inverted world of the play is the plague itself, the ensuing flight of the wealthy from London is its first symptom. Lovewit, a representative of the upwardly mobile merchant class, leaves his Blackfriars property to avoid infection. Assuaging the anxieties of his accomplices about the possibility of the landowner’s return and the threat of order, the servant-cum-confidence man Face implores to “fear not him. While there dies one a week / O’ the plague, he’s safe, from thinking toward London.”9 The image of the landowner safely “busy at his hop-yards” (1.1.184) in the countryside is essential to what Cheryl Lynn Ross describes as “a society suffering a thoroughgoing contagion of immorality,” the absence of authority countered by the accumulation of interactions between the gulls and the criminals with Subtle, “the waste product that effaces boundaries,” at its fore.10 Subtle’s

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performance of alchemical subterfuge suggests the social manifestation of material abjection. The ease with which he, the prostitute Dol Common, and Face assume the place left by Lovewit reveals the vulnerability of the city, in analogue with its plagued subjects, to both internal and external sources of corruption. The influx of mountebanks, quack doctors, and fraudsters that followed from the retreat of city officials and wealthy citizens has offered students of the play the clearest social parallel to the schemes of The Alchemist’s plot. In addition to catalyzing the radical, if temporary, reordering of social hierarchies, Lovewit’s absence also introduces material contagion as the fundamental way of conceptualizing the nature of the disease over divine providence. To those with access to the cleaner air of the countryside, there seemed little doubt about whether divine or natural orders governed the transmission of infection. The ensuing vacuum not only provides the opportunity for Face to use the house as a staging ground for a variety of grifts but also establishes the demystified praxis of material contagion as the rule of their proceedings, and indeed of the world as the play imagines it. The play arrives at this position of moral compromise not only through representations of social devolution but also through its preoccupation with unelevated material relations as a focal point of its language. The following pages will examine how The Alchemist transposes the responses of early modern English religious writers to material causality, contagion, and atheism into the objects of its dramatic satire. It will also consider how the imprecise form of early modern contagion gives Jonson an apparatus with which to imagine the phenomenon of ideological changeability and its potential antidote. Published sermons by the London preachers Thomas White and Adam Hill vehemently identify atheism as a heresy that originates with and culminates in states of abject materiality specifically characterized by ideological and physical contagion.

Polemical Writing and Contagious Atheism The language of separatist preaching literature is a well-established source for the jargon of Jonson’s stage Puritans.11 The detailed reproduction and conflation of the verbal content of millenarianism and other marginal religious rhetoric with the arcane technical nomenclature of alchemy in The Alchemist present both discourses “as similar kinds of frauds.”12 There is less recognition, however, of how prominent

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examples of such writing might inform Jonson’s approach to naturalist etiologies and their ideological consequences. In A Sermon Preached at Pawles Crosse, Thomas White affirms that the suffering of the plague is an outcome of sinful behavior, identifying playhouses as places of physical indulgence and corruption. They are avenues for the spread of diseases that, in a commonplace of Christian and especially Dissenter doctrine, are always inextricably spiritual and bodily in quality. While White’s history as a Dissenter was less antagonistic than Clapham’s, his attitude regarding disease is closely aligned in this passage to the same views that landed Clapham in prison. They appear to rework basic views of Calvin, who asserts in the Institutes that “All of us, therefore, descending from an impure seed, come into the world tainted with the contagion of sin,” a position that easily, if somewhat inaccurately, can be extrapolated into an equation between generational sin and the transmission of physical states.13 White, in turn, urges his audience to beholde the sumptuous Theatre housee, a continuall monument of Londons prodigalitie and folly. But I vnderstande they are nowe forbidden bycause of the plague, I like the pollicye well if it holde still, for a disease is but bodged or patched vp that is not cured in the cause, and the cause of plagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes. Quic quid est causa causae est causa causati [The cause of a cause is the cause of the effect].14

While White’s “cause” is clearly moral, the Privy Council orders to which he refers were not motivated by moral imperatives against the culture of playgoing but part of a broader attempt to curb the spread of the plague by limiting all recreational public gatherings.15 Rather than a response to sin, the apparent spirit of the “pollicye” is an attempt to address the material rather than spiritual provenance of the disease, what Pierre de la Primaudaye refers to as the “hidden cause” that brings the patient to the physician rather than the preacher.16 In the same sermon, White again situates atheism as both opposed to and proceeding from unity between spiritual and bodily existences: “If they will needes gyue their soule to God, and their body to the Deuill, let them be sure that God will haue eyther bothe or none.”17 This is a monism that takes an established orthodox position to its moral extreme. Much as his reframing of the Privy Council ban on playing casts a heuristically material approach to plague containment with a spiritual emphasis, White wants to preclude

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the possibility of natural causality for disease. He associates deviation from the unity between spiritual and material phenomena with historical theological heterodoxies, and ultimately atheism: But these good felowes incline toward the errour of the Manichees, & make two beginnings, god & the deuill, but in truth they are rather Atheists, which serue no God at all, except their belly be theyr God, or else it is so by halues…18

To emphasize the impossibility of separating spiritual from bodily or material spheres of existence, White invokes the old heresy of Manichaeism, an early synthesis between Christian, pagan, and Gnostic philosophies.19 In the hostile atmosphere of post-Reformation dissent, the controversies of the early church were revived as fodder to characterize newly undesirable positions and forms of heterodoxy. “The Manichees” thus came to represent any form of moral dualism, especially those that appeared to emphasize the sufficiency of knowledge and will as the means to choose between good and evil. In White’s argument, this amounts to dividing spiritual from material causes. The inevitable “truth” of such a division is not a deficient form of belief or another sect, new or old—it is atheism, with the implication that any introduction of a worldly origin for good leads, with causal inevitability, to unbelief. Hill goes on to describe atheism in a variety of additional terms, emphasizing a series of doctrinal denials that become increasingly political, before concluding on the specific theme of physical contagion: For he denieth GOD the father, he trampleth vnder his foote the blood of our Sauiour, he dishonoureth the spirit of grace; in his heart he is an infidell, in his tongue a blasphemer, to his Prince a traytor, to his countrey a rebell, to his house a poyson, to his friends a plague: wheresoeuer he goeth, the earth is accursed; wheresoeuer he speaketh, the aire is infected; and wheresoeuer hee dwelleth, there dwelleth the wrath of God for euer.20

The rhetoric of the passage takes on the familiar shape of accumulation and apposition that often frustrate historical inquiries into atheism with implications of over-inclusivity. Beginning with the abstract groundwork of doctrine, Hill’s atheist figure first denies each element of the trinity; this develops into transgressions attached to the specific bodily locations of the heart and tongue. These still symbolize the distinction between

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an interior seat of faith and an avenue of expression with which it can be aligned or not, and which, in the case of the atheist, are both in sinful agreement. The next items in the list do not suggest materiality through an extension of bodily imagery but situate the atheist in a distinctly political and historical context: Atheism works against worldly as well as divine authority and excludes the atheist from the essential social units of friendship and family. Finally, the atheist takes on the qualities of a corruptive physical force, becoming part of an “infectious” environment in a way that suggests miasma and other “accursed” unnatural imbalances. In Hill’s model, atheism manages to occupy a space that suggests material abjection but which derives from and sustains spiritual and ideological deviance. This undesirable proximity to inhuman materiality is an essential element in the interpretation of atheism in the literature of the English Renaissance, and one that will reveal its closeness to the contemporary models of contagion and ideological transmission. With a scriptural quotation from the Epistle of Jude that describes the fate of unbelieving interlopers, Hill distinguishes between other heretics that remain open to redemption and atheists, for whom Hill transposes Jude’s uniquely illegible and irredeemable vision of nature. Atheists are …vesselles of dishonor, they are cloudes without water carried about of windes, corrupt trees, and without frute, twise dead, and plucked vp by the rootes, they are the raging waues of the sea, foming out their owne shame, they are wandering Stars, to whom is reserued the blacknesse of darkenesse for euer.21

This characterization of damnation through the image of the wandering stars is an apt reference for Hill, given that the epistle concerns itself with false teachings and the special danger of those who “crept in unawares” among the faithful despite their inner irreligion. The unreadable quality of the “filthy dreamers” of Jude 1:8 speaks to Hill’s prior characterization of the atheist as a figure whose presence is pervasive and ultimately culminates in the ephemeral and inhuman image of unclean, infectious air. Finally, Hill appeals to an analogy between the progression of infectious disease and the spread of atheism to characterize the magnitude of social peril posed by its imagined contagiousness. Imagining English society in macrocosmic relation to the body of the diseased patient, Hill’s analogy reiterates atheism as a progressive pathology, moving from marginal locations to the center of vitality and power:

240  J. CHARLES ESTABILLO As poison when it entreth into the body, it infecteth first the vains, secondly the blood, thirdly, the members, & last of al the heart: so Atheisme began in the vains of the lighter sort of people, and from thence it hath crept into the blood & generositie of this land, by meanes whereof it is spread into all the members and parts of this realme: God keepe it from the heart, that is, from the Court & the Citie of London.22

Atheism is a threat because of its perceived changeability and proximity to natural forces. The origins of the disease, or the details of its purpose within the world of creation, remain obscure; and yet, its path and progress toward base materiality are eminently clear. Like Jude’s unfixed stars or the unseen but deadly progression of infectious disease, these iterations of atheism take as their object a world infected with the ubiquity of plague, comprising natural phenomena that vex and challenge the limits of orthodox explanation. In his satire of religious polemicists such as White and Hill, Jonson targets not only their theological and social contradictions but their keen awareness of the progress from the concept of natural contagion to atheism. The anxious association between materiality and atheism by polemical Christian preachers gives form to two of the dupe characters in The Alchemist: Tribulation Wholesome, an expediently open-minded Puritan brother, and Sir Epicure Mammon, the would-be benefactor of the philosopher’s stone. As part of Jonson’s anatomy of London society, the atheist as a figure embedded in narratives of base materiality is both proximate and porously identified with the Puritans who so vocally disavow their own place in the world of experience in their warnings against atheism. In both The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, the resolution of these extremes is not a transcendent source of material authority, but integration within the unredeemed matter of London life.

Workplace Atheism and “Nature Naturized” The parodic stage Puritan of The Alchemist, Tribulation Wholesome, muses about the ambiguous origins of human behavior to justify impure means toward a “sanctified” end, where “The children of perdition are oft-times / Made instruments of the greatest works” (3.1.15–16). The separation of deeds from both their more immediate ends and their relation to an eventual salvation was at the center of post-Reformation theological conflicts. Puritan attitudes about the status of works become

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self-serving manipulations of a doctrine such as sola gratia, and like the progression from sectarianism to atheism in commentaries by Francis Bacon and Thomas Nashe, Jonson makes ideological mutability the first step toward moral corruption and a social problem proximate with atheism.23 Tribulation thus deploys a reductive form of materialism to absolve sinful means toward ideal ends: Beside, we should give somewhat to man’s nature, The place he lives in, still about the fire, And fume of metals, that intoxicate The brain of man, and make him prone to passion. Where have you greater atheists than your cooks? Or more profane, or choleric, than your glass-men? More anti-Christian than your bell-founders? What makes the devil so devilish, I would ask you, Sathan, our common enemy, but his being Perpetually about the fire, and boiling Brimstone and ars’nic? We must give, I say, Unto the motives, and stirrers up Of humours in the blood. (3.1.17–29)

In language that clearly invokes an affable and self-serving version of the accumulative rhetoric in the sermons of Hill and White, Jonson’s Tribulation counterintuitively locates atheism at the nexus between internal and external environments. Rather than anxiety about this designation of unbelief to the sphere of natural exigency, however, his conflation of inner and outer causes becomes the justification for fraudulent investment. Part of Jonson’s satire is to deploy the form of polemical writers to voice the very philosophies against which they inveigh. Like the “error of the Manichees” that White imagines, the eager Puritan is willing to entertain a duality between higher spiritual causes and base material means. The scheme with Tribulation and Ananias does not indicate the problem of contagion directly, but the faulty reasoning in this passage has the “little John Leydens” (3.3.23) performing the kind of atheist materialism that White links to naturalist etiologies of contagious disease. From the perspective of many pre-modern conceptions of contagion, Tribulation’s reference to the atheist cook quite accurately appears as the outcome of a confluence of environmental factors. Pre-modern conceptions of contagion included both the transmission of disease through contact with infected people and objects and environments.

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When Thomas Lodge describes contagion as “euil qualitie in a bodie, communicated vnto an other by touch, engendering one and the same disposition in him to whom it is communicated,” it is clear from his usages elsewhere in the treatise that this includes human bodies and environmental phenomena such as miasma or putrefaction.24 Tribulation’s example could be imagined as an example of contagion, but the cook does not contract atheism from conversation with or exposure to the ideas and expression of an atheist position such as Marlowe’s supposed “atheist lecture.” He is rather the spontaneous victim of the interaction between a morally neutral human constitution and overexposure to similarly inert physical phenomena, conditions that converge and transubstantiate into a charged heretical state. While Tribulation does not name this process as such, his somatization of heresy combines two essential elements of pre-modern contagion: the attempt to understand the interface between the body and its environment within the event of contagious disease, and the transposition of this physical dynamic into the immaterial terms of theology and morality. Jonson’s approximation of atheism through elemental qualities is conversant with contemporary etiologies of subversive ideologies. In a passage from the sprawling netherworld of Terrors of the Night, Nashe locates atheism alongside the “scum” of dreams at an interface that, despite being satirically supernatural, displays distinctly elemental proclivities toward the brilliance and self-consumption of fire: Those spirits of the fire, howeuer I tearme them comparatiuely good in respect of a number of bad, yet are they not simply well inclinde, for they bee by nature ambitious, haughty and proud, nor do they loue vertue for it selfe any whit, but because they would ouerquell and outstrip others, with the vaineglorious ostentation of it. A humor of monarchizing and nothing els it is, which makes them affect rare quallified studies. Many Atheists are with these spirits inhabited.25

As the outcome of an environmental interface, this anatomy of the atheist is thematically analogous to the diagnostics of Tribulation Wholesome. Part of a series of elemental identities that extemporizes upon the four Galenic humors, Nashe imagines that proximity to spirits of fire threatens a variety of humoral tendencies and excesses. Contrary to many popular portraits of atheism as the summative position of gluttony and base indulgence, here the atheist humor is abstemious and

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tends toward the scholarly and poetic. Nashe’s potentially self-­referential view aligns with other discourses that warn of excessive learning as the path toward unbelief, but is unique in its combination of humoral identification with the daftly positive characterization of atheism as an unfortunate byproduct of haughty brilliance. The “spirit of fire” seems also to refer to both exogenous and endogenous influences. Exposure to and inhabitation by such a spirit implies movement from the outside inwards, and yet the progression that Nashe describes is contained within the identity of the subject of the spirit in question. Filled as it is with pseudo-facts and satirical bombast, his inclusion of atheism within the taxonomy of the spirit suggests a selective natural philosophy that elides the moral implications of its own materialist tendencies. In a hyperbolized version of the atheist inflamed by Nashe’s “spirit of fire,” Sir Epicure Mammon enters the stage for the first time in The Alchemist and promptly expounds upon the intellectual, material, and sensual excesses that the alchemical power of the stone will afford him. As Jonson’s most extravagant dupe figure, Mammon’s devotional status is complicated: His surname casts him as an idolater, but the play makes his false gods the textures and sensory experience of an utterly materialized world. His surname implicates him within a durable, if also fragmented and inaccurate, Christian reading of Epicurean materialist philosophy as the most potent form of classical pagan atheism for its rejection of the cosmological dualism between material and spiritual levels of existence. Between these monikers, he is a figure that “devotionalizes” Epicurus as a sign of a fragmentary Lucretian cosmography and its cultural transformation into a byword for bodily indulgence and amoral sense-worship. In a disorienting modulation of vocal register, Mammon conducts a catechism of physical indulgence and prurience, the amorphous form of his speech mirroring the dangerous “vapours” that pass from corruptive appetites to vulnerable reason. Given the key to endless wealth, he will “walk / Naked between his succubae” (2.2.63–64); feast, among a variety of absurd rarities, upon “the swelling unctuous paps / Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off ” (100–101); and in accordance with the complementarity of different states of vice so commonly imagined in the period, mix adultery and incest by assuring that he “will ha’ no bawds / But fathers and mothers: they will do it best” (74–75). Mammon’s vision magnifies the fulfillment of human life in the satisfaction of bestial appetites and is thus crucially linked to the intersection of atheism with that perennial ideological

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project of civilization, the differentiation of human from animal life. Mammon’s fantastic naturalism locates the zenith of human fulfillment through entirely material causes, transmuted as they are into a catalogue of indulgence. In a perversely complicating turn, it is this worldview that provides the play’s only direct reference to the contagiousness of the plague. In the long exchange between Mammon and the rightly suspicious gamester Surly, the almost delirious knight pauses in his enumeration of excesses that he will enjoy through alchemy to describe the healing potential of the imagined philosopher’s stone: ’Tis the secret Of nature naturized ‘gainst all infections, Cures all diseases coming of all causes; A month’s grief in a day, a year’s in twelve; And, of what age soever, in a month: Past all the doses of your drugging doctors. I’ll undertake, withal, to fright the plague Out o’ the kingdom in three months. (2.1.63–69)

Like Tribulation’s inept appropriation of humoral contagion, Mammon’s dream of an alchemical panacea is as fatuous as his plans to have “the beards of barbels served instead of salads” (2.2.82). Jonson ridicules the Puritans through the pettiness of their moral expedience, but Mammon is a kind of visionary who, like the “glasses / Cut in more subtle angles” (45–46) that he imagines for himself, multiplies every encounter with the philosopher’s stone into its most specific excesses. Where the “Puritan cant” of Tribulation and Ananias clearly derives from the prolific religious writing that is the target of Jonson’s satire, Mammon’s idiolect is much more singular. Like a lens that magnifies its objects so far as to render them unrecognizable, its images are particularized almost to the point of incoherence, a parody of the world reduced to atoms of sense experience. The outrageous comic effect of his imagined omnipotence is the most noted thematic outcome of these formal qualities, but Mammon also figures the power of alchemy as the jocoserious promise of complete knowledge and control over nature. In this way, the coveted stone takes on the insidious qualities of an early model of the technology anticipated by the methods of Baconian science: “how better to use [nature] in order

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wholly to dominate it and other men.”26 While his visions emphasize the tactile objects of appetite, the curing power of the stone to “fright the plague” is figured through more abstract terms as an object within nature that can transcend “all causes” that remain otherwise opaque to the gazes of either science or theology. The “theory” behind this caricature signals Jonson’s awareness of the ideological debates surrounding the nature of disease. The idea of the “secret / Of nature naturized” recalls the “hidden cause” of nature in de la Primaudaye and gestures toward the depth of a material causality that accompanies any theorization of the plague through the mechanics of contagion, as well as the dream of a relationship to nature that might comprehend and conquer it.27 However hyperbolic its dressings, Mammon’s idea of the philosopher’s stone as “nature naturized” is also an incisive commentary on the view of nature embedded in the concepts of infection and contagion. Epicure Mammon thus earns his namesake not only through the naively Epicurean worship of the appetites but also through the naturalism of his imagined control over a world that is the mere sum of its causes. In extrapolating a modern sense of materialist contagion from these fragments of The Alchemist, the threat of critical anachronism is poised against the sense that Jonson’s treatment of the plague refracts a nascent but specific sense of contagion as a way of determining natural causes that also appears in his contemporaneous sources. Donald Beecher describes the divergence between modern expectations about contagion and their counterparts in the early modern period: Contagion is that part of diagnostics concerned with the transmission of diseases or disease-inducing conditions whereby identifiable pathological states are seen to replicate themselves in different hosts. Paradoxically, for the earliest theorists, this entails a constellation of pathogenic circumstances, rather than the actual transfer of infectious entities.28

Beecher’s approach to pre-modern contagion emphasizes the elaborate and pervasive continuity between contagion as a model for apparently physical diseases and emotional or psychological states. The slightly ambiguous distinction between what he terms the “earliest theorists” and “diagnostics” lends the historical orientation of his statement a conciliatory and forward-looking quality. Current models of contagion, one could imagine, might come to accommodate some of the implications of its pre-modern predecessor. In a similar view, Vivian Nutton objects

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to the reductive application of historical difference when considering theoretical systems of the past: Historians have occasionally denied to the doctors of antiquity a knowledge of contagion on the grounds that they had no theory of seeds of disease or of germs, but this is to confuse an appreciation of contagion qua contagiousness with one explanation of its mechanics.29

While the plurality of sense that attends upon the pre-modern concept of contagion seems to exclude it from meaningful relation with what Beecher terms “diagnostics,” Nutton asserts the stability of contagion as a term that still works to describe the contemporary observation and experience of infectious disease. Despite widely variant accounts of the still-ineffable essence of contagious contact, early theories—and their deployment by lay interlocutors such as Jonson—are attuned to the increasing salience of conceiving the phenomena of disease through complex natural interfaces. Rather than specific phenomena that can be rendered in positive clinical terms, contagion describes the layered interaction between subjects rendered as vulnerable to both material and moral forces. For Allison P. Hobgood, the inherent plurality of causal interactions is contained within the pre-modern concept of contagion. She contends that Contagion, rather, was about the mutual interface of susceptible elements in a specific moment of contact. Privileging the reciprocal interaction between all participating entities contagion characterized the entire scene of transaction in its utmost complexity.30

Lacking a reliable empirical explanation for the transmission of “infectious entities,” early modern conceptions of contagion tend to refer to the moment of contact between changeable inner states and endlessly complex and hostile environmental factors. Another facet of the paradox, however, is the recurrent difficulty to conceptualize consistent accounts of an interface that can accommodate plausible practice, let alone justify physical curatives and treatments. One of Nutton’s most incisive claims is that pre-modern speculation about contagion based on particles or “seminaria,” so appealing to the modern interlocutor as potential harbingers of future science, remained isolated from practice and essentially recreational in scope:

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The hypothesis of causative seeds was a philosophical luxury for the intellectual practitioner; it did not lead, either in antiquity, the Renaissance, or even down to the mid-nineteenth century, to the cure of disease by the elimination of these tiny agents from a diseased body.31

Nutton refers specifically to the proto-atomist positions found in texts by Lucretius and humanists such as Girolamo Fracastoro, but the tension between theoretical awareness of material phenomena and its possible practice in Hellenic and continental contexts also describes the convoluted situation of contagious disease in early modern England. The deployment of alternative derivations for natural phenomena was oblique and heuristic in quality. Legislative action based upon speculative material causes (the killing of dogs, for example) had limited effectiveness, and yet the most basic social response—widespread flight from London by the wealthy—clearly produced the morally neutral but physically immediate result of reduced mortality.32 For Jonson, this inconsistency provides the opportunity to satirically exploit selective applications of incomplete contagion theory when it is expedient for unscrupulous characters such as Tribulation and Mammon. Reading The Alchemist according to the ambivalent directionality of early modern contagion may suggest that the ideal moral subject occupies an essentially peripatetic position of balance between the demands of the appetites and the tempering force of reason. The interaction between body and environment is ultimately subject to the precarious but adequate powers of the soul. Such a view of Jonson’s application of the humors envisions the same blending of moral and physical circumstances to produce the spiritual condition that structures the heresy and atheism denounced by Hill and White and steadfastly refuses the position that the humors are a nascent way of physicalizing moral failure. With this essentially conservative view of Jonson’s humoralism in mind, the satirical function of the crude materialist version of contagion theory and its application to the problem of atheism becomes clear. As a Puritan, Tribulation is one of Jonson’s most severe objects of parody, and essentially everything that his character suggests and opines is laughably self-contradictory. The physicalist theory, here used to defend the moral acceptability of fraud for spiritual purposes, can thus be viewed as another element of bankrupt Puritan ethics. The suggestion that physical processes such as the somatic reaction to noxious fumes could be the root cause of inherently moral and spiritual transgressions undermines

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theological conceptions of the same social problems, and so by applying a form of logic that the pre-modern mind would likely have immediately recognized as “atheistical,” Jonson has the Puritan unwittingly occupy the space of his supposed atheist. After all, Tribulation manages to invoke sympathy for Satan by suggesting that his evil can be traced to the demanding work conditions of the underworld and de-essentializing the nature of evil along the way. Keeping in mind the inconsistent quality of early modern theories of transmission, interpretation of the brief physical etiology of heterodoxy that Jonson voices through Tribulation must also account for its location within the context of dramatic conventions and the literary framework of satire. The prevalence of plague in The Alchemist does not produce a text that provides access to essential elements of the disease or its experience in London; it is instead a backdrop, a discourse that informs the play, but which Jonson transforms into a dramatic system that speaks primarily to related but distinct social issues. In unsurprising contrast to the critical reluctance to confront the heterodox elements of Jonson’s satire, William Empson identifies the moral center of the play within a critique of dogmatic observance that echoes both Lucretius and Plutarch’s contrasting of atheism and superstition, quipping that “one cannot get on with The Alchemist without accepting its moral. This might seem easy to grasp; the play sets out to dissuade its audience from superstitious belief.”33 Rather than seeking out the resolution of stable authority in the play, Empson finds Jonson constantly interrogating the locus of responsibility for human behavior, holding up for inspection the discourses of cultural authority (religious belief, social status, wealth) as well as the forms of knowledge that would undergird these positions (scripture, civility, commerce). This process frequently takes place within and through the humors as a symbolic structure that can reimagine social imbalances through the local and dramatically unified terms of the individual body. This would be an easy reproduction of the kind of collapse between material and moral conditions that appears in the polemicists, except that Jonson retains a keen awareness of the distinction between “real” and metaphorical bodies. To generate momentum for stinging satire, Jonson carefully constructs the differential between the frailty of the humoral body and its incompleteness as a symbol of balance and harmony. Tribulation is himself “infected” with a humoral imbalance toward greed, a situation of vulnerability that he reproduces in his figurative etiology of atheism and heresy.

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Like the “lighter sort of people” that Hill identifies at the beginning of the social “infection” of atheism, Ananias and Tribulation are subject to the contagious influence of greed and indulgence because of their obviated weakness and vulnerability to worldly vicissitudes. Like de La Primaudaye, Jonson’s complex vision of the human constitution appeals to both the moral powers of the soul and the unavoidable material dangers of nature and society. While atheism is not reducible to the emergent natural outcome that Tribulation posits, nor the accumulation of vices and heresies with which Hill’s Crie of England begins, these engagements with atheism nonetheless identify it through and alongside contagion, at the troubled interface between material and moral causes in the early modern world.



Notes





1. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), C3. 2. Henoch Clapham, An Epistle Discoursing Upon the Present Pestilence (London, 1603), A3v. A contentious figure of post-Reformation religious life in London, Clapham was imprisoned for contributing to the panic caused by the plague epidemic: Alexandra Walsham, “Clapham, Henoch (fl. 1585–1614), writer on theology and preacher,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (4 June 2018), https://doi.org/10. 1093/ref:odnb/5431. 3. Historical Dictionary of Stuart England, 1603–1689, ed. Ronald H. Fritze and William B. Robison (London: Greenwood, 1996), 181. 4. Bans on meetings of “great multitudes of people” begin as early as a Guildhall Proclamation of 1569, and quarantine orders appear in 1518: Glynne Wickham and Herbert Berry, English Professional Theatre, 1530– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 59; Paul Slack, “The Response to Plague in Early Modern England: Public Policies and Their Consequences,” in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. John Walter and Roger Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 168. 5. A prevailing ideology of historical alienation warns that, in the words of Lucien Febvre on Rabelais’s supposed atheism, “there is really no common measure” between early modern and modern subjects; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century and the Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 100. Paraphrasing the Febvrian historiography that still informs critical hesitation about the analysis of pre-modern atheism, David Wootton describes the delimited parameters of such study: “In truth, there could

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be no real history of irreligion until one entered the second half of the seventeenth century and began to measure the impact of the Cartesian distinction between mind and body upon the European intellectual community”; “New Histories of Atheism,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, eds. David Wootton and Michael Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17. 6. John Hull, for instance, asserts that “Papisme is masked Atheisme” in The Unmasking of the Politique Atheist (London: Ralph Howell, 1602), G8v; English humanist Roger Ascham condemns the habit of travelling on the continent among Italians who are “Epicures in living, and ἄθεοι in doctrine” in The Scholemaster, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Bell and Daldy, 1863), 84; Francis Bacon’s final reason for atheism (after religious sectarianism, priestly scandal, and habitual scoffing) is “learned times, specially with peace and prosperity”; “Of Atheism,” in The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 38. 7.  Thomas Cooper, “contingo,” in Thesaurus linguae Romanae & Britannicae (London, 1584). 8. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura: Book III, ed. E. J. Kenney, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), l. 470–471; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. H. A. J. Munro (Cambridge: Deighton, 1891), 68. 9. Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Alvin Kernan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1.1.182–183. Subsequent quotations will correspond to this edition and will be cited parenthetically with act, scene, and line numbers. 10. Cheryl Lynn Ross, “The Plague of The Alchemist,” Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 440, 443. 11. Alexander H. Sackton, Rhetoric as a Dramatic Language in Ben Jonson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948): 49; J. S Mebane, “Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: Utopianism and Religious Enthusiasm in ‘The Alchemist’,” Renaissance Drama 10 (2006): 117–139. 12.  Robert M. Schuler, “Jonson’s Alchemists, Epicures, and Puritans,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 172. 13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 248. 14. Thomas White, A Sermon Preached at Pawles Crosse (London, 1578): C8–C8v. 15. Wickham and Berry, English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49.

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16. Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. T. B. (London, 1586): 30: “if we heale our soules, we may cure ourselves of the most of them [diseases]: and as for others, which come by defect of nature, or by some other hidden cause, we have the counsell and helpe of Physitions.” 17. Ibid., C3–C3v. 18. White, A Sermon, C3–C3v. 19. Augustine was perhaps the most famous example of a convert from the Manichean religion; refutations of the sect in his Confessions and by Eusebius inform its later evolution into a byword for a number of related heresies; see Augustine and Manichaean Christianity, ed. Johannes Van Oort (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 20. Hill, The Crie, 33. 21. Ibid., 35. 22. Ibid., 36. 23. Bacon’s first cause for atheism is the proliferation of “divisions in religion, if they be many,” Essays, 38; Thomas Nashe condemns English sectarian division, claiming that “our contentions (for the most part) are the seeking to prove truth no truth, after once she is found out,” Christs Tears Over Jerusalem (London: Longman, 1815), 127. 24. Lodge, A Treatise, B2v. 25. Thomas Nashe, “Terrors of the Night or a Discourse of Apparitions,” in Thomas Nashe, ed. Stanley Wells (London: Arnold, 1964), C1. 26. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Verso, 1997), 4. 27. In the notes to his edition, Kernan cites the likely source for “nature naturized” in the scholastic opposition between natura naturata and natura naturans, but suggests that Jonson’s phrase likely corresponds to an intensification of nature rather than the reduced essence of the created in natura naturata: 209. 28. Donald Beecher, “An Afterword on Contagion,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 35. 29. Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History 27, no. 1 (1983): 1. 30.  Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 62. 31. Nutton, “Seeds of Disease,” 14.

252  J. CHARLES ESTABILLO 32.  Mark S. R. Jenner, “The Great Dog Massacre,” in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 44–61; Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 136. 33.  William Empson, “The Alchemist,” in William Empson: Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume Two, The Drama, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Verso, 1997. Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster. Edited by John E. B. Mayor. London: Bell and Daldy, 1863. Augustine. Augustine and Manichaean Christianity. Edited by Johannes Van Oort. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Bacon, Francis. “Of Atheism.” In The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, edited by Brian Vickers, 37–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Beecher, Donald. “An Afterword on Contagion.” In Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Claire L. Carlin, 243–260. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1. Edited by John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960. Clapham, Henoch. An Epistle Discoursing Upon the Present Pestilence. London, 1603. Cooper, Thomas. “Contingo.” In Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae, Ee6. London, 1584. de la Primaudaye, Pierre. The French Academie. Translated by T. B. London, 1586. Empson, William. “The Alchemist.” In William Empson: Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume Two, the Drama, edited by John Haffenden, 97–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century and the Religion of Rabelais, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Fritze, Ronald H., and William B. Robison, eds. Historical Dictionary of Stuart England, 1603–1689. London: Greenwood, 1996. Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Hobgood, Allison P. Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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Hull, John. The Unmasking of the Politique Atheist. London, 1602. Jenner, Mark S. R. “The Great Dog Massacre.” In Fear in Early Modern Society, edited by William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts, 44–61. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. Edited by Alvin Kernan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Lodge, Thomas. A Treatise of the Plague. London, 1603. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Translated by H. A. J. Munro. Cambridge: Deighton, 1891. ———. De Rerum Natura: Book III. Edited by E. J. Kenney, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mebane, J. S. “Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: Utopianism and Religious Enthusiasm in ‘The Alchemist.’” Renaissance Drama 10 (2006): 117–139. Nashe, Thomas. Christs Tears Over Jerusalem. London: Longman, 1815. ———. “Terrors of the Night or a Discourse of Apparitions.” In Thomas Nashe, edited by Stanley Wells, 143–175. London: Arnold, 1964. Nutton, Vivian. “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance.” Medical History 27, no. 1 (1983): 1–34. Ross, Cheryl Lynn. “The Plague of the Alchemist.” Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 439–458. Sackton, Alexander H. Rhetoric as a Dramatic Language in Ben Jonson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Schuler, Robert M. “Jonson’s Alchemists, Epicures, and Puritans.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 171–208. Slack, Paul. “The Response to Plague in Early Modern England: Public Policies and Their Consequences.” In Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, edited by John Walter and Roger Schofield, 167–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Walsham, Alexandra. “Clapham, Henoch (fl. 1585–1614), Writer on Theology and Preacher.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 4 June 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5431. White, Thomas. A Sermon Preached at Pawles Crosse. London, 1578. Wickham, Glynne, and Herbert Berry. English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wootton David. “New Histories of Atheism.” In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by David Wootton and Michael Hunter, 13–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

CHAPTER 13

Embedded in Shakespeare’s “Fair Verona” Rebecca Totaro

This paper is an invitation to consider William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet anew by taking its setting of Verona as an ecosystem in which the biotic and abiotic constituents are disposed toward spontaneous generation. This ecosystem is one that I will be calling an “epidemic assemblage.” Verona’s constitution is one of constant, complex, random, friction-producing exchanges among its many and diverse parts. Each of the street brawls between Montagues and Capulets is sparked by this friction, and the same friction gives rise to Romeo’s love bursts (for Rosaline and then for Juliet) and to each of Mercutio’s disruptive discourses on dreams and love, as well as to his dying exclamatory curse, “A plague on both your houses.”1 The plague itself, which prevents the delivery of the Friar’s letter to Romeo, is also among the products of a teeming Verona. In this reading, the ill-fated stars cannot be a singular viable cause for the play’s action, nor can we isolate for blame any of the characters. We encounter in Verona a tangible, diverse, and interactive arena of “distributive agency” that, as Jane Bennett explains, “does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect.”2 From this embedded perspective in Verona, R. Totaro (*)  Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9_13

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we gain insight into the overwhelming passion of young love and we enter into what I see as yet more powerful and currently salient investigations regarding agency and the experience of sudden, extreme change. Supernatural or human, agency in this Verona proves disturbingly inconsequential. Refreshingly correlative to the diminishment of singular agency of either kind (human or supernatural), extreme and unpredictable events of change in this Verona need not only sign forth tragedy; they may also speak to the spontaneity of joy in wonder. * * * Informed by the scholarly work of early modernists exploring the phenomenology of embodiment and by recent applications of French philosophical theory taken up by political scientist Jane Bennett and sociologist Joost van Loon, my work here is also inspired by recent efforts to expose and explore for examination the notion of “cute Shakespeare.”3 As Julia Reinhard Lupton explains in the introduction to an edited volume of papers on the subject, some of which were delivered at the 2004 Babel Working Group conference, consideration of the aesthetic category of “cute” is useful in examination of appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays. Sianne Ngai defines the aesthetic category of “cute” as “disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities” that “evoke in us a desire to protect them.”4 Among the Shakespeare plays best suited to this category, Lupton cites Romeo and Juliet for its having been so regularly and relentlessly tamed in its repeated use in high school curricula and performance as well as for its internal representations of love through a number of cute “transitional objects” such as Juliet’s “tak[in]g Romeo as her transitional object when she imagines him as a bird on a line.”5 I argue here that the through-line of cuteness both within the play and brought to it in recent high school and performance adaptations has obscured the play’s complexity, which I seek to expose again for appreciation and discussion. To this end, I also take direction from Margreta DeGrazia, whose goal in her award-winning Hamlet without Hamlet is to tone down the volume of that play’s titular character.6 A brooding, intellectual Hamlet, she contends, has been culturally augmented over time: Hamlet eclipses other aspects and versions of the play, of the character, and even the reasons for his modernity (1, 4).7 When we

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clear the way for a reading of our play by similarly toning down the overwhelmingly passionate presence of the characters Romeo and Juliet, and when we (dare I suggest?) unyoke them from each other to view the play as a whole, we expose alternative readings underneath the popular culture abridgement. In this paper, with this approach, my turn with the play is to “fair Verona”; it is in Verona, “where we lay our scene” (prologue 2) and where rapid exchange among its actants makes it impossible to avoid contagious transmission or to pinpoint a “patient zero” in this story of love and hate.8 We might instead talk about this city of Verona as “ground zero” for the events of the play. * * * As I think about Verona, and Shakespeare’s representation of it that exceeds what either “setting” or “ground zero” can convey, I join with scholars from across the many disciplines that encompass the medical humanities who are employing Joost van Loon’s concept of “epidemic space” to help understand complex ecosystems of rapid, contagious, human–nonhuman exchange.9 “Epidemic space,” he explains, is not merely a “figure of speech”, but an essential linchpin in the continuous iteration between the microphysics of infection and the macrophysics of epidemics (van Loon, 1998). It is the site or “junctural zone” (Ryan, 1996) where various actors meet, including virulent pathogens, medical experts, politicians and journalists; it is there where sensemaking condenses into specific realities. (40)

For this reason, this site is also, according to van Loon, “a dense space, marked by complex connections [among] … patients, medical staff, equipment, modes of transportation, roads, hospital wards, virulent pathogens, parasites, animals, communication technologies, military personnel, weapons, barbed wire, but also less tangible actors such as regulations, procedures and accounts” (40). Further still, epidemic space extends into the realm of the symbolic, memorial or otherwise historical, and virtual, “referring to forms of affectivity that operate by means of, for example, news, rumours, metaphors and myths” (41). A contagion event, as with any natural disaster, involves just such a variously, uniquely, and imperfectly mixed sets of human and nonhuman actants, changing over time. Van Loon’s approach also shows that attempts to identify a single cause or

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lesson from any natural disaster are ultimately not practical. This concept of epidemic space is popular in part, therefore, because it so appealingly lines up with experience writ large; for example, we know that infectious entities surface and spread, and that communities react to them in ways seen and unseen, anticipated and impossible entirely to identify. Van Loon’s call to examine “epidemic space” is, then, a call to policy makers not to lose sight of either the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest as they seek to identify and understand the many complex, changing, and always unique patterns of epidemics, the better to protect those in their care. The need for this kind of approach to public health is increasingly apparent in our globally connected world of planes and people, borders and tunnels, mosquitos and monkeys, fuel shortages and environmental degradation. The need for this kind of approach to complex experiences— from falling in love to founding a company or predicting the stock market—is also clear for the same reasons. Due to its complexity as a concept, however, it is challenging to apply it usefully to real-world epidemic outbreaks once they occur. Complexity needs to match the reality, because van Loon’s “epidemic space” demands time and resources, it is better suited for theoretical analysis in preparation for outbreaks of contagion than for use on the frontlines. The concept of “epidemic space” does, however, lend itself in immediate and practical application to the discussion of the complexities of a fictional space, which will always have demarcated limits. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, the space is Verona, with Mantua as adjunct; its contents and actions do not also extend to or take influence from the rest of Italy or Europe. Its space is inflected by summer heat that increases the rapidity of transmission of thoughts, words, and actions; it is definitely not subject to the frosts of winter when people stay indoors.10 Shakespeare’s Verona is a closed set. Shakespeare’s Verona is nevertheless a multidimensional set composed of people, weapons, borders, weather, ritual, musical instruments, and masks, which is why I prefer the term “assemblage” to the word “space.” As a term, “assemblage” is also gaining traction in scholarly and scientific discourse due to its use by political scientist Jane Bennett. Bennett borrows the term from Deleuze in defining it as a “human-nonhuman working group” in which all things in the group are “actants” that together exert a distributive agency upon the world around them.11 Among Bennett’s examples of such an assemblage is obesity in the USA; the increase in obesity is not due to an individual’s will over desire but to multiple actants

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interacting—human and nonhuman—from the chemical content of sugar and the interests of big pharma to those of factory farmers and laws govern­ing minimum wage.12 Shakespeare’s Verona is just such a working group out of which infectious disease, rage, and lovesickness emerge and mix; so too are joy, respect, and community generated here. With respect to early modern literature, thinking about Verona as an epidemic assemblage—with its multiple moving parts and the need for an interdisciplinary approach to its study—is also in line with the methods for prescientific understanding of disease. Early modern London, particularly during the decades between 1560 and 1635, was just such an epidemic assemblage, with outbreaks of bubonic plague causing crisis mortality once a decade on average—exacerbated by population mobility, complexity, and density.13 As Michael Neill and others have shown, people in England at the time did not restrict their accounts of plague and other diseases to statistics, or to a quest for patient zero or an antibiotic match.14 Instead, they represented natural disasters as mixtures of social, religious, political, physical, and other concerns, and they represented them in narrative rather than quantitative forms.15 Pre-modern healers from wise women and midwives to barber surgeons and physicians correspondingly considered illness as a manifestation of imbalance unique to each individual in his or her local situation, requiring the kind of treatment we might call holistic.16 As Mary Floyd-Wilson explains, “Indeed, the more one reads plague treatises, the more apparent it becomes that they rarely treat plague as a thing but focus instead on presenting a complex hierarchy of causation. Working in concert, supernatural, preternatural, and natural causes were thought to generate plague epidemics” and all disease (404).17 The concept of an “epidemic assemblage” is thus useful for the purposes here, to bring back to the surface a number of important aspects of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that have been nearly lost through its mass appropriation as the story of ideal young love. * * * I turn now to what might be the grimmest scene in the play, to show within Shakespeare’s words the problem with tidy tellings of this tale.18 When Juliet wakes in the tomb to find the Friar at her side, having expected to see Romeo, she begs the Friar for explanation: “Oh comfortable Friar, where is my lord …where is my Romeo” (5.3.148–150). In response, the Friar urges her,

260  R. TOTARO … Lady, come from that nest Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep. A greater power than we can contradict Hath thwarted our intents. Come, come away. Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead; And Paris too. Come, I’ll dispose of thee Among a sisterhood of holy nuns. Stay not to question, for the watch is coming; Come, go, good Juliet. I dare stay no longer. (151–159)

These are the first words Juliet hears upon waking, and each successive clause, punctuated by the Friar’s repeated “Lady, come” … “Come, come away,” “Come,” “Come, go, good Juliet” is more horrible than the last. She wakes in a “nest of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep” the opposite of the “pleasant sleep” (4.1.106) the Friar had promised. Worse, an unnamed “greater power / …hath thwarted” the plan of her promised reunion with her husband. Still worse, the Friar underscores the fact that her husband is both literally dead and intimately connected with her, “in thy bosom.” The pain would seem already to be at its height for Juliet but then the Friar utters words that will mark a clear path for her: “Come, I’ll dispose of thee / Among a sisterhood of holy nuns.” This solution is close to the one Juliet’s father had threatened were she to have disobeyed his command to marry Paris in the first place. This fact, aligned with her dead husband’s body, is the dead weight that makes impossible Juliet’s emergence from the vault.19 Here is Aristotelian reversal at its height. Worthy of more attention are the Friar’s words of explanation for the failure of the plan that was so nearly successful: “A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents.” To say that this is an unsatisfying response to the gravity of the situation would be an understatement. In its brevity and suggestion of an outside force that has “thwarted” their plans, the statement suits neither the Friar, the situation at hand, nor the play as a whole; that is, it does not unless we reassign the origin of that “greater power.” The energy of the play denies the possibility of a single external force as this greater power, because by this point in the play we have already experienced the power of this Verona’s many moving parts. Among them are the stars, the ancient grudge, the heat of the summer day, the fiery temper of Tybalt, and equally passionate spirit of Mercutio, the eager courtship of Paris, Romeo’s love(s) and

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Juliet’s, the pride of their parents, the earthquake marking Juliet’s age, the cutting edges of blades, the best intentions of the Nurse and Friar, the swift efficacy of poison, the plague that halts the delivery of the letter to Romeo, and the efforts of the citizens of Verona and their Prince, who tire of the feuds. By the time Juliet wakes in the crypt, these things have together both enabled and “thwarted” the complex plan that might have brought the lovers together unharmed. This collective of Verona is the “greater power than we can contradict” and it arises spontaneously, uniquely, and locally. With this view, the full play opens to us, ready for fresh treatment and for surprises as joyfully as painfully emotion-eliciting. * * * Shakespeare fashions his assemblage of Verona by way of thick description through the glimpses he gives into its history, its familial and communal rituals, its characters’ memories, and by its contagious pleasures as much as its mortal contagions.20 The Nurse’s account of Juliet’s age is a powerful example of the vitality that is endemic to Verona. In a lengthy response to Lady Capulet’s query, the Nurse replies (in abbreviated form here): Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she, God rest Christian souls, Were of an age, Susan is with God; She was too good for me. But as I said, On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen; That shall she, marry! I remember it well. ‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years, And she was weaned, I never shall forget it, Of all the days of the year, upon that day. For I had then laid wormwood to my dug, Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall; My lord and you were then at Mantua. ….. For then she could stand high-lone; nay, by th’ rood, She could have run and waddled all about, For even the day before, she broke her brow. And then my husband—God be with his soul, A’ was a merry man—took up the child. ‘Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face?

262  R. TOTARO Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit; Wilt thou not, Jule?’ and, by my holidam, The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay.’ To see now how a jest shall come about! (1.3.18–49)

The account of Juliet’s age that Shakespeare gives to the Nurse is clearly not a tidy mathematical calculation. It is unwieldy in its cheerful, generative stream of consciousness. There are many moving parts, with the celebration of the “Lammas” festival, “the earthquake,” the sun shining, “dovehouse,” “wormwood,” absence of Juliet’s parents, presence of the Nurse’s husband and daughter (deceased by the time of the telling), Juliet’s “fall,” and the humor of Juliet’s reply of “Ay.” The earthquake, weening, and proximity of the Lammas festival serve to stabilize the memory, but they are not its primary focus. Of these, the merry exchange between her husband and Juliet, enhanced by his calling her “Jule,” is what has made the day memorable for the Nurse. Moreover, each of these parts comes together by coincidence, symbolized by both the quake and the jest—things different on the surface but memorable because they are each spontaneous and striking in their difference from quotidian experience.21 In a period when the Catholic, Puritan, and Church of England leaders were bartering for interpretive control over such events—from floods to illness, from accidental death to monstrous births—Shakespeare’s choice to treat the earthquake in this manner is especially striking as he speaks against authorities of the time who were unified on one point: a Christian God was always intentionally bringing about all change.22 Shakespeare is in limited company when as part of this earthquake memory he emphasizes not God as its prime mover or the lessons God intends by its occurrence but rather the joyful experience of a human embedded in a literally shaking environment in which she gains security, even from within the confluence of events beyond her control. With respect to the quake, the nurse contemplates neither her own nor anyone else’s relationship with God, and she is not concerned about her own agency. Recalling Jonathan Wright’s argument in “The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity during the English Reformation,” there is a dangerous displacement here of God and even of conscience23—a displacement inherent perhaps in human animals, embedded as they are in a system that allows things to be events, insides to be outsides, and a certain acceptance of being, without needing to name or place it.

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As important as these lines are to Shakespeare’s unique characterization of the nurse compared to his source text by Arthur Brooke, those adapting the play often diminish them because they have little explicitly to do with main plot of the play. Those who do so also often limit mention of Romeo’s first love and/or of the plague that prevents the delivery to Romeo of the Friar’s letter. The latter omission is of course ironic and telling in that its removal strips the actual contagion from the play as if to suggest that the only transmissions of consequence are the emotions of love and hate. The emotions of consequence are also those of pride, of parental love, of envy, of concern, and of joy. Another result of undermining the lines in question is diminishment of the parts of the play that most display agency as distributive, and as resulting from a mixed assem­ blage of human and nonhuman parts—the earthquake, the plague, and Romeo’s love that was never only directed toward Juliet. * * * With the start of the action of the play proper at act 1 scene 1, Shakespeare shows just such a mixed reading of the potential of Verona: Verona. A Public Place. Enter SAMPSON and GREGORY, of the house of Capulet, armed with swords and bucklers SAMPSON Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals. GREGORY No, for then we should be colliers. SAMPSON I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw. GREGORY Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar. SAMPSON I strike quickly, being moved. GREGORY But thou art not quickly moved to strike. SAMPSON A dog of the house of Montague moves me. GREGORY To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand, therefore, if thou art moved, thou

264  R. TOTARO runn’st away. SAMPSON A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will take the wall of any man or amid of Montague’s. (1.1.1–11)

What we have are two men overheated and receptive to catching fire with any spark. Shakespeare conveys the scene’s heat in several ways. The first is by the stichomythic construction of the exchange, which enacts the friction. Turning to diction, the early modern terminology of “coals” and “choler” is another expression of Verona’s heat, as “choler” is the bodily humor associated with rage of the sort that might lead to a hangman’s noose or “collar.” Still more interesting is the fact that as heated as this exchange is, Sampson and Gregory have no clear motive or plan. They cannot even quite agree about what or who is the agent of their action, of what will cause them to strike. Do they strike of their own will? Do they strike because they “be in choler”? Is it because “A dog of the house of Montague moves” them? Shakespeare’s words place all of these causes of action on the table. For Shakespeare’s audiences, the friction of this scene would appear to be a symptom of a larger ecosystem ripe for eruption. It would suit their understanding of the operations of emotions and, more generally, of ­physics. As Gail Kern Paster and others have shown, early moderns imagined their bodies as extensions of the natural world.24 The boundaries between bodies were thought porous, and the materials making up all bodies were shared: earth, wind, water, and fire. Early moderns experienced a long-standing and powerful relationship between physiology and meteorology such that a sigh was a microcosmic wind and an angry outburst was a microcosmic volcanic eruption. Their macrocosmic equivalents, a wind and a volcanic eruption, were each of them considered symptoms of Earth’s body undergoing change.25 The interactions between Montague and Capulet—spontaneous, lacking in clear direction—are the symptoms of an epidemic assemblage coming into its prime. It is worth noting that we can glimpse Shakespeare’s thick description of this human–nonhuman ecosystem heading toward upheaval, his Verona, in Baz Lurhmann’s fiery explosive 1996 version of the play set in a Verona styled after Venice Beach California. In the opening scene, fast cars, guns, and gas end in literal explosion. As Lurhmann understood, this opening scene is critical to an audience’s understanding of the action of the play. With it, Lurhmann calls attention to the random nature of all

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eruptions of violence. Such a claim jeopardizes the easy assignation of a clear moral to the story, and I am arguing that this lack of clear causation is exactly what Shakespeare’s play represents. Many adaptations of this story of love and death find clarity of causation within it, as if everything is already a foreshadowing. This is the case with Shakespeare’s source: Tragicall Historye of Romeu and Juliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in English by Ar. Br. (1562) as well. In this prose romance, Arthur Brooke showcases a Prince who is determined on page one: he “alone dyd raigne, / To reache rewarde unto the good, / to pay the lewde with payne.”26 At the end of the play, Brooke’s Prince follows through and doles out severe punishments after Romeo and Juliet are found dead. He banishes Juliet’s nurse, “Because that from the parentes she / dyd hyde the marriage,” and he has the apothecary found and “hanged by the throte.” (fol. 84). This Prince also pardons the Friar due to prior record of good service, but the implication is that he would otherwise deserve punishment, and the Friar on his own removes himself to a hermitage and spends the rest of his days in prayerful penitence (84). Brooke provides a story of crime and punishment, with a Prince resembling Foucault’s plague-desiring ruler who uses community suffering as an excuse for tightening control, for tying up—or in fact executing—loose ends.27 Shakespeare offers the opposite: the impossibility of assigning blame to explicit people or things. * * * In this light, the moralistic prefatory and closing remarks of Romeo and Juliet’s conservative authorities, the Chorus and the Prince, also become more interesting. Beginning with these words of the Chorus, let us consider them first by noting their traditional hallmarks, which I have placed in bold, and then a second time looking to an alternative reading, which I have underlined: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

266  R. TOTARO Do with their death bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (Prologue 1–14)

In these words, with this emphasis in bold, Shakespeare creates a clear through-line of causality. The stars cross Romeo and Juliet’s love, which is “death-mark’d.”28 It is, moreover, a love that read backwards was designed to serve as a punishment to end their “parents’ strife.” In this play as a whole, I have been arguing, Shakespeare overtly militates against such a reductive reading, and this passage in particular speaks to his larger vision of agency in the story. Placing emphasis now instead on the words that are underlined in the passage above, the tragic love is clearly the product of a locality, of a place (“fair Verona”), and of time (when the “ancient grudge” is newly revived); it is not solely the product of agency, human or divine. The sudden nature of that grudge is also indicated by Shakespeare’s use of the word “break” to mean “To burst,” as in the case of “Of an abscess or boil: To burst the surface, so that the contents escape.”29 There is no agential origin for the bursting. It happens, just as the last lines imply: the story of death-marked love is the two hours “traffic” or transaction between the actors and the audience, resulting in a co-created, dialogic experience rather than a unilateral moral directive.30 In the play’s final scene as well, Shakespeare reveals not closure but openness, in spite of the Prince’s efforts to make sense of the tragedy, to lay some blame, to control the mess. We would be wrong, or at least reading restrictively, if we view him as successful in this effort: This letter [from Romeo] doth make good the friar’s words, Their course of love, the tidings of her death: And here he writes that he did buy a poison Of a poor ‘pothecary, and therewithal Came to this vault to die, and lie with Juliet. Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague, See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love. And I, for winking at your discords too, Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished. (5.3.285–295)

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Interpreting the events in the way the Chorus had initially, the Prince concludes both that Romeo intentionally “Came to this vault to die,” and, with a heavier hand in the interpretation, that the “love” of the couple serves exclusively as “scourge” for “hate” with a “heaven,” the greater power. Here might be our tidy closing with decided agency and moral; yet the Prince cannot persist in this state, standing outside events as a guide. He acknowledges his own involvement, adding, “And I for winking at your discords too / Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish’d.” Who or what is to blame, then? The Prince wobbles a bit, such a different character from that fashioned by Brooke. Shakespeare nevertheless gives the Prince another chance to achieve closure. In the very last words of the play, after the family fathers have promised to erect golden statues of memorial for each other’s child, the Prince says, A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned and some punished, For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. (5.3.305–310)

Here in this effort, the Prince admits more mixture: it is “a glooming peace,” in which now instead “some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.” But Shakespeare’s Prince discloses neither the identity of the “some punished” nor their punishments. Scholars have speculated that this is nevertheless Shakespeare’s nod to Brooke, whose Prince doled out those severe punishments, but that speculation eliminates the additional function of these lines. These lines also serve as final directions to those who hear them; not only to the Montagues, Capulets, and Verona’s attendant citizens but also to Shakespeare’s audience for each performance. All are to “Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.” When they do, they might each find that “Some shall be pardoned and some punished.” It is as if the play were a subtle sermon, with the final verdict not issued by the Prince but by each individual who hears the story, moved to consider his or her own response to it. He has been, in his own words, “your moved prince” who will become “general of your woes,” leading Verona’s citizens together

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“even to death,” not by way of individual punishments as Brooke’s prince had done. The final words of Shakespeare’s Prince, and of the play, call attention to the through-line of “glooming” peace, of the “sorrow,” “sad things,” and “woe” that express the pathos of this radically tragic situation. Shakespeare concludes this play with only one clear lesson: in times that promise unexpected, rapid change of whatever kind, and especially in the event of crisis mortality, the only recommended actions to take are always compassionate, communicative ones. However much the authoritative voices of this play might try to account for its tragic ending, however great the need to overlay Romeo and Juliet with our definitions of genre and form, and however much pressure there may be to package the play for a particular audience, the fact remains that when we attend to the play with consideration of Verona as an epidemic assemblage, and as deGrazia and Lupton would advise, we find so much more to this play that is edgy and realistic, teachable and enjoyable. In its messy action and its loose ends, the play captures lived experience. As we know too well, lived experience never lands us in a place of tidy, comfortable closure, in a simply “fair Verona” or anywhere else for that matter. Experience is always unpredictable, making our desperation to account for it a thoroughgoing project. To be freed from the related need to read Shakespeare’s Verona predominantly as the setting for tragic ends is to have the opportunity to read indulgently and changeably, open to newly plausible truths about love, death, and hate, as well as about the joys of family, coming of age, friendship, and jests. From within a culture of mortality, as within a tragic love story, there are many such joys and other experiences equally deserving of “more talk” when we “[g]o hence” to tell our stories.31

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Rene Weiss, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Arden, 2012), Prologue 2. All citations of the play will be to this edition. 2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 31. 3. See Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments

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in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Mary Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6; Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 16; Gail Kern Paster, “The Tragic Subject and Its Passions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156; Paster, “Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance,” in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 137–152; and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 34 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Joost van Loon, “Epidemic Space,” Critical Public Health 15, no. 1 (2005). 4. Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (October 2010): 948–958. I am indebted to Lupton for my knowledge of this source. 5.  Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Cute Shakespeare,” ed. Lupton and Thomas Anderson, Special Issue of Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 3–5. I am also referring to Julia Reinhard Lupton’s paper delivered as part of the panel, “Cut Him Up in Little Stars: Romeo and Juliet Among the Arts,” at the World Shakespeare Congress, 1 August 2016; and to Sianne Ngai’s monograph, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 6. Margreta DeGrazia, Hamlet Without Hamlet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 7. “The Hamlet this book would do without,” DeGrazia explains, “is the modern Hamlet, the one distinguished by an inner being so transcendent that it barely comes into contact with the play from which it emerges” (1), a play in which Hamlet is actually modern with respect to the ways he navigates patrilineal succession that is broken—a prince who is dropped from inheritance of his title (2).

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8. On the concept of “patient zero” and its value see Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Mythology of ‘Patient Zero’ and How AIDS Virus Traveled to the United States is All Wrong,” The Washington Post, 26 October 2016, http://wapo.st/2eRMQlW?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.bebab3a35dc4, accessed 6 June 2017; Donald J. McNeil Jr., “The Ethics of Hunting Down ‘Patient Zero,’” New York Times, 29 October 2016; N AntulovFantulin, et al., “Identification of Patient Zero in Static and Temporal Networks: Robustness and Limitations,” Physical Review Letters 114, no. 24: 1–5; Richard A. McKay, “‘Patient Zero’: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2014): 161–194; and “Patient Zero” podcast 10.4, http://www.radiolab.org/story/169879-patient-zero/, accessed 30 June 2017. 9.  Among the many scholars applying van Loon’s “epidemic space” in their research are Sven Opitz in “Regulating Epidemic Space: The Nomos of Global Circulation,” Journal of International Relations and Development 19, no. 2 (2016): 263–284; Myra J. Hird, who treats the politics and gift-giving of parasites and viruses in The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), especially pages 55–57, 86–87; David L. Smith who brings attention to the need for heterogenic models for infectious disease epidemics, in “Spatial Heterogeneity in Infectious Disease Epidemics,” in Ecosystem Function in Heterogeneous Landscapes, ed. Gary Lovett (New York: Springer, 2005), 137–164. See also the important examination of Critical Perspectives in Public Health, which features van Loon’s essay reprinted (ed. Judith Green and Ronald Labonte [London NY: Routledge, 2008]). Green and Labonte see van Loon’s work as useful for the advocating and practicing of “critical perspectives in public health,” which seek always to ask “’But why?” versus the “(not unimportant) descriptive and monitoring functions of public health”; their approach seeks to “probe[] continuously deeper; it is fundamentally concerned with the social practices of power and how these practices (political, economic, engendered, cultural) work to stratify the individual into hierarchies and so stratify their risk, vulnerability and access to resources for health” (10). 10. On the relationship between heat and violence, see as a starting point, see Henry J. Enten, “Are Heatwaves a Hotbed for Crime?” The Guardian (10 July 2012), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/ jul/10/are-heatwaves-hotbed-for-crime, accessed 24 June 2017. 11. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii, xvii. 12. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, Chapter 3.

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13. On the calculation of crisis mortality ratios, see Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81–82; for a reassessment of the category of “crisis mortality,” see Dobson, Contours of Death, 465n.1. See also Erin Sullivan, “Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality,” in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, ed. by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (Routledge, 2010), 76–94. 14. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and Mary J. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 15. On patient narration of condition in early modern medicine, see especially Margaret Healy, “Journeying with the ‘Stone’: Montaigne’s Healing Travel Journal.” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 2 (2005): 231–249 and Olivia Weisser, Roy Porter Student Prize Essay, “Boils, Pushes and Wheals: Reading Bumps on the Body in Early Modern England,” Social History of Medicine 22, no. 2 (2009): 321–339. 16.  On the early modern medical marketplace, see especially Kevin Siena, “‘The Foul Disease’ and Privacy: The Effects of Venereal Disease and Patient Demand on the Medical Marketplace in Early Modern London,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no. 2 (2001): 199–224; Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and the Urban Poor in Early Modern London (London and New York: Longman, 1998), especially 203–229; and David Gentilecore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17. Mary Floyd-Wilson, “‘Angry Mab with Blisters Plague’: The Pre-modern Science of Contagion in Romeo and Juliet,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 404. 18. My word-anchors for this examination of Romeo and Juliet will not, then, include those that might be predictable such as Mercutio’s famous curse, “A plague o both your houses” or his words about the blisters Queen Mab causes. Rather my focus is primarily on words that have garnered less popular attention but are equally if not more revealing of Shakespeare’s layered representation of the distributive agency in the epidemic assemblage of Verona. On Mercutio’s Mab and plague, see Floyd-Wilson, “Angry Mab with Blisters Plague.” Floyd-Wilson takes up Mercutio’s speech as she examines the role of sympathetic contagion. This is a subject I do not take up here but it would help identify another set of actants that are part of the assemblage of Verona. See also the Introduction to

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Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, ed. by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) and in that volume, the essay by Barbara Traister, “‘A Plague on Both Your Houses’: Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama,” 169–182. 19. The lines regarding the “greater power” do not appear in the first quarto, where instead the Friar only replies, “Lady, come forth. I hear some noise at hand. / We shall be taken. Paris, he is slain, / And Romeo dead; and if we here be ta’en, / We shall be thought to be as accessory. / I will provide for you in some close nunnery” (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Jill L. Levenson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 3, 104–108). 20. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), Chapter 1. 21. Here “spontaneous” and “unwilled” hint at a through-line that could well be added to this paper: that of spontaneous generation as the nature of natural events, from contagion to meteorological phenomena. On these subjects as they have informed my findings, see first Luke Taylor, “Donne’s Unwilled Body,” John Donne Journal 30 (2011): 99–121 and Malcolm Wilson’s, Structure and Method in Aristotle’s ‘Meteorologica’: A More Disorderly Nature, which is essential reading on this subject (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 111ff. 22. On the interpretation of natural wonders by leaders of different early modern confessions, see especially Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-reformation England (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 23. Jonathan Wright, “The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity During the English Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, no. 1 (1999): 113–133. 24.  See especially Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6; Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 16; and Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 162. 25. For more on the relationship between meteorology and physiology, see Totaro, Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation (London: Routledge, 2017) part of the Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, a series edited by Karen Raber. 26. Arthur Brooke, Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in English by Ar. Br. (London, 1562), Fol. 1.



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27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 198–199. 28. For more on the “physical signs of pestilence” as a form of being “deathmarked,” see Floyd-Wilson, “‘Angry Mab with Blisters Plague,’” 406 and Ernest B. Gilman, who presents the idea of plague wounds as God’s writing or marking on the body in Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 94ff. 29. If we were to opt for the closest alternative definition for “break,” agency is applied: related to land, to break is “[t]o part or lay open the surface of (anything), as of land (by ploughing, etc.)” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “break” verb I.4. and I.5.a., http://www.oed.com, accessed 6 December 2018). An agent is implied, one that is breaking ground intentionally to plant. Shakespeare’s use here of “break” is, then, absolutely associated with the language of disease, as “ancient grudge break to new mutiny” without identified cause. The Arden Third Series editor Rene Weis agrees with “break” here meaning a non-agential “erupt” (123n.3). 30.  Oxford English Dictionary s.v. “traffic” noun 1.a. To engage in transaction for profit; 3 fig. Intercourse, communication; dealings, business, http:// www.oed.com, accessed 6 December 2018. 31. Please see as informing this call to read tragedy from its middle, from the sometimes as joyful mess of its sometimes as joyful parts, Carol Gilligan’s Shakespeare- and Apuleius-informed The Birth of Pleasure (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) and Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).

Works Cited Antulov-Fantulin, Nino, Alen Lancic, Tomislav Smuc, Hrvoje Stefancic, and Mike Sikic. “Identification of Patient Zero in Static and Temporal Networks: Robustness and Limitations.” Physical Review Letters 114, no. 24 (2015): 1–5. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Brooke, Arthur. Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in English by Ar. Br. London, 1562. Crane, Mary Thomas. Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Crawford, Julie. Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-reformation England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

274  R. TOTARO DeGrazia, Margreta. Hamlet Without Hamlet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Dobson, Mary J. Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Eggert, Katherine. Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. “‘Angry Mab with Blisters Plague’: The Pre-modern Science of Contagion in Romeo and Juliet.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, edited by Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, 315–342. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ———. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gentilecore, David. Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gilligan, Carol. The Birth of Pleasure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Healy, Margaret. “Journeying with the ‘Stone’: Montaigne’s Healing Travel Journal.” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 2 (2005): 231–249. Hird, Myra J. The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Cute Shakespeare,” edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton and Thomas Anderson. Special Issue of Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 1–12. ———. “Cut Him Up in Little Stars: Romeo and Juliet Among the Arts.” Paper presented at the World Shakespeare Congress. Birmingham, UK, 1 August 2016. McKay, Richard A. “‘Patient Zero’: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88, no. 1 (2014): 161–194. McNeil, Donald J., Jr. “The Ethics of Hunting Down ‘Patient Zero.’” New York Times, 29 October 2016. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

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Ngai, Sianne. “Our Aesthetic Categories.” PMLA 125, no. 4 (October 2010): 948–958. ———. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Opitz, Sven. “Regulating Epidemic Space: The Nomos of Global Circulation.” Journal of International Relations and Development 19, no. 2 (2016): 263–284. Paster, Gail Kern. “Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance.” In Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., 137–152. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. “The Tragic Subject and Its Passions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Claire McEachern, 142–159. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pelling, Margaret. The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations, and the Urban Poor in Early Modern London. London and New York: Longman, 1998. ———. Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Rene Weiss. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012. ———. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Jill L. Levenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Siena, Kevin. “‘The Foul Disease’ and Privacy: The Effects of Venereal Disease and Patient Demand on the Medical Marketplace in Early Modern London.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no. 2 (2001): 199–224. Slack, Paul. The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Smith, David L. “Spatial Heterogeneity in Infectious Disease Epidemics.” In Ecosystem Function in Heterogeneous Landscapes, edited by Gary Lovett, 137– 164. New York: Springer, 2005.

276  R. TOTARO Sullivan, Erin. “Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality.” In Totaro, Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, 76–94. Taylor, Luke. “Donne’s Unwilled Body.” John Donne Journal 30 (2011): 99–121. Totaro, Rebecca, and Ernest B. Gilman. Introduction to Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. Edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman, 1–34. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. ———. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation. In Perspectives on the Nonhuman in Literature and Culture, edited by Karen Raber. Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming. Traister, Barbara. “‘A Plague on Both Your Houses’: Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama.” In Totaro, Representing the Plague, 169–182. van Loon, Joost. “Epidemic Space.” Critical Public Health 15, no. 1 (2005): 39–52. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Weisser, Olivia. “Boils, Pushes and Wheals: Reading Bumps on the Body in Early Modern England.” Social History of Medicine 22, no. 2 (2009): 321–339. Wilson, Malcolm. Structure and Method in Aristotle’s ‘Meteorologica’: A More Disorderly Nature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. WNYC Studios. “Patient Zero”. Radiolab. Podcast audio, 14 November 2011. http://www.radiolab.org/story/169879-patient-zero/. Accessed 30 June 2017. Wright, Jonathan. “The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity During the English Reformation.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 1 (1999): 113–133.

Afterword

There were numerous reasons why anti-theatricalists believed that the early modern playhouse functioned a site of contagion, or in Stephen Gosson’s terms, the “chair of pestilence.”1 For one, the plague was associated with the “sins of the suburbs,” and it was standard practice to prevent “disorderly public assemblies” when outbreaks occurred.2 City officials argued that “To play in plague time is to increase the plague by infection; to play out of plague time is to draw the plague by offendings of God upon occasion of such plays.”3 The crowds and malodorous air, as Amy Kenny argues in this volume, made the theater a potentially dangerous gathering place. But since the corruption that “lay at the root” of disease was both physical and moral, the anti-theatricalists critiqued playing itself for generating “filthy infections” in the audience.4 In John Rainolds’s words, “the manners of all spectators commonly are hazarded by the contagion of theatrical sights […].”5 One concern for critics of the theater was the possibility that “unsuspecting” spectators, as J. F. Bernard’s essay suggests, will carry home with them and then imitate the theater’s infectious sights, images, and affectively charged narratives. Jennifer Panek reminds us that our current understanding of how we may “involuntarily take on others’ emotional states” is not dissimilar to early modern interpretations of contagion as an affective response that transforms the viewer. In Virtue’s Commonwealth, for example, Henry Crosse insists that “the internal © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9

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powers must be moved at [theater’s] visible and lively objects.”6 More pointedly, Philip Stubbes warns readers that such contagious effects will necessarily pollute their domestic realm: “these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites, or worse.”7 In this argument, rather than functioning as cautionary tales or examples of the monstrousness of sin and vice, theatrical representations of adultery, thievery, betrayal, and murder simply encouraged audience members to enact their own d ­ epravities. Indeed, if audiences failed to heed these admonishments, and they “stay[ed] too long” at the theater, Gosson warns that a divinely sanctioned sickness will be their retribution: “God is just, his bow is bent and his arrow is drawn, to send you a plague.”8 Both anti-theatrical discourse and writings about contagion describe the spread of corruption as a simultaneously moral and physical phenomenon. It was not unusual, as Brownyn Johnston’s essay suggests, to interpret the devil himself as a “material disseminator of both vice and disease.” Contagion, in John Charles Estabillo’s words, “describes the layered interaction between subjects rendered as vulnerable to both material and moral forces.” And as Ariane Balizet explains, the plague was often represented as an “indifferent tyrant and God’s righteous scourge.” We can plainly discern the moral etiology of disease in Thomas Dekker’s Newes from the Graves-End: Sent to Nobody (1604), in which a massively destructive dragon emblematizes plague as divine punishment: But this fierce dragon (huge and fowle) Sucks virid poison from our soule, Which being spit forth again, there raigns Showers of Blisters, and of Blaines, For every man within him feedes A worme which this contagion breedes9;

In his identification of the source of the dragon’s infectious spit as the poison within our own souls, Dekker gets at what Jennifer Feather characterizes as a “sameness at the root of susceptibility.” In a similar vein, Thomas Lodge in A Treatise ofthe Plague defines contagion as an attraction between two like entities: as “no other thing but a like disposition by a certaine hidden consent communicated by touch vnto another.”10 Infection occurs, as Cliff Werier observes, in the bodies and “minds of

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receptive hosts,” and the most receptive host is vulnerable due to sinful excesses or the “abuse of God’s gifts.”11 Since, as Dekker makes plain, moral corruption already exists in humans, the plague dragon f­unctions as the agent that translates sin into the physical symptoms of disease. Hidden evil erupts as visible blisters and blaines on the body. More ambiguous in meaning, perhaps, is the status of the worm that every man feeds within himself. Is the worm bred by the contagion or does the worm breed thecontagion? Lynette Hunter has suggested that cankerworms, which “consume[ ] the plant from the inside,” resembled characterizations of the plague in its manifestation as both an “internal contamination and external ­infection.”12 Similarly, for the preacher Robert Bolton, the theater and its players are as noisome wormes that canker and blast the generous and noble buds of this land; and doe by a slie and bewitching insinuation so empoyson all seeds of vertue, and so weaken and emasculate all the operations of the soule, with a prophane, if not vnnaturall dissolutenes13;

Worms, as Ian MacInnes has demonstrated, were not typically perceived as an “external event”: They were generated “from within the human body.”14 In essence, contagion, as Dekker and his contemporaries understood it, is an interaction between a body that proves “apt” (which typically means morally and physically corrupt) and an external source of corruption (poison, bad air, astral influence) that proves attracted to that body. When discussing the “aptnesse of the body of man,” both medical writers and theologians believe that “Whether the ayre be infected without us, there never wanteth infection within us.”15Thomas Nashe in The Terrors of the Night (1594) compares “the slime and durt in a standing puddle, [which] engenders toads and frogs, and many other vnsightly creatures” to the slime “melancholy humor still thickning as it stands still, [which] engendreth many mishapen obiects in our imaginations.”16The unnatural reproduction of standing pools that generates “‘imperfect’ creatures such as frogs, toads, worms, and scorpions” not only signifies the “corruption and putrifaction in the earth” but it also provides an external picture of an apt body’s consent to disease and infection.17 As Emily Weissbourd contends, the spontaneous generation associated with disease and death identified “reproduction itself” with contamination.

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For Protestant reformers, one’s internal “corruption of nature,” which breeds worms and poisonous sin, was “derived from the parents in generation by the body” and then exacerbated by external evils.18 Scholars interested in the history of contagion have often identified Paracelsus and Fracastoro as anticipating nineteenth-century microbiological conceptions in their description of the exogenous nature of “seeds” as agents of contagion. But this interpretation overlooks both writers’ understanding that contagion occurs only between objects that share a constitution. Fracastoro explains that these primary seeds “seek out and adhere to the humor for which they felt a natural affinity.”19 Paracelsus underscores the “reciprocity between man and heaven.” In his theory, the human “creates the astral semina of the disease, the contagium. This is a physical entity, a body. But it is created by something non-corporeal, the sinful passion and imagination of man.”20 In short, early modern contagion emerges from a conspiracy of intersecting causes—supernatural and natural, moral and physical. These complexities are deftly captured in Rebecca Totaro’s reading of Verona’s “epidemic space” as “an ecosystem in which the biotic and abiotic constituents are disposed toward spontaneous generation.” Given the purported dangers of playing, it seems surprising that audiences still sought the entertainment and spectacle of the theater. Certainly, they did so for recreation, but some may also have found merit in the opinion that theater-going could help promote physical and moral health. As Jennie Votava’s essay demonstrates, at the heart of both theatrical attacks and defenses is a shared rationale that maintains that performances can alter the bodies and minds of the audience. If those most apt to infection are of an “euil constitution of body, repleate with euil humours, men of vnbrideled dyet,” then such evil humors could be purged, as Thomas Heywood and others argued, by viewing a comedy. The right theater-going experience may cure those “devoted to melancholy,” “refresh such weary spirits as are tired,” and “moderate the cares and heaviness of the mind.”21 Citing Sir Philip Sidney’sApology for Poetry in An Apology for Actors, Heywood relates the story of “tyrant Phaleris,” whose heart was “mollified” when he witnessed a performance of his own “inhumane massacres.”22 For defenders of the stage, representations of vice do not infect all men and women indiscriminately with corruption or sin. Moreover, government regulations on public gatherings could be construed as wrongly urging people to neglect

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“the duties of humanity.”23 It is, as Heywood suggests, the moral constitution of the spectators who may make a play “bad or good.” And those spectators with noble minds and honorable natures will be “encouraged in their virtues” and inspired to “humanity and good life.”24 Indeed, the strange possibility, recognized by Jennifer Forsyth, that healthy bodies could cure afflicted persons speaks to the spiritual logic at work in theories about both contagion and theater-going. Critics lamented that the monstrous sins represented on stage necessarily corrupted the spectators, while defenders of the stage insisted that it is the moral constitution of the spectator that determines her physical and spiritual response to those representations. Ultimately, the ideological conflict may rest on how these controversialists discerned the role of divine providence in the secret operations of both contagion and theater. Where Gosson suggests that God will strike the sinful players and playgoers with disease, Heywood reassures his readers that the theater functions as God’s instrument, bringing to light previously unknown truths or treacheries. In Heywood’s anecdotes, effective theatrical performances can trouble an audience member’s guilty conscience or assure a town’s escape from the attack of “remorseless” enemies.25 Whether Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed that theater infects its spectators with devilish sin and corruption or recreates them with “honest pastimes” that honor God’s glory, all parties agreed that playgoing stirred and shaped the early modern spectator in untold and hidden ways.26 To paraphrase Sir Philip Sidney, playing, like “skill in physic,” may be abused and do harm by its “sweet charming force.” But this same sweet force, when “rightly used,” also has power to do the most good.27

Notes

1. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), ed. Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2004), 91. 2. Paul Slack, “Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe: The Implications of Public Health,” Social Research 55, no. 3 (1988): 448 and 438. 3. “Answer to the Players’ Petition,” Shakespeare’s Theater, 317. 4. Slack, 438 and Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theaters (1580), Shakespeare’s Theater, 70. 5. John Rainolds, The Overthrow of Stage-Plays (1599), Shakespeare’s Theater, 177. 6. Henry Crosse, Virtue’s Commonwealth (1603), Shakespeare’s Theater, 189.

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7. Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583), Shakespeare’s Theater, 121. 8. Gosson, 111. 9. Thomas Dekker, Nevves from Graues-End Sent to Nobody (London, 1604), D1v. 10. Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603), L2r. 11. Slack, 437. 12.  Lynette Hunter, “Cankers in Romeo and Juliet: Sixteenth-Century Medicine at a Figural/Literal Cusp,” in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 171–185, esp. 171. 13. Robert Bolton, A Discourse About the State of True Happinesse Deliuered in Certaine Sermons in Oxford (London, 1611), 73. 14. Ian MacInnes, “The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 263. 15. Thomas Thayre, A Treatise of the Pestilence (London, 1603), who cites the “evill disposition of the body,” 2; Stephen Hobbes, A New Treatise of the Pestilence (London, 1603), notes the necessity of the “aptnesse of the body of man,” A2v; Thomas Brasbridge, The Poore Mans Jewel (London, 1578) states that bodies must “be apt to be infected,” A7r; Henoch Clapham, An Epistle Discoursing upon the Present Pestilence (London, 1603) explains that “Whether the ayre be infected without us, there never wanteth infection within us,” B2v. 16. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night (London, 1594), Ciiv. 17.  Lucinda Cole quoting Thomas Lodge and Edward Topsell, “Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 69. 18. William Perkins, A Golden Chaine: Or the Description of Theologie (1600), 256. 19.  Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23. 20. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd revised edition (Basel and New York: Karger, 1982), 181. 21.  Lodge, B4r and Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), Shakespeare’s Theater, 242. See Nichole DeWall, “‘Sweet Recreation Barred’: The Case for Playgoing in Plague-Time,” in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, ed. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 133–149.

Afterword





22. Heywood, 243. 23. Slack, 446. 24. Heywood, 239, 241, and 244. 25. Heywood, 245–246. 26. On “honest pastimes,” see Heywood, 224. 27. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (London, 1595), G2v.

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Index

A acting, 2–3, 31, 153–154, 158–159 Adelman, Janet, 123n34 adultery, 107, 115–118, 150 affect, 3, 25–42, 147–148, 151–153, 155–157, 158–160. See also contagion, and theater air, 2, 5, 47–59, 66, 84, 86, 89, 92, 217–218, 236, 239, 279 Alchemist, The, 16, 218, 235–236, 240–245, 247–249 alchemy, 235, 236, 244 alcoholism, 128, 129, 133, 143n16 Anaxagoras, 218 animals, 64, 71–73 animal blood, 53, 55, 57 dogs as vermin, 79n30 antipathy, 108, 110–111, 120n4, 121n16 antitheatricalism, 25–42, 88, 192, 199, 200, 237, 277–278, 281 Antony and Cleopatra, 184n18 Aquinas, 96n1 Aristotelian, 27, 97n19, 98, 260

Aristotle, 5, 27 Armin, Robert, 85 Artaud, Antonin, 110, 215, 222, 223 Ascham, Roger, 250n6 Ashley, Robert, 110 Asp, Carolyn, 99n34 assemblage, 16, 258, 259, 264, 268 assemblage theory, 258–259 atheism, 234–244, 247–249 audience, 2–3, 29, 32, 38, 47, 51, 148, 149, 154–155, 158–160, 192, 199, 200, 214–215, 225–226 Augustine, 251n19 Aunger, Robert, 193 Austin, William, 49 Avicenna, 8 B Bacon, Roger, 229n16 Bacon, Sir Francis, 10, 196, 241, 244, 250n6, 251n23 bacteriology, 7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 D. Chalk and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14428-9

285

286  Index Bainter, Natalie, 148, 161n5 Balizet, Ariane M., 120n8 Bardolph, 127–128 Barish, Jonas, 27 Bartels, Emily, 174 Bartholomew Fair, 150, 240 Bate, John, 52 Battle of Alcazar, The, 59n29 Beecher, Donald, 69, 245–246 Bennett, Jane, 255, 256, 258 Bernstein, Robin, 153–154, 158, 164n40 Bezé, Théodore de, 87 Bible, the, 87, 239 Blackmore, Susan, 193 blood, 76, 108, 110–114, 120n8, 122n25, 122n29, 178 as stage effect, 53, 55, 57, 59n26 bloodletting, 111 Bloom, Gina, 51 blushing, 127, 128, 132–133, 136, 151, 153 Bodin, Jean, 66 body politic, 50, 174, 203 Bolton, Robert, 279 Bovilsky, Lara, 121n15 boy player, 88, 158–160 Bradwell, Stephen, 48 brain, 48 Brathwaite, Richard, 48, 86, 151–153, 156 breath, 47, 48, 50–52, 56–57, 83, 86, 91–93, 95 Bristol, Michael, 226 Brooke, Arthur, 16, 263, 265, 267 Bryskett, Lodowick, 153 Bullein, William, 129 Burman, Jeremy, 194 Burns, M.M., 99n33 Burton, Robert, 25 Butler, Judith, 105–107

C Calvinism, 74 Calvin, John, 237 Carroll, William C., 42n50 Castiglione, Baldassare, 87–88, 156 Catholicism, 86, 262 Chalk, Darryl, 17n1, 38n3, 201 Changeling, The, 13, 105–119, 150 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A, 150 chastity, 112, 114 choler, 263–264 Church of England, 262 Clapham, Henoch, 233, 237, 249n2 Clark, Stuart, 69–71 Cleland, James, 155–157 Cole, Lucinda, 66 comedy, 25–42 Comedy of Errors, The, 12, 25, 26, 33–38 compassion, 151–152 Constable of Castile, 86 contagion, 234–235 and atheism, 233–249 and crowds, 50–52, 54–56, 200–204 and the devil, 12, 63–77 and emotion, 30, 147–148, 151–154, 159–160, 162n21, 180, 171–173, 178 and kissing, 12–13, 83–95 and language, 74, 169–173, 179, 181 and the meme, 191–206 and plague, 7–11, 216–218, 244–247 and the senses, 25–38, 48, 69–71 and sex, 105–119 and shame, 147–160 and storytelling, 214–215, 219–228 and sympathy, 38n3, 74, 152, 162n23, 170–171, 173, 174, 179–182

Index

and theater, 2–3, 25–38, 47, 49, 51–53, 88, 192, 199, 214–215, 219, 225–226, 237, 280–281 Cooper, Thomas, 10 Coriolanus, 15, 154, 184n18, 192, 195–202, 204–206 Cosin, Richard, 152 Crane, Mary Thomas, 5–7 Crawford, Patricia, 122n25 Cressy, David, 201, 202 Crosse, Henry, 277 crowds. See contagion Cymbeline, 184n18 D dance, 148, 154–160 Darr, Orna Alyagon, 76 Darwinism, 192, 196 Davies, John, 130 Dawkins, Richard, 191–194 DeGrazia, Margreta, 256, 268, 269n9 Dekker, Thomas, 8, 49, 51, 216–217, 278–279. See also Witch of Edmonton, The de la Primaudaye, Pierre, 237, 245, 249, 251n16 Deleuze, Gilles, 258 demonology, 71 de Montaigne, Michel, 10 Dennett, Daniel, 193–194 devil, the, 28, 63–77 Devil is an Ass, The, 67 digital media, 227 disease, 1, 3–5, 25–27, 29–31, 33, 37–38, 50, 53, 63–67, 70–74, 76, 77, 88–90, 92–94, 99n42, 108, 119n4, 129, 134, 136–139, 143n18, 152, 169–177, 193, 199, 201, 213–217, 220, 222, 224, 233–237, 239, 241–242, 245–247, 259 disguise, 157

  287

disgust, 13–14, 127–131, 135–142 Doctor Faustus, 69, 73 dogs (and plague contagion), 79n30, 247 Donne, John, 99n41 Douglas, Mary, 66 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, 131 dregs, 92 Duchess of Malfi, The, 122n32 Dugan, Holly, 48, 88, 99n40 Duke of Saint-Simon, The, 156 E earthquake, 262 Eastman, Nate, 195 Ebola, 169, 183n32 ecosystem, 255 embarrassment, 148–160, 161n11, 161n12 embodiment, 192 emotional contagion. See contagion empathic embarrassment, 162n25 empathic embarrassment, 151–153, 155–160 Empson, William, 248 England, 106, 109, 114–115 English national identity, 106 Epicureanism, 243–245 epidemic space, 257–258 epilepsy, 71 Erasmus, Desiderius, 84–85, 88 etiology, 8–9, 27, 31, 64, 69, 77, 160, 278 Every Man in his Humour, 217 evil, 13, 248. See also contagion F Facebook Hamlet, The, 226 Fall, the, 121n19 Falstaff, 127–129, 131–137, 139, 143n18

288  Index Febvre, Lucien, 249n5 femme fatale, 83 Fennor, William, 55 Finkelstein, Richard, 42n50 Fissell, Mary, 72, 79n27 Fitter, Chris, 195 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 18n21, 38n3, 99n42, 120n4, 121n16, 171, 259, 271n18, 273n28 Ford, John. See Witch of Edmonton, The Foucault, Michel, 265 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 6–8, 31, 218, 219, 247, 280 Freedman, Barbara, 35 Fuchs, Barbara, 119n2, 121n14 G Galen, 1, 5, 8, 96n1, 218 Galenic, 30, 31, 64, 66, 71, 83, 89, 94, 173, 234, 242 Game at Chess, A, 109 George, David, 195 germ theory, 1, 7, 34, 48, 83, 173, 219, 245–246 Gesta Danorum, 226 Gilman, Ernest B., 4, 273n28 Girard, René, 129–131, 177, 216, 222 gonorrhea, 137 Goodcole, Henry, 66, 70 Gosson, Stephen, 2, 12, 25–34, 38, 199, 281 Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 25–33, 277 School of Abuse, The, 2, 27 Gould, Robert, 52 Greenblatt, Stephen, 42n49 Green, Judith, 270n9 Griffin, Eric, 110 Guazzo, Francesco Maria, 71 gunpowder, 52

H Habermas, Jurgen, 215 Hale, David G., 206n3 Hamlet, 58n18, 213–215, 219–228, 256 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 6, 17n11, 18n28, 37, 41n37, 90, 119n4 Healy, Margaret, 10–11, 17n11, 18n28, 67, 69, 71, 120n8, 183n2 Henry IV, Part 1, 127, 128, 131, 133–136 Henry IV, Part 2, 128, 131, 136, 137 Henry V, 128, 129, 131–132, 138–140 Henry VI, Part 1, 76 Henry VI, Part 2, 58n16 Henry VIII (All is True), 140–142 Heywood, Thomas, 280–281 Hickok, Gregory, 162n21 Hill, Adam, 236, 238–241, 247, 249 Hillier, Russell, 174 Hindle, Steve, 196–197 Hippocrates, 1, 5, 8 Hird, Myra J., 270n9 HIV, 169 Hobgood, Allison P., 147–148, 246–247 Holland, Peter, 195 Howard, Francis, 109 Howard, Skiles, 155, 164n39 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, 89 Hull, John, 250n6 humors, 26, 49, 64–65, 67, 71, 84, 94, 108, 153, 170, 171, 175, 180, 242, 247, 248 Hunter, Lynette, 279 I I.G., 199 infection, 27, 33, 35, 36, 48, 63–68, 71, 73–77, 89, 108, 110, 112,

Index

114–115, 170, 172–174, 177, 182, 197–200, 206, 217, 218, 234–236, 245, 249 sexually transmitted, 135–137 Insatiate Countess, The, 156 J James I, King, 72, 196–198 Jameson, Fredric, 224 jealousy, 85, 86, 117, 217, 222 Jonson, Ben. See individual play titles Jowett, John, 149, 165n44 Julius Caesar, 47–57, 59n33, 172–175, 184n18 K Kathman, David, 164n42 Kernan, Alvin, 251n27 King John, 51, 58n18 Kinney, Arthur F., 41, 42 kinship, 107–108, 113, 115, 117, 118 kissing. See contagion Kramer, Heinrich, 70 Kuper, Adam, 194 Kyd, Thomas, 226 L Labonte, Ronald, 270n9 Langley, Eric, 172 Lanier, Douglas, 35 Late Lancashire Witches, The, 72 laughter, 29, 150, 158 Lemnius, Levinus, 4–5, 7 leprosy, 71, 89, 129, 134, 137, 139, 143n18, 216 Lévi Strauss, Claude, 107 Leviticus, 72 Lindsay, Hal, 183n4 Lodge, Thomas, 28

  289

Devil Conjured, The, 69–70 Treatise of the Plague, The, 8–11, 73, 129, 233, 241–242, 278 London, 7, 49, 216, 225, 233, 235–236, 239–240, 259 lovesickness, 98n21, 259 Lucretius, 234–236, 247, 248 Luhrmann, Baz, 264 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 256, 268, 269n4 M Macbeth, 66, 72 MacInnes, Ian, 279 Malleus Maleficarum, The, 70 Mallin, Eric S., 90, 216, 219 Manichaeism, 238 Marlowe, Christopher, 73, 242. See also individual play titles marriage, 105–108, 110, 113–114 Marshall, Cynthia, 206n5 Martin of Tours, Saint, 89 Master of the Revels, 155 Mazzio, Carla, 70 McConachie, Bruce, 162n21 medicine, 1, 112, 115, 172, 216–218, 234 memes, 15, 191–192, 226, 227 meme theory, 191–196, 198–200, 205–206 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 131, 136 metatheater, 36, 54 meteorology, 173, 264 Method Gun, The, 154, 158 miasma, 2, 5, 48, 49, 64–67, 89, 92, 95, 108, 173, 180, 239, 242 Middleton, Thomas. See individual play titles Midlands Revolt, The, 192, 195–197

290  Index Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 67, 154 Miller, Rowland S., 152, 161n5 mirror neurons, 151, 152, 160, 162n21 miscegenation, 105, 107, 110, 111, 115, 116 misogyny, 89, 149 Mitchell, Peta, 194, 195 More Dissemblers Besides Women, 14, 148–149, 154–160 Much Ado About Nothing, 51, 58n16 Mukherjee, Ayesha, 195 Mullaney, Steven, 150, 215 Munday, Anthony, 2, 199 Munro, H.A.J., 234 N Nashe, Thomas, 241, 251n23. See also Terrors of the Night, The national identity, 105–107, 108, 115, 119 nature, 239, 244–245, 249 Neely, Carol Thomas, 108, 122, 123 Neill, Michael, 118, 122n22, 122n26, 123n33, 259 Neptune’s Triumph, 163n31 Nest of Ninnies, A, 85 Ngai, Sianne, 256 Nice Valour, The, 159 Nisbet, Edward, 201 Noble, Louise, 172 Nutton, Vivian, 218, 245, 246 O obesity, 258 Ormsby, Robert, 199 Othello, 13, 58n18, 105–108, 115–119, 119n2, 122, 123

P Pantin, Isabelle, 6, 18n16, 184n15 Paracelsus, 6–7, 173, 234 Paré, Ambroise, 130 Parker, Patricia, 42n65, 122n25 Park, Katherine, 97 passions, 152, 173–174, 178, 199 Paster, Gail Kern, 51, 111, 148–149, 157, 161n11, 162n17, 164n42, 264 pathophysiology, 27, 31 patient zero, 257, 259 Pelling, Margaret, 6, 7 perfume, 48–49, 57 Perkins, William, 280 Perry, Curtis, 41n38 pity, 14–15, 152, 170, 171, 173–182 plague, 1, 2, 4, 7–9, 27, 29, 31, 38, 48–49, 66, 68–69, 129–131, 138–139, 141, 152, 214–215, 222–223, 225, 226, 233–238, 240, 244–245, 248, 255, 259, 278–279 Play of Plays and Pastimes, 30 Plutarch, 248 Plutarch’s Lives, 56, 59n36 pneuma, 26, 86 poison, 2, 107, 108, 110–112, 115, 116, 118, 197, 213, 261, 279 Pollard, Tanya, 17n1 pollution, 63, 65, 74 Protestantism, 36 Prynne, William, 2–3 Puritanism, 236, 240–241, 244, 247, 262 pyrotechnics, 52–53 Q Qualtiere, Louis, 218

Index

R race, 106, 109–111, 118, 119n3 Rainolds, John, 3, 88, 90 Rankins, William, 2, 199 Rape of Lucrece, The, 172 rats, 66, 79n30 Ravelhofer, Barbara, 164n34 revenge, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 74, 75, 172, 176, 178, 180, 181, 219, 222 Reynolds, John, 196 rhinophyma, 128–129, 135, 143n16 Richard II, 58n16, 154 Richard III, 131 Richardson, Brian, 224 Rickey, Mary Ellen, 92 Ricoeur, Paul, 224, 226 Ridley, Matt, 192 Ridout, Nicholas, 154, 161n11, 163n30 riot, 52, 192, 195–198, 201 Rivlin, Elizabeth, 35 Roach, Joseph R., 26 Robinson, Benedict, 130 Romeo and Juliet, 15–16, 195, 218, 230n35, 271n18, 272n19 rosacea, 128–129, 135, 143n16 Rosen, Barbara, 76n36 Ross, Cheryl Lynn, 235 Rous, Francis, 87 Rowley, William, 12, 121n21. See also Changeling, The; Witch of Edmonton, The Roychoudhury, Suparna, 185n19 S Sawyer, Elizabeth, 66 Schmelling, Sarah, 226, 230n34 Scot, Reginald, 59n29 scrofula, 89 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 147, 149, 151

  291

senses, 2, 129 smell, 47–57 taste, 93 touch, 9–11, 27, 29–31, 32, 35, 63, 68–69, 70, 74, 76, 89 vision, 31, 35–36, 69–70 Serlio, Sebastiano, 52 Serpell, James, 72 Shakespeare, 195, 196. See also individual play titles shame, 91, 129, 133, 147–160, 161n11, 161n12. See also contagion Sidney, Philip Sir, 28–30, 280, 281 sighing, 264 Simpsons, The, 213 Slack, Paul, 271n13 Slights, William, 218 Smith, David L., 270n9 Spain, 106, 108–110, 111–112, 114–115, 120n7, 122n27 Spanish Gypsy, The, 109 Spanish Match, The, 108–110, 115, 119, 120 special effects, 52 species, 6, 13, 31, 64, 69, 70–72, 218, 229n16 Spencer, Benjamin, 7–8 Sperber, Dan, 194 spirit, 86–87, 96n1 spontaneous generation, 117–118, 255, 272n21 sprezzatura, 156 Spurgeon, Caroline, 213 Standish, Arthur, 198 Stubbes, Philip, 199, 277–278 sympathy (for contagious sympathy), 6, 152, 161n5, 174, 180–181, 218. See also contagion syphilis, 1, 26, 33, 37, 38, 88, 91, 128, 129, 134, 137, 214, 216

292  Index T Taming of the Shrew, The, 25 Targoff, Ramie, 96, 97 Terrors of the Night, The, 242–243, 279 Thayre, Thomas, 279 Theater, 2. See also contagion and affect, 25–26, 147, 153–154, 155, 163n28 and publicity, 215, 219, 222, 225 Theophrastus, 218 Timon of Athens, 58n16 Titus Andronicus, 14–15, 169–182 Tomkins, Silvan, 149, 151 Totaro, Rebecca, 4 touch. See senses Traub, Valerie, 89 Troilus and Cressida, 12–13, 84, 90–95 tumblr, 225–227, 230n35 Twelfth Night, 147–148, 159 twitter, 226, 227 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 95 Tylee, Claire M., 99n34 U Ur-Hamlet, 226 V Van Elk, Martine, 37, 41n38 van Loon, Joost, 256, 270n9 vermin, 63–65, 71–73, 77 vision. See senses

W Waldron, Jennifer, 40n26 Walter, Brenda Gardenour, 86 Webster, John. See Duchess of Malfi, The Wells, Stanley, 214–215 Westward for Smelts, 85 Whigham, Frank, 113 White, Thomas, 237–238, 240, 241, 247 Wilkinson, Robert, 196–197 Willis, Deborah, 172 will-o’-the-wisps, 135 Wilson, Bronwen, 215 Wilson, Frank Percy, 79n30 Wilson, Thomas, 150 Winter’s Tale, The, 58n16 witchcraft, 63, 65, 66–67, 69–70, 72 Witch of Edmonton, The, 12, 63–77 witch scratching, 76 Woman Killed With Kindness, A, 148 Women Beware Women, 159, 164n41 Wootton, David, 249n5 Wright, Jonathan, 262 Wright, Thomas, 163n27 Y Yachnin, Paul, 215, 225 YouTube, 226 Z Zimmerman, Susan, 164n42