Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body 2014032481, 9781138804289, 9781315753119

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Shakespeare’s “Discourse of Disability”
PART I: Nation
2 Teeth Before Eyes: Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III
3 A “Grievous Burthen”: Richard III and the Legacy of Monstrous Birth
4 Obsession/Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare
5 Seeing Feelingly: Sight and Service in King Lear
6 “Strange Virtue”: Staging Acts of Cure
7 Shakespeare and Civic Health
PART II: Sex
8 “The King’s Part”: James I, The Lake-Ros Affair, and the Play of Purgation
9 “Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery”: Falstaff, Will Kemp, and Impaired Masculinity
10 Flower Imagery and Botanical Illustration: Health and Sexual Generation in Romeo and Juliet
11 Shakespeare’s Embodied Ontology of Gender, Air, and Health
PART III: Emotion
12 Speaking Medicine: A Paracelsian Parody of the Humors in The Taming of the Shrew
13 Catching the Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare
14 Breastfeeding, Grief, and the Fluid Economy of Healthy Children in Shakespeare’s Plays
15 The Worm and the Flesh: Cankered Bodies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
16 Afterword: Ten Times Happier
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body

This book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare’s literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the “crook-back” King Richard III or the “corpulent” Falstaff, the conflicts between different healthcare belief systems in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, the power of figurative language to delineate or even instigate puberty in the Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet, and the ways in which the powerful or moneyed mediate the access of the poor and injured to cure or even to care. Integrating insights from disability studies, health studies, and happiness studies, this book develops both a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today. Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She has written two scholarly monographs, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (2005) and Shakespeare’s Medical Language (2011 and 2014).

Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

1 Shakespeare and Philosophy Stanley Stewart 2 Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia Edited by Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta 3 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within James W. Stone 4 Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance Catherine Silverstone 5 Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book Contested Scriptures Travis DeCook and Alan Galey 6 Radical Shakespeare Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career Christopher Fitter

7 Retheorizing Shakespeare through Presentist Readings James O’Rourke 8 Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England Jonathan Baldo 9 Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy Peter Kishore Saval 10 Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre The Early Modern Body-Mind Edited by Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble 11 Mary Wroth and Shakespeare Edited by Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies 12 Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body Edited by Sujata Iyengar

Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body Edited by Sujata Iyengar

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with parts 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body / edited by Sujata Iyengar. pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Human body in literature. 3. Health in literature. 4. Happiness in literature. I. Iyengar, Sujata, editor. PR3069.B58D57 2015 822.3'3—dc23 2014032481 ISBN: 978-1-138-80428-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75311-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To K1, K2, and RM

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Shakespeare’s “Discourse of Disability”

ix xi 1

S U JATA I Y E N GAR

PART I Nation 2 Teeth Before Eyes: Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III

21 23

A L L I S O N P. H OBGO O D

3 A “Grievous Burthen”: Richard III and the Legacy of Monstrous Birth

41

G E O F F R E Y A . JO H N S

4 Obsession/Rationality/Agency: Autistic Shakespeare

58

S O N YA F R E E MAN L O F TI S AN D L I SA UL E VI CH

5 Seeing Feelingly: Sight and Service in King Lear

76

A M R I TA D H A R

6 “Strange Virtue”: Staging Acts of Cure

93

K AT H E R I N E S CH AAP WI L L I AMS

7 Shakespeare and Civic Health M AT T KO Z U S KO

109

viii

Contents

PART II Sex

125

8 “The King’s Part”: James I, The Lake-Ros Affair, and the Play of Purgation

127

H I L L A RY M . N UN N

9 “Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery”: Falstaff, Will Kemp, and Impaired Masculinity

142

CAT H E R I N E E . DO UBL E R

10 Flower Imagery and Botanical Illustration: Health and Sexual Generation in Romeo and Juliet

158

DA R L E NA C I RAUL O

11 Shakespeare’s Embodied Ontology of Gender, Air, and Health

176

S U JATA I Y E N GAR

PART III Emotion

193

12 Speaking Medicine: A Paracelsian Parody of the Humors in The Taming of the Shrew

195

NAT H A N I A L B. SMI TH

13 Catching the Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare

212

I A N F R E D E R I CK MO ULTO N

14 Breastfeeding, Grief, and the Fluid Economy of Healthy Children in Shakespeare’s Plays

223

A R I A N E M . BA L I ZE T

15 The Worm and the Flesh: Cankered Bodies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

240

A L A N NA S K U SE

16 Afterword: Ten Times Happier

260

K AT H A R I N E A . CRAI K

Contributors Index

269 273

List of Figures

1.1 “A hunch-backed old man supported by a crutch with a whinnying horse behind.” Woodcut by Tobias Stimmer, 1580. Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons attribution-only license CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2.1 “The forme of an iron breast-plate, to amend the crookednesse of the Body.” Ambroise Paré, Workes, 1634. Dddd6v. Reproduced with permission of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia. 3.1 “Broadside on Conjoined Twins Born in Middleton Stoney, 1552.” © Trustees of the British Museum. 5.1 Shakespeare, King Lear, 1608 [Q1], L2v. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 5.2 Shakespeare, King Lear, 1623 [F], ss2v. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 6.1 Excerpt from The Ceremonies for the Healing of Them that be Diseased With the Kings Evil, Used in the Time of King Henry VII, 1686. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 8.1 “A Lybell uppon the Ladie Rosse.” ZCR 63/2/19 f 20r. Reproduced by permission of Cheshire Archive and Local Studies. 10.1 Portrait of John Gerard with potato flower. Herball, 1597. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 10.2 The life-cycle of the potato. John Gerard, Herball, 1597. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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List of Figures

10.3 “Of the Rose: Rosa.” William Turner, New Herball, 1568. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 10.4 “The great Musk-Rose and the Velvet Rose.” John Gerard, Herball, 1633. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 10.5 “The Single Musk-Rose.” John Gerard, Herball, 1633. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 14.1 “Breast-pump.” From Frawen Rosengarten. Von vilfaltigen sorglichen Zufällen und gebrechen der Mütter und Kinder, so inen vor, inn, unnd nach der Geburt begegnen mögenn. Walter Hermann Ryff, 1545. Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons attribution-only license CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 15.1 “Elizabeth Hopkins of Oxford, showing a breast with cancer which was removed by Sir William Read. Engraving by M. Burghers, ca. 1700.” Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons attribution-only license CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Acknowledgments

My first thanks must go to the Shakespeare Association of America, under whose auspices I convened a seminar on the topic of “Health, Well-Being, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body” at the 2013 Annual Meeting in Toronto. Just under half the essays in this collection were developed from the work we did in that seminar, and I acknowledge with gratitude the steering committee, the participants, and the auditors who challenged us (especially David Hillman and Katharine Craik). I also thank those contributors who joined us at later dates during the volume’s development for enriching and extending our reach and understanding of this topic. The two anonymous peer-reviewers at Routledge helpfully pushed us to integrate the book’s emerging focus on disability studies throughout the volume and within each essay. All contributors tolerated with grace and humor my importunate demands for timely submissions and revisions. I appreciate their consummate professionalism. I acknowledge the support of the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, which allowed the volume to be so beautifully illustrated. I extend further thanks to the scholars who helped me engage more deeply with disability studies as it became clear that the volume was developing that focus. The writing and friendship of Chris Gabbard and Ilene Chazan, and the marvelous life of their son August, first introduced me to disability studies in life and in literature many years ago. Allison Hobgood, Sonya Loftis, and Katherine Schaap Williams valuably critiqued the introduction and my own contribution. Sarah Mayo’s sharp eyes went over the proofs. I am also grateful for the students who have taken my classes about Health, Writing, and Medicine, especially Audrey Waits, who startled me with the beautiful formulation that sometimes all we can offer to non-responsive persons with disabilities or illnesses is our love and care, and that it is that loving expression that makes us and them human and alive. I acknowledge with chagrin that any remaining errors are my own.

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Introduction Shakespeare’s “Discourse of Disability” Sujata Iyengar

Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body puts into conversation early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness. These essays debate our own notions of health and fitness through an interrogation of the different ways that early modern bodies engaged with the world. The “Shakespearean body” includes not only bodies in Shakespeare but also bodies that read, perform, and critique the plays, poems, and cultural phenomena that we associate with the name, and the corpus of those texts themselves. The volume raises and attempts to answer a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor; emotional competence or satisfaction; and joy or self-fulfillment. In addition, the volume integrates two relatively new disciplines, health studies and happiness studies, by investigating and to a certain extent critiquing our own pursuit of both health and happiness. Health studies develops from disability studies, which analyzes both disability and able-bodiedness as social and historical categories. Henri Stiker’s A History of Disability historicizes the development of what has been called the medical model of disability. In the most extreme forms of the medical model, persons with disabilities were considered unfit, nature’s mistakes, worth consideration only insofar as they could be “corrected” and returned to conventional normalcy and functioning within society. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, which considers embodiment and selfhood in the present day and in the early modern era alongside each other, draws from the post-medicalized versions of disability studies. These schools of thought treat persons with disabilities as whole subjects—sublime, earthly, perfect, flawed, fully human beings with the capacities for experiencing both good and evil impulses, joy and sorrow, exquisite pleasure and excruciating pain. UK sociologist Tom Shakespeare (to avoid confusion with William Shakespeare, I refer to “Tom Shakespeare” by his first name and last name throughout) taxonomizes the post-medical development of disability studies into three categories: the “strong social model,” the “cultural disabilities studies” model; and finally, his own “social realist” model. The social model (as summarized by Tom Shakespeare) distinguishes between “impairment” (an empirical, bodily attribute that differs from what is considered normal

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or healthy) and “disability” (the social consequences of that impairment). In other words, it argues that while persons might be born with or acquire through illness or accident particular impairments, society alone creates disability. The “social model of disability” might be typified by activists and writers such as the late Harriet McBryde Johnson, activist lawyer and member of the disabled-rights movement “Not Dead Yet,” who argued that a truly enlightened society would offer to persons called disabled by the able-bodied world the tools, help, and staff they needed in order to fulfill their intellectual, physical, and ethical potential, rather than defining such persons by and through their constraints. Not Dead Yet sounds a clarion call to us to respect and enable the lives of persons with disabilities in their fullest senses—intellectual, social, and sexual—rather than on the one hand attempting to “correct” certain conditions or constraints and on the other dismissing the rights and privileges of different kinds of bodies and minds when those bodies cannot be easily, surgically, or pharmaceutically “cured.” McBryde’s own life was exemplary: living with a progressive neuromuscular disorder that constrained her physical mobility and necessitated constant help from an attendant, she eloquently discussed and materially demonstrated her full engagement and enjoyment of physical, intellectual, and social life, and her refusal of so-called corrective procedures. Not Dead Yet asserts the full human rights—to food, shelter, employment, mobility, sociability—of all persons, including those with physical and mental conditions that require help from other human beings and from the societies in which they live (in other words, the group that we now call “disabled”). Critics question, however, the social model’s dichotomy between “impairment” (physical limitations as understood by a medical model) and “disability” (the social conditions that turn impairment into inability by failing to provide for the impaired person’s mobility, health, or activity). It is more helpful, they suggest, to imagine that impairment and disability are interactive, to acknowledge that some impairments are inherently disabling, and to recognize that many persons with disabilities live with chronic pain, recurrent infections, and restricted mobility or cognitive functions (even as we try to avoid creating a hierarchy of ills and claiming that some persons deserve more than others to be called “disabled”). Moreover, observes Tom Shakespeare, the goal of equalizing opportunities, although laudable, cannot be applied to “Nature.” To make the natural world accessible to all would be impossible: as a wheelchair user and a person with paraplegia, he is unlikely to ascend Mount Everest (and neither, for that matter, are most of the able-bodied, or most of his or our readers). He extends an argument that Peter Coleridge, Lennard Davis, and many in the disabled-rights movement have already mounted that calls for the able-bodied to imagine themselves as “the not-yet-disabled” (Coleridge 215) or the “Temporarily-Able-Bodied” (Davis 36). Tom Shakespeare’s notion of universal impairment, however, seems to turn the idea of even temporary able-bodiedness into non-existent ablebodiedness by extending the notions of temporary able-bodiedness and

Introduction

3

impairment to all bodies; both the so-called disabled and the Temporarily Able-Bodied are always impaired. He suggests that we move from imagining that we inhabit a world in which only persons with disabilities suffer from impairments to acknowledging that “everyone is impaired” (86) and that from time to time, we find ourselves in a “predicament.” His “critical realist” model of disabilities is “interactional” (75), he writes, a framework that “do[es] not explain disability as impairment, and [does not] see impairment as determining” (75). For example, he found that the main effect [of his own restricted growth] in daily life was that many people stared at me....Education may reduce but is unlikely ever to eliminate this basic curiosity. Therefore, I will always be stared at. This is not pleasant, even if people are not actually hostile. I cannot escape the awareness of my abnormal embodiment, however much I am happy and successful as an individual. But I do not think these reactions can easily be explained away as oppression. They are a fact of life, like the vulnerability to back problems that is another dimension of the impairment. (75) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has beautifully explored the ramifications of “staring” (the title of her book on the subject) and its ambiguous relationship to power or knowledge-gathering. Distinguishing between the stare and the gaze (the latter associated in feminist criticism with the imposition of hierarchy and subordination upon those who lack power in particular cultures), she analyzes the ways in which starer and staree (her preferred terms) can, ideally, move away from, on the one hand, the “baroque stare” championed in the so-called freak show or the “dominance stare” of the gaze or, on the other hand, the avoidant stare that refuses to catch the eye of another human being altogether. Instead, she notes moments that highlight the mutually intelligible and compassionate exchange of stares between the “intent yet ephemeral” glances of curious starers and “the look that the [starees] return... without rebuke or hostility...a calm, constant insistence on their own humanity” (181). Both staring and being stared at become “predicaments,” in Tom Shakespeare’s terms, uncomfortable or even unpleasant, and yet part of what joins starer and staree in being human. Bill Hughes complains, however, that the revised social model advocated by Tom Shakespeare, Nicholas Watson, and others neglects the existing power structures that can render miserable the lives of persons with disabilities. Hughes finds a biological determinism or reductivism in Tom Shakespeare and Watson’s arguments and responds: “The attempt...to normalize disability at an anthropological level by invoking the empirical universality of impairment ends in a sociological limbo dominated by a pre-social notion of life as limit” (678). In cultural disabilities studies, in contrast, “[m]ateriality itself is a social process ... such that cultural narratives and representations of disability have the power to shape corporeal experience even as those narratives themselves

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are being shaped by the material realities of non-normative bodies and minds” (Hobgood and Wood 5). Critiquing what he calls “U.S.-style cultural disabilities studies,” in turn, Tom Shakespeare argues that this model concentrates on “rhetoric” at the expense of action or of the lived human experience. Again using himself as an example, Tom Shakespeare contrasts his earlier “predicament” as a fairly healthy person with restricted growth, to his later experiences after severe spinal cord injury: The predicament of impairment—the intrinsic difficulties of engaging with the world, the pains and sufferings and limitations of the body—means that impairment is not neutral. It may bring insights and experiences that are positive, and for some these may even outweigh the disadvantages. But that does not mean that we should not try and minimise the number of people who are impaired, or the extent to which they are impaired: I would very much like to turn back the clock to before the onset of my paraplegia. (86–87) Perhaps the dispute surrounding the power of “cultural narratives” to “shape corporeal experience” is intractable, insofar as Tom Shakespeare does inject a dose, as it were, of positivism into the conversation, colloquially summarizing his beliefs through an imagined advocate: “‘people are disabled by society and by their bodies’” (75). His point is well taken, and we might remember Susan Sontag’s anguished insistence in Illness as Metaphor that illness or impairment cannot be understood through metaphor without diminishing the experience of the body whose world is formed this way. Yet historians of health (notably Roy Porter) have challenged Sontag’s ideal of bodily experience emptied-out of metaphor, arguing that it is through metaphor, narrative, and interaction that human beings develop selfhood in both an embodied and an intellectual sense. Critics of the “rhetorical” cultural disabilities studies underestimate, moreover, the imaginative and socially relevant (“critical realist,” to use Tom Shakespeare’s term) work that cultural disabilities studies in its best modes can do. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s elegant and thoughtful Narrative Prosthesis argues for the fundamental importance of story, metaphor, and rhetoric in shaping human sensory and material experience. In fact, they wonder whether humanities and arts scholarship that is inflected by cultural disabilities studies can bring us “closer to recapturing the ‘popular’ values of everyday lives” (43), within range of the bodily microsensations, the vivid corporeal textures, of human existence. Moreover, they argue: If disability is a product of an interaction between individual differences and social environments (architectural, legislative, familial, attitudinal, etc.), then the contrast between discourses of disability situates art and literature as necessary to reconstructing the dynamics of this historical interaction. (27)

Introduction

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As Allison Hobgood and David Wood suggest, despite “the tug of metaphor,” the cultural model actively asserts “the ways lived particularity interacts with environment, and it especially understands the meanings and consequences of disability as determined by embodiment’s interface with cultural narratives, language, and representations” (5). An embodied critical ontology of disability studies might question what it means historically and materially to be able-bodied, and most importantly, would challenge the tendency of the dominant culture to devalue persons with disabilities because of the threat that non-normative bodies present to the able-bodied self-image. It might take up Bill Hughes’s challenge to the “profoundly invalidating vision of disability that haunts the non-disabled imaginary” (682): it might, in fact, take us to the newer field of health studies. Health studies continues the process of historicizing “ableness” or ablebodiedness and queries our dominant notion that good health comprises physical autonomy, athleticism, youthfulness and beauty. Health studies also, provocatively, observes that what we now think of as good health— freedom from disease, including chronic, non-life-threatening physical conditions and mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, and obsessivecompulsive disorders—is a historically and socially bounded phenomenon. We know that earlier periods of history lived with high infant mortality, outbreaks of plague, cholera, and other infectious diseases, and chronic, then-untreatable ailments; we are less apt to notice, however, these distant cultures’ own definitions of what constituted good health. Most Christian cultures in the West subordinated both mental and physical health to moral soundness. As Stuart Clark notes in Vanities of the Eye, an influential strain of early modern thinking in England and Puritan America held that socalled normal vision dazzled viewers with the physical beauties of the world and distracted them from the pursuit of inner, spiritual and godly truth. Blindness enabled insight. The so-called able-bodied teeter only one injury, one illness away from disability; moreover, at the beginnings and the ends of our lives, every single one of us lacks physical autonomy and must rely upon the kindness and respect of others and their recognition of our capacity to experience joy and  pain. Similarly, most of us are the not-yet-sick, one job loss, one collapsed hedge-fund away from having our abilities constrained, our lives controlled by medical conditions rather than by ourselves. The increased prevalence of, say, asthma—a condition known to have both genetic and environmental components—among the poor provides a set of discrepancies explicable only if we understand that social norms, rather than essential or predetermined or innate markers, determine both class and health status (“CDC Data Brief”). Just as health studies asserts that bodily conformity neither enables nor disables the positive and full range of human experience, so happiness studies finds that contentment or well-being does not depend upon physical vigor but upon emotional resilience. The founders of the famous longitudinal

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Grant Study of ageing and well-being (which tracked 268 male Harvard sophomores for over seventy years) believed in 1937 that good bodily health was essential to its subjects’ well-being as they aged. George Vaillant (who took over the study in the 1960s) found that, however, what mattered more than the misfortunes (physical and emotional) that the men in the study encountered—and certainly more than their bodily health as understood by their doctors—were their emotional resilience and ability to adapt. Daniel Gilbert has similarly found that most of us have a happiness “set-point” to which we will naturally return even after grave or incapacitating loss or injury. In some cases, this process takes one to three years, but ultimately, it seems human beings adapt to their new bodies, and that those who do so most quickly and effectively possess or acquire emotional resilience, a capacious potential for happiness. Even as Gilbert and others’ prescriptions for acquiring “resilience” can be helpful for individuals, we find it important to note that no stigma should attach to those who cannot or who choose not to “bounce back” from life’s challenges, nor does emphasizing resilience and “grit” obviate our responsibility towards caring for others and their well-being. In other words, just because some wheelchair-users are as happy or happier than the so-called able-bodied, the able-bodied should not then ignore the material conditions that could turn impairment into disability (the absence of ramps or appropriate seating and aisles in buildings, and so on), nor could or should we expect persons with disabilities or non-normative bodies and minds to exhibit “happiness” if disabling material conditions are removed. Moreover, Disability, Health, and Happiness questions even the seemingly self-evident notion of “happiness”—whether understood as good fortune or happenstance (as, Kevin Laam suggests, it was most frequently envisioned in the early modern period); intense short-lived periods of joy or ecstasy; sensory pleasure or comfort; entertainment and novelty (“fun”). Even the narrower category of self-actualization (what the Greeks might have called eudaimonia) breaks down under scrutiny, whether we believe we can achieve it through personal activities and experience, including religious faith (what some believers might call grace); or service to others (what the Romans might have called virtus); or through adherence to a socially-valued moral code (what some secularists might call ethical living). A critically embodied ontology also questions our post-Enlightenment or post-Cartesian assumptions about the happiness or well-being of persons with cognitive differences. Christopher Gabbard writes movingly about his son August, who suffered from cerebral palsy, spastic quadriplegia, cognitive impairments, and other disorders. Unable to see, move, speak, feed, or toilet himself without help, for some able-bodied persons, August triggers the fearful response of “better off dead than disabled.” Many such well-meaning people would like to put an end to August’s suffering, but they do not stop to consider whether he actually is suffering.

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At times he is uncomfortable, yes, but the only real pain here seems to be the pain of those who cannot bear the thought that people like August exist. (218) So far from experiencing only “suffering” or “pain,” August could and did frequently experience pleasure and joy, laughing not only in response to physical stimuli such as tickling but also to the loving voices of his family and to the sound of his favorite music. But why turn to the early modern period to explore the ontological interface between human bodies and emotions within their material environments? Stiker’s work, and that of Michel Foucault before him, presents the humanist project itself as one that depended upon defining, characterizing, and disciplining the body. Foucault for the first time suggested that sexuality might have a “history” and that it could be discussed as constructed rather than essential, contingent rather than fixed. Norbert Elias’s classic text The Civilizing Process identifies Erasmus’s On Civility (translated into English in 1532) as part of the larger Renaissance project of establishing norms for social behavior and conversation. Erasmus begins his discourse on civility with the proper way to direct one’s gaze: [N]at frownyng / which is syne of crueltie / nat wa[n]ton / which is toke[n] of malapertnesse / nat wandring & rollynge / which is syne of madnesse / nat twyringe and spyeng / which is token of suspection and compasynge disceyte / nor ha[n]gyng downe which is syne of folly: nor afterwarde twynklyng with the browes / whiche in sygne of vnstablenesse / nor making as a ma[n] astonyed (And that was noted in Socrates) nor to sharpe / a syne of malyce / nat makyng synes and profers nor besy wanton / a token of yuell chastyte: but representyng a mynde well enstabled / & amyable with honesty. Nor is it nat said with out cause of antique sage me[n] / that the eye is the seate and place of the soule. (Erasmus A3) Erasmus almost predicts Garland-Thomson’s taxonomy of stares: dominating (the cruel frown), stimulus-driven (the pert glance), blank (the wandering eye), hostile (the spy), separated (the sharp or sidelong glance), baroque (stone-faced amazement), the goal-driven (the eager come-hither) and, perhaps, the engaged stare (the firm and amiable look; Garland-Thomson 9). Instead of Garland-Thomson’s mutually engaged stare as the collaborative affirmation of our humanity, however, appears the metaphysical belief in the spark of divinity (the soul) or intellect (the firmly established mind) or goodness (amiability and honesty) inhabiting the body and shining out of its windowed eyes. The ongoing scholarly process of historicizing embodiment, the senses, and the boundaries of the body continued after Elias through interventions

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such as Francis Barker’s The Tremulous Private Body, which historicized the idea of bodily autonomy or of “private” space, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, which argued that both gender and biological sex could be found to be “discursive” or socially mediated and that the body itself provided a “variable boundary” (Bodies, sub-title; Gender 189) between self and world. Thomas Laqueur’s study Making Sex presented human sexual dimorphism as historically and socially constructed and asserted that a “one-sex” model predominated in pre-Enlightenment Europe. Carla Mazzio and David Hillman’s edited collection The Body in Parts suggested that not just the body but even its organs and processes could be placed within material and historical contexts. Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed revisited the one-sex model popularized by Laqueur both to critique and to extend it, and identified the social persistence of gender through female “leakiness” or bodily fluids. The “humoral turn” in early modern body studies continued with Paster’s Humoring the Body and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Paster, and Katherine Rowe’s essay-collection Reading the Early Modern Passions. These works all participated in what Bruce R. Smith has called historical phenomenology, the study of sensory experience in historical, material, and social context. Jennifer Vaught’s edited collection sensitively engages disease with rhetoric and metaphor in historical contexts. Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard’s recent anthology Shakespearean Sensations further locates the most fundamental human experiences and emotions within the richly nuanced material and social worlds that, they argue, both developed and were developed by those contexts. Hobgood and Wood’s edited collection Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, and their special issue for Disability Studies Quarterly (“Disabled Shakespeares”), finally takes early modern body studies firmly into cultural disabilities studies. Hobgood and Wood’s theoretical and textual arguments are particularly helpful to scholars and readers engaging with early modern theories of disability. Hobgood and Wood write: “early modern disability studies...develops from a flexible array of historicist and presentist methodologies and textual-and performance-related concerns that work together to examine difference, selfhood, and identity in the Renaissance” (Recovering 190). Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body turns to William Shakespeare’s works because of their multiple voices or polyvocality (drama, and the lyric speaker in the poems), and because of the works’ wide cultural allusiveness in their own time (the range of references within them) and their wide cultural appropriation in our own era. This expansive sense of the Shakespearean allows hearers and readers to explore very broadly questions surrounding the relationships among health and such measures of “well-being” as prosperity, employment, youthfulness, strength, peace of mind, friendships, physical comfort, and so on without restricting our analysis to a single genre. In other words, Shakespearean texts allow us to range freely among dietaries and breviaries of health, sermons on happiness, plague orders and moral philosophy, just as the plays do, and to

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consider health and happiness as part of a social and material network that creates what we understand as the human body and its qualities. We  can investigate the changing meanings of disability, health, and happiness in Shakespeare’s time and in our own in many ways, but below, I offer a case study of Shakespeare’s use of the word “disabled” and its immediate cognates “disability” and “disabling.”1 To be “disabled” in Shakespeare is to experience a physical, moral, or economic slowdown, but the word is rarely used as a participial adjective or to connote a pre-existing or unchangeable or tragic condition; instead, the verbal form clarifies disability as a temporary state conferred upon one by another’s—or by one’s own—actions or prejudice. The Earl of Suffolk, tongue-tied in the presence of his beautiful prisoner Margaret of Anjou, castigates himself, “Fie, de la Pole! Disable not thyself” (1 Henry VI 5.5.23). He first wonders whether he should write down his desires, since he is unable to speak them, but ultimately devises another solution: disabled by his own prior marriage from wooing Margaret on his own account, he wins her for his King. Bassanio explains his poverty to Antonio in The Merchant of Venice by explaining he has “disabled [his] estate” by overspending, or, in his own metaphor, bearing too “swelling” a “port,” walking tall, as if on his toes, until his gait has crippled him (1.1.123–24). Later in the play, the Prince of Morocco, one of Portia’s unsuccessful suitors, questions his own fitness to woo her but then reassures himself that “to be afeard of my deserving / Were but a weak disabling of myself” (2.7.29–30). Ironically, he proves to be correct that he is “disabled” in Portia’s eyes; prejudiced against his dark skin, she sighs in relief at his departure, “Let all of his complexion choose me so” (2.7.79). When Rosalind chides the melancholy Jaques because he has “disable[d] all the benefits of [his] own country” by aping the habits of another, she similarly associates foreign origin with impairment or infirmity (As You Like It 4.1.30–31). A fuller reading might read Jaques’s melancholy as David Houston Wood reads Cassio’s drunkenness in Othello—as a narrative prosthesis, in Mitchell and Snyder’s terms, that compensates for a socially deviant erotic attraction, that is, as an illness, a medicalized or pathological condition that diverts our attention from the socially threatening inter-ethnic marriage of Othello and Desdemona in Othello or from the same-gender courtship of Orlando and Ganymede in AYLI. Later in AYLI, Touchstone recounts an instance in which his lower status in court might “disable” him when he demonstrates the “Reply Churlish” of an imaginary courtier by describing how the former “disabled [Touchstone’s] judgement,” or disallowed Touchstone’s effectiveness as a judge (5.4.70–71). At the same time, what Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona calls the “discourse of disability” can prove disingenuous, a common “association of disability with deceit” that Kevin Stagg and others have found in early modern rogue literature and that subjects disabled bodies to increased scrutiny (Stagg 23). The exchange begins when Valentine urges Sylvia to

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befriend Proteus warmly, for his sake. Sylvia dubs herself too “low [a] mistress” for Proteus, who in turn insists that he is too “mean a servant.” Impatient, Valentine interrupts to demand that both “Leave off discourse of disability,” and urges their swift acquaintance (2.4.99–102). For Valentine, “disability” is always feigned, a “discourse” or exercise: in this sense, he sees more truly than he realizes, since Proteus, we later learn, “love[s Sylvia] tootoo much” (198). In performance, Proteus’s and Sylvia’s excessive and false humility towards each other can mask Sylvia’s discomfort with Proteus’s evident admiration; a mutual attraction; or Sylvia’s forced compliance with her lover’s demand to show “special favor” to his friend (94), which itself proleptically figures 5.4, when Valentine forgives Proteus for his attempted assault on Sylvia and instead outrageously makes a gift of her to his friend: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee” (83). However the introduction of Sylvia to Proteus is played, their ambiguous lines treat “discourse of disability” as social camouflage, words of deficit uttered by able-bodied individuals in order to try to escape a predicament. Sonnet 66 might seem to provide an exception to this rule of actively enabled disability (that is, to differ from these earlier situations in which a single, human individual is responsible for the transformation of predicament into disability). The narrator of Sonnet 66 complains its “strength [is] by limping sway disabled,” a phrase that potentially defines disability in medicalized terms, the halting gait of a strong body with an enfeebled limb or the disabled (limping) body in turn deforming or impairing an able-bodied one: Tyr’d with all these for restfull death I cry, As to behold desert a begger borne, And needie Nothing trimd in iollitie, And purest faith vnhappily forsworne, And gilded honor shamefully misplast, And maiden vertue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d, And strength by limping sway disabled, And arte made tung-tide by authoritie, And Folly (Doctor-like) controuling skill, And simple-Truth miscalde Simplicity, And captiue-good attending Captaine ill. Tyr’d with all these, from these would I be gone, Saue that, to dye, I leaue my loue alone. (Shakespeare, Sonnets E2v) The sonnet seems to establish a body whose disabilities, in the medical narrative, fit it only for death: limited mobility (limping), inarticulacy (tongue-tying), mental illness (folly), cognitive difference (simplicity), and sickness (ill). In this sense, the sonnet reiterates the dehumanizing

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able-bodied belief that associates bodily and cognitive impairment, culturally, with a life that is literally worth less than that of an able-bodied person. Moreover, phrases such as “strength by limping sway disabled” associate the abuse of power—a moral evil—with a physical impairment, in this case, the non-normative gait of the power-hungry character “sway” (and it is hard not to imagine Shakespeare’s own Richard III, whose “halt[ing]” authority compels obedience and subordinates the able-bodied characters around him [1.1.23, 1.2.237]).

Figure 1.1 “A hunch-backed old man supported by a crutch with a whinnying horse behind.” Woodcut by Tobias Stimmer, 1580. Published under a Creative Commons license with permission of the Wellcome Library, London. ICV No 50395R.

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The power and compassion of Sonnet 66 emerge, however, in the way it unexpectedly ascribes power to the imagined impaired beings who proceed through its lines; thus, with irony and wit, it draws our attention to the ways in which early modern life systematically took power away from real persons with disabilities and sentenced the halt and the lame to beggary, the tongue-tied to silence, the insane to restraints or institutionalization, and the cognitively different to ostracism. The metaphor of disability here does not solely reinforce a medical model of disability but also alerts us to the complex negotiations among impairments and disabilities (social, material, financial, bodily, sexual) that produce that “tired” lyric voice. In fact, the sonnet itself formally encodes the transformation, or rather, interaction, among impairments and disabilities. As Helen Vendler observes, the poem opens with a plaintive series of sufferers alone, but in line 8, an unexpectedly early volta, or turn, brings in the entities that inflict these injustices (308). We could even narrow down this turn to the word “disabled,” where the sonnet begins to blame the specific institutions that have turned impairment into disability or created impairment in the first place. The lyric speaker opens the poem with a definition of its own impairment, lacking rest or sleep, one of the six “non-naturals” in Galenic medicine that regulated bodily and humoral health. Then it lists the unfair material conditions or social impairments that have rendered that voice miserably exhausted at the very sight of the abject—or occasionally elevated—characters under discussion. Emergent mercantilism has “desert[ed]” those who most need financial support—the “begger borne,” who will not inherit wealth, unlike the “Nothing[s]” or wealthy non-entities who are also in need of nothing. Purest faith, religious or marital, is either betrayed or turns apostate (the passive “forsworn” is deliberately ambiguous), so the institution of the church affords no protection. The aristocracy, or a noble patron, offers no reward, only “gilded honor,” the superficially attractive semblance of truth rather than solid virtue. Youthful sexuality is prostituted, and virtuous persons threatened with false accusations or “disgrac[e].” These institutions and places—markets, churches, great houses, family homes—have exerted improper “sway” or power over strength, art, skill, truth, and goodness. Paradoxically, however, lines 8–12 emphasize the fundamental strength, art, skill, truth, and good that exists within the seemingly “disabled,” “tongue-tied,” foolish, “simple,” and “ill.” Vendler notes that the sonnet brings back in line 11 the solitary sufferer, without a blameable agent, with “simple truth miscalled simplicity” (309). The sonnet does not establish a simple binary between physical impairment and socially-determined disability, but, to use Tom Shakespeare’s terms, simple truth finds itself in a “predicament,” moving interactively between these terms. The poem brings out parallels between terms of able-bodiedness and terms of disability through sounding the acoustic and rhetorical devices of alliteration, anaphora, and polyptoton: strength/ sway, captive/captain, simple-truth/simplicity (the 1609 spelling foregrounds the closeness of Simple-Truth and Simplicity [my emphasis]).

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Finally, although the couplet repeats the opening phrase of the poem, the sonnet’s final anaphora chooses life over death in an affirmation of the value of human lives that are impaired, disabled, deserted, forsworn, misplaced, disgraced, miscalled, captive, tired. The repeated phrase “Tyr’d with all these” serves almost as repotia, the repetition of a phrase but with significant tonal differences, or as epistrophe, a repeated phrase that bookends a series of lines or clauses. It’s particularly appealing to think of that repeated phrase as repotia (literally, another drink: the speech given at a wedding feast), because it ushers in love. In original spelling, loue and lone are separated by one inverted print character. What makes precious the suffering, bragging, creating, caring characters of the sonnet, and the lyric speaker itself, are love, and the capacity to receive it. Sonnet 66 presents able-bodiedness, health, and happiness as contested terms. The “tired” and restless narrator craves “restfull death” but gives up its desire and consents to remain among the tongue-tied, the disabled, the fools, the simpletons, the captives, and among the needy nothings and Captains ill. This volume likewise negotiates all three terms of our title, directly or indirectly, in conversation with each other. Most scholarship on the subject of happiness in Shakespeare has concentrated upon eudaimonia, or the quest for the good and virtuous life. This volume investigates instead how disability, health, and happiness in Shakespeare come into being through the complex relations among bodies and their systems, rhetoric and objects, and also through character and genre. Chapters are organized into three parts: Nation, Sex, and Emotion.

PART I: NATION Our first part engages disability, health, and happiness in light of rank and nation—not just within the early modern appropriation of medieval political theory (the so-called doctrine of the monarch’s “two bodies”) but also within existing and emergent early modern discourses of civic and domestic health. In Chapter Two, Allison P. Hobgood addresses head-on the question of whether a disability studies framework risks reading Shakespeare anachronistically, and evaluates both existing scholarship on ablebodiedness in Shakespeare and the discourse of disability surrounding the recent discovery of the body of the historical King Richard III. She argues that Shakespeare’s Richard III itself both establishes and engages with an emergent early modern medicalized model for disability that is, importantly, both materially embodied and metaphorically rich. Her essay uses both presentist and historicist modes of criticism, discussing the performance of Peter Dinklage (2004), himself a person with restricted growth, as Richard III. Hobgood historicizes Richard’s body within an emerging rhetoric associating variant bodies with invisibility or anonymity, while in Chapter Three, Geoffrey A. Johns locates Shakespeare’s challenge to early

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modern ideas of disability within the diagnostic discourse of monstrosity circulating in England after 1552. This discourse recognizes, Johns suggests, that sometimes monstrosity could trigger vicious, amoral, socially transgressive acts without a corresponding manifestation of physical signs—in other words, a “monster” without a monstrous body. Shakespeare’s Richard emerges through this tradition of monstrous interpretation, Johns argues, explicitly and complexly to critique England’s national history—specifically, the hypocrisy and “diseased” state associated with the Wars of the Roses. In Chapter Four, Sonya Freeman Loftis and Lisa Ulevich argue provocatively in favor of “reading Shakespeare through autism.” While Shakespeare’s characters might not meet the modern diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder, Loftis and Ulevich suggest that a variety of Shakespearean characters, particularly Hamlet and Coriolanus, share recognizable autistic traits, and that such traits, moreover, destroy or threaten to destroy empire itself. Patterns of power, disobedience, and deference intersect complexly in King Lear, writes Amrita Dhar, in which the objections of the able-bodied Servant (so interpellated or hailed astutely by Dhar as a moral agent in the action) to Cornwall’s blinding of Gloucester make manifest the ways in which domestic subservience can dehumanize and disembody members of this body politic. Dhar’s essay in Chapter Five begins with a caring act performed by a subordinate; Katherine Schaap Williams’s essay in Chapter Six begins with a healing act performed by the king. Williams’s discussion of the “royal touch,” the cure of struma or scrofula by a reigning monarch, in Macbeth problematizes early and postmodern understandings of “cure” and “care.” Drawing upon disability theory, Williams argues that although the medicalization of the monarch’s body is intended to consolidate royal power, it draws attention instead to the ephemerality of the holy cure because the performance of healing depends upon physical contact. The literally tangible relation between subject and monarch, she finds, potentially undercuts notions of both cure and royalty. Matt Kozusko’s essay in Chapter Seven critiques the long-standing association between the study of Shakespeare and the civic and intellectual health of the nation. Although he argues that such a dynamic, in which a text is made sacred and invoked as a guideline for civic health, is both necessary and inevitable, he observes that such prescriptions deny the collaborative production of these texts and their meanings; cannot be proven empirically to be healthful; use Shakespeare as medicine for a critic or participant who is returned to health through reading; and might divert readers and thinkers from engagements that might improve the “health” of the nation in more profound or longer-lasting ways. This essay looks ahead to those in our final part, since it also addresses the question of whether Shakespeare can make us happy—and what such happiness might mean.

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PART II: SEX Our second part considers to what extent sex and gender function as disabilities, impairments, or predicaments in early modern England. Where Kozusko’s essay in our previous part indicates the indirect effects of Shakespeare upon national health, Hillary Nunn’s essay in Chapter Eight recounts a fascinating episode of diagnosis through royal theatre, one that emphasizes the curative power of King James’s and Queen Elizabeth’s bodies and of the theatrical as humoral therapy in Hamlet. Where Williams’s essay investigated King James’s ability to heal the diseased body, however, Nunn’s demonstrates the ways in which the king’s body defines and delimits what kinds of bodies and sensory abilities are normal or healthful. Nunn explores the sexualized gossip surrounding the Lake-Ros affair, in which the Countess of Exeter, renowned for her powers as a healer, was accused of administering a poisoned glister (clyster) or enema to the Lady Ros. So great was the scandal that the king himself intervened and attempted to reconstruct the alleged crime. Arguing that early modern notions of bodily “accommodation” in some distinctive ways anticipate our present-day legal use of the term to “accommodate” bodies of differing abilities, Nunn suggests that the episode presents the consequences of striving to accommodate the body—to improve its functions and comfort—within early modern English society. Her essay thus interrogates the interplay among rank, sex, obscenity, and healthfulness in this period. In Chapter Nine, Catherine E. Doubler likewise deconstructs present-day understandings of sexed and healthy bodies by turning to the past. She contrasts the athletic figure of actor Will Kemp and the fictional body of Shakespeare’s Falstaff to demonstrate how notions of able-bodiedness and disability work to construct early modern masculinity. She thus shows us how Falstaff breaks down not only stable categories of gender (as others have noted) but also how he undoes both early modern anatomy and the hierarchy of muscle, fat, and flesh fetishized by our own era. Floral imagery and botanical illustration in early modern England likewise present a normative model of human sexual maturation, writes Darlena Ciraulo in Chapter Ten. The vigor and well-being of the reproductive body visually mirrors the evolution of the flowering plant in its tripartite process of bud, blossom, and seedpod. What, she notes, is particularly interesting about this conventionally feminine floral analogy is its early modern application to the generative health of the male body as well. Reading female bodies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, Sujata Iyengar’s essay in Chapter Eleven argues that these plays use air—ubiquitous, invisible, contingently disease-spreading or health-bestowing—to figure gender as attribute, impairment and disability, or as the conversation among them.

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PART 3: EMOTION In Chapter Twelve, Nathanial B. Smith opens our part on emotion in an essay that brings out good or bodily health as not only a vector for socializing gender but also as something that is performed. His essay dovetails with Nunn’s in its attention to the power exerted over human bodies by humoral diagnosticians and detectives, royal or otherwise. Using J.L. Austin’s speechact theory, Judith Butler’s development of it, and discussing present-day selfconscious deployments of speech-act theory by medical practitioners, Smith argues that Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew satirizes and parodies early modern discourses of humoral health through theatrical mechanisms and performative speech: Petruccio deploys early modern humoralism to “tame” Katherine even as it becomes evident that such therapies are merely excuses for bodily and political control. Katherine’s controversial final speech, he suggests, is both “happy and unhappy” in Austin’s terms, successful in its appeal to Petruccio yet unsuccessful in convincing women off- and on-stage that Petruccio’s tactics are effective and necessary for marital or romantic harmony. In Chapter Thirteen, Ian Frederick Moulton continues to analyze the conflict between romantic love and happiness in Shakespeare by investigating the vexed relationship between erotic satisfaction and bodily health in early modern England. Although today, popular literature imagines romantic love to be necessary to happiness or fulfillment, Moulton’s essay argues that Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare’s sonnets imply that happiness and good health cannot coexist with romantic love. Love existed as a corporeal ailment in popular and medical treatises about human emotions; early modern thinkers wonder how lovers may retain their bodily equilibrium when seized by desire. Moulton’s essay revisits in this context the figure of the flower exquisitely analyzed by Ciraulo, and anticipates the compassionate reading of the image in light of early modern cancernarratives that is offered by Alanna Skuse later in this part. The poignant connection between happiness and pain manifests again in Ariane M. Balizet’s essay in Chapter Fourteen, which explores the depiction of wet-nursing in Shakespeare’s plays. Many wet-nurses lactated only because they recently lost or deserted their own infants, so that, Balizet suggests, the wet-nurse evokes both grief and sustenance in early modern households. The wet-nurse’s grief healed and strengthened her employer’s infant, and, Balizet argues, lactation might have provided the nurse with a way of coping with her own loss. Balizet’s essay considers Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, and Macbeth in order to examine the association between the wet-nurse’s recovery from grief and the baby’s nourishment in order to argue that early modern readers and viewers imagined breastfeeding as health-giving for both nurse and infant. In Chapter Fifteen, Alanna Skuse re-reads the figure of the rose as a trope with which to describe sexual and bodily corruption. She argues that the term canker, while recognised as

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referring to the “canker-worm,” a horticultural parasite, also had currency in its own time as referring to the disease of cancer, understood as a morbid disease that defied the curative efforts of surgeons and physicians, and to the “cancer-worm” sometimes supposed to cause this affliction. Skuse’s thoughtful, counter-intuitive reading emphasizes the beauty and fragility of the rose, and its association with healthy or normative sexuality and sexual development (as does Ciraulo’s), but, she suggests, the canker-worm eats through body, flower, and metaphor. Slippage between the “canker worm” as a metaphorical and a somatic presence in these poems, she asserts, reveals the extent to which the disease of cancer and the canker-worm in the flower problematize the boundary between self and other, figural and literal, sick and well. Finally, Katharine A. Craik’s Afterword in Chapter Sixteen reflects upon the essays that precede it in the volume and considers early modern joy and the ways it intersects with human disability, able-bodiedness, and health. Craik contrasts early modern happiness to the banal calculations of the “Happiness Index” favored by Britain’s government or the measure of “Gross National Happiness” instigated by the King of Bhutan. Her sustained and thoughtful readings of the sonnets by Shakespeare in which he urges his young addressee to beget children extend and critique Laam’s suggestion that for early modern moralists, true joy or delight is unavailable on earth. Rather, suggests Craik, early modern joy can be glimpsed fleetingly through the text as the imagined radiance of as-yet-unborn progeny, biological and literary. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body thus ends with a metaphysical paradox: seekers after happiness find it through its pursuit, although the single-minded pursuit of joy or delight for their own sake will destroy happiness or ecstasy. As Shakespeare’s Cressida comments wryly on the nature of a fallen world: “Joy’s soul lies in the doing” (Troilus and Cressida 1.3.265). We wish you all joy and health in your reading. NOTE 1. References to the works of William Shakespeare come from The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, and are cited parenthetically within the text by sonnet and line numbers. References to Shakespeare’s sonnet 66 come from the online facsimile of the 1609 volume Shakespeares Sonnets, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library, as indicated parenthetically.

WORKS CITED Barker, Francis. The Tremulous Private Body. 1984. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. ———. Bodies that Matter. 1993. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

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Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Coleridge, Peter. Disability, Liberation, and Development. 1993. Oxford: Oxfam, 2006. Print. “CDC Data Brief, May 2012.” Web. Accessed 26 June 2014. . Craik, Katharine, and Tanya Pollard, eds. Shakespearean Sensations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print. Davis, Lennard. Bending Over Backwards. New York: NY UP, 2002. Print. “Disabled Shakespeares.” Special Issue of Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). Edited by David Houston Wood and Allison Hobgood. Web. Accessed 21 May 2014. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Print. Erasmus, Desiderius. De Civilitate: A Lytell Booke of Good Maners for Chyldren. Trans. Robert Whittington. London: 1532. EEBO Web. Accessed 21 May 2014. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 3 Vols. 1976–1984. New York: Pantheon, 1978–1986. Print. Gabbard, Christopher. “Odd Quirks.” Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy. Ed. Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Reynolds, Ralph Savarese. Rutgers UP, 2010. 217–23. Print. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: Why We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Vintage, 2007. Print. Hillman, David, and Carla Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. Hobgood, Allison, and David Houston Wood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. Print. Hughes, Bill. “Being Disabled: Towards a Critical Ontology of Disability Studies.” Disability and Society 22.7 (2007): 673–84. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. Laam, Kevin. “Shakespeare and Happiness.” Literature Compass 7.6 (2010): 439–51. Web. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00711.x. Web. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. Print. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. ———. Humoring the Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print. Porter, Roy, and G. S. Rousseau. Epilogue. Gout: The Patrician Malady. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. 284–85. Print. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014. Print. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nicholas Watson. 2001. “The social model of disability: an outdated ideology?” Research in Social Science and Disability 2 (2002): 9–28. Print. Shakespeare, William. Works. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Print.

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———. “Sonnet 66.” Shake-speares Sonnets. London, 1609. E2v. Repr. Folger Shakespeare Library. Web. Accessed 21 May 2014. Smith, Bruce R. Phenomenal Shakespeare. New York: Wiley/Blackwell, 2010. Print. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, 1978. Print. Stagg, Kevin. “Representing Physical Difference.” Social Histories of Disability and Deformity. Ed. David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg. 2006. London: Routledge, 2012. 19–38. Print. Stiker, Henry Jacques. A History of Disability. Trans. William Sayers. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Print. Vaught, Jennifer C., ed. Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Print. Vendler, Helen, ed. “Sonnet 66.” The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. 307–11. Print. Wood, David Houston. “‘Fluster’d with flowing cups’: Alcoholism, Humoralism, and the Prosthetic Narrative in Othello.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). Web. Accessed 22 May 2014.

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Part I

Nation

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Teeth Before Eyes Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III Allison P. Hobgood

In September 2012, a team of archeologists from the University of Leicester uncovered a crude grave hidden in a most unassuming spot. The site, long ago the medieval Grey Friars friary, served in modernity as a parking lot for the Leicester City Council Social Services and, to much excitement, the long-lost burial place of one of England’s most controversial monarchs: King Richard III. By February 2013, scientists had identified with supposed certainty—via techniques like radiocarbon dating, isotopic analysis, and mitochondrial DNA testing—that the buried bones indeed belonged to Richard (Burns). Since then, historians, literary scholars, fans, and detractors alike have speculated about the accuracy of this recent discovery and its impact on lore that has surrounded a king traditionally deemed a cruel killer “determined to prove a villain / and hate the idle pleasures of these days” (Woollasten; Shariatmadari; Shakespeare, Richard III 1.1.30–31). In this essay, I am interested in the ways that, long after his death and even now in his resurrection, King Richard’s body—and the various processes used to diagnose that body—always take center stage. Renaissance writers and historians from Thomas More to Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed to William Shakespeare obsessed over Richard’s physical shape and used it to determine who he was as both a ruler and man. Take, too, as a modern corollary, the archeologists, historians, and scientists at the University of Leicester who have dedicated an entire website, “The Discovery of Richard III,” to the latest Ricardian news. There they post in near real-time not just Plantagenet history and biographical tidbits, but a thorough, scientific assessment of Richard’s habitus. Among other things, they outline the processes that have helped confirm the king’s bones as his own and offer detailed empirical findings and painstaking evidentiary descriptions of Richard’s skeletal remains. I outline some data here at length: The skeleton is in good condition apart from the feet, which are missing as a result of later disturbance...the position of the vertebrae in the ground clearly reflected their position in life and was not a product of the awkward burial position...He had severe idiopathic adolescentonset scoliosis. This may have been progressive and would have put additional strain on the heart and lungs, possibly causing shortness

24 Allison P. Hobgood of breath and pain...Unaffected by scoliosis, he would have stood around 5ft 8in (1.73m) tall, above average height for a medieval man, though his apparent height might have decreased as he grew older and his disability may have lifted his right shoulder higher than his left. (Buckley et al. 536) Ostensibly in the name of scientific validation, the authors retroactively extrapolate and catalogue the “condition” of Richard’s living body: male, age 20–30, slender, above average height but for scoliosis evidenced by true-to-life vertebral positioning and consistency with various early modern characterizations. As this summary attests, barely second in importance behind confirming that the buried bones belong to Richard is the discovery that the king was, indeed, disabled. His skeleton provokes examination and diagnosis, in other words, as if one might finally uncover Richard’s “real” nature by scrutinizing the truths of his “real” body. And sure enough, for years, scholars have debated the status of Richard as an early modern disability figure, most often insisting that his hunchback, withered arm, and halting gait were nothing more than the political machinations of Tudor mythologists (Saccio; Kendall; Weir). As Marjorie Garber explains of Shakespeare, for example, “either the dramatist was himself shaping the facts [of Richard’s physiognomy and character] for political purposes, or he was taken in by the Tudor revisionist desire to inscribe a Richard ‘shap’d’ and ‘stamp’d’ for villainy” (64). Garber notes that Shakespeare, like his literary predecessors, used and abused history in his tale of Richard’s reign by conflating his character’s supposed deformity with a subversive and criminal national politics. Although Garber claims that Richard’s deformity is “transmitted not genetically but generically through both historiography and dramaturgy” (69), I would argue that a sort of genetics is indeed at work in the play. More specifically, Shakespeare’s intense pathologizing of Richard’s physical health through scientific discourse does much to transmit and shape our understanding of the last Yorkist king. In what follows, I explore how Shakespeare engages throughout The Tragedy of King Richard the Third a medical model of disability rapidly developing in the early modern period. More broadly, I argue that the play illustrates a quite complex construction of disability in the Renaissance as it verifies how disability would have signified in definite material terms, not just metaphorical ones. The play’s original performance, which the Norton, Cambridge, and Folger Shakespeare editions concur most likely took place in 1592 or 1593, was situated at a unique historical juncture wherein Richard’s lack of “fair proportion” (1.1.18) would have been interpreted via latent medieval beliefs in the marvelous and widespread curiosity about monsters, but also via burgeoning trends towards scientific rationalism that aimed to diagnose atypicality so as to cure individuals of supposed impairments and restore them to normative, able-bodied health. In other words, my essay takes Richard’s health and

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physical (un)wellness—as it is prescribed through an early modern medical model of disability—as the focal point of how and why his body might mean in the play. Although one might determine disability studies an anachronistic mode through which to read Shakespearean drama, notable recent work suggests quite the opposite. David Houston Wood and I lately made such a case in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, in which we attest that human variation has always existed and, while they have been redefined over time and according to variable cultural circumstances, even historical norms, standards, and schema generally depended on ability/disability paradigms that stigmatized uncharacteristic physical and mental embodiment to uphold the social fiction of the “normate” (Traub; Hobgood and Wood 7–16; Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 8). Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum corroborate my argument by showcasing the disparaging exploitation of early modern disabled individuals through “the lucrative trade and display of monsters...plentiful in the seventeenth century” (99). Deborah Stone, too, outlines through a keen history of English Poor Laws key connections between poverty, vagrancy, and disability culture in early modern England. She explains, for instance, that “in the eyes of Poor Law administrators, five categories were important in defining the internal universe of paupers: children, the sick, the insane, ‘defectives,’ and the ‘aged and infirm.’ Of these, all but the first are part of today’s concept of disability” (40). Whereas the first part of my discussion uses Shakespeare to concretize and historicize disability in the early modern period, the latter half of this essay explores a recent performance of Richard III to both clarify my historicist account and confirm the play’s contemporary resonances. A drama in which time is so terribly out of joint seems especially apt for this kind of atemporal reading and, thus, lends itself well to an early modern disability studies methodology which, as Wood and I have suggested elsewhere, “develops from a flexible array of historicist and presentist methodologies and textual- and performance-related concerns” (Recovering Disability 190). Like Philip Schwyzer’s new work on Richard III that “observe[s] how the present turns into the past” and “explore[s] how the past negotiates a place for itself in the present” (5), the second part of this essay discusses how Peter Dinklage’s 2004 portrayal of Richard III’s physical distinctiveness as dwarfism illuminates how early modern and modern disability narratives similarly envision disability as legible, at least at first glance. I suggest that Dinklage’s height makes him readily identifiable on stage as a person of short stature and hence casts him as “disabled”; and yet, paradoxically, it is this same supposed legibility that makes Dinklage’s Richard often invisible to those around him. Dinklage, as Richard, elucidates how disabled persons are scrutinized constantly by a normative gaze and yet often go unrecognized in contemporary Western culture. Shakespeare’s Richard is at once the most and least visible of bodies, the most and least seen of human beings. In his performance of Richard as a dwarf, Dinklage not only draws attention

26 Allison P. Hobgood to this paradox but uses Gloucester’s invisibility to manipulate his way to the throne; put differently, Richard artfully exploits the very anonymity his disability virtually guarantees.

DIAGNOSING RICHARD I opened this essay with attention to the real King Richard’s recently recovered skeleton not to privilege or condone a medical model of disability that pathologizes the king’s “deformity” as disorder (and hence treatable as such) but rather to prompt us away from readings of the literary Richard that default too easily to metaphor. I would argue that in both the English Renaissance and now, it has been of utmost importance that Richard’s disability be representational, not literal, in order to, as Stephen Greenblatt suggests, “heighten dramatic effect and to intensify the political, psychological, and metaphysical dimensions of [Shakespeare’s] villainous antihero” (508). More precisely, our characterizations of Richard via early modern literary and cultural histories have overlooked his actual body in the face of the figurative work that body is meant to do; we’ve used Shakespearean drama to enable Richard to pass through history in an able body so as to keep on figuratively disabling him. By supposing Richard physically able-bodied and only narratively crafted as deformed so as to sustain Tudor legend or to embody the medieval Vice tradition properly (as Comber suggests), we have authorized the notion of disability foremost as metaphor, and perpetuated the discursive legacy of stigmatic correspondence between monstrous exteriority and immoral interiority. The discovery of King Richard’s spinal deformity should give us pause, then, and encourage reassessment of the ways we have come to read his impairments. As Robert McRuer affirms, disability studies scholars in particular take issue with Richard’s one-dimensional treatment. Alongside Tiny Tim, he explains, Richard III is “one of the two most despised characters in literature. The distaste for Richard in disability studies is not particularly difficult to comprehend, given the ways in which his ‘monstrous’ body logically explains his monstrous deeds. His ‘deformity’ is, in other words, generally causally connected to his evil machinations” (McRuer 295).1 A too easy reliance upon teratological and moral models of disability in which physical difference connotes sin and corruption has limited us from mining other disability discourses in early modernity.2 In exploring Richard’s body as diagnosed—and diagnosable—in Shakespeare, we begin to open up an alternate disability history in the period, one that is perhaps closer to what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “Richard’s contradictory significations of disabled corporeality” (105). In this new approach where signification is less heavily symbolic, one of the earliest representations of Richard, offered in John Roas’ History of England (1490), might serve not just as metaphorical

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slander but also as a pragmatic description of anomalous birth: Richard was “retained within his mother’s womb for two years and emerg[ed] with teeth and hair to his shoulders” (quoted in Comber 188). Likewise, Edward Hall’s claim that “He was little of stature, eiuill featured of limnes, croke backed, the left shoulder muche higher than the righte” (188) reads not necessarily as a marker of Richard’s moral waywardness but a precise cataloguing of Richard’s health and wellness not so different from the modern-day Leicester account we encountered just above. Moreover, it is not as if in their own time Renaissance individuals with scoliosis or spinal curvatures were relegated strictly to the figurative realm of mystery, portent, or prodigy. As Kathleen Y. Moen and Alf L. Nachemson illuminate, whereas individuals in the early Middle Ages indeed perceived spinal deformity as divine retribution, that understanding changed significantly in the English Renaissance as physicians like Ambrose Paré described scoliosis for the first time and “appreciated spinal cord compression as a possible cause of paraplegia” (2570). Early modern physicians speculated that poor posture could cause spinal injury and even suggested various treatments to reverse the impairment. Paré specifically “advocated the use of iron corsets fabricated by armorers, in addition to axial traction” and closely considered how growth might have related to curvature progression, “recommend[ing] new breast plates to be made every 3 months for growing individuals” (Moen and Nachemson 2570). These diagnoses and treatment plans, not unlike our contemporary medical and rehabilitation models of disability, “[treat] disability as a disease in

Figure 2.1 “The forme of an iron breast-plate, to amend the crookednesse of the Body.” Ambroise Paré, Workes, 1634. Dddd6v. Reproduced with permission of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia.

28 Allison P. Hobgood need of a cure” (Davis 40–41), and thus testify to another mechanism for comprehending Richard’s disabled body in the Renaissance. In this particular case, discourse around the king’s non-normative physiognomy works toward establishing norms for human development, health, and wellness that might be traced back onto gestation or the moment of one’s birth. Employing an early modern medical model of disability—just one of the “multiconflictual ideologies of disability” operating in the period (Mitchell and Snyder 105)—Shakespeare’s play literally “fleshes out” Richard by pathologizing his bodily variation. The drama imagines early modern playgoers who were not reading Richard’s body solely as monstrous and malevolent but scientifically noting, marking, and delineating how his habitus deviated from (perhaps their own) typical, healthy embodiment.3

RICHARD’S TEETH If we rethink Richard’s representation in Shakespeare as reflecting a nascent medical model of disability, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third begins to seem less like a monster movie and more like a physician’s log. In a Shakespearean tetralogy consumed by the health and wellness of its “tender babes” (Richard III 4.4.9), the clinical record of Richard’s corporeal distinctiveness begins in 3 Henry VI when Gloucester describes his own birth. Just prior, King Henry reviles Richard by recounting all the omens that surrounded that moment of parturition. He outlines a series of “evil sign[s]” that occurred simultaneously (3 Henry VI 5.6.44), none of which actually address the material circumstances of Gloucester’s birth at all: in “the hour that ever [Richard] wast born” (43), owls shrieked, crows cried, dogs howled, and “hideous tempests shook down trees” (44–46). While his portrayal eventually attests to the baby as “an indigested and deformèd lump” whose head was filled with teeth when he was born (51, 53), its primary concern is in interpreting supposedly portentous auspices “aboding luckless time” (45) as a means of defaming the Yorks even as “the aspiring blood of Lancaster / Sink[s] in the ground” (61–62). Unlike Henry, who admits forecasting as his primary intent—“And thus I prophesy” (37)—Gloucester describes his shape and birth history as material markers of difference that constitute his uniqueness: “I am myself alone” (84). Richard emphasizes his literal physical habitus and the anomalous presentation of his body at birth to code his impairments as crucial singularity. He explains, “I have often heard my mother say / I came into the world with my legs forward” (70–71), and that, as King Henry suggested and his mother’s midwife confirmed, “he [was] born with teeth” (75).4 Certainly Richard plays on how even as a youth his “crooked” body “plainly signified” a penchant for evil (79, 76), but his discourse is far more deliberately embodied than Henry’s. The material status of his body—early teething and breech birth—matters far more, especially in marking difference as empowering

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and not stigmatizing, than the supposed portentousness attributed to those physical characteristics. Close attention to Gloucester’s teeth resurfaces in Richard III when the young Duke of York engages in a conversation with his grandma regarding the transformation of children into adults. Even as the Duchess explains to the boy in 2.4 that “it is good to grow” (Richard III 2.4.9), the young York presses her about the correct and expected pace of human development. “Small herbs have grace,” he remembers his uncle Gloucester telling him; “gross weeds do grow apace” (13). Defending his own typical progress into manhood, York counters with the story of Richard’s extraordinary birth and stunningly rapid growth as a child: “Marry, they say my uncle grew so fast / That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old. / ’Twas full two years ere I could get a tooth” (27–29). Although his comment serves to further disparage Richard, to verify that he was in fact “the wreched’st thing when he was young” (18), it also offers rhetorical confirmation that disability in late sixteenth-century England could be defined medically according to standards of anatomical normalcy. Surely, the tale of Richard’s teething cites conventional medieval wisdom that labeled children born with teeth “divine prognosticators of such calamities as pestilence and famine” (Burnett 67), and hence the recounting of this strange tale figures Richard’s disabled body in mythological proportions. The story of his “gnawing” has clearly been told more than once: “they say,” begins York, repeating a narrative about his uncle’s childhood that already circulates amongst his family. Richard’s monstrousness, signified in his strangely present baby teeth, is affirmed again and again in the telling and retelling of the story of his miraculous birth. On the other hand, however, the toothy Richard is defined by medical abnormality and against explicit standards of physical ability. Somewhat paradoxically, his capacity to “gnaw” at such a young age is understood not as uncanny capability but terrifying bodily flaw. Symptomatic of both disease and genetic malformation, the fact that he “had his teeth before his eyes” (4.4.49) pathologizes his unfit body as differing from expected biological progression: “my uncle grew so fast.” In taking up the tale of baby Richard, the Duke of York compares Gloucester’s deviant embodiment and unusual growth patterns to his own “normal” ones; York notes, importantly, “‘Twas full two years ere I could get a tooth” (2.4.29, my italics). In a vein strikingly resonant with a contemporary medical model of disability, the young duke employs existing early modern medical discourse around teething to highlight how Richard’s physiology fundamentally differs from his own. As Hannah Newton notes, teething and illness often were conflated in the period; illness resulting from teething included swelling of the gums and jaws, fevers, cramps, and other infirmities (52; see also Winston). She further suggests that “teething caused disease by bringing pain,” and the pain “unsettled the humoral balance of the body by heating and augmenting the hot humours choler and blood” (52). The stark comparison York offers in this scene figures Richard as physically deviant and prone to disease and

30 Allison P. Hobgood disorder, even, Greta Olson suggests, as sub- or inhuman. With too-soon teeth and yet a body “So long a-growing, and so leisurely” (2.4.19), Gloucester fails to meet universally recognizable standards of development and wellness. York contrasts his own ideal body, one that cuts teeth appropriately at age two, against Richard’s; his is the uniform model of health and ability to which Richard’s atypical anatomy might never conform. The drama’s opening soliloquy in which Gloucester famously “descant[s] on [his] own deformity” (1.1.27) likewise evidences the play’s investment in a medical model of disability that prescribes proper health and development so as to make visible any deviance from those standards. Playing to the sympathies of a captive audience, Richard bemoans his impairments as well as their stigmatizing force. How cruel, he laments, to be curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up. (18–21) While this scene is most often read (as in Ian Moulton’s “A Monster Great Deformed”) as the play’s initial, figurative conflation of deformity and sin, Richard’s language in this passage undeniably reflects the weight and influence of scientific discourse. According to the king, a “dissembling nature” has abandoned its appropriate temporal trajectory, sending him into the world unnaturally “before [his] time.” Part and parcel with Richard’s abnormal growth course in which his teeth come before his eyes, his limping body, “so [lame] and unfashionable” (22), is unfit in great part due to its untimeliness. As Richard proclaims himself “deformed,” “unfinished,” and “half made up,” he describes a faulty, hence failed, biological product that appears in the world before it should. His lamentation invokes a pitiful counter-discourse in which physical variations are not symbols of divinity or monstrosity but impairments with very real, material consequences: even dogs bark at Richard as he “halt[s] by them” (23). Richard’s descant offers disability as portent but also pathology; he describes his disfigurement as empirical evidence of an anomalous physiology that pushes back against socially sanctioned norms for health, wellness, and even happiness.5

SEEING RICHARD As we probe this alternate disability narrative in Richard III—one that engages science and medicine in the name of diagnosing impairment—we not so surprisingly uncover, as I have suggested elsewhere, a profound desire within early modern culture to trace disability onto the body and systematize that visible difference (Hobgood, “Caesar”). Latent medieval discourses of monstrosity and prodigiousness, as well as early modern discourses of

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science and rationality, all want to understand disability as overtly legible. Early modern physiognomy, for example, claimed that “people live within a discernible semiotic order” (Torrey, “‘The Plain Devil,’” 139). The monstrous body is defined by notable, physical difference: Richard’s hunchback identifies him as a “poisonous bunch-backed toad” (1.3.244). Similarly, the medicalized body registers disability through observable indicators. In 3 Henry VI, Gloucester himself systematically records those “symptoms” and impairments: an arm “like a withered shrub,” “an envious mountain on my back,” and “legs of an unequal size” (3.2.156–59). Too, in Richard III, Gloucester is “rudely stamped” (1.1.16) and “misshapen thus” (1.2.237); he is “made up...so lamely and unfashionable” (1.1 21–22) that he “halts” (1.2.237) as he walks. Whether Gloucester is described as “A cockatrice.../ Whose unavoided eye is murderous” (4.1.54–55) or a “lump of foul deformity” (1.2.57), his disability is highly legible. The difference that marks him as disabled supposedly is always decipherable insofar as it is written directly upon his body. Indeed, we see throughout Shakespeare’s play characters’ overwhelming desires to avoid “false intelligence or wrong surmise” (2.1 55); they want to read Richard’s body, and read it right. Hastings contends that “there’s never a man in Christendom / Can lesser hide his love or hate than [Gloucester], / For by his face straight shall you know his heart” (3.4.51–53), whereas Lady Anne, on the other hand, deems Richard an indecipherable “dissembler” (1.2.172). And in fact, my own aim in this essay until now has been much like the “score or two of tailors” Richard imagines “study fashions to adorn [his] body” (1.2.243–44). I intend here to help us reshape and refit Richard according to a new Renaissance disability narrative. That is, in probing the play’s relationship to an early modern medical model of disability, we begin to register a wider array of possibilities for how Richard’s physical distinctiveness might have signified and been read on the Shakespearean stage. What if, however, we were to consider the ways Richard’s body is invisible even as the play primarily attunes characters and playgoers to the project of making it legible? What if our need to comprehend Richard differs from our ability to comprehend him such that his physical variance registers not a multiplicity of meanings but the limits of perceptibility instead? In what remains here, I will argue that the more Richard and his embodiment get read throughout the drama, the less visible they actually become. The more the play’s characters, for instance, try to pin down—and most often stigmatize—his body, the more his body disappears. As the play progresses, his habitus comes to contain so many possibilities for meaning that it actually fades from view; the precise, disabled body that prompts such intense attention from spectators, in the end, gets erased by over-signification. Monstrosities or maladies, portents or pathologies, Richard’s impairments are vehicles for meaning-making such that, as both Schwyzer and Williams (“Enabling Richard”) suggest, his materiality and personhood become unnotable except as means to some other signifying end.

32 Allison P. Hobgood Interestingly, Richard himself anticipates the possibility that disability, while it invites constant inspection and interpretation, produces invisibility. Consider again briefly Richard III 1.1 wherein Richard imagines “pass[ing] away the time” spying his “shadow in the sun” (25–26). Likewise in the following scene, he apostrophizes, “Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass” (1.2.249–50). As these various lines intimate, Richard portrays his person as lacking any element, and the terms that describe his body, as Williams points out, “rely on negation or abstraction (‘not shaped,’ ‘curtailed’)”; he is mere negative space (“Performing Disability” 762). In spite of his material mass that obstructs light cast from the brightest of heavenly objects, he is but shadow.6 According to the king, like the contingent darkness of a silhouette, he is both legible and illegible; he leaves a mark, but that mark is nothing more than the absence of light.7 Put another way, while Richard’s disability is the thing that encourages his visibility, it is also the very thing that, as Williams concurs (“Performing Disability”), renders him illegible and prevents him from fully being seen.

DWARFING RICHARD In Francis Bacon’s famous essay, “Of Deformity,” the philosopher takes up this paradox of perceptibility as he describes the way “all Deformed Persons, are extreme Bold” (255). Deformity, he explains, “layeth their Competitours and Emulatours asleepe; As never beleeving, they should be in possibility of advancement, till they see them in Possession” (255). For Bacon, as Michael Torrey clarifies, deformity disarms others such that “physiognomical sign and psychological symptom are thus transformed into a kind of beneficial camouflage” (138). And indeed, Bacon confirms, “Deformity is an Advantage to Rising” (255). Already here in 1625, we see how notable disability actually promotes a kind of obscurity. Whether the stigma associated with corporeal variation comes from an outright rejection of disability— the refusal to see it even as one stares at it—or the biased assumption that impairment disqualifies one from “the possibility of advancement,” each instance results in the same outcome: invisibility. In 2004, at The Public Theater in New York City, director Peter DuBois addressed, in useful transhistorical terms, this intense cultural desire to scrutinize disability difference and render it legible, only then to ignore or dismiss it. Even though the 2004 production has been criticized for, among other things, its lack of psychological subtlety, earnest laughter, and theatrical weight (Lahr; Heilpern), it offers remarkable commentary on the construction of Richard’s disability in both modern and early modern contexts. DuBois cast as his protagonist Peter Dinklage, an actor who, as a person of short stature, could bring new “visibility” to Richard’s disabled character.8 And in fact, in an interview with Charles McNulty of The Village Voice,

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Dinklage suggests that he is just the man to play King Richard: “With me being a dwarf, the difference is already there.…There’s no need to play up the deformity. I can experience it from the inside.” What interests me most, though, is the way DuBois’s production enhances and complicates the historical disability narrative I have articulated thus far. DuBois’s Richard III not only enacts, in its own way, a premodern cultural imagination of disability as both legible and not, but compliments that narrative by performing it in a postmodern moment. Dinklage’s Richard, standing 4 feet, 5 inches tall, embodied a desired legibility quite characteristic of disability in the English Renaissance; at the same time, however, his Richard forced audiences to grapple with their own contemporary relationship to disability and, moreover, to the visibility—or lack thereof—of disabled persons in modern, Western culture.9 Thus, I turn to Dinklage’s performance because it confirms how “Richard III has not ceased to be our contemporary” and offers a useful modern correlative that, as Philip Schwyzer argues, might “interpret and politically intervene in the present moment by aligning it with a specific moment in the past” (9, 90). As Schwyzer further suggests, Richard III is unabashedly untimely and, both across the last 400 years and in the playtext proper, resists conventional configurations of past, present, and future (221). The play has numerous “loci of temporal instability” and dramatizes “a ceaselessly wavering temporal surface,” Schwyzer clarifies; “There is no genuine possibility of saying whether what we are beholding is taking place ‘now’ or ‘then,’ or of estimating the distance between these points” (222). Too, Richard himself is chronically out of step with time, even from the play’s opening scene in which he “sets out to overturn the temporality of supersession, whereby one age is seen to have succeeded another” (Schwyzer 215). Whether in Richard’s newly unearthed bones or Dinklage’s 2004 rendition of the infamous king, we see traces of Richard and his world in our own; and yet our contemporary moment—for my purposes here, in the practices of both playing and medical science—continually rescripts that lurking past. In a play in which the past, present, and future constantly find and dissolve themselves into each other, it seems logical to examine DuBois’s contemporary rendering to locate not just history in the now, but the now in history. Before honing in on the cultural work performed by Dinklage’s modern Richard, let me briefly address two further matters: whether we might substitute one impairment for the next, and whether dwarfism even “qualifies” as disability. Although these are quite complicated issues, I would contend that Dinklage’s aforementioned sentiment—“I can experience [deformity] from the inside”—begins to answer both of them simultaneously. DuBois concurs that “unlike other actors, Peter doesn’t have that middle step where he has to learn what that psychology is.…It’s immediate. He was able to question the character from his own personal perspective” (McNulty). These assertions intimate that Dinklage knows and feels Richard’s difference as his own, and hence suggest that atypical embodiment as a person of short

34 Allison P. Hobgood stature might, at least at times, carry with it similar material consequences and experiences as disfigurement. Of numerous types of dwarfism, two are most common: pituitary dwarfism in which an individual’s body is smaller in stature but retains typical proportionality, and achrondroplasia in which an individual’s torso is average but her arms and legs are foreshortened (Fiedler). Thus, in both dwarfism and deformity, the body diverges from an ideal form, gets pathologized by the medical community as a “condition,” and carries with it complicated mythological and linguistic histories (Garland-Thomson, Staring 162; Fiedler ch. 1 and 2; Garland-Thomson, Staring 172). Likewise, both deformed people and individuals with restricted growth have been stigmatized as freaks across numerous cultures and time periods, and exploited in the name of (proto)capitalism and entertainment. The question of whether to conceive of dwarfism as disability is more complex. If, however, disability is defined in part by how impairments and differences get coded negatively by social processes and become barriers to access (Davis 12), one might again argue for the association of dwarfism and disfigurement.10 Although disability scholar Tom Shakespeare usefully critiques the strong social and cultural disability studies models to compel us towards an “interactive disability” model that better accounts for the ways “people are disabled by society and by their bodies” (75), DuBois’s 2004 production stages Dinklage’s non-normative stature to specifically illuminate how quickly impairment becomes disability when atypical embodiment meets inaccessible built environment. For example, as New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley writes, “ascending the throne has never been more of a struggle for the title character of Richard III”; the throne of England, he jibes, “was obviously designed for a taller king.” DuBois, to highlight the visual force and material realities of Richard’s impairment, compels Dinklage to clamor onto a throne that is roughly twice his size. “That means,” Brantley clarifies, “that for this Richard, physically placing himself in the seat of power requires strenuous and gymnastic exertions, made more difficult by the oversize royal cape that enfolds and thwarts him.” Dinklage’s weighty accoutrements and difficult ascent of the throne render his atypical embodiment even more prominent. His body not only defies certain social and cultural expectations but quite literally “mis-fits,” to borrow Garland-Thomson’s coinage, its physical environment (“Misfits”). King Richard’s deformity, represented in Dinklage’s dwarfism, becomes startlingly notable in the inaccessible, incompatible theatrical spaces that surround it. Whereas Sara van den Berg argues that the small size characteristic of a dwarf aesthetic “can contradict and critique accepted values, forcing on others a point of view that can diminish their stature to that of a dwarf” (25), I assert that the aesthetic DuBois creates with Dinklage as his lead does not induce a sympathetic perspective in which we might see ourselves in Richard, but rather a distancing effect through which Richard puts to use the invisibility his disability invokes.11 The Public Theater production

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only makes more obvious how onstage characters and spectators alike are invited to scrutinize Richard’s body—to identify, label, and stare at his difference—and yet, ultimately, refuse to note him fully. As early as 3 Henry VI, in fact, Gloucester anticipates this lack of presence. Gleefully cognizant of how unnoticed he goes, he describes himself as both camouflage and impermanent, invisible and ephemeral: “I can add colours to the chameleon, / [and] Change shapes with Proteus for advantages” (3.2.191–92). And Hastings, for one, corroborates Richard’s self-assessment later in the tetralogy as he bemoans his failure to recognize what was right in front of him. “Woe, woe for England!” he laments in Richard III; “Not a whit for me, / For I, too fond, might have prevented this” (3.4.80–81).12 The above instances attest—just as Dinklage’s embodiment evidences in performance—that Shakespeare’s Richard is the vulnerable target of a normative gaze, and yet this gaze is a dismissive one that never entirely acknowledges his personhood. In her important work on staring, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson illuminates the complex rituals of looking in which we engage. Staring, she contends, is “a sensory sorting process of determining an interpretive foreground and background, of formulating an ocular hermeneutics” (Garland-Thomson, Staring 176–77). Dinklage’s Richard “throws down a visual hermeneutic challenge to its discomforted viewer”; it undoes conventional approaches to seeing and reading the body (178). A variant body like Dinklage’s that is at once hyper-visible and yet visually indeterminate in its difference poses a fundamental cognitive problem for many viewers. Though it is legible in its dwarfism, it is illegible in its deviation from expectation and, further, in its representational indeterminacy. Dinklage’s non-normative size can provoke in viewers what Garland-Thomson defines as “separated staring”; starers cannot sustain their gazes, but rather engage in “visual fleeing,” in a “wide-eyed, looking-over-one’s shoulder retreat of the fearful” (187). And indeed, DuBois recalls Dinklage’s candid explanation of this exact staring encounter: “Peter once talked about how we’re taught not to stare at those who are different,” remembers DuBois. “He says this is why dwarves and people in wheelchairs make the best shoplifters. Others are being watched by Richard, but they don’t want to watch him, which in a sense makes him more dangerous” (McNulty). In his performance of Richard, Dinklage emphasizes the king’s awareness of this visual anonymity, and he portrays the play’s protagonist not as defeated by that inscrutability, as Williams ultimately argues in “Enabling Richard,” but rather empowered by it. The king is “made more dangerous” by processes of literal and figurative dismissal; viewers visually flee Richard as, per Francis Bacon nearly 400 years ago, they simultaneously deem him too insignificant to be worthy of attention. “Richard’s a man who knows what he is,” explains Dinklage: “He’s bitter about it, but he’s prepared to use it to his advantage. People discredit him because of his appearance. They just see him as a crazy deformed warrior. They don’t expect things from him or take him seriously enough, and they don’t realize what’s happening

36 Allison P. Hobgood until everybody’s dead” (McNulty).13 In other words, DuBois’s casting of Dinklage as the wily Richard calls attention to the aspect of the king’s character that makes him most tragic and yet most powerful—his invisibility. Whereas, on the one hand, Shakespeare’s play is obsessed with seeing and naming Gloucester’s difference, Dinklage’s performance reveals, on the other hand, how the drama is equally interested in just the opposite. Characters in Richard III watch and note Gloucester not necessarily to confirm his commanding visibility but rather to affirm his lack of perceptibility and presence. DuBois employs his leading man to emphasize this strange paradox that characterizes the disabled Richard. Dinklage’s height functions specifically as an embodied metaphor for invisibility, one that, to again echo Bacon, “layeth [Richard’s] Competitours and Emulatours asleepe” (255). The king’s deformity, the fact that he is so “rudely stamped” and “scarce half made up” (1.1.16, 21), marks him as distinctly notable and yet renders him, however mistakenly, wholly unremarkable. Just as the excavation of the real Richard’s grave in Leicester has, as The New York Times headline quipped, “[Put] Richard III in Battle Once Again,” so, too, is my essay a call to arms of sorts. More precisely, my attention to Shakespeare’s Richard has not meant to undo—or even undermine—much of the vital work that has burgeoned for years around one of Shakespeare’s most distinctive, and distinctively embodied, characters. Rather, I hope these ruminations might reopen conversation we have presumed, in spite of ongoing scholarship on this play, to be fairly settled. This essay has aimed to identify useful transhistorical resonances—as well as Richard’s explicit construction in the Renaissance via a proto-medical model—that should press us to revisit with new interest a play we assume to know all too well, and to call into question what ableist culture often holds true about disability, its representations, and its realities, both historically and now. NOTES 1. On typical characterizations of Richard’s physiology, see Plasse, “Corporeality and the Opening of Richard III”; Aune, “The Uses of Richard III”; and Torrey, “‘The Plain Devil.’” 2. On teratology and early modern monsters, see Deutsch and Nussbaum, Defects; Turner and Stagg, Social Histories of Disability and Deformity; Daston and Park, “Unnatural Conception”; Knoppers and Landes, Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities; and Huet, Monstrous Imagination. On the “religious model” of disability, see Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks before the Blind; and Heyveld, “The lying’st knave in Christendom.” 3. On the classical typology of monsters, see Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad, and the Ugly.” 4. Interestingly, the Leicester skeleton recovery found that Richard’s third molars were “unusually small”; Leicester online, “What the bones can and can’t tell us.” 5. In Essais, Montaigne anticipates this counter-discourse that comprehends disability via empirical science; see Mitchell and Snyder, 103.

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6. On Richard’s shadow, perspective, and proportion, see Charnes, Notorious Identity, ch 1. 7. Thanks to an audience at Davidson College who noted the use of shadows in The Public Theater’s Richard III. Rooney clarifies the production’s lighting effects in his “Review: Richard III.” 8. Marcella Kostihová explains that Richard III is “surprisingly ambiguous in describing the physical nature of Richard’s deformity” and “this ambivalence challenges each production to invent its own bodily projection of Richard’s evil interiority”; “Richard Recast,” 136–37. 9. On early modern dwarfs and visibility, see van den Berg, 25. 10. van den Berg argues that because dwarfs “often function normally, [they] both are and are not disabled,” 24. 11. On disability aesthetics, see Siebers, Disability Aesthetics; Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand; and Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness. 12. Williams describes Richard’s body as the “multiplication of indistinction,” 765. 13. On overlooking Richard, see Rossiter, quoted in Slotkin, 6.

WORKS CITED Aune, M.G. “The Uses of Richard III: From Robert Cecil to Richard Nixon.” Shakespeare Bulletin 24.3 (2006): 23–47. Print. Bacon, Francis. The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban. London: Printed by Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625. Print. Brantley, Ben. “A Big Throne to Fill, and the Man to Fill It.” The New York Times 12 Oct. 2004. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . Buckley, R. and M. Morris, J. Appleby, T. King, D. O’Sullivan, L. Foxhall. “‘The King in the Car Park’: New Light on the Death and Burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars Church, Leicester, in 1485.” Antiquity 87.336 (2013): 519–38. Print. Burnett, Mark Thornton. Constructing “Monsters” in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hamps.; New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print. Burns, John. “Discovery of Skeleton Puts Richard III in Battle Once Again.” The New York Times 23 Sept. 2013. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . Charnes, Linda. Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Comber, A. E. “A Medieval King ‘Disabled’ by an Early Modern Construct: A Contextual Examination of Richard III.” Disability in the Middle Ages: Rehabilitations, Reconsiderations, Reverberations. Ed. J. Eyler. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 183–96. Print. Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. “Unnatural Conception: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England.” Past and Present 92 (1981): 20–54. Print. Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print.

38 Allison P. Hobgood Davies, Surekha. “The Unlucky, the Bad, and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. A. S. Mittman and Peter Dendle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 49–75. Print. Davis, Lennard J. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York UP, 2002. Print. Deutsch, Helen, and Felicity Nussbaum. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Print. “The Discovery of Richard III.” University of Leicester. Web. Accessed 14 May 2014. . Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Fiedler, Leslie A. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Print. Garber, Marjorie. “Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History.” Shakespeare’s History Plays. Ed. R. J. C. Watt. London: Pearson, 2002. 62–75. Print. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print. ———. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26.3 (2011): 591–609. Print. ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Hall, Edward. The Union of the Noble Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke. London: 1548. Print. Heilpern, John. “A Sluggish Richard III: Where Is Our Royal Psycho?” The New York Observer 25 Oct. 2004. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . Hobgood, Allison. “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). Web. Accessed June 26 2014. . Holinshed, Raphael. The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. London: Imprinted for Iohn Hunne, 1577. Print. Huet, Marie-Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Kendall, Paul Murray, Thomas More, and Horace Walpole. Richard III: The Great Debate. London: Folio Society, 1965. Print. Knoppers, Laura Lunger, and Joan B. Landes. Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Print. Kostihová, Marcela. “Richard Recast: Renaissance Disability in a Postcommunist Culture.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ed. A. Hobgood and D. H. Wood. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 136–49. Print. Lahr, John. “Running Wild.” The New Yorker. 25 Oct. 2004. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . McNulty, Charles. “The Little King: Size Doesn’t Matter in a New Production of Richard III at the Public Theater.” Village Voice Online 31 Aug. 2004. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . McRuer, Robert. “Fuck the Disabled: The Prequel.” Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. Madhavi Menon. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. 294–301. Print.

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Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print. Moen, Kathleen Y., and Alf L. Nachemson. “Treatment of Scoliosis: An Historical Perspective.” SPINE 24.24 (1999): 2570–75. Print. More, Thomas. The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght. London: 1557. Print. Moulton, Ian Frederick. “‘A Monster Great Deformed’: The Unruly Masculinity of Richard III.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.3 (1996): 251–68. Print. Newton, Hannah. The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. Olson, Greta. “Richard III’s Animalistic Criminal Body.” Philological Quarterly 82.3 (2003): 301–24. Print. Plasse, Marie A. “Corporeality and the Opening of Richard III.” Entering the Maze: Shakespeare’s Art of Beginning. Ed. R. F. Willson. New York: Lang, 1995. 11–26. Print. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print. Rooney, David. “Review: Richard III.” Variety. 11 Oct. 2004. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . RowHeyveld, Lindsey. “‘The lying’st knave in Christendom’: The Development of Disability in the False Miracle of St. Alban’s.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). Web. Accessed 30 Aug. 2014. . Saccio, Peter. Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama. New York: Oxford UP 1977. Print. Schwyzer, Philip. Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Print. Shakespeare, William. Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI). The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard, Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. 326–97. Print. ———. Richard III. Ed. Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square, 1996. Print. ———. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. The Norton Shakespeare. Eds. Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard, Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. 516–600. Print. King Richard III. Ed. Janis Lull. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Shariatmadari, David. “Are they Richard III’s remains?” The Guardian 30 Mar. 2014. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. . Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. Print. Slotkin, Joel Elliot. “Honeyed Toads: Sinister Aesthetics in Shakespeare’s Richard III.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7.1 (2007): 5–32. Print. Stone, Deborah A. The Disabled State: Health, Society, and Policy. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984. Print. Torrey, Michael. “‘The Plain Devil and Dissembling Looks’: Ambivalent Physiognomy and Shakespeare’s Richard III.” English Literary Renaissance 30.2 (2000): 123–53. Print. Traub, Valerie. “The Nature of Norms in Early Modern England: Anatomy, Cartography, King Lear.” South Central Review 26.1–2 (2009): 42–81. Print. Turner, David M., and Kevin Stagg. Social Histories of Disability and Deformity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

40 Allison P. Hobgood van den Berg, Sara. “Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ed. A. Hobgood and D. H. Wood. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 23–42. Print. Weir, Alison. The Princes in the Tower. New York: Ballantine, 1994. Print. “What the bones can and can’t tell us.” University of Leicester. Web. Accessed 14 May 2014. . Wheatley, Edward. Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. Print. Williams, Katherine Schaap. “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). Web. Accessed 30 Aug. 2014. . ———. “Performing Disability and Theorizing Deformity.” English Studies 94.7 (2013): 757–72. Print. Winston, Jessica. “Richard III’s Teeth.” Rendezvous: Journal of Arts and Letters 36.2 (2002): 43–46. Print. Wood, David Houston, and Allison Hobgood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. Print. Woollasten, Victoria. “Skeleton Discovered Under Car Park May NOT Be Richard III.” Daily Mail Online 27 Mar. 2014. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. .

3

A “Grievous Burthen” Richard III and The Legacy of Monstrous Birth Geoffrey A. Johns

Although Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard III is widely recognized by scholars as representing an emerging early modern notion of “disability,” a palpable contention has arisen recently as to exactly how this conception functions within the first tetralogy (Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, ca. 1591; 2 Henry VI, ca. 1590–91; 3 Henry VI, ca. 1591, and Richard III, 1591–92, in which Richard is present in all but the first), and, moreover, precisely what his disability may mean within the context of disability studies. In attempting to define the parameters of Richard’s physical abnormality, for example, Katherine Schaap Williams’s “Enabling Richard” carefully examines the rhetoric of “negative associations” attributed to his physical body, seeking to articulate a theory of Richard’s disability that is distinct from that of deformity, and that she wishes to distinguish from “a pre-modern notion of disability that construes bodily deformity as the visible sign of moral evil” in order to broaden the scope of her analysis. Allison Hobgood’s essay in Chapter Two of this volume seeks to historicize the rhetoric of Richard’s physical disability within the context of an emerging medical discourse concerning “monsters,” thus positing a theory of disability filtered through a lens of “scientific rationalism” that viewed abnormality as something that called for cure and normalization. These and similar studies offer important insights into conceptions of bodily alterity that arise from Shakespeare’s characterization of the last Plantagenet king. They provide fruitful opportunities to meditate upon the terminology and stakes of disability studies. Notably, however, no one so far has been able to fully reconcile a disability studies reading of Shakespeare’s Richard with the process of signification by which the import of his amorphous body might be conveyed, logistically and otherwise, to a live playhouse audience, given the inconsistent descriptions of his malformed body and character that are given—by Richard and by others—at various points throughout the tetralogy. Curiously, the means and the ends to which Richard’s body is invoked in the Henry VI plays differ notably from the purposes of bodily references in Richard III, particularly in regard to how Richard himself describes it, as well as how the other characters interpret—or refuse to interpret—what it can be understood to reveal. Richard most directly sketches out his bodily alterity

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about halfway through 3 Henry VI, describing an arm shrunken up “like a withered shrub,” as well as “an envious mountain” heaped on his back, and, finally, legs shaped “of an unequal size” (3.2.156–59).1 In the opening of Richard III, by contrast, such specific references to literal deformities have been replaced by a catalog of disability—specifically, of incapacity: he is, he claims, “not shaped for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass”; “rudely stamped, and want[ing] love’s majesty”; “curtailed of […] fair proportion, / Cheated of feature”; “Deformed, unfinished”; and “scarce half made up” (1.1.14–16, 18–21). The play often invokes deformity, but, as Marcela Kostihová has noted, Richard III is “surprisingly ambiguous in describing the physical nature of Richard’s deformity”; instead, it seems utterly to refuse to give its eponymous character any reliable language with which to characterize the nature of his much-referenced physical alterity. As Kostihová remarks, this ambiguity in the play is “particularly perplexing considering that the text is destined for staging” in a primarily visual medium (136). It seems clear, therefore, that some form of embedded but nonetheless recognizable signification must be present within the play to contextualize the apparent ambiguities in both Richard’s appearance and physical (in)capacity. In this chapter, I wish to forward an argument for the physical ambiguity of Shakespeare’s Richard as an integral part of his function both within the historical framework of the first tetralogy and the popular discourse of abnormal or “monstrous” births with which his original London audiences would have been quite familiar. Considered in this way, the refusal of Richard III to align with any single interpretation of Richard’s abnormal body and subsequent physical limitations hearkens directly from early modern debates on the significance of literal monstrous births as portents that might foretell the future or otherwise offer dire warnings about events in the recent past. The interpretation, noted by Williams, that aligns Richard’s malformed body with the perception of a reciprocally evil character or otherwise morally deficient mind is an important mainstay of scholarly attention paid to this play that comes directly out of textual evidence—for example, Richard’s confirmation of his having being prodigiously born with teeth, “which plainly signified / That I should snarl and bite and play the dog” (3H6 5.6.76–77). Present even within these lines, however, lurks a persistent shadow of ambiguity between discernable physical abnormality and its interpretation as a motivation for behavior. Further, given that the supposed limitations that set Richard apart from his “fair proportioned” peers consistently fail to impede him from accomplishing his designs, the play seems to throw into doubt its own discourse of disability, as well as the notion, developed and supported throughout the Henry VI plays, that physical deformity can reliably indicate inward turmoil. In the end, Richard’s textual instability seems entirely the point. It constitutes a performative lacuna designed to stoke the imaginations of the play’s original audience members to supply their own narratives

A “Grievous Burthen” 43 of bodily signification, only to have such meaningful narratives explicitly undermined as the plot unfolds. Richard’s purported disabilities, moreover, are consistently proven to offer him advantages over his peers who are, by contrast, ensnared by their reliance upon the supposed transparency of meaning and their inability to anticipate, perceive, or contend with that which is not outwardly explicit. Richard’s great ability then, is his aptitude for deflection and guile, an ability uniquely afforded to him by his physical difference—a trait that Hobgood in the previous chapter has termed his “invisibility”—as well as the seemingly infinite mutability of both his body and his character. The figure of Richard on the Elizabethan stage, finally, is a sort of persistent but elusive signifier that simultaneously arouses and evades the impulse of the spectator to classify and to interpret. An endless deferral of conflicting meaning, Richard very literally embodies the contentious, bloody history of England’s Wars of the Roses, as well as the medical and popular discourses of community morality and abnormal physiology that was contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s career. As such, an examination of the ways in which this important figure of early modern drama operates both within and outside of a clearly definable framework of “healthy” or otherwise recognizable criteria of the able-bodied is crucial to fully contextualizing modern notions of ability and deviations from bodily normalcy.

PROPHECY AND THE “NATURE” OF MONSTROUS BIRTH First staged over a century after the House of Tudor was founded, Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard as an immoral, murderous, and hunchbacked usurper, although only one example from a tradition of such portrayals, is one of the most popular and enduring examples of disability from the English Renaissance. Such depictions include Thomas More’s The History of King Richard the Third (started ca. 1513, published 1557), whose description of Richard is copied nearly verbatim in the chronicles of Richard Grafton (his continuation of John Hardyng’s Chronycle, 1543), Edward Hall (The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, 1548), and finally, Raphael Holinshed (Chronicles, 1577 and 1587). Other chronicles depicting Richard as the product of an abnormal birth include those of John Rous (Historia Regum Angliae, 1492, mss.) and Polydore Vergil (Anglica Historia, completed in 1513, published 1534). Less familiar, however, are the ways in which the specific representations of Richard’s physical alterity and associated disposition align themselves with the circumstances and discourse of “prodigious” or “monstrous” birth as understood in contemporaneous popular print media. This literary interpolation of birth deformity and prodigious monstrosity at such a crucial moment of national history explicitly links the popular conception of England’s national past with the anxious interpretive history of “monsters,” both in the physical sense of

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deformed bodies and that of a moral condition marked by hypocrisy and inward corruption with which such figures had long been associated. As such, the tetralogy implicitly attributes Richard’s birth deformities to divine retribution for his rebellious father’s sins, which are made physically manifest upon birth. Such explanations for monstrous births appeared frequently in the medical discourse of Shakespeare’s age, as described in treatises such as the humanist writer Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses (1561) and Des Monstres et Prodiges (1575) of the physician Ambroise Paré. Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses, or “prodigious stories,” was perhaps the most influential of the continental “wonder books” in England. Its connection to England’s growing popular fascination with monstrous births was explicit, since the author dedicated and hand delivered the first edition to Queen Elizabeth I as an illuminated manuscript in 1560, a full year before a printed edition appeared in Paris.2 In his preface to the print edition, dedicated to Jean de Rieux and translated by Edward Fenton as Certain Secret Wonders in 1569, Boaistuau acknowledges the popular perception of these creatures as seeming “to be brought into the world as wel in contempt of nature, as to the perpetuall infamie and grief of their parents” (A4v) and, further, that “fathers and mothers bring forth these abhominations, as a horrour of their sinne” (C4v). Such sentiments appear in Shakespeare even as early as Richard’s first appearance in 2 Henry VI, when Lord Clifford derisively regards Richard and his brother Edward, who have accompanied their father into the field, as “a brood of traitors” (5.1.137), and Richard specifically as a “heap of wrath, [a] foul indigested lump, / As crooked in thy manners as in thy shape!” (155–56). (Compare Prospero’s allegation in The Tempest that “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” is “as disproportioned in his manners / As in his shape” (5.1.278–79, 294–95), when he speaks of Caliban, another of Shakespeare’s characters who is endowed with an uncertain physical body that defies both classification and description.) In these initial moments of Richard’s presence on stage, Clifford explicitly links his mind with his body and implicitly attributes the shortcomings of both to his transgressive heritage as the offspring of a rebellious traitor. In this, the play reflects ways in which the physical manifestations of disability in cases of actual abnormal birth could function as signs by which a hidden meaning could be ascertained as to the inward or spiritual character of an individual (often one or both parents). As with those of the historical and literary Richards, readings of birth abnormalities often constituted retrospective explanations of or justifications for the motives and influences behind particular actions at the same time that they drew explicit moral conclusions evaluating human behavioral choices. Such is frequently the case in popular “monstrous” broadside print ephemera that were commonly sold—and sung—in London streets, as well as many of the explanations for birth deformities supplied by the more elite texts of both Boaistuau and Paré. Given the gravity of such claims,

A “Grievous Burthen” 45 published interpretations of monstrous births were always characterized as either needing or having been given a great deal of deliberation, which they would perform in their descriptive treatments of the deformities by considering many physical and non-physical contributing factors. Boaistuau, for example, offers as many as six separate possible causes for monstrous births; Paré, who was much more explicitly invested in the science behind such occurrences, expands this number to thirteen, with a particular emphasis on the disposition of the child in utero. Although these authors differed in background, education, and the ends to which their texts explicitly applied their knowledge, it is significant that each characterized the import of monstrous birth in terms of intellectual and spiritual astonishment that is predicated upon first beholding and then humanistically meditating upon an interpretation of the malformed body as a means of obtaining a sort of real or spiritual curative that could lead the beholder to amend bad behavior and affirm their faith. Boaistuau most directly describes this significance in his preface: amongst all the thinges whiche maye be viewed vnder the coape of heauen, there is nothyng to be seeene, which more stirreth the spirite of man, whiche rauisheth more his senses, whiche doth more amaze hym, or ingendreth a greater terror or admiration in al creatures, than the mo[n]sters, wonders and abhominations, wherein we see the workes of Nature, not only turned arsiuersie, misseshapen and deformed, but (which is more) they do for the most part discouer vnto vs the secret iudgeme[n]t and scourge of the ire of God, by the things that they present, which maketh vs to feeele his maruellous iustice so sharpe, that we be constrained to enter into oure selues, to knocke with the hammer of our conscience, to examin our offe[n]ces, and haue in horrour our misdeedes. (A4) Attempting to apply a more explicitly medical discourse in his own project, Paré is generally less comfortable with indeterminacy, and seeks to distinguish in his treatise between “monsters”—whose causes he could identify—and “marvels”—those things “which happen completely against Nature” (3), and that he regarded as arising “from the pure will of God, to warn us of the misfortunes with which we are threatened, of some great disorder, and also that the ordinary course of Nature seemed to be twisted in producing such unfortunate offspring” (6). Paré’s reluctance does not, however, forestall his occasionally waxing rhapsodic in a vein similar to Boaistuau’s, especially when he finds himself at a loss to attribute a satisfactory physical cause to an example he recounts. “There are divine things,” he concludes after describing one such case, “hidden, and to be wondered at, in monsters—principally in those that occur completely against nature; for in those, philosophical principles are at a want, so that one cannot give any definite opinion in their case” (73). For both Boaistuau and Paré, finally,

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monsters seem to have provoked a great fascination in their ability not only to arrest attention and demand deciphering but also to expose the limits of human knowledge, emotion, and experience. These texts, even in their attempt to provide a written record of the knowledge and experience of Western culture in the examination of monsters, stand as testimony to that which they must acknowledge can never be known or understood regarding the divine and natural order of the universe. What is perhaps most significant about the modes of interpretive discourse championed by authors like Boaistuau and Paré, both for the purposes of clarifying the monstrous significance of Shakespeare’s Richard III and elaborating upon the body of disability studies scholarship, is the tendency in these accounts to regard abnormal physicality as an embodied ellipsis—a deferral of immediate signification that resists attribution of singular meaning during the first moment of encounter. When adapted for the stage, it is this very sense of interpretive indeterminacy that gives Richard his seeming “invisibility” within the tetralogy, particularly Richard III, and allows him to so masterfully manipulate the rhetoric and even the physical attributes of his own disabled body. There is also a long history, predating printed records, that regarded monstrous births as one of a variety of circumstances that presages future events, as is suggested by the etymological tie of the English word monster to the Latin noun monstrum: “an unnatural thing or event regarded as an omen” (Oxford Latin Dictionary [OLD]). In its original association with omens and their role in forecasting future events, the monster, as Jean Céard notes, “was originally a term belonging to the vocabulary of divination,” closely linked to the concepts of the prodigy, the wonder, and the portent (prodigium, ostentum, and portentum, respectively; 182). As such, it makes sense that the development of discourse surrounding the monster has always been one of tracing deferred meanings and investigating physical signs that point off into an unknown future or backward into an unexamined past. Another sense of the monstrous comes from the verbal form monstrare, contributing a number of related meanings to the modern concept of the monster as one whose function is “to point out” and “to show by example,” as well as to teach, reveal, indicate or betray (i.e., against one’s intentions), or to give directions. This sense in turn is often related to a third term, the verb monere, meaning “to ... advise, recommend, warn” (OLD). Although not exclusively so, it is this conception of the monster as both a “showing” and a “warning” that seems to have been the predominant interpretive mode for writers of English broadside print accounts of monstrous births that seem to have influenced both the physical descriptions and characterizations of Richard. Here, the appearance of the monster enfolds a wider array of unknowns into its possible import: what is at stake, in other words, is no longer simply a question of what a “monstrous” child’s disabilities show and how, but also whom they may address, as well as for what purpose. The desperate final speech of Shakespeare’s Henry VI stages one such retrospective prophecy, and the play’s original Tudor audiences would easily

A “Grievous Burthen” 47 have recognized it as part of a familiar historical narrative. Among other instances throughout the tetralogy, Henry’s final speech repeatedly invokes Richard’s malformed body as a site for the interpretation of retrospective prophetical messages, and identifies him as a harbinger of untold death and calamity to England. “And thus I prophesy,” he begins, “many a thousand / […] Shall rue the hour that ever thou wast born”: The owl shrieked at thy birth—an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howled, and hideous tempests shook down trees; The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top; And chatt’ring pies in dismal discords sung. Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope— To wit, an indigested and deformèd lump, Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born, To signify thou cam’st to bite the world. (3H6 5.6.37, 43–54) The doom of which Henry speaks, of course, is the continuation of the political chaos of rebellion and civil war realized in England by the Wars of the Roses. It is this state of disorder and corrupted morality that Shakespeare epitomizes in his vision of Richard, whose reciprocally deformed body and mind are both the products of and the signposts by which the turmoil and rancor of a corrupt and divided nation are expressed. Richard poses, as the prophecy suggests, a hidden, inward malice and self-interest that are detrimental to both the health and prosperity of the kingdom and to Richard’s willingness—and perhaps even his ability—to act in its interest. The history of interpreting birth deformities as omens or prodigies that indicate conflict or discord in the natural order may be traced to Aristotle, whose Physics describes “monstrosities” as “failures in the purposive effort [of nature]” to conform to or “reach a determinate end.” Such failure, Aristotle asserts, “must have arisen through the corruption” of what he calls “the seed” (2.8 par. 5). As such, the expected similitude of the offspring to its progenitor is essential to the classical definition of the monstrous; deviation from the accepted norm was the basis of defining physical monstrosity. Shakespeare invokes this particular mode of interpretation in Henry’s description of Richard as a defect of the “fruit” in contrast to the “goodly tree” from which it sprung. Nevertheless, Aristotle notes that, even in its apparent failure, “nature is […] a cause that operates for a purpose” (par. 11). He thus rejects the notion that monstrous births could be truly unnatural. That Aristotle reads the appearance of monsters simultaneously as manifestations of an order and a disorder in the machinations and designs of nature is an important and seemingly contradictory aspect of the scientific discourse that developed around monsters in Renaissance debates, as noted by

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Céard. Both systems of interpretation, as he claims, are “averse to the idea that any effect whatever can in fact be against nature” (187). This seems most apparent in Aristotle’s focus on the role of corruption in the process of birth and reproduction, which works to define monsters as deviations, albeit rare ones, that have natural, physical causes. The significance of such discourse, for those seeking a theological or metaphysical rationale for these phenomena, is a connection between classical and early modern notions of “natural” generation that insists upon a particular significance for each of the monster’s deformities as an indication of present corruption—that is, a faulty and perhaps an initially invisible or inward cause or quality which, once made manifest, must be decoded in order to uncover its origin. Like Richard himself, monsters, for Aristotle, are an embodiment of something that initially seems to be paradoxical: they are the purposeful products of a corruption that has occurred in the usual course of nature—but even in this, they are purposive effects, rather than mere accidents or aberrations, that have been wrought by nature to fulfill certain ends. Henry’s verbal attack on Richard in his final speech demonstrates the variety of ways in which Tudor attitudes about Richard’s bodily deformities and corresponding moral character were interrelated. Both are frequently described as products of an imbalance in the natural order whose cause had to be puzzled out through reading and interpreting prophetic messages encoded in his behavior and appearance. Richard himself confirms the details rehearsed in Henry’s prophecy immediately following his murder: “since the heavens have shaped my body so,” he says in mock-prayer, “Let hell make crooked my mind to answer it” (3H6 5.6.78–79). Significantly, however, the relationship Richard describes between his body and mind is that of cause and effect rather than the reciprocity suggested in Henry’s prophecy. In other words, Richard suggests that “a crooked mind” is a consequence, rather than a concomitant feature, of his physical alterity and, apparently, of the way he is regarded by others because of it. Francis Bacon evinces a similar attitude in his essay “Of Deformity” (1625) when he describes “[d]eformed persons” as “commonly euen with Nature: For as Nature hath done ill by them; So doe they by Nature: Being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of Naturall Affection; And so they haue their Reuenge of Nature” (2K3v). Both cases reveal an attitude that anticipates the “natural” disposition or affect of a person marked with deformity to be malcontented, rapacious, and pitiless. The relationship between such concerns and the question of Richard’s ability is, however, much more difficult to distinguish; it is ultimately unclear whether the treasonous goals he asserts in the opening to Richard III, and the wicked deeds he performs to achieve them, are motivated out of an inability or else simply an indisposition to conform to not just the outward appearance of others, but their actions and emotions. As quoted above, for instance, Richard claims to be “not shaped for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass” (1.1.14–15), and to “want love’s majesty” (16). He further describes himself as “curtailed” (18), “cheated” (19), “unfinished” (20), “scarce half made up” (21), etc., all of which, as Williams

A “Grievous Burthen” 49 has noted, are negative associations that denote deficiency from the norm, but they are also curiously opposed to the superfluity—that is, of teeth and excessive labor pains—described in Henry’s account of his birth. Because of his deficiencies, he claims “I cannot prove a lover” (28), but proves in the very next scene to be highly adept at wooing Lady Anne, even in the height of her grief and hatred. At length, Richard’s seemingly inconsistent characterization of his own behavior and motivations, whether read as deliberate or compulsive, epitomizes the complex early modern associations between bodily autonomy, community morality, and the metaphor of a reciprocally healthy body and mind. Later in Richard III, Richard is accosted by a second verbal attack—this time, from his mother, the Duchess of York—that resembles Henry’s in its scope of prophecy and tribulation. Notably, however, it specifically expands upon the circumstances to which he alludes surrounding Richard’s unhappy birth, most especially the unusually intense torment and agony of her labor pains that, as the duchess ominously suggests, have never ended: A grievous burden was thy birth to me; Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy; Thy schooldays frightful, desp’rate, wild, and furious; Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous; Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly, bloody: More mild, but yet more harmful; kind in hatred. (4.4.168–73) Whereas both this and Henry’s speeches connect the pain of labor to the emotional distress and grief Richard would come to cause during the course of his life, the duchess’s description embeds the more intimate suggestion of an increasingly sinister malice she has witnessed hidden beneath a veneer of “mild” behavior. As Richard has grown and matured, she seems to suggest, the legibility of his motives and the nature of his character have been increasingly obscured, a development that emphasizes both the urgency and the “burden” of correctly reading and interpreting those motives and ambitions that he conceals from view. The duchess’s comments perhaps most strikingly resonate with Richard’s characterization of himself as being without familial affection. Here, the duchess describes her son as a pitiless and unlovable fiend for whom she never felt any motherly esteem or affection, and who she claims “cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell” (167). The duchess’s characterization of herself as unable both to love and to take any happiness in her child implicitly identifies a corresponding deficiency in Richard’s character that, in turn, constitutes its own retroactive prophecy to explain the ease with which he is able to betray and kill his nephews and brother. Through the prophetic language deployed in these speeches by Henry and the duchess, the tetralogy posits a complex correlation among the turmoil of Richard’s birth and childhood, his visible bodily deformities and resulting disabilities, and the treacherous and cruel character that he manifests as an adult behind a mask of “mild” comportment.

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MONSTROUS SPECTACLES AND MARVELING EYES The rest of this chapter engages more substantively with the popular discourse of monstrous births present in the extant sixteenth-century broadsides that, I argue, are representative of a tradition of monstrous signification and interpretation that Shakespeare’s Richard III specifically invokes, although the prints themselves are rarely given extensive scholarly attention. The readings of these materials that do occasionally surface frequently use the broadsides as examples of pre-modern superstition, touchstones against which a narrative of medical and empirical “progress” can be measured. Given this tradition, as well as the accounts’ own explicit interpretations of the link between specific sins and the manifestations of deformity, it is understandable why such scholars as Katherine Schaap Williams and A.W. Bates attempt to steer their analysis away from drawing too-pat conclusions about the relationships among deformed or disabled bodies, the notion of evil, or the enactment of sinful behavior. It is my hope, however, that disability studies can reclaim the moral and spiritual dimension of monstrous birth accounts as a productive alternative vector by which the definitions of “disability” can be responsibly expanded both within Renaissance and modern contexts. Such analysis is uniquely poised to offer valuable insight into the ways by which communities both past and present deploy the rhetoric of literal and metaphorical physical alterity according to predetermined moral codes of behavior in order to produce and sustain themselves. Crucial to the moral and social import of Shakespeare’s Richard as a specific visual representation of both deformity and immorality on stage are the visual and perceptual relationships between his physical birth defects and the supposed ethical or moral deficiencies associated generally with human vice and moral corruption. Moreover, these associations are particularly significant in the case of monstrous births because the transgressive desires or actions with which they are identified are either hidden from view or inappropriately tolerated by the society in which the birth occurs. As was the case in popular print accounts of monstrous births, it seems clear that the spectacle of deformity taxed its audience with an interpretive imperative, regardless of what that interpretation might be. As historian David Cressy has noted, “Monstrous births might mean many things, but they could not be allowed to mean nothing” (36), a claim averred by the variety of broadsides and pamphlets that offer up specific interpretations of what truths any given monster might reveal or what it had to teach. Although many early accounts of such births include the circumstances of the monster’s parentage and consanguinity, these accounts tend to perform their analyses with a much wider interpretive scope than simple analogy between deformity and immorality or vice. In fact, as A.W. Bates has suggested, the intended targets for the moralizing “lessons” in such accounts were not, in fact, the sinner parents of the deformed child, but rather, the society that fostered the monster and who must also bear responsibility

A “Grievous Burthen” 51 for it (50). Further, the rhetorical aim of such accounts was to “[exhort] the reader to keep societal norms by showing him [through example] that the human and natural laws were interrelated” (16). In other words, this popular genre of literature hailed subjects as members of a community governed by explicit and implicit moral norms and values, and required the simultaneous reading and diagnosis of the literal and metaphorical relationships between the physical human plane and one that lies beyond: natural, divine, or both. The earliest of the extant broadsides in English depicting a monstrous human birth is the 1552 Broadside on Conjoined Twins Born in Middleton Stoney that is extant in its most complete form in the British Museum, where it is catalogued under the descriptive title.

Figure 3.1 “Broadside on Conjoined Twins Born in Middleton Stoney, 1552.” © Trustees of the British Museum.

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The print survives in three fragments that contain prose and verse text, as well as two prominent woodcut illustrations that depict front and back views of horizontally opposed twins that are joined at a common waist.3 Although each half of the “double Chylde” is normally proportioned from the navel upwards, a number of deformities are visible at the waist, including three legs that grow out from the body at odd angles—two of which, the prose description attests, are otherwise “of good and parfit shape & fashion,” while another is deformed, “with .ii. feete, hauing but .ix. toes,” wrapping asymmetrically along the top of the leftmost child’s body in both images. Despite the fact that a clear intention behind the account of these twins is an effort to understand and index their abnormalities, the broadside seems to resist its own catalog, depicting in the illustration of the monstrous leg a physical instability that defies the print’s capacity to fix its meaning—a feature that is similar to the ways in which Shakespeare’s Richard defies the conventions of stage representation in the depiction of his own deformities. In effect, the identical positioning of this leg in the two woodcuts, despite the shift in perspective that the rest of the child’s form undergoes (that is, from “front” to “back” views), renders it all the more monstrous, as if to suggest the mutability of both its physical properties and what they might signify. In both narratives, deformity actively defies the parameters of the media that tries to present and contain it; the implication that it may be unrepresentable by conventional means is, in the end, perhaps a literary/artistic representation of the limitations of human knowledge. These earliest popular monstrous birth broadside accounts constitute an early form of the broadside ballad—a literary form that Claude Simpson has called “an urban variety of subliterary expression” (x). Their potential influence and appeal was considerable given that literally any passersby, irrespective of their ability to read the words of the text, could become absorbed into the narrative and become a consumer of print, simply by virtue of occupying the same street as the bookseller, hearing the ballad verses recited or sung, or glancing at the woodcut illustrations exhibited on the page. The popularity and influence of such ephemeral print genres, as Tessa Watt’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety has shown, can to a great extent be attributed to their combination of printed text with nonliterate media forms such as pictographic elements and familiar tunes (7). While the cost effectiveness of the single-sheet broadside ballad no doubt contributed substantially to its popularity given the more prohibitive expense of bound books, it was the unique combination of its multiple consumer interfaces—the tune, the verse, the woodcut illustrations—that, as Watt explains, “appeal[ed] to those on the fringes of literacy” (5).4 These elements supplied the genre with a unique ability to bridge the literacy and—to some extent—class barriers that limited the accessibility and wide appeal of other printed materials, even those that could also be cheaply purchased. As such, these accounts of monstrous births are significant within print history as a truly popular

A “Grievous Burthen” 53 literature that labored to arrest the attention of spectators at linguistic and non-linguistic registers of comprehension and direct the gaze through initial astonishment into a process of recognizing, meditating upon, and interpreting bodily alterity. As is typical in broadsides of this type, the content of the print’s verse parts is quite distinct from the delivery of factual description provided by the prose text, offering instead a number of interpretive claims and moral warnings that the birth of these children may reveal. The first of these parts consists, remarkably, of two Latin quatrains that call attention to the teaching and warning functions that are foundational to the discourse surrounding monstrous bodies as portents. Although the Latin verses are imperfect, their presence in the text is singular among the other extant sixteenth-century monstrous birth broadsides of England, constituting a specific appeal that may target a more educated audience than is usually assumed to have consumed such materials (or, alternatively, the pretense of one). The verses, however, are not merely ornamental; whether composed specifically for this account or else copied from an existing source, they seem to specifically hail their audience as one drawn together by the communal experience of encountering a printed “sheet,” presumably from a bookseller or hawker: Each of you who bends marvelling eyes on this sheet, Shake off the fearful burden of an astonished mind: This is the divine power of high-sounding Jove Whose hand brandishes this frightening rod at you. You who are not a monster in body, do not become so in spirit, Nor let the mind be contaminated with knowledge that should be feared. Learn well that you may transcend this worldly life by fleeing monstrous things; And direct your paths with a watchful mind.5

[1]

[2]

Especially striking in this verse is the manner in which it hails its audience as a small, impromptu community whose members are drawn together through the mutual experience of their strong reaction to the “fearful burden” of monstrous spectacle, even at the same moment that it suggests such unabated astonishment may distract the beholder from the grave message the child embodies (1.1–2). Coincident with this message is the implication of correction and punishment as part of the purpose of the child’s appearance, as is suggested with reference to the “rod,” a perennial metaphor of discipline and education, particularly that of young children (1.3–4). In the end, this recalls both the knowledge—and, by extension, the practice—of sin made possible to mankind in Eden after first tasting from the forbidden tree, as well as the postlapsarian condition of humanity besought by physical and worldly temptations that jeopardize the soul. As such, the rhetoric of these verses invokes the seemingly contradictory reactions of astonishment

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and careful deliberation without privileging one over the other—both serve necessary functions in realizing the final message the child may impart to the beholder. The English verse, consisting of three quatrains, more pointedly interprets the relationship invoked in the final Latin verses between the monstrous body and the perceived condition of mankind’s deteriorated, abased spiritual state. Such as we be, such is this age Behold and you shall se. So far in vice, do men outrage That monsters they may be. Our bodies growe, al out of kinde Our shape is straunge to syght, So Sata[n] hath drawe[n] ma[n]’s mo[n]strous mynd From God, from truth and right. Wo[n]der no more, make straight your wai[s]e Stand fast and feare to fall, The Lorde hath sent vs in these dayes An Image for you all.

[1]

[2]

[3]

Significant here is the explicit collapse of the transgressive “vice” of humanity with the alarming physical alterity presented by the double child (1.3). The charge made in the verses against sinners is much more than just a comparison; sinners, the verse suggests, are not simply like monsters because of their unruly qualities and refusal to conform to expectation, they are monsters, hideously deformed invisibly and inwardly by their intransigent and unruly disregard of “God, […] truth and right” (2.4). The final quatrain both warns and reassures, insisting that the “image” embodied by the monster is not simply a sign of divine wrath but also a product of God’s mercy that anticipates the possibility of salvation for individuals who undertake to “make straight [their] ways” (3.4). The ultimate effect of the broadside’s twenty lines of verse is a powerful summoning of its audience’s attention that draws from both the arresting spectacle of gruesome deformity it illustrates and the fearful reaction it anticipates, attempting to lead spectators through a directed but nonetheless individual process of assessment and critique by beholding a deformed body. Further, by insisting that the natural reaction of fear one may experience upon seeing monsters is actually fear of God’s wrath, it supplies, more than simply a motive, the very means by which the spectator may diagnose and correct the moral failings encountered in his or her own life. Although only fragments of the tradition survive, extant monstrous birth broadsides such as the account of the Middleton Stoney birth of 1552 reveal a vibrant discourse of informed social commentary and engagement that addresses common fears and apprehensions intersecting nearly every

A “Grievous Burthen” 55 strata of English society. Even more than this, such print survivals reveal a complex system of signification and interpretation whose chief rhetorical function seems to have been to teach its audiences through example and entertainment the nature of their own subjectivity, and its role in their civic responsibilities to themselves as well as to their neighbors and countrymen. As was the case with the Elizabethan playhouses, the visual, performative, and aural aspects of such accounts could entice potential audience members across the seemingly impermeable barriers of class and literacy for a common, curative end. Especially important in monstrous birth accounts is the teaching function repeatedly employed to instruct audiences in how to read, interpret, and synthesize various kinds of “texts,” inciting them then to apply the lessons learned there to the amendment of their own lives and behavior. These prints thematize the potentially vexed relationship between these goals and the human faculty to conceal that which is inwardly felt or believed. This capacity for concealment, as the accounts suggest, carries with it positive associations when individuals are instructed in self-examination and reflection, but is otherwise potentially dangerous when used to manufacture a deceptive, false exterior that others must learn to penetrate in order to discern the truth. In this way, the accounts worked to enable spectators to learn something about themselves and their place within a Christian society as purveyors of good thoughts as well as good deeds. The popularity and ubiquity of monstrous birth ephemera throughout the sixteenth century is a key factor in the literary genealogy and cultural significance of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Although his most direct source— Thomas More’s History—was probably written at a time that predates any extant English monstrous birth ephemera, it contains a number of similar engagements with the discourse of monstrosity that these texts would take up in their metonymic and emblematic readings of deformed bodies as physical manifestations of transgressive inwardness.6 Shakespeare’s first tetralogy adopts More’s birth metaphor in order to depict Richard as the product of monstrous conception and delivery, thus investing his character with the familiar, polysemous, and sometimes contradictory meanings associated with contemporary accounts of such phenomena. The ubiquity and popularity of these accounts would ensure that their original audiences would have been familiar with the interpretive traditions invoked by Richard’s characterization and have been able both to recognize and to contend with the complex interpretive demands of the lessons offered by the play with regards to the individual culpability of specific “sinners,” as well as broader issues of social responsibility. Like the monsters of the broadside tradition, the literary Richard’s body is an amalgamation of signs that indicate specific messages about the presence of a divine power and displeasure with human behavior. Similar, too, are the ways in which Richard’s purportedly misshapen form, like those of the children described and illustrated in ephemeral print, is regarded as a sort of cultural litmus that

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indicates the presence of hypocrisy and sin hidden from and/or tolerated by the community in which it appears. Finally, that such an important measure of social corruption should initially seem so immutable and resistant to the attribution of fixed meaning begs further inquiry into the process of social signification such narratives depict. As such, Richard’s role in this national drama is to function as the self-proclaimed “formal Vice, Iniquity,” who willfully sows deceit and discord as becomes the bearer of a reciprocally deformed mind and body that unnaturally renders him an expert in “moraliz[ing] two meanings in one word” (R3 3.1.82–83).

NOTES 1. This and all subsequent Shakespearean quotations hail from The Norton Shakespeare. 2. Unfortunately, no modern edition of Boiaistuau’s work exists in English. Paré’s work, published in 1573, although not translated into English until 1575 as part of his collected works, is more familiar to modern scholars than Boaistuau’s, owing largely to Janis Pallister’s 1982 annotated English edition. 3. A previous owner of the broadside has seen fit to watercolor these images (Livingston 118). A full-color digital scan of the broadside may be viewed via the British Museum’s online image gallery at by searching the print’s registration number: 1928,0310.102. 4. Although no extant sixteenth-century monstrous birth broadside indicates a specific tune to which its verses could be sung (as was frequently the case in the broadside of the seventeenth century), the verses are always written in a format that could easily conform to contemporaneous popular music, such as heroic quatrains or the ubiquitous “eight and six” ballad meter employed in the present account. 5. The translation provided here is my own, somewhat liberal presentation of the rhetorical and poetic sense of the verses. It was completed with the invaluable assistance of Dr. M. Teresa Tavormina. 6. Logan estimates a date of circa 1513 for the composition of the History. As mentioned previously, it was first published, unattributed, after More’s death in Grafton’s 1543 continuation of Hardyng’s Chronicle, and again in the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, before appearing in the 1557 English edition of More’s English works (More lx–lxi).

WORKS CITED Aristotle. Physics. Trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random, 1941. Print. Bacon, Francis. The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban. London: Printed by Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625. STC 1148. EEBO. Web. Accessed 25 May 2014.

A “Grievous Burthen” 57 Bates, A. W. Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Print. Boaistuau, Pierre. Certain Secrete Wonders of Nature. 1566. Trans. Edward Fenton. London: Henry Bynneman, 1569. STC 3164.5. EEBO. Web. Accessed 22 May 2014. Broadside on Conjoined Twins Born in Middleton Stoney. London: John Day, 1552. The British Museum. Reg. AN118208001. Web. Accessed 22 May 2014. Céard, Jean. “The Crisis of the Science of Monsters.” Trans. Constance Spreen. Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance. Ed. Philippe Desan. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991. 181–205. Print. Cressy, David. Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Hobgood, Allison P. and David Houston Wood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. Print. Hobgood, Allison P. “Teeth Before Eyes: Impairment and Invisibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge. 23–40. Print. Kostihová, Marcela. “Richard Recast: Renaissance Disability in a Postmodern Culture.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ed. A. Hobgood and D. H. Wood. 136–49. Print. Livingston, Carole Rose, ed. British Broadside Ballads of the Sixteenth Century: A Catalogue of the Extant Sheets and an Essay. New York: Garland, 1991. Print. More, Thomas. The History of King Richard the Third. 1557. Ed. George Logan. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Print. Oxford Latin Dictionary. 8 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968. Print. Paré, Ambroise. On Monsters and Marvels. 1573–85. Ed. and Trans. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Simpson, Claude M. The British Broadside Ballad and its Music. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1966. Print. Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Williams, Katherine Schaap. “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009): n.pag. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. .

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Obsession/Rationality/Agency Autistic Shakespeare Sonya Freeman Loftis and Lisa Ulevich

To read literary character is to diagnose: we observe demeanor, interaction, reasoning; we measure idiosyncratic particulars against generic types so that we can evaluate a character in the historical and literary company he keeps. Yet the crucial task that we all face—and that we work to help our students face—is to define our evaluative criteria, to illuminate not the diagnosis for its own sake, but the beliefs and assumptions that lead us there. Thus, the diagnostic questions we pose—“Is Hamlet really mad?”—hold up a mirror to our own scrutinizing gaze as much as, in this case, to the melancholy prince. Facing this question, undergraduates will often conclude that “mad” is a nebulous, ableist, and pejorative term that is rather difficult to define. But in Spring 2014, when Sonya asked her students about Hamlet’s madness, she received a response that surprised her: in the ensuing debate, one student explained madness in a way that made his autistic professor acutely uncomfortable—offering a label that felt suddenly personal and giving a definition that brought Hamlet home. “Hamlet could be labeled ‘mad’ based on his obsessive nature and repetitive behaviors,” the student argued. Obsession and repetition, two qualities central to Hamlet’s story, are maligned by the modern Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and could be considered characteristics of autism.1 Hamlet’s obsessive nature clearly contributes to the play’s bloody finale and to his own death. Hamlet’s intense single-mindedness is also a characteristic that some modern audiences and readers might associate with the autism spectrum. (Persons with autism disagree over a preferred terminology: some argue that “having autism” implies that autism is a disease or defect, others claim the term “autistic” as a statement of identity, while still others prefer “person with autism” [Murray 23–24]. We use these various terms interchangeably here.) The diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder do not include “obsession,” but they do include “unusually intense” interests. In general, autistic interests tend to be narrow but deep, and while interests can change periodically throughout one’s life, “special interests” tend to become defining characteristics in a person’s character— thus, people on the spectrum sometimes seem “obsessive.” Psychologists use characteristics such as obsession and repetition as markers of mental difference for a variety of modern disorders. While it seems doubtful that

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any of Shakespeare’s characters meet the modern diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder, this does not mean that none of Shakespeare’s characters possess autistic traits. A variety of Shakespearean characters, particularly Hamlet and Coriolanus, could be said to have recognizable autistic tendencies. Exploring these characters through the lens of modern diagnostic practices illuminates changing historical conceptions regarding traits traditionally used as markers of cognitive difference. Specifically, modern discourse about autism provides an especially rich framework for examining such markers, as the neurodiversity movement growing within the autism community has created new discourses that de-pathologize these characteristics, reading character traits that have been historically devalued (such as “obsession” and “repetition”) as valuable, strong, and even aesthetically pleasing. When autistic traits appear in Shakespeare’s characters, they are either rigorously punished (leading to tragic downfall) or comically sanctioned (leading to the ridicule of the other characters). Shakespeare’s works thus prioritize and affirm neurotypical characteristics by consistently imagining autistic traits as weakness and moral failing. Shakespeare’s plays, as part of a canonized conception of what Western drama believes to constitute tragedy itself, form part of a larger cultural and historical discourse that affirms neurotypical characteristics and punishes autistic ones, reading traits such as “repetition” and “obsession” as markers of madness. AUTISM AS METHOD: THE UNRHETORICAL HAMLET The perception of all autistic people as inherently obsessive is a negative but culturally common stereotype, and while modern psychiatry has judged that the unusually intense pursuit of one’s goals may form part of a diagnosable mental disorder, the early modern characters around Prince Hamlet also judge his intense behavior to be decidedly unhealthy. Even before Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, those around him find his fixation on the past unnatural. His mother, knowing her tenacious son all too well, seems to fear that Hamlet’s mourning could continue indefinitely: “Do not for ever with thy vailèd lids / seek for thy noble father in the dust” (1.2.70–71; emphasis ours). Claudius describes Hamlet’s ongoing mourning for his father as “a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers” (1.2.102–04). Even without his assumed “antic disposition,” Hamlet’s behavior is already “unnatural” and “unreasonable”; specifically, his commitment to one course of action appears excessive. Claudius considers Hamlet’s intense and steadfast mourning as irreligious, stubborn, and even as an absence of understanding betraying a lack of intelligence: But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness, ‘tis unmanly grief.

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Hamlet’s inherently fixated nature only intensifies when he learns the cause of his father’s death. Hamlet makes his single-minded focus abundantly clear: Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records ………………………………. And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain. (1.5.92–104) While Hamlet is slow to deliver the demanded revenge, he is true in his promise to think of his father’s death to the exclusion of other activities. He quickly becomes “obsessed,” “extreme,” and “fixated...forgetful of everything else” (Vey-Miller and Miller 84; Green 168; Sedlmayr 38). Thus, Shakespeare presents an obsessive nature as one of Hamlet’s defining characteristics from the very beginning of the play, and the characters around him judge his obsession as unnatural and unhealthy. While modern audiences may rely on cultural stereotypes to read obsessive behavior as autistic, early modern audiences would be more likely to rely on cultural stereotypes to read obsessive behavior as melancholic. Some of the controversies and stereotypes surrounding modern discourses of mental disorder also prevailed in early modern conversations about humoral theory. Other characters attribute Hamlet’s actions and attitudes to a humoral imbalance, blaming his hang-up on an excess of black bile, a melancholy that feeds an obsessive, analytical nature. Claudius argues that Hamlet is less mad than melancholy: “There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood” (3.1.163–64). The critical history of Hamlet is riddled with suppositions about the Prince’s melancholy humor—and as critics have been quick to point out, Hamlet’s character fits a number of melancholy stereotypes: melancholics were believed to be introspective, given to depression, intense and obsessive, and more likely to see ghosts (Sedlmayr 35). But while an excess of black bile was believed to cause potential mental disability, it was also imagined to confer some strengths; melancholy individuals were also believed to be unusually intelligent and able to concentrate, and to be more likely to have prophetic wisdom or artistic abilities (Sedlmayr 42; Neely 13). In some ways, early modern stereotypes about melancholy people mirror the autistic savant stereotype so popular today. The autistic savant’s elevated skills in areas such as memory, math, and language acquisition evoke wonder and shock (Osteen 13). While the special skills of savantism create

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an “exotic” display, they also reassure majority audiences about the nature of autism itself, in that savantism provides what Stuart Murray describes as the “compensation cure,” the supposition that “these skills act to compensate for the disability with which they are associated” (Murray 209, 66). Thus, savants “overcome” disability through amazing mental achievements, as though a disability in one area is canceled out by achievements in another area. The image of the savant who overcompensates for disability through genius in a narrow field parallels the stereotype of the “supercrip” (the physically disabled individual who overcomes tragedy) of disability studies at large (Osteen 30). Known for his intelligence and keen memory—he recalls the passage describing Priam’s slaughter from a play he saw “not above once” (2.2.417)—Hamlet could be seen as a kind of melancholy savant. As Carol Thomas Neely explains, “the melancholy constitution creates its own ‘superior’ norms...melancholics are posed between illness and heroic achievement” (13). Certainly, the modern “compensation cure” stereotype that haunts the autism spectrum mirrors an early modern understanding of melancholy: one might view intelligence and concentration as “compensation” for depression and obsession. Overall, such stereotypes can dehumanize disabled people, setting up a false perception that certain aspects of identity or character must be overcome. Of course, any discussion of obsession (autistic, melancholic, or otherwise), raises issues regarding agency and rationality. Hamlet is no exception, as the protagonist’s autistic traits may lead audiences to question his ability to exercise agency and reason. Autistic people, like neurotypical people, display both agency and reason—but because autism supposedly compromises these attributes that are so frequently seen as central to “being human,” our society encourages people on the spectrum to imagine themselves as lesser than their neurotypical counterparts. In fact, Hamlet may show some of this internalized oppression. Believing himself a “melancholic” person partially controlled by his humors, he seems to perceive himself as lesser than or weaker than Horatio because of his melancholy/autistic traits. He says to his friend and confidant, blest are those Whose blood and judgement are so well co-mingled That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee. (3.2.61–67) Hamlet perceives Horatio as having a good balance of blood (passion or humor) and judgment. Unlike Hamlet, he is not controlled by one particular passion (or one particular obsession) and is therefore free from the ravages of both passion and fortune. Hamlet admires in Horatio the quality his

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society has told him that he himself lacks—humoral balance. As Lindsey Row-Heyveld explains, early moderns might have understood cognitive difference “humorally, as the corporeal result of ‘excess’ or ‘lack,’ both physical and moral” (78). Thus, Hamlet may view his own melancholic status as a physical excess (too much bile) resulting in a moral lack (the various mental impairments attributed to melancholy characters). A kind of biological determinism sets in, an interpretive looping in which one who is expected to be autistic/melancholic acts out a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Gerold Sedlmayr argues, Hamlet calls into question “the autonomy that any temperament...especially the melancholy one, can thus assume” (38–39). Discussing the carousal that he sees around him in Denmark, Hamlet interprets excessive drinking as a sign of humoral imbalance and imagines that men are biologically condemned to certain actions by such an imbalance: That for some vicious mole of nature in them— As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin, By the o’ergrowth of some complexion, Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, …………................. be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. (1.4.18.8–18.20) Because of their humors, the men are predisposed to excessive drink. According to Hamlet, this is a fault of “their birth” for which they are not responsible. Yet they are perceived as less reasonable then other men, since this humoral imbalance is capable of “breaking down the pales and forts of reason.” No matter how they may try to exercise their individual agency, society will “censure” them because of the “corruption” caused by their humors. Humoral theory imagines cognitive difference as embodied and biological, mirroring modern medicine’s search for a genetic cause of autism. As Neely notes, “Although Renaissance conceptions, representations, and treatments of madness seem at first impossibly distant and alien, our own debates about the condition often recapitulate or grow out of those earlier ones” (1). Mardy Phillippian explains, “Modern cognitive science...may be returning to an earlier, ancient notion of mind/body interinfluence and moving away from the sharp division postulated by Descartes” (156). Humor theory, like modern autistic culture, is concerned with the tension between cognitive and embodied difference and with the power of labels and stigma (Hamlet is expected to act a certain way because of his melancholy temperament). Current debates about the tension between “sign” and “symptom” in relation to autism and other mental disabilities run parallel to this discussion of humor and agency (Yergeau). Is deep interest (or obsession) a sign of agency and

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choice, or simply another symptom of disorder? As Hamlet praises Horatio’s ability to act (something that he has been made to feel, through his melancholy label, that he himself lacks) and opines the inability of other men to choose as freely, his explorations of such ideas suggest that current discourses about autism have an early modern counterpart in humoral theory. Throughout the play, the question of how much (or what kind of) reasonable agency Hamlet can exercise over his obsession becomes both theological and etiological: if audiences imagine a divine explanation for obsession, they might dehumanize people with autistic traits. In Shakespeare’s play, the protagonist’s obsessive exploration of Denmark’s past is at least partially explained by a supernatural spirit of dubious origins: The spirit that I have seen May be the devil ...and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy— As he is very potent with such spirits— Abuses me to damn me. (2.2.575–580) Hamlet imagines that the ghost may be an evil influence. Specifically, he imagines himself, because of his melancholy temperament, as particularly susceptible to the influence of such a spirit, and describes the ghost as especially “potent” for a melancholic person. In other words, Hamlet’s position as a melancholy supercrip has opened him up to a potentially dangerous encounter with the divine, his melancholy nature conferring both impairment and mystical power. (The stereotype of those with autism as being mystical or spiritual is, unfortunately, alive and well.) Although it has been frequently argued that the Renaissance marked an important turning point in the cultural construction of disability— moving society from a focus on family-centered care and a supernatural understanding of disability to a focus on institutionalization and the medical model of disability—scholars have increasingly commented on the over-simplification of such a model. For example, Allison Hobgood argues that “the early modern period witnessed neither an instantiation of new ‘modern’ ways of imagining disability nor a disavowal of old ‘premodern’ views but a far messier ‘working through’ of these variable perspectives.” In this case, Hamlet experiences a potentially disabling condition that makes him susceptible to supernatural influence—Hamlet’s impairment is simultaneously biological/scientific (via the humors) and mysteriously divine (via the ghost). The shared etymology of “obsession” and “possession” captures Hamlet’s liminal position between a medical and a spiritual understanding of disability. The word “obsess” once meant for an evil spirit “to control (a person) from without” (OED, s.v. “obsess”). While the ghost may not inhabit Hamlet’s melancholy body, some early modern playgoers might have feared that an outside force had taken over Hamlet’s melancholy

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mind. In short, the belief in obsession as a force that comes from without may contribute to the dehumanization and exclusion of people with autistic traits. Hamlet’s obsession/possession, whether inspired by inborn character traits or supernatural influence (or by some combination of the two), raises questions of rationality in conjunction with questions of theology, as early modern thinkers conflate what it means to be reasonable with what it means to be human. As Row-Heyveld notes, “Renaissance humanists, who associated reason with the divine...characterize[ed] the loss of reason as a break with God” (75). Hamlet judges his own ability to reason as poor (“for by my fay, I cannot reason”) shortly before contemplating reason in his famous speech on the “quintessence of dust”: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason” (2.2.258; 2.2.293–94). In this speech, the ability to reason is a key aspect of being human, an ability that Hamlet (and the characters around him) may imagine Hamlet as lacking. As Margaret Price points out, “Aristotle’s famous declaration that man is a rational animal gave rise to centuries of insistence that to be named mad was to lose one’s personhood.” Thus, early modern stereotypes regarding melancholy madness overlap modern stereotypes regarding the autism spectrum, as obsession and repetitive behavior can be falsely read as “unreasonable,” perhaps inviting the majority neurotypical audience to imagine those “without reason” as less than human. Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet plays into the stereotype of those on the spectrum as emotionally unexpressive while simultaneously demonstrating some difficulty with theory of mind and with reading facial expressions. Specifically, Hamlet blames himself and finds his emotional responses and actions to be lacking compared to the social norms, imagining his melancholy nature as deficit. Melanie Yergeau suggests that scientific hypotheses about Theory of Mind (ToM) can be especially dehumanizing for people on the spectrum, since some theories propose that people with autism do not understand that other people have minds, thoughts, and feelings, and that they are frequently unaware that those minds, thoughts, and feelings may work differently from their own. These supposed problems with empathy are intimately tied to larger questions of what it means to be human. “Theories about ToM not only deny autistic people agency; they call into question their very humanity,” writes Yergeau. For example, the mass media sometimes interpret autistic people’s problems with expressing empathy to mean that people with autism cannot feel love or form emotional bonds. Many autistics have argued that they do feel empathy, and dismiss medical constructions of ToM that they feel dehumanize autistics. Hamlet is always suspicious of reading the outside—he seems unable to trust his own (and therefore others’) ability to use theory of mind: “I know not ‘seems’... they are actions that a man might play” (1.2.76–84). He is strangely surprised (and particularly offended) to learn that Claudius’s facial expressions do not reflect his intent: “meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile,

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and be a villain” (1.5.108–09). Although he lives in the king’s household, he feels the need to set up a special circumstance to look for signs of Claudius’s guilt; the play-within-the-play lets Hamlet “observe his looks” (2.2.573). Hamlet hopes to probe Claudius’s expressions for evidence, but feeling suspicious about facial expressions—and knowing that they do not betray all (especially to an autistic audience)—he asks his neurotypical friend Horatio to help interpret: Give him heedful note, For I mine eyes will rivet to his face, And after, we will both our judgements join To censure of his seeming. (3.2.77–79) Indeed, the play’s general fascination with acting and facial expressions may be a sign that its protagonist is struggling to decode social cues. When Hamlet finds himself unable to act without facts and logic (he must establish more concrete proof of Claudius’s guilt), he also finds himself saddled with guilt for what he perceives as his own inappropriate emotional responses. He berates himself for the intensely single-minded and analytical approach that has led to a distinctly autistic inertia: “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.86–87). He is especially distraught when the player’s fake emotional response seems more effusive than his own natural one: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, .................................. Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms of his conceit? And all for nothing. For Hecuba! (2.2.528–35) Hamlet’s desire to display the “typical” emotional response that others expect of him resembles the frustration autistics may feel when their emotions are dismissed or ignored if they do not express them in conventional ways. Hamlet perceives the player’s display of false emotion as “monstrous,” and is angry that a “fiction” or “dream” of Hecuba delivers the neurotypical social cues (“tears,” a “broken voice”) that communicate emotion to others. Hamlet feels that he lacks this skill, and that he leaves others unaware of his emotions through his lack of expression and action: Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing. (2.2.543–546)

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Literally, the verbose Hamlet has said plenty. But with his body and expressions, he has not yet delivered his father’s fatal message. When he compares himself to the neurotypical player, Hamlet feels unable to express himself and to accomplish his ends. Overall, Hamlet demonstrates a sense of self-blame for his inability to interpret or communicate with the people around him. One of Hamlet’s most distinctive traits, and one that allows the other inhabitants of Elsinore to ignore and dehumanize him, is an unusual use of language. Specifically, Hamlet’s language is verbose, allusive, repetitive, and non-reciprocal—all characteristics stereotypically associated with a distinctively autistic communication style. Although Hamlet is full of “words, words, words,” the other characters in the play do not understand the majority of what he says (2.2.192; Findlay 194). Claudius and Guildenstern both complain about his seeming non sequiturs: “I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine,” and “Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame, and start not so wildly from my affair” (3.2.87–88; 3.2.282–3). As Abigail Heiniger explains, “Hamlet’s speech consists of a disjointed series of seemingly unrelated ideas...in order to understand Hamlet, the audience is forced to infer the unspoken connection between Hamlet’s sporadic statements” (122). Marguerite VeyMiller and Ronald Miller agree: “While in his own mind he is constantly referring to the request of the Ghost and the evil in characters around him, others don’t know what Hamlet is talking about...his condition is exacerbated because he cannot share it” (84). Thus, Hamlet’s surplus of words actually inhibits communication. As Guildenstern points out, Hamlet is good at talking but not at conversation: he describes the Prince as “aloof” and says that he is “Niggard of question, but of our demands / Most free in his reply” (3.1.8; 3.1.13–14). In other words, Hamlet is stingy with question (here meaning “conversation”), although he will attempt to answer other people’s “demands” (questions put directly to him). Hamlet answers, but he does not initiate; he speaks, but he does not communicate—throughout the play, his words find no understanding listener, and he sends message after message that cannot be fully received. Hamlet’s speeches also make extensive use of repetition and allusion, two other characteristics common in autistic communication. Echolalia is sometimes more than the simple repetition of sounds, words, and phrases heard elsewhere—it can also be communication through pastiche: “O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!...Why—/ ‘One fair daughter, and no more / The which he loved passing well’” (2.2.385–90). Using bits of old song, proverbs, and other allusions, Hamlet makes points about the situation in Denmark; audiences can see that Hamlet’s echolalia has clear reason and meaning, even when the characters on stage cannot. But as with his other seeming non sequiturs, Hamlet’s use of pastiche is largely non reciprocal. As Price explains, one of the communication problems faced by people with mental disabilities is a matter of audience: “social integration is key to narrative ability,

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which would seem to foreclose the possibility of a mad rhetor, for what is madness but a radical disunity of perception from that held by those who share one’s social context?” If words are not understood, do they still have meaning? Or are they “but (read: only) wild and whirling?” Indeed, such questions are part of the larger cultural conversation regarding autism and self-expression, as it has frequently been suggested that autism (and other mental disabilities) resist rhetoric, narrative, and story-telling at large (Price). Unfortunately, misunderstood messages can be easy to ignore: “To lack rhetoricity is to lack all basic freedoms and rights, including the freedom to express ourselves and the right to be listened to...some rhetors— including the ‘severely mentally retarded and mentally ill’—are denied these basic freedoms and rights even by the most liberal measures” (Price). In the end, Hamlet’s autistic use of language proves to be only one more excuse for other characters to dismiss and dehumanize him.

WOUNDS AS SOCIAL METADATA: CORIOLANUS BOUND Absolute, single-minded, and, as his nemesis/double Aufidius understands, “Not to be other than one thing” (4.7.42), Coriolanus is inertia itself. Volumnia calls her son “too absolute” (3.2.40). Aufidius welcomes the exiled Coriolanus as “most absolute sir” (4.5.135).2 Throughout the play, Romans and Volscians alike acknowledge Coriolanus’s obstinacy. Shakespeare ultimately shows that his obsessive commitment to valor and meritocracy is not just the source of a tragic downfall, but evidence of susceptibility and weakness. Jarrett Walker refers to Coriolanus’s strongly held beliefs as “obsessions” (171), and the interpretation of Coriolanus as “unsociable” has a long critical history (Bligh 265). For all his refusals to budge on any point of Roman politicking, Coriolanus is a figure whose course becomes less and less his own the more stringently he insists on standing his ground. In this way, Shakespeare depicts the most characteristically autistic of his tendencies— adherence to his principles regardless of their conflict with normative social codes—as helplessness. Blood-soaked berserker on the battlefield though he may be, Coriolanus is throughout the play a misfit, incapacitated by his inability to accommodate the social expectations of neurotypical Rome. Coriolanus’s martial accomplishments are beyond dispute, but his obsession with battle and resulting heroic prowess does not save him from social judgment. The other Romans find Coriolanus’s social behavior enigmatic and constantly misinterpret him. The opening scene, which, like many others in the play, dramatizes evaluations of his temperament, shows that although his patriotism is not in question, Coriolanus himself is otherwise inscrutable. The citizens guess at his motives, which vary from pride (1.1.33) to the dutiful wish “to please his mother” (1.1.32). Brutus guesses that it is “Fame, at the which he aims” (1.1.254), and one citizen suggests no conscious motive at all: Coriolanus’s campaigning is the result of his constitution, “What he

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cannot help in his nature” (1.1.35). Characters remark on Coriolanus’s “nature” throughout the play, often suggesting in context that Coriolanus is helplessly subject to it. Brutus, having turned the people’s favor against Coriolanus, anticipates that “his nature is, [that] he [will] fall in rage / With their refusal” of the consulship (2.3.247–48). Aufidius links the consistency of Coriolanus’s behavior with his nature: He bears himself more proudlier, Even to my person, than I thought he would When first I did embrace him. Yet his nature In that’s no changeling. (4.7.8–11) The variety of the speculation and the denial of agency implicit in the notion that a deterministic “nature” governs Coriolanus’s action both suggest the incompatibilities between the different spheres of activity Coriolanus faces in the play—the battlefield and the streets of Rome. What moves him in the former is not necessarily comprehensible in the latter. No single motive seems obvious to the Romans, even for his activity in the sphere that best suits him, and before the first act ends, we find that Coriolanus’s actions are susceptible to active reinterpretation by the people around him. Summoning Coriolanus to the wars against the Volscians, a senator reminds him of an earlier promise to do so. His agreement, “Sir, it is, / And I am constant” (1.1.229–30), introduces the absolutism that becomes so destructive as the play unfolds, as well as the paradoxical vulnerability of this trait. As soon as Coriolanus departs, the tribunes rewrite his vow of constancy into proof of pride. Sicinius asks, “Was ever man so proud as is this Martius?” (1.1.243). Brutus replies, “He has no equal” (1.1.244), an evaluation of character that does not immediately make clear in what respect Coriolanus is peerless. Although Coriolanus’s motives are not plain to others, they will not hesitate to decide for themselves—and to their own advantage—how to read his character. If Coriolanus has no equal in pride, the trait is unjustifiable, contemptible. If he is peerless in accomplishment, his pride is justifiable. Brutus evidently has the former sense in mind, and later directs the citizens to see Coriolanus in that light. The instability of the character evaluation, however, illustrates how vulnerable Coriolanus’s identity is, how tied to social interpretation, and how detached from his own conviction of being “constant.” Because his inability to court the citizens politically becomes so central to his downfall, Coriolanus’s capacity to motivate subordinates on the battlefield is especially remarkable; he is a skilled commander. Yet his success in this respect demonstrates how dependent upon social context is his ability to communicate: he needs military hierarchy and the exigency of battle to make his communication with others effective. He enters battle cursing and indeed attacking not the enemy but the cowardice of the Roman soldiers (1.5.1–16), his rhetorical assault mimicking the catalogue of abuse he leveled at the citizens in his first speech, and characterized by the same kind

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of aggressive epithets (“you dissentious rogues,” “you curs” [1.1.153; 157]; “You shames of Rome! you herd of—,” “You souls of geese” [1.5.2; 5]). On the battlefield, although not in the streets of Rome, this assault fosters solidarity. Coriolanus’s ability to motivate is, in fact, a demand that his subordinates become like him: Follow. ……………………………. ... Now prove good seconds. ’Tis for the followers fortune widens [the gates], Not for the fliers. Mark me, and do the like. (1.5.13–16) Leadership by example is the only form of social communication in which he excels, and even in this situation, his agency is dubious. His extreme actions on the battlefield outwardly manifest his consistency; he does “what [he] can” (1.10.16) inevitably, and the motivating effect of his actions on others is secondary. He ably rallies a group of soldiers to face Aufidius—the men cheer and take him up into their arms—but his rallying cry is an incitement to imitation, a reinforcement of military and patriotic values his audience already holds, and an indirect summary of identity: If any such be here— As it were sin to doubt—that love this painting Wherein you see me smeared; if any fear Lesser for his person than an ill report; If any think brave death outweighs bad life, And that his country’s dearer to himself; Let him alone, or so many so minded, Wave thus, to express his disposition, And follow Martius. (1.7.67–75) In battle, other soldiers must imitate Coriolanus’s inexorable fierceness from tactical necessity as well as in order to fulfill military social hierarchy. This “disposition” in the other soldiers, however, is particular to the battlefield; their commander’s disposition is always this savage, honor-bound, and patriotic. Transplanted after victory into the streets where he must cajole for a position of leadership rather than simply exist as “the man I am” (4.5.55), Coriolanus finds himself obliged to follow a social script he is fundamentally unable to accommodate. The essential conflict in Rome is not about Coriolanus’s unwillingness to bear public praise or to show his wounds, but rather, that neurotypical social codes render his objections simply invalid. Coriolanus and his countrymen, in fact, value the same objectives in military accomplishments, but complete miscommunication sets him at odds with both the citizens and the patricians who orchestrate the public rituals of praise. The wars are a natural exercise of patriotism: Coriolanus affirms,

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“I have done as you have done, that’s what I can; induced, / As you have been, that’s for my country” (1.10.15–17). When Menenius and Volumnia tally Coriolanus’s wounds, Menenius remarks that “Every gash was an enemy’s grave” (2.1.141–42). Yet when Coriolanus insists that public airing of his deeds is an offense to him—the ceremonial flourish is a “bribe” (1.10.38) and hyperbolic “praises sauced with lies” (1.10.52)—Cominius asserts discursive priority: Too modest are you, ………………………………….. . ... By your patience, If ’gainst yourself you be incensed, we’ll put you, Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles, Then reason safely with you. (1.10.52–57) The label of modesty invalidates any subjective authority Coriolanus possesses, overwriting his objections as mere modesty (an affectation meant to be overborne), not reasons with substance. The very process of praise diminishes his agency, a point sharpened by Cominius’s amiable threat to shackle and reason with the angry soldier. Clearly, according to the neurotypical Roman view, Coriolanus is not demonstrating reason. The arguments he does put forth, that praise for the performance of duty is superfluous and suggests some impurity of motive, are statements of principle that he will not forgo but that remain incoherent to the society around him. The public ceremony of speaking to the people, such an apparently essential process of negotiating social relationships, is a mere irrelevance to Coriolanus, who asks Menenius to “o’erleap that custom” and “pass this doing” (2.2.133; 136). But Menenius’s response shows unequivocally that Coriolanus must bend, and indeed, reshape himself to accommodate the demands of ritual: “Pray you, go fit you to the custom and / Take to you, as your predecessors have, / Your honor with your form” (2.2.139–41). Menenius presses his friend through both precedent (“Have you not known / The worthiest men have done’t?” [2.3.43–44]) and the suggestion of social exclusion implicit in refusing to do as others have done. According to Menenius, to fit oneself to normative custom is a matter of little effort, an easy role to assume—and the formula “pray you” notwithstanding, Menenius’s statement is a directive, not a request. The only concession Coriolanus is able to make is couched in the discourse of acting, a model for social interaction he finds not only repellent in its insincerity but one he cannot sustain. As Pascale Drouet notes, “it might be useful to associate exhibition and counterfeiting, since Coriolanus’ passivity in submitting to the penetrating gaze of the public is closely related to the art of personating and simulating, an art for which Coriolanus has no gift whatsoever” (86). The lines he imagines delivering to the people appall Menenius with their political ineptitude and total lack of audience awareness:

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CORIOLANUS: ‘Look, sir, my wounds. I got them in my country’s service, when Some certain of your brethren roared and ran From th’ noise of our own drums. MENENIUS: O me, the gods! You must not speak of that. (2.3.47–50) Understood as an incompetent actor, Coriolanus fails to be able to follow directions the neurotypical Romans around him perceive as obvious and sensible. More troublingly, “custom” and “ceremony” assume a naturalized, objective authority. Coriolanus’s resistance therefore becomes perverse, and Menenius’s anticipatory groan, “You’ll mar all” (2.3.54), is a judgment that fails to recognize other ways of thinking, and labels Coriolanus’s approach as a guarantee of failure rather than a marker of difference. The role of ritual in the normative Roman social script is to inspire the citizens’ trust and consent. Coriolanus’s attempt to fulfill the script does not wholly fail, but the ambivalence of the people’s reaction to him only increases his vulnerability to the tribunes who plot to use his antipathy for the people as a way to cultivate antipathy for him. Coriolanus presents himself to the citizens to ask, “Well then, I pray, your price o’ th’ consulship?” (2.3.68). The response shows that the price is an exchange of social metadata, the manner rather than the substance of the suit: “The price is to ask it kindly” (2.3.69). He fulfills this request as well as he can, but the only way he can get through the conversation with the citizens is to make explicit the fact that he is “flatter[ing] my sworn brother the people to earn a dearer estimation of them” and “counterfeit[ing] the bewitchment of some popular man and giv[ing] it bountiful to the desirers” (2.3.87–88; 92–93). Even counterfeit social currency functions as social currency—the citizens do pledge their voices to him—but Brutus and Sicinius make quick use of the people’s lingering suspicions that Coriolanus mocked and “flouted [them] downright” (2.3.149) to turn them against him. As Yvonne Bruce points out, “What fails in Coriolanus is not words, but the uses to which its [sic] rhetoric is put...Coriolanus is about the manipulative function of rhetoric” (94). Some of the people are sure that Coriolanus insulted them; another intuits a breakdown in Coriolanus’s way of expressing himself, akin to the explanations of his behavior as a function of his unavoidable “nature”: “No, ‘‘tis his kind of speech; he did not mock us” (2.3.150). Even as the citizens seem generally supportive of him, Coriolanus’s communication and motives are still fundamentally inscrutable to them. The best he is able to manage, in short, is an incoherent suit for favor which produces such uneasy votes that Brutus and Sicinius are able to sow disfavor with little trouble. Paradoxically, Coriolanus’s insistence on principle, his obsessive consistency, makes him vulnerable to the contradictory interpretations of others, which vary in the play from pride to boasting to modesty to “soaring insolence” (2.1.17, 2.1.18, 1.10.52, 2.1.240), as well as the tribunes’ insinuations that

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he steadfastly hates the people even as he courts their votes (2.3.165–97). Aufidius, too, understands Coriolanus’s obsessively rule-bound nature as a source of vulnerability. After the Volscians are defeated in battle, a soldier remarks to Aufidius that Coriolanus is the devil. Aufidius replies that his nemesis is “Bolder, though not so subtle” (1.11.17): Coriolanus cannot connive. In the logic of this play, Coriolanus’s very obsession with being inflexibly “the man I am” comes across as both untenable and foolish. The tribunes take Coriolanus’s half-hearted politicking, his failed attempt to accommodate himself to the social script imposed on him, and recast it to the citizens as insincerity and proof of his lingering scorn. In fact, they easily anticipate the outcome of Coriolanus’s conversation with the citizens because he is so consistent. Brutus says that he heard Coriolanus declare he would not show his wounds to the people (2.1.217–22), and he and Sicinius know that the soldier will follow through: “It was his word” (2.1.223), after all, and they know he will “hold his purpose”; “‘Tis most like he will” (2.1.226–27). His inability to do otherwise than “hold[ing] his purpose” allows the tribunes to assume control over him because they anticipate the social poses he will attempt to strike. The citizens’ parting sentiments, after the tribunes reinterpret Coriolanus’s actions to them—“almost all / Repent in their election” (2.3.243–44)—testify to Coriolanus’s failure as much as the tribunes’ manipulative savvy. That Coriolanus’s obsessiveness makes him helpless becomes particularly clear when the tribunes render Coriolanus’s behavior as evidence that he is a traitor. The accusation only makes the latter respond more insistently and violently, redoubling the traits that jar the most violently against Roman social norms. Sicinius warns him, “You show too much of that / For which the people stir” (3.1.55–56). Coriolanus’s scorn for the people develops into a tirade, the extent and vehemence of which he seems unable to moderate. Menenius and the senators try to curtail his speech, but the soldier is carried away by the force of his own repetition: “This was my speech, and I will speak’t again” (3.1.65). Brutus’s attempt to silence him (“Enough with over-measure!”) provokes only redoubled effort, force-feeding discourse: “No, take more” (3.1.143). Coriolanus’s absolute insistence on denouncing the people’s ignorance manifests his refusal to bend to the rhetorical and social demands of the neurotypically-governed environment around him. And although he insists on speaking, and speaks his “reasons, / More worthier than [the people’s] voices” (3.1.122–23), the behavioral scripts around him override him. The judgment of the tribunes is not only political, but the enforcement of a socially-sanctioned rhetorical norm: “He’s spoken like a traitor, and shall answer / As traitors do” (3.1.165–66). His traitorousness is a function of speech aggressively dispensed “with over-measure” according to a standard of expectation about social and rhetorical interaction that Coriolanus cannot meet. Menenius, ever trying to mitigate the damage caused by his friend’s social disposition, only reinforces Coriolanus’s compulsive honesty: “His nature is too noble for the world. /.../ His heart’s his mouth. / What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent” (3.1.255–58).

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His very nobility, his inescapable nature, is beyond social coaching. That Coriolanus reaffirms his own inflexibility in spite of his banishment renders him heroically consistent but brittle; even in exile, he maintains, “you shall / Hear from me still, and never of me aught / But what is like me formerly” (4.1.52–54). Fundamentally at issue in Shakespeare’s tragedy is the danger of calling into question the necessity of a social norm by the suggestion that it is dispensable. Coriolanus does precisely this, and the act is in many ways even more aggressive than his most violent military campaign. The people around Coriolanus take the behavior that Coriolanus believes shows his integrity—maintaining inflexible opinion, refusing to flatter—as the behavior of a renegade, dangerous because of its incompatibility with neurotypical expectation. Showing “too much of that / For which the people stir” in fact exposes the tautological nature of behavioral scripting—the behavior is “too much” when it makes the neurotypical populace react as though it is “too much,” a subjective reaction easily reified into a norm against which other behavior can be judged. The determination of what is “too much” rests entirely in the hands of the people, not of Coriolanus. This is the most toxic type of misunderstanding. Where Coriolanus means unswervingly to maintain his principles, the Roman crowds hear a litany of abuse. Where he perceives the flighty weakness of the people, the tribunes read and indeed manufacture his betrayal. As an enemy of Rome, Coriolanus is as inexorable and inhuman as a natural disaster, “A trembling [brought] upon Rome” (4.6.125) alongside Aufidius, against which “Desperation / Is all the policy, strength, and defense / That Rome can make...” (4.6.134–36). He becomes a terror not only in the violence he threatens to do to the city, but in the violence he has already done to the security of its codes of social behavior. Ultimately, the social logic of the play punishes Coriolanus for difference, positioning him to become a fearsome enemy, and at the very point of his death, rendering him subject to narrative governed not only by inimical, neurotypical Roman principles, but by those of Rome’s enemies: Cut me to pieces, Volsces... ……………………………... If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles. (5.6.112–16) The burden on that conditional “if”—the vulnerability to an external system of social narrative and its representation of one’s actions—is the real tragedy of Coriolanus. In this chapter, we have explored some of Hamlet’s and Coriolanus’s autistic traits, noting ways in which Shakespeare’s narratives espouse neurotypical characteristics and punish autistic ones, as his plays subtly inform a larger discourse of compulsory able-bodiedness that elides autistic ways

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of being. In these plays, autistic characteristics lead to exclusion, ridicule, rejection, dehumanization, and even tragic death. At issue in this study is not just the autistic experience, but the way social systems of language, identity, and acceptable behavior interface with individual difference. To identify the points of contact and (perhaps especially) conflict between an individual and such systems shows us that, although the discourses of mental health and social interactions continually evolve, the concerns of embodiment and identity are both long-standing and still pertinent. In the classroom, we have both encouraged our students to consider the social and historical particularity of a label like “mad.” From revengers such as Titus Andronicus and Hamlet in the Shakespearean canon to their blackly humorous modern counterparts such as Martin McDonagh’s volatile INLA militant Padraic (“mad enough for seven”), characters whose obsessions pit them against their societies’ norms are among the most illuminating and, in a way, palatecleansing dramatic figures. Such characters recalibrate our students’ and our own evaluative criteria, inviting us continually—perhaps obsessively—to ask ourselves: mad in whose eyes?

NOTES 1. For a practical explanation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria, see Atwood. 2. On Aufidius as double, see Bruce 105.

WORKS CITED Atwood, Tony. The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2007. Print. Bligh, John. “The Mind of Coriolanus.” English Studies in Canada 13.3 (1987): 256–70. Print. Bruce, Yvonne. “The Pathology of Rhetoric in Coriolanus.” Upstart Crow 20 (2000): 93–115. Print. Drouet, Pascale. “Resisting Counterfeiting and Bodily Exhibition in Coriolanus.” The Spectacular in and around Shakespeare. Ed. and intro. Drouet. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 85–98. Print. Findlay, Alison. “Hamlet: A Document in Madness.” New Essays on Hamlet. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning. New York: AMS, 1994. 189–205. Print. Green, André. “On Hamlet’s Madnesses and the Unsaid.” Freud and Forbidden Knowledge. Ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky and Ellen Handler Spitz. New York: New York UP, 1994. 164–82. Print. Heiniger, Abigail. “Reviving Sympathy for the Insane: Hamlet in Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal of Kentucky Studies 25 (2008): 118–26. Print. Hobgood, Allison P. “Caesar Hath the Falling Sickness: The Legibility of Early Modern Disability in Shakespearean Drama.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009): n. pag. Web. Accessed 1 May 2014.

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McDonagh, Martin. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. London: Methuen Drama, 2001. Print. Murray, Stuart. Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008. Print. Neely, Carol Thomas. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Print. “Obsess, v.” Def. 1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2009. Web. Accessed 8 May 2014. Osteen, Mark. Autism and Representation. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Phillippian, Mardy, Jr. “The Book of Common Prayer, Theory of Mind, and Autism in Early Modern England”. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 150–66. Print. Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Kindle ebook. Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedy.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 73–87. Print. Sedlmayr, Gerold. “‘What Madnesse Ghosts Us All’: Melancholy Madness in Burton’s Anatomy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Shakespearean Culture—Cultural Shakespeare. Ed. and intro. Jürgen Kamm and Bernd Lenz. Passau, Germany: Stutz, 2009. 27–45. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Vey-Miller, Marguerite M. and Ronald J. Miller. “Degrees of Psychopathology in Hamlet.” Hamlet Studies 7.1–2 (1985): 81–87. Print. Walker, Jarrett. “Voiceless Bodies and Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Perception in Coriolanus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 43.2 (1992): 170–85. Print. Yergeau, Melanie. “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4 (2013): n. pag. Web. Accessed 1 May 2014.

5

Seeing Feelingly Sight and Service in King Lear Amrita Dhar

CORNWALL [to GLOUCESTER]: If you see vengeance— SERVANT: Hold your hand, my lord. I have served you ever since I was a child, But better service have I never done you Than now to bid you hold. (The History of King Lear 14.69–72; The Tragedy of King Lear 3.7.70–73)  LEAR: O ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes. GLOUCESTER: I see it feelingly. (The History of King Lear 20.139–142; The Tragedy of King Lear 4.5.138–141)

My chapter begins with a Servant who sees feelingly.1 As we shall see, he sees far too feelingly for his own good. Yet he sees right through a Quarto (The History of King Lear, in 1608) and a Folio (The Tragedy of King Lear, in 1623) to a point of his absolute annihilation in the world of the play. The terrible, irresistible power of his feeling sight remains with us only as a memory of his profound, necessary, contingent, and mortal pity, which achieves not at all what it set out to achieve. But to me, the moment of his seeing feelingly transforms the play from a history or a tragedy of a king, as the title of the play would have us think, into something infinitely greater: a story of an unremarkably and absolutely human person. Beginning, therefore, with a strange interruption by Servant, the task of this essay will be to examine such seeing feelingly in the world of King Lear—and in that of its readers and viewers. I return then to the blind man whose words I borrow in my title. Making a connection between Servant’s evidently visceral seeing and Gloucester’s confessedly feeling seeing, I shall read for what I would like to call the latter’s blind subjectivity. I offer that the latter offers a hard-earned and struggling subjectivity, one that is continually evolving and in itself uncertain, but for the while that we get to see it and participate in it, it opens up our own access to a curiously feeling sight. Unlike Servant, Gloucester only learns to

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see feelingly in the course of the play and at the cost of his eyes. It takes him a while, and it takes us a while as we follow him. But his and our experience changes radically both what we understand by feeling and by sight. I admit and enjoy the richness of the metaphorics of blindness and vision and reason and perception that critics have long found worthy of attention in Lear. I shall read, however, between and through the metaphorics of this physical affliction to indicate the irreducible physicality of visual disability, and its relation to the creative and the regenerative in the world of Lear. Using the inheritance of recent and contemporary disability studies that allows me to treat bodies not as language effects but as causal and impressionable agents, I shall explore the peculiarities of experience at the contingent human level of Gloucester’s disabled body. In complete agreement with David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s valuable assertion that even “while the representational portraits we investigate often prove unsatisfactory, they allow us viscerally to encounter disability in a way that we would not otherwise,” I shall ask, even as Simone Chess does, “[w]hat does the spectacle of visual impairment mean for sighted (and for blind) readers or audiences?” (Mitchell and Snyder 45; Chess 105). I shall read for Shakespeare’s investment both in Gloucester’s changed body and in metaphor, and in order to do this, I shall enlist occasional help from theatrical and filmed performances of the play. The final question I want to approach, then, is whether it is conceivable in an unaccommodating world to see feelingly and still live to tell the tale. BETTER SERVICE At the end of what in The History of King Lear (1608; henceforth History) is Scene 14, and in The Tragedy of King Lear (1623; henceforth Tragedy) Act 3 Scene 7,2 the king’s two eldest daughters and Cornwall learn from Edmund (in the Tragedy, Edmond) that his father Gloucester has against their express wishes gone forth to help his old king, and that in the impending battle with France, he intends to side with the invaders. After his errand of kindness to the old man who is taking spectacular leave of his senses on a stormy heath, Gloucester returns to his castle and is surprised by Regan and Cornwall (by now, Edmund and Goneril have left the castle), who have him tied to a chair and interrogate him. Once they have from Gloucester his open statement of sympathy with Lear, they can go ahead with punishing the traitor. In a curious backward glance at what Goneril had a little earlier quite gratuitously suggested as punishment—Regan had offered, “Hang him instantly,” but Goneril had advised, “Pluck out his eyes” (History 14.3–4; Tragedy 3.7.3–4)—Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eyes. In Peter Brook’s 1971 direction, the blinding is carried out using a spoon, thus visually drawing from and lending to the grotesque culinarity of Cornwall’s “Out, vile jelly!” (History 20.80; Tragedy 3.7.81) of a few lines later. One eye done and one to go, Cornwall is suddenly asked to stay his hand by one of his

78 Amrita Dhar servants. But Regan, no less incensed than Cornwall at this upstart Servant’s interruption (“A peasant stand up thus!” History 14.77; Tragedy 3.7.78), stabs the latter fatally from behind. In the resulting scuffle, Servant deals Cornwall a death wound. This, however, stops neither the total blinding of Gloucester, nor his being turned bleeding out of doors. In the Quarto, two other servants (Second Servant and Third Servant) use the diversion created by the wounding of Cornwall to extend to the now outcast Gloucester what help it lies in their power to give. Recent criticism that posits the idea of service as a major organizing factor of Shakespeare’s world has brought into some currency several points of interest within this moment of Servant’s intervention. Burnett significantly calls it a “crisis of authority” within a world of changing economic and social hierarchies (85–86). Anderson cogently points out that even in his moment of rebellion, Servant considers his action to be service (188). David Schalkwyk, in the vein of Michael Neill and Richard Strier, stresses that in certain situations, resistance or outright disobedience is a necessary component of good service (Strier 172–77; Schalkwyk 222–24). Valuable as they are, however, none of these contributions seems able to fully account for the power or shock of the moment of intervention. From the historicist work by Strier and Schalkwyk, we know of the ideas of political radicalism available to Shakespeare’s world. Popular works by Marian exiles John Ponet (1556) and Christopher Goodman (1558), the Scot George Buchanan (1579, trans. 1680), the Puritan William Gouge (1622), and Protestants John Dod and Robert Cleaver (1630), for instance, articulate severally that not only may servants not obey a master if obedience to the master meant disobedience to God, but that even not disobeying an unjust master was disobedience to God (Ponet D7; Goodman l4; Buchanan F9-[G]; Gouge M3v; Dod and Cleaver A3–A3v). It is, therefore, not the business of Servant’s disobedience that is my point of examination here. What interests me is the simple matter of this moment’s existence in the play, and the kind of precedent it sets for later action: the unpredictable eruptions of meaning that Servant’s feeling sight and better service set off within Lear’s deeply hierarchical, patriarchal, and monarchical world. Before turning to reasons and reverberations, however, it is worth recalling the overwhelming use of images and metaphors of the eye that the play has used so far and will continue to use. Indeed, the moment under discussion is heavy with eyes. Lear, while leaving Goneril’s house after he has lost half his train and effectively fallen out with her, admonishes his “Old fond eyes” for weeping (History 4.279; Tragedy 1.4.264). “Beweep this cause again I’ll pluck you out,” he tells them, violently, furiously (History 4.280; Tragedy 1.4.265). In something of a nod to this manifestation of fondness and grief, Gloucester, when held and interrogated by Regan and Cornwall, bursts out that he has sent the old king off to Dover “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes” (History 14.53–54; Tragedy 3.7.54–55). But it turns out that he is only giving Cornwall ideas, for when

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Gloucester concludes his outburst with “I shall see / The wingèd vengeance overtake such children” (History 14.62–63; Tragedy 3.7.63–64), Cornwall provides the dark rejoinder: “See’t shalt thou never” (History 14.64; Tragedy 3.7.65). He then proceeds to strip Gloucester of his eyes. Servant intervenes, is wounded, and, dying, calls out to the manifestly restrained, helpless, and maimed Gloucester: “O, I am slain, my lord! Yet have you one eye left / To see some mischief on him” (History 14.78–79; in Tragedy 3.7.78–79, “O, I am slain. My lord, you have one eye left / To see some mischief on him”). Cornwall, again taking the taunt, returns with “Lest it see more, prevent it” (History 14.80; Tragedy 3.7.81), and blinds Gloucester. The first words of the blinded Gloucester, however, seem to refer to a pain more emotionally devastating than physical—“All dark and comfortless” (History 14.82; Tragedy 3.7.83)—and it is through Regan and Cornwall’s words that Gloucester’s physical pain and brokenness are brought home to us: the “eyeless villain” (History 14.93; Tragedy 3.7.94) is to be thrust out at gates to “smell / His way to Dover” (History 14.90; Tragedy 3.7.91). Why, to return to our question, put onstage this ocular-vocabulary-riddled, strange, non-momentous moment? I would like to argue that it exists to serve the play in several different, albeit related, ways. First, in a framework that otherwise seems constantly to be on shifting and desperately bleak moral ground, it provides an emotional asylum outside the frames of obvious or even insidious power we see in the play. Servant’s singular and deeply risk-laden empathy and the wounding or disability it seeks to prevent enable a profound re-imagining of the human and of what it is worth fighting for. There is something irreducibly pitiful about the punishment of an old man who has himself gone out of the way of prudence to side with his old master who is no longer king. For trying to help where help is most superfluous because, it would seem, it is most useless, he has started a process of irreversible sympathy for us. What Servant tries for him, in turn, is no more and no less than what he tries for the old king. The acts of kindness are just as inevitable and just as arbitrary, and Lear’s claims on our emotional investment rest on just such impertinent, absurd, and slender props. I also offer that this moment foregrounds what students of subaltern studies would recognize as rebellion as a function of restraint. This essay is not a subaltern studies consideration of Lear, nor do I use the word “subaltern” to posit a meaningful primacy of power either within or without the play. I only wish to use that singularly helpful concept from subaltern studies that grants that history is a function of individual actions, actions that may or may not find explanation from the apparent political, social, or cultural situatedness of a given individual. Servant, by virtue of being a servant, is our subaltern individual, and our point of interest is that this individual acts in a situation and in a manner that, he must know, will fail him. He acts still. He acts, indeed, when even the textual logic of the play explicitly tells him how not to act. Gloucester appeals: “He that will think to live till he be old / Give me some help!” (History 14.66–67; Tragedy 67–68). But the one

80 Amrita Dhar thing that Servant must not be thinking as he intervenes with Cornwall is to live till he be old. And he acts after Gloucester has already lost an eye. There is a peculiar delay and a peculiar driven-ness, therefore, to his action. In that delay, however minimal, I see the restraint and submissiveness that is as much the property of a subaltern/servant as rebellion may be. The rebellion that is a function of restraint is for that very reason stronger and a bearer of higher stakes. In this respect, such a rebellion is not unconnected to the very history of the growth of subaltern studies. 1970s post-Independence India saw the beginning that agonized precisely over these questions of submission or challenge. A generation was essentially talking back to its parents’ generation, in full awareness of the fact that the latter had ushered in the political independence the former was born in. That is why the challenge of the 1970s, when it came, could be both utterly unapologetic, and exceedingly tender. This deep embeddedness within history is something, too, that subaltern studies shares with disability studies.3 That Servant’s stakes are very high, I need not be at pains to prove; he pays for his defiance with his life. But this moment importantly carries echoes of two other moments of restraint and defiance—of Kent’s talking back to Lear during the division of the kingdom, and of Edgar’s submitting as a madman to the blind Gloucester only to take advantage of his disability and disallow him a death at the cliffs of Dover. I shall have occasion to return to Edgar, but of Kent’s rebellion, a word is in order here. While putting forth his argument about conscience as arbiter for any action by those in service, Schalkwyk quotes an intriguing line from John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s Godly Forme of Houshold Gouernment that seems directly to feed Kent’s words of rebellion. “And surely all duty of seruants which is not done of conscience, is but eye seruice” (Dod and Cleaver A2v). This is not to say that Shakespeare read his Dod and Cleaver before creating Lear (the Gouernment was published after Lear), but the peculiar phrase “eye-service,” which seems to have been in such currency as not to even require glossing in the text, here catches the eye. The Oxford English Dictionary lists other revealing sixteenth-century instances of the use of the phrase in this sense. In the Tyndale New Testament (1534), Colossians 3.19 urges: “Servauntes be obedient vnto youre bodyly masters in all thynges: not with eye service as men pleasers but in synglenes of herte fearynge god” (Bible in English). Similarly, Robert Crowley, in 1549, exhorts in the Voyce of the Laste Trumpet: “Se thou serue him...not with eye seruice faynedly” (A4v). Used as in Dod and Cleaver, eye-service stands for everything superficial, inadequate, and outwardly shallow. And this is precisely what Kent sees in the behaviour of Lear’s eldest daughters. Thence his outburst, even after Lear’s threat: “Kent, on thy life, no more!” (History 1.143; Tragedy 1.1.152). Lear orders Kent out of his sight, and breaking all decorum, Kent commands his king: “See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye” (History 1.147–48; Tragedy 1.1.156–57). He also manifestly

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breaks free of restraint: “Revoke thy doom, or whilst I can vent clamour / From my throat I’ll tell thee thou dost evil” (History 1.152–53; Tragedy 1.1.161–63 has an interesting revision: “Reuoke thy gift, / Or whilst I can vent clamour from my throat / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil”). Both restraint and the freedom from it come into relief when the only way Lear can make Kent stop his clamour is by reminding him of his “allegiance” to him (History 1.154; Tragedy 1.1.164). As we know, what Kent hears is his banishment. Again, the stakes have been very high. Kent has come close to losing his life, and he has certainly lost land, employment, and social and political identity. The only way he can work himself back into worth and identity is by serving still, although he is profoundly aware that he now “dost stand condemned” (History 4.5; Tragedy 1.4.5) in his office. But this brings us also to the next function the moment of Servant’s intervention performs in the play.

TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED Servant’s intervention presents a model of service that can function without the expectation of mutuality or reciprocity. If there is one thing expected of masters in Shakespeare’s world—and this is explicit in the works of Dod and Cleaver and Gouge and Fosset (1613), among others—it is that masters recognize within the master-servant relationship their position as master, and both behave responsibly in their respective capacities. If subordination of servants is desired, that condition is workable only within a reciprocity of care and recognition between the servant and the served. But Servant’s rebellion marks a crucial disjuncture in such a reciprocal expectation, for what Servant calls service (indeed, the best service he has ever tendered his master, for better service he has never done him than now to bid him hold), Cornwall sees as disobedience. We have granted Servant loyalty and service on the strength of what is conscionable and for how clearly he wishes to save Cornwall from his unjust self. But under the circumstances, Servant must know that he serves without hope of acknowledgement, much less care. He has defied in a situation where there is no turning back, and he dies, therefore, serving. Here, too, appear premonitions of scenes with Kent and Edgar. When Lear is finally brought to Cordelia in Dover, the daughter asks Kent how she may repay his goodness. Kent, who had after banishment expressly chosen to use his freedom from service to rededicate himself to his beloved master, answers, perhaps predictably, “To be acknowledged, madam, is o’erpaid” (History 21.4; Tragedy 4.6.4). However sweet this acknowledgment, it does not come from Kent’s master, and Kent has to wait until Lear wakes from sleep and tries to place him. At this poignant moment of awareness of having lost everything, Lear, however haltingly, does address Cordelia as his daughter.

82 Amrita Dhar What is easy to miss at this moment of union between father and daughter is the almost-but-not-quite recognition between master and servant. Lear comes close to knowing Kent. “Methinks I should know you, and know this man” (History 21.61; Tragedy 4.6.57), he says, but the materiality of mis-memory catches up with him—he cannot for the life of him remember the garments he wears, or where he lodged last night. When he takes his thread up again, it is to recognize his child. Kent remains almost-remembered, almost-known. That is all the recognition he will get until the very end. At and accompanied by Cordelia’s death, Lear hovers in the final battlefield between madness and acuity as age, exhaustion, and grief catch up with him. Here, finally, after an unchallenged admission of failing sight—“Mine eyes are not o’ the best” (History 24.274; in Tragedy 5.3.253, “Mine eyes are not o’th’best”), he confides, and the metaphorical and the material have not been this close save in Gloucester—does he know Kent. “Are not you Kent?’ (History 24.276; Tragedy 5.3.256). But Kent’s eager response and quick reminder that he has as Caius all this while been with the king is met with a blank. Caius, Lear tells Kent, is “dead and rotten” (History 24.279; Tragedy 5.3.260). If there has been recognition, it has been short-lived and ambiguous. Edgar, too, has served without acknowledgment. But he has served Gloucester as mad Tom. The very idea of recognition had been absurd when the madman led the blind. Indeed, the Second and Third Servants had known as much in the Quarto: Gloucester’s Let’s follow the old Earl [of Gloucester] and get the bedlam To lead him where he would. His roguish madness Allows itself to anything. (History 14.100–102) (The Tragedy has no counterpart to these lines.) Edgar’s Poor-mad-Tomness has a reciprocal use and liberty—the roguish madness allows itself to anything, and in madness, he can go anywhere, anyhow, anywhen. But this assumed mental loss, along with Gloucester’s actual visual loss, is also precisely what prevents his disclosure of himself to his father. He has therefore withheld comment until he was armed and on his way to challenging the victorious Edmund in the battlefield. He has disclosed himself to his father hoping to return to him, but because he is uncertain of coming back. But the very moment at which mutuality and recognition are sought, however, turns out to be the moment of greatest loss: Gloucester’s: flawed heart Alack too weak, the conflict to support— ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (History 24.192–95; Tragedy 5.3.187–90)

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A close look at this moment in the two main versions of the play provides a curious glimpse into a textual enactment of this loss. In both versions, 1608 and 1623, Albany asks Edgar how he has known his father’s sufferings, to which Edgar responds, “By nursing them” (History 24.19; Tragedy 5.3.172). Images of this speech in both versions appears below and on the following page.

Figure 5.1 Shakespeare, King Lear, 1608 [Q1], L2v. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Figure 5.2 Shakespeare, King Lear, 1623 [F], ss2v. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Edgar relates to Albany how he knows the sad tale of his father’s misfortunes—by the simple fact of nursing those misfortunes. Accompanying his father in his disguised state, he has led him, begged for him, and saved him from despair. He has been, in everything, serviceable—save that he did not reveal himself to Gloucester. “Never,” he says in  the  Quarto, “O father!

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revealed myself unto him” (History 24.188). The address “O father!” here leaves Edgar as an articulation that he knows will never meet its object. In the Folio revision of this moment, the echo of “O father!” lingers in the air acutely unheard for not having been mouthed and worded unambiguously by the son to the father in the time they had had together. In Grigori Kozintsev’s film (1971), there is no Dover cliff, no fall, just an empty wandering of the heath while the son leads the father. All the while, Edgar is at the very edge of what it is possible to perform, for pity impedes performance. Until the end, few words are exchanged between son and father. But on one occasion, when Tom takes Gloucester’s hand to lead him, he first kisses it. It is not made clear what the blind man makes of the kiss, if he makes anything of it at all. But that during the kiss Edgar brings to his lips everything he does not say, is evident. The Quarto leaves a ghostly palimpsest of print for the Folio, which then both affirms and denounces the non-revelation. Revised, the line reads back to the Quarto’s “O father!” with “Never—O fault!—revealed myself unto him” (Tragedy 5.3.183). In the History, Edgar, full of grief, addresses the absent Gloucester: “(O Father!).” In the Folio, it is as if he can hear himself calling to his father and going unanswered, so that he can now address himself, “O fault!,” full both of grief and censure. Reciprocity is sought at an impossible reach. It fails. But Edgar’s “brief tale” (History 24.177; Tragedy 5.3.172) of disguise and survival and overwhelming pity (“And when ’tis told, O that my heart would burst!” History 24.178; Tragedy 5.3.173) links us back both to the moment of Servant’s intervention, and to Edgar himself, who much like us, the readers and viewers of Lear, had not long ago been stranded on a desolate edge of the world to try and make sense of the oblivious words and actions of a blind father and a mad man who used to be king. Sight involves a very sheer labour, and that is where we must now turn. FIT FOR BEHOLDING When Edmund reveals to Cornwall and the sisters his father’s treachery in going forth to help the old king, and Gloucester’s intentions to side with the invading French army, Cornwall is incensed. “Seek out the villain Gloucester,” he commands (History 14.3; in Tragedy 3.7.3, “Seek out the traitor Gloucester”). He then expresses a horrible solicitousness towards the Earl’s son: that Edmund should keep “our sister [Goneril] company. The revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father are not fit for your beholding” (History 14.5–7; Tragedy 3.7.5–7). Edmund just as horribly complies. Once he and Goneril are departed, Cornwall says something that is so nauseating in its premeditation as to cast in great doubt the case of anger that he pleads for himself—and in what he says is all the complacency and confidence of understanding that power can be unethical yet still able to be wielded as power, and that although the taking of life is

86 Amrita Dhar considered a grave charge, the imparting of mutilation and disability and pain and suffering are not. “Though we may not pass upon his [Gloucester’s] life / Without the form of justice, yet our power / Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men / May blame but not control” (History 14.22–25; Tragedy 3.7.23–26). In other words, legal proceedings might be necessary in order to execute someone, but other forms of affliction that he can mete out to the traitor Gloucester may be generally blamed but not, ultimately, questioned with any consequence. As we know, Cornwall is almost entirely right; but for a most unexpected intervention, there should have been no control at all. Such as the control is, it does not succeed, but what is interesting to us is how Servant’s own control towards himself and his own safeguarding fails. In our own day, disability rights activist, writer, and teacher Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s observations on Staring: How We Look brings together the influential strands of thought of two philosophers—Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry—as she crafts her own powerful vision of “be-holding” (Garland-Thomson 185–96). Sontag, considering the ethics of looking, registers her wariness with a one-way gaze at suffering and difference that inhibits identification between a looker and a looked-at. “No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain” (7). Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of extreme suffering are those who can do something to alleviate that suffering. “The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (Sontag 42). She also registers that “[c]ompassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers” (101). Scarry places forth the idea of the very sight of whatever is beautiful as a propulsive force for what is just, and therefore good: [S]urely what we would wish is a world where the vulnerability of the beholder is equal to or greater than the vulnerability of the person beheld, a world where the pleasure-filled tumult of staring [at what is beautiful] is a prelude to acts that will add to the beauty already in the world—acts like making a poem, or a philosophic dialogue, or a divine comedy; or acts like repairing an injury or a social injustice. (74–75) For “[b]eauty is pacific: its reciprocal salute to continued existence, its pact, is indistinguishable from the word for peace. And justice stands opposed to injury: ‘injustice’ and ‘injury’ are the same word” (107). Garland-Thomson synthesizes that “[b]eauty is a perceptual process and a transitive action: it catches interest, prompts judgment, encourages scrutiny, creates knowledge” (188). Drawing from these ideas of gradually engaged looking, Garland-Thomson advances her own theory of holding by the eye, be-holding: To be held in the visual regard of another enables humans to flourish and forge a sturdy sense of self. Being seen by another person is key to our psychological well-being, then, as well as our civil recognition.

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Staring’s pattern of interest, attention, and engagement, the mobilization of its essential curiosity, might be understood as a potential act of beholding, of holding the being of another particular individual in the eye of the beholder. (195) Be-holding, in the manner that Garland-Thomson helps us envision, is an act of great responsibility: a radical decentering and an emphatic self-less-ness, and finally, an undertaking of potentially abandoned empathy. The responsibility of the eye is inseparable from the responsibility of the I. And in the I that must act as the eye sees, our Servant is clearly recognizable. Indeed, the act of beholding as performed by the insubordinate Servant is close to a sense of the impressionable early modern agent as studied recently by a group of scholars of our period. In a volume probing the early modern self’s subjection to the transformative effects of reading, watching, hearing, and listening, Katharine Craik and Tanya Pollard precisely point out how in our own day, “emotion is increasingly understood as rooted in the body,” and with the help of a range of essays on poems, playhouses, and plays of the time, bring into relief the early modern preoccupation with the impetus into action through exposure to sight or sound or emotion (3). A viewer or reader may not remain unmoved in the face of sensation. Servant, whether or not he knows himself existing within a play that is viscerally meditating the terms and effects of allegiance, loyalty, pain, age, grief, and mortality, beholds viscerally. His labour of sight, his witnessing of a maiming, and his consequent impassioned intervention cost him his life. It is as if his responsibility towards the humanity he is part of fails him utterly in his responsibility towards himself and his own preservation. Yet it brings us precisely to the third pivotal function I contend Servant’s intermediation brings to the play: a profound complication of the ideas of subordination, survival, and performance.

PRACTICING LOVE The act barely concealed within all practice is that of art, of willed reiteration of motion or sensation such that an action becomes a skill, and skill a proficiency. As such, there is something unnatural about the practice of something—something artificial, something performed. Thus Lear, seeing Kent in the stocks outside Gloucester’s castle, being reminded of the absence of all welcome he has had from Regan and Cornwall at their castle, remarks: “This act persuades me / That the remotion of the Duke and her / Is practice only” (History 7.270–72; Tragedy 2.2.278–80). And again, here is the maddening king this time on the heath: “caitiff, in pieces shake,  / That under covert and convenient seeming / Hast practised on man’s life” (History 9.54–56; in Tragedy 3.2.54–56, “caitiff, to pieces shake, / That under covert and convenient seeming / Hast practised on man’s life”).4

88 Amrita Dhar In their several ways, Kenneth Graham and Katharine Eisaman Maus propose that a conscientious servant may perform service in a way that convinces the served or the master that what the servant wills is in fact what the master wills. In Maus, the servant is the master’s other self—that self of the master that knows the master better than the master does. Graham argues that love and justice that wish to be serviceable need to be performed in a register that can be understood not only within a private and individual code of conduct, but publicly. Indeed, that serviceable love might need to learn how to present itself. It might even need to ingratiate itself within the dominant structure of power or understanding, so that the exercise of love may not be construed as a threat, and may not therefore lead to the annihilation of the agent performing the love or service. Kent and Edgar both provide good instances of service performed—by hook or by crook—such that it advances them who are meant to be served. Notwithstanding our knowledge of the limitations of service by Kent and Edgar to Lear and Gloucester, we may yet admit what they accomplish. Naïveté, plainness, and straightforward submission make way for disguise, deceit, and even coercion. Subordination and performance allow survival both of Kent and Edgar (as Caius and Poor Tom) and their assumed charges, Lear and Gloucester. But even the twisted consolation—of survival by a certain adoption of cunning—available to Kent and Edgar is denied Servant in the blinding sequence. Here is a situation where Servant has neither time nor space for methods of subterfuge or indirection. Assuming non-threatening forms of intervention would render the intervention pointless. But even with all his subordination, Servant may not perform what will ensure his survival. He performs, therefore, what it makes most sense to perform: a challenge and an outrage, though still service (better service has he never done). In so doing, he opens up in the moment of his intervention—notwithstanding the inconsequentiality we have recognized with our privileged overview of the play—a potential space of stupendous consequentiality. If the world of Lear may be said to have a history, Servant enters it by challenging the master under whose name he would otherwise have been entirely subscribed (and deprived of even his generic name). As we know, this challenge is the last thing Servant performs. But he sets off again reverberations within the play of service performed with an assumption of extraordinary individual responsibility. Paradoxically, it is a responsibility that comes into being only when its agent has nothing (more) to lose. For these reverberations, let us one final time return to Edgar and Kent. Edgar has been leading Gloucester as Poor Tom since Gloucester was cast out of his castle. The contract—bound by a purse of money—is that Tom will lead Gloucester to a cliff high overlooking the sea, and leave him there. To start with, Tom had been as mad as reported and expected. But some way into their journey, Gloucester begins to question both the steepness of the ground he is being led over, and Tom’s madness. He thinks the ground is level (“Methinks the ground is even” History 20.3; Tragedy 4.5.3), and that

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Tom’s speech has changed (“Methinks you’re better spoken” History 20.10; Tragedy 4.5.10). Edgar, about to disallow his father his own termination, has no hesitation not only in pointing out to Gloucester his visual affliction, but in abusing it: “Why, then your other senses grow imperfect / By your eyes’ anguish” (History 20.5–6; Tragedy 4.5.5–6), he tells Gloucester. The blind man is suitably chastened, and hastens to agree. Edgar then stands Gloucester still and in a speech that anyone but Gloucester—whom he has bullied into thinking that he cannot think straight—would consider an exquisitely coherent articulation, describes the steepness he claims he dares not look upon. Peter Brook’s film here stands Gloucester on a crashing seashore so that he may tumble for a fall. Gloucester falls, fails to die, and is discovered by a man who asks him to “look up” (History 20.59; Tragedy 4.5.59) towards the “dread summit of this chalky bourn” from which he has tumbled (History 20.57; Tragedy 4.5.57). To Gloucester, it all suggests, following the hints of his discoverer, that he has been preserved alive by some miracle. Thus, through deliberate use of his sightlessness, bewilderment, and helpless submission, Edgar wins back, for the moment, his father. An exhausted man promises a terrible endurance: “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die” (History 20.75–77; Tragedy 4.5.75–77). Shortly after, Lear will wander in the way of this twosome, and claim to remember Gloucester’s eyes (History 20.130; Tragedy 4.5.167) well before he can put a name to his old Earl (“I know thee well enough: thy name is Gloucester” History 20.163; Tragedy 4.5.172). Edgar will watch the two old men converse at strangely convergent yet crossed purposes while Gloucester begins to lapse back into despair even as he begins to see the world “feelingly” (History 20.142; Tragedy 4.5.141). Like Servant, Edgar has not had many options—to convince Gloucester of the miraculous nature of his life, he has had to allow Gloucester the fall. But could he have known that even after Gloucester’s promise to face the world anew, the mad king would wander in and remind his father of wounds “to the brains” (History 20.178; in Tragedy 4.5.183, “to th’brains”)? At this moment of reflected and deflected suffering, Edgar is deeply implicated within heavy grief, and something that is painfully saved from disbelief precisely by his eyes and ears and senses working all too well: “I would not take this from report; it is, / And my heart breaks at it” (History 20.135–36; Tragedy 4.5.134–35). The broken and bewildered bodies and minds of the older men, instead of being standardized or disciplined by the normative space around them (a normative space inhabited by Edgar, and not least, a multitude of readers and playgoers), take over that space to mark it with both pain and unpredictable triggers for empathy. Kent’s is the final act of better service. The stakes are high as ever, and service, pity, and pragmatic kindness come together in his final words as he allows Lear to die: “Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer” (History 24.307–309; Tragedy 5.3.288–290). In Brook’s film, for instance, the scene of Lear’s death has a violence of its own. Edgar, meaning to support the old

90 Amrita Dhar man, extends his hand, but Kent grabs him and shoves him away. Lear must be allowed to die. Again, there is assumption of immense responsibility, but the words come from such a companion to the king who has materially suffered all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Lear has, and who exits the play with a darkly ominous set of words—that he has a journey to go to which his master calls him, and he must not say no (History 24.315– 316; Tragedy 5.4.296–297). Extremest aggression meets extremest pity, and we may wonder again if this is what love looks like in service. In such renderings of strange kindness, as I hope I have shown, categories, hierarchies, and capabilities drown in a way that makes it difficult to think of the old forms of power and organization ever rearranging in any meaningful way. Meaning, instead, resides in the eruptions and (in)consequences that defy explanation within existing discourses. The material and embodied world is changed—because inhabited—by bodies that not only mark difference, but act as receptacles for experiences belonging to the extreme reaches of the human. In closing, let us look at Grigori Kozintsev’s handling of the scene of Gloucester’s blinding. When his first eye is gouged out, Gloucester’s cry of pain is with a shocking suddenness and break in cinematic sequence shown to exactly coincide with the cry of pain of someone we have not seen until now: Servant. Indeed, we view not the gouging of the eye (which directors Peter Brook and Richard Eyre bring within the lens frame), but the anguished face of Servant as he clutches at his own healthy eyes at the same time as Gloucester behind him loses his. Perhaps, cinematically, this split action and split second prepare the viewer for Servant’s resistance to the blinding. But this mirrored suffering provides to me the best answer for why a scene of such surpassing brutality is staged by Shakespeare (instead of violence happening offstage and being reported onstage): because it is not enough to consider either this moment, or the play, as an intellectual probe into power or human nature or filial duty or love or service or even all of those things. The presented embodiment of irremediable loss—with an act of selfless empathy alongside—is an invitation to see the world feelingly. I offer, in fact, that it goes a step further: to say that that which is not seen feelingly, is not sight—or sense. In his blind man, Shakespeare acquires a peculiar facility of language that enables the phrase through which neither seeing nor feeling is allowed to remain either just affective or physiological, and in which both sight and feeling, verbally and adverbially, implode upon and change each other.

NOTES 1. I am grateful to all members of the Shakespeare Association of America 2013 seminar on “Health, Well-Being, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body” for reading and supporting an early version of this essay. To Valerie Traub, in whose earlier University of Michigan seminar on “Shakespeare and Embodiment” many of these ideas first took shape, my consistent and continued thanks.

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2. The Norton Shakespeare claims to reproduce the Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear on facing pages, apart from a separate conflated version. A close reading of the part of the play that has been my point of departure in this essay took me to facsimile versions of the two texts, however, and I noted significant differences between the 1608 Quarto text and what the Norton presents as the Quarto, and the 1623 Folio text and what the Norton presents as the Folio. My essay here does not pursue a textual analysis, but an awareness of the two bodies of text in the 1608 and 1623 Quarto and Folio will inform my reading. 3. For a sense of the lived, rights-based beginnings of the interdisciplinary field that is now disability studies, see “Mission and History,” Society for Disability Studies, or Mason. 4. Edmund, Edgar, Gloucester, and Goneril similarly know of the habit and possible deviousness of practice. See, for instance, History 2.156; Tragedy 1.2.159; Tragedy 2.1.72 (tellingly, the History has “pretence” instead of “practice” in this instance). Or again, see History 24.146; Tragedy 5.3.141.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Linda. A Place in the Story: Servants and Service in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. Print. Brook, Peter, dir. King Lear. Altura Films. 1971. Film. Buchanan, George. De iure regni. 1579. Trans. “Philalethes.” N.p., 1680. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Burnett, Mark Thornton. Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience. Basingstoke, Hamps.: Macmillan, 1997. Print. Chess, Simone. “Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in Early Modern Popular Performance and Print.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 105–122. Print. Craik, Katharine and Tanya Pollard, eds. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print. Crowley, Robert. Voyce of the Laste Trumpet. London, 1549. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Dod, John, and Robert Cleaver. A Godly Forme of Houshold Gouernment. London, 1630. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Fosset, Thomas. The Seruants Dutie. London, 1613. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: Why We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Goodman, Christopher. How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd. London, 1558. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties. London, 1622. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Graham, Kenneth J. E. “‘Without the form of justice’: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 438–61. Print. Kozintsev, Grigori, dir. King Lear [Korol’ Lir]. Lenfilm. 1971. Film.

92 Amrita Dhar Mason, Karen. “Disability Studies: Online Resources for a Growing Discipline.” College & Research Libraries News 71.5: 252–60. 2010. American Library Association. 2010–14. Web. . Accessed 30 June 2014. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print. Mission and History. Society for Disability Studies. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. . Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print. Neill, Michael. “Servant Obedience and Master Sins: Shakespeare and the Bonds of Service.” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998): 131–71. Print. Ponet, John. A Short Treatise of politike power. London, 1556. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Print. Schalkwyk, David. Shakespeare, Love, and Service. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblattet al. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. ———. King Lear. London, 1608. ———. King Lear. London, 1623. qq2–ss3. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, 2003. Print. Strier, Richard. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1995. Print. Tyndale, William. The Newe Testament. 1534. Bible in English. Chadwyck-Healey, 1996. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014.

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“Strange Virtue” Staging Acts of Cure Katherine Schaap Williams

Robert Laneham’s record of Elizabeth I’s entertainment at Kenilworth Castle in the summer of 1575 offers a vivid account of healing. Following the list of men advanced to knighthood during Elizabeth’s visit, Laneham’s letter recalls that allso by her highnes accustumed mercy & charitee, nyne cured of the peynfull and daungeroous diseaz, called y[e] kings euell, for that Kings & Queenz of this Ream, without oother medsin (saue only by handling & prayerz) only doo cure it. (F3v–F4) The anecdote frames the queen’s intervention as effectual to “cure” the nine supplicants, who experience a disease known for “peynfull” and “daungeroous” symptoms. Yet Laneham suggests that the action is not exactly or entirely medical, for this cure is ascribed not to “medsin,” but to a religious ritual and encounter with the queen’s own person, a performance of bountiful royal aid in the face of a threatening illness. Though Laneham marvels at the encounter between Elizabeth and the subjects who seek her aid as he lays out the contours of the practice associated with English monarchs throughout the early modern period, this was not simply an isolated incident. The disease known in Latin as struma, a tubercular infection that produced swelling of the neck and visible sores, was called in English scrofula (though the title was imprecise in the period, also invoked to describe lymphatic swellings, goiters, or thyroid problems). While physic manuals and surgical treatises offered remedies, those who were too sick, destitute, or desperate sought aid from the monarch. The liturgical ceremony began with prayers and scripture readings, and then each sick person would approach the monarch twice, first to be touched on the neck or throat and then to be presented with a gold coin, or “angel,” as a token of the healing.1 Early modern accounts traced the royal touch back to Edward I, and scholars note that the English practice was revived with the Tudors and gained greatest prominence with the Stuarts. After James I came to throne in 1603, the ceremony would continue for another hundred years. Despite—and perhaps because of—Charles I’s loss of the kingship and life, Charles II employed the royal touch to great effect during

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the Restoration: in the twenty-five years of Charles II’s reign, Marc Bloch “confidently estimates” (212) in his foundational study, Charles touched around 100,000 people for the “King’s evil.” James II, not to be outdone, continued the ceremony even in exile after 1688. Whereas William III rejected the custom, Queen Anne revived the ceremony briefly—notably, Samuel Pepys recounts an experience of receiving the royal touch—but the official practice ceased upon her death in 1714. Modern critical attention to the ceremony has demonstrated the sacred ritual’s political value to early modern English monarchs. Deborah Willis, in one of the most extended treatments of the rite, argues that contemporary audiences would likely have interpreted the royal touch within three paradigms: the “magical,” or “the product of a supernatural power mysteriously inhering in the king’s person”; the “orthodox,” or “the product of a mysterious combination of prayer and natural process”; and the “theatrical,” or “the product of the power of the human imagination responding to a ruse” (150–51). This focus on interpretation underlines the symbolic valence of the spectacle and usefully explicates the range of responses the act provoked. In the period, the “miraculous and peculiar gift” of the monarch, Reginald Scot notes in 1584, accrued varied accounts of causality: “some referre to the proprietie of their persons, some to the peculiar gift of God, and some to the efficacie of words” (2A8r–v.). In this chapter, I explore how the “cure” this practice proclaims—albeit a kind of cure that appears deeply estranged from modern notions of medical practice—might amplify our understanding of early modern concepts of health. Tropes of health and disease, Margaret Healy notes, are a consistent preoccupation of early modern texts, which repeatedly express cure as a desired end, framing fiction’s “imaginative flights” as “grounded in the flesh and its perceived pathologies” (15). Yet the dominant humoral paradigm of the body, as Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood observe, “is implicitly based upon aberration, imperfection, and thus corporeal difference” (12); health might be characterized as a fleeting state of balance, rendering cure the aftereffect of a customizable repertoire of tactics, less a pronouncement of accomplishment than a brief equipoise in the body. Following Sujata Iyengar’s point that cure could even be defined, in the early modern period, as broadly as “the cessation, even if temporary, of the presenting symptom” (89), I suggest that textual accounts that designate the practice of the royal touch a “cure” prompt a number of questions: How does this performance of healing theorize cure by aligning it with and through acts of the monarch’s body? What can the confidence about cure mean within a humoral paradigm of fluctuating health? How might the confounding of permanence gesture to cure’s definitional root in the Latin word for “care” as an ongoing response to bodily vulnerability? Within contemporary disability studies, the concepts of “health” and “cure” are most often linked to critique of the medical model of disability, which understands illness as a personal misfortune and frames the sick body as the object of medicine’s corrective practice. The medical model, in Tobin

“Strange Virtue” 95 Siebers’s words, “situates disability exclusively in individual bodies and strives to cure them by particular treatment, isolating the patient as diseased or defective” (54). Cure is at once the ideal that drives medical intervention to accord with bodily norms, and a fantasy because, as the idealized instantiation of a norm, it is unattainable. Drawing on the concept of the “vanishing point” in performance theory, Johnson Cheu reads cure—which he defines as “the possibility of a normal body”—as “a perspective that is assigned by the able-bodied viewer to the disabled body” (138), the putative “convergence where medicine and the disabled body appear to intersect” (138). Cure, in this sense, is temporally inscribed as a future moment in which a body, through medical intervention, regains the invisibility of health. This chapter traces the insistence on cure in early modern texts that defend and proclaim the monarch’s healing touch in order to consider how these representations cite cure’s imminence but reveal its delay. Turning first to Macbeth, I suggest that the theater’s capacity to register an absence evokes this lacuna by reporting, but not representing, the act of the royal touch. The stage offers a resource for marking the time of cure, the gap between the rhetoric of the ritual and the proof of its effects—a problem that, in the healing rite, the presence of the monarch’s physical body is taken to solve. Even if cure is not necessarily conceived as final or complete in the early modern period, the ceremony for the royal touch repeatedly emphasizes a visible standard that defines health. That standard is the monarch’s body, the ideal figure that makes possible the promise of cure. While directives for the rite foreground the monarch’s touch for the potential health it signifies, I consider how this performance, premised upon—and potentially undercut by—the immediacy of physical encounter, draws attention instead to the uncertainty of cure’s temporal dimension, the undefinable “when?” of cure.

MACBETH AND THE KING’S EVIL Shakespeare’s reference to the ceremony famously appears in Macbeth. In 4.3, Malcolm and Macduff are in England waiting to see the king, and their exchange about the royal touch divides the scene between Malcolm’s unsettling test of Macduff’s devotion, framed as a question of kingly virtue, and the news of the deaths of Macduff’s wife and children that will prompt them to action. When an unnamed “Doctor” enters the stage, Malcolm and Macduff ask him what keeps the king, and he details the reason for the English king’s absence: There are a crew of wretched souls That stay his cure. Their malady convinces The great essay of art, but at his touch, Such sanctity hath Heaven given his hand, They presently amend. (4.3.142–46)2

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The speech reports the action of the monarch, marking the time of “cure” as the caesura evokes the plea from the crowd. The conclusion, they “presently amend,” attempts to close the distance between the ceremony’s pronouncement of cure and the desired curative effect. The doctor’s emphasis on the impotence of the “great essay of art” and the divine “sanctity” that authorizes the king’s “cure” has led critics working on early modern medicine and literature to read his character as the vehicle for an anachronistic and perfunctory political reference. Barbara Traister argues that in Macbeth the two doctors who appear “function more as authenticators than as healers” (46), not performing medicine but testifying to the effects of good and bad kingship. F. David Hoeniger, in an extended discussion of the ritual, suggests that the moment “evoke[s] the image of the holy king” in order to “remind the audience of how the custom and ceremony continued in their own time” (276), mapping James onto Edward the Confessor. Other studies of literary representations of early modern medicine, in fact, exclude this brief exchange from consideration because the doctor simply doesn’t practice any medicine.3 Macbeth’s reference to historical practice, then, intrudes in the play as a compliment to James at the risk of marring the plot’s forward motion, a critical conclusion perhaps best exemplified by Henry N. Paul’s observation, in his classic study, that it “would be hard to point to any passage in the plays of Shakespeare more irrelevant to the drama, and more obviously inserted to serve some topical interest” (367). Indeed, as Stephen Deng recounts, in the late eighteenth century, Francis Gentleman, an actor, complains that Shakespeare “lugged in, by neck and heels, a doctor for the strange purpose of paying a gross compliment to that royal line, which ridiculously arrogated a power of curing the evil, by a touch” (quoted in Deng 163).4 Yet I want to take Gentleman’s reported scoff seriously—with the emphasis on excess and redundancy—in order to ask: why is the exchange prolonged and what might this apparently unnecessary moment accomplish? The scene could end with the doctor’s entrance and explanation, which would be sufficient both to satisfy the contemporary gesture of reference to James in Macbeth and to end the awkward probe of Malcolm’s kingly virtues. Strikingly, however, the doctor exits, but the explication of the royal touch continues. As if unable to comprehend what he (and the audience) has just heard described, Macduff queries Malcolm further, who explains at length: ‘Tis called the evil— A most miraculous work in this good King, Which often since my here-remain in England I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven Himself best knows, but strangely visited people, All swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures, Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,

“Strange Virtue” 97 Put on with holy prayers; and ‘tis spoken, To the succeeding royalty he leaves The healing benediction. With this strange virtue He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy, And sundry blessings hang about his throne That speak him full of grace. (4.3.147–60) If the technically repetitive lines, as Paul suggests, “interrupt the action rather distressingly” (368), they also launch new associations within the dramatic fiction, detailing the “healing benediction,” the ceremony of touch that the king bequeaths to “succeeding royalty.” The explanation shifts from the action—“he cures”—to the ritual at the moment the king is “hanging a golden stamp,” the construction of the sentence poised to mediate between the object and form of the ceremony. Pairing the supplicants’ illness and the king’s power—the “strangely visited people” and the “strange virtue”—Malcolm articulates a relationship between the name of the disease and the body that enacts the cure. The “King’s evil” attaches a title to the disfiguring symptom that announces the illness, a tautology—in which “kings cured scrofulas because it was the royal disease: scrofulas were called the royal disease because kings cured it” (13)—that Frank Barlow traces to the thirteenth century. The diagnosis marks the limit of treatment, the last resort of healing in the singular person of the monarch. The repeated term “strange,” furthermore, repositions the scene within the play’s linguistic ecology: the word appears sixteen times in Macbeth, more than in any other play by Shakespeare except The Tempest. In a play rich with medical allusions and preoccupied with the vulnerable bodies of kings, the “strange” details that Malcolm offers about the supplicants frame the king’s cure as the expression of care. Their “swoll’n” and “ulcerous” bodies mark the disease not only in terms of physical suffering but as “pitiful” symptoms that prompt cure as an affective social response. What I want to underscore in the scene’s replay of the king’s ceremonies of touch—the “strange purpose,” to recall Gentleman’s disgruntled remark—is how the moment measures and refracts theatrical time. Macbeth, Jonathan Gil Harris observes, “is the play in which Shakespeare most dabbles in the untimely” (470). I take the repeated narration of the offstage ceremony of cure to resonate within and outside of the dramatic fiction. The doubled description evokes a parallel action that happens in the present of the play and offers a history that calibrates the elapsed time of Macbeth’s rule: during Malcolm’s “here-remain,” he has “often...seen” the “miraculous work.” Yet the duration of recounting also marks out the absent period of cure, a coincidence with the present of the play’s performance that emphasizes how poorly the healing ceremony fits in a play that echoes with the cry, “’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7.1–2). Neither of the Scottish kings auditioned by the dramatic fiction has the leisure to attend to the needs of a sick populace. Within the world of Macbeth, the violence in Scotland continually

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forecloses upon moments of respite: only in England does the power to “stay” the king portend physical healing, not political disaster. Although the “cure” strand of the narrative returns later in the scene, when Malcolm urges the newly-bereaved Macduff, “Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge / To cure this deadly grief” (4.3.215–16), this later emphasis summons self-sufficient action, snapping out of the lull in the dramatic fiction’s lingering monument to monarchical healing. Indeed, when William Davenant remakes this scene in his late seventeenthcentury adaptation of Macbeth, he locates Macduff and Malcolm’s exchange in Birnam Wood, transforming their discussion by emphasizing the royal touch as an impetus to planned action rather than delay.5 Noting that “The gracious Edward has lent us Seymour / And ten thousand men,” Malcolm asserts: Assistance granted by that pious King Must be successfull. He, who by his touch Can cure our bodyes of a foul disease Can by just force subdue a Traytors mind Power supernaturall is unconfin’d. (4.3.76–80) To this, Macduff replies: “If his compassion do’s on men diseas’d / Effect such cures, what wonders will he do / When to Compassion he adds Justice too” (4.3.81–83). The cure, in Davenant’s version, becomes a symbolic index to military might. Their exchange reads the act of healing only for the logic of political efficacy that redoubles with “supernaturall” aid; while Malcolm’s “cure our bodyes” includes himself as the recipient of the monarch’s aid, the point of the help is metaphorical, not medical. Gesturing to the historical myth of the ritual’s origins—and actually naming this king “gracious Edward”—Malcolm cites the English king’s healing acts only as mere preamble to his real interest in the martial payoff of the monarch’s power. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, however, dwells upon the report of the healing ceremony in performance, even though the play does not stage the English king’s practice of the royal touch. Never making visible a successful act of cure, the scene gestures to the potential for incompletion in the “miraculous work.” This moment in Macbeth occurs within a dramatic world of causality, following the logic in which, as Bert States observes, “a play plucks human experience from time and offers an aesthetic completion to a process we know to be endless” (50). Here, the doubled account of the sovereign’s “strange virtue” implicitly acknowledges the unpredictable chronology of fluctuating health. The ceremony of the royal touch signifies a medical act through the language of healing; yet some length of time obtains between the cure announced and body restored. Even the staunchest of early modern defenders never claimed that the royal touch healed every time, and as Thomas Fuller notes in 1655, “a complete miracle is done

“Strange Virtue” 99 presently and perfectly, whereas this cure is generally advanced by Degree and some Dayes interposed” (quoted in Bloch 241). Bloch observes that scrofula is especially apt to be taken for a sign because symptoms appear intermittently, “a disease that easily gives the illusion of being cured” (242), and what was characterized as a “supernatural action, when it took place, was generally only a delayed action” (241). Cure becomes a problem of “perspective” because it is uncertain, only retrospectively recognized even though the ceremony for healing stakes a confident claim. In what follows, I turn to contemporary accounts to consider how this problem of delay— the gap in cure to which time points in Macbeth—is managed in the practice of the rite by foregrounding the monarch’s body.

“HANDLING THEM TO HEALTH”: REPRESENTING THE ROYAL TOUCH Macbeth’s allusion to the royal touch stresses the medical dimension of the practice. While, as Hillary Nunn’s essay in this volume observes, James made a point of identifying himself figuratively as the royal “physician” to the state, Malcolm’s speech makes a surprisingly technical reference to the kind of practitioner usually required to heal the illness. The patient lives in “despair of surgery,” a gesture to the treatment for scrofula that often required the surgeon’s intervention. Practitioners of surgery—or what John Woodall nominates the “Handy part of healing” (B1) in his 1639 treatise, The Surgeons Mate—engaged in manual treatment of the body, a dimension of medicine often identified in contrast to the physicians’ learned accounts of illness. Given their work on the body’s surfaces and close connections to cosmetic operations, Margaret Pelling observes that barber-surgeons in the period, in particular, “provided means of fending off the threat, or appearance, of physical decay” (104). This emphasis on the appearance of the patient and the need for visible curative effects is everywhere in William Clowes’s 1602 treatise, which announces as its aim “The artificiall cure of that malady called in Latin Struma, and in English, the evill, cured by kinges and queens of England.” Alongside the medicinal preparations that take up the first forty pages, Clowes includes an account of “A most miraculous Cure, healed onely by the Queenes most excellent Majesty, when neither Phisicke nor Chirurgery could take place or prevaile” (G4v), an insistence on the impotence of both branches of medical practitioners already evident in one of the dedicatory poems to Clowes’s treatise, which exclaims, “Then Phisicke yeeld; give place Chirurgery / The Rationall and Practicke for this paine / Are both a like” (A3v). When medical practice could not effect a change, Clowes claims, Queen Elizabeth’s touch brought healing to his former patient: through the “gift and power of Almighty God, by her Graces onely meanes laying of her blessed and happie hands upon him, shee cured him safely within the space of sixe monthes” (H1r–v). The credit for the

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cure goes to God, but the concentration of power is in the queen’s hands. While this emphasis on Elizabeth’s physical presence, as Willis suggests, “points in the direction of transformation” (154) as it heightens the distinction between the queen’s healing hand and the patient’s swollen throat, the “meanes” of medical practice is an encounter of flesh that designates the royal body as a unique site of health. Not only does the monarch appear as hope to the patient beyond the aid of “Rationall and Practicke” assistance, the ceremony for healing insists that the royal body encounters the diseased body at the point of the sore. In William Tooker’s 1597 defense, a distinctly manual capacity is a hallmark of Elizabeth’s practice, for he writes: “often have I seen her with her exquisite hands, whiter than whitest snow, boldly and without disgust pressing there sores and ulcers and handling them to health, not merely touching them with her fingertips” (Crawfurd 74). Although both James and Charles I evinced some hesitance about the interaction, this emphasis on the hand of the monarch—and admiration of the extensive contact— is repeated throughout the seventeenth century in literary representations that stress that the English monarchs touch the sore specifically, unlike their French counterparts who also perform a rite of royal healing. This custom is marked as historical precedent. John Bird recounts the descent of the gift from Edward the Confessor, a myth of origin dating from around 1066 in which Edward heals a woman who, told in a dream that “if she were wash’t, stroak’d, and sign’d by the Kings hands, she should receive a perfect cure” (G4); after the “performance by the King in the ceremony,” who touches the infected glands of the throat, “the skin breaks, the worms, and mattur drop out, the swelling fals, all the pain goes away, all that stood by being amazed to see such a cure to be performed in Royal Robes, and such virtue to proceed from hands which held a Sceptre” (G4). John Browne’s 1684 account likewise hails Edward the Confessor as the “first Curer of Strumas, by Contact or Imposition of Hands” (2C4), before arguing that the royal gift finds its perfection in Charles II, reinforcing the king’s claim through the interaction with every would-be patient on whom he laid his hands. To be sure, the English monarchs shrewdly employed the symbolic importance of the ritual’s curative effects for political ends. Elizabeth discontinued the practice of distributing cramp rings for healing, but emphasized the ritual of touching for scrofula as an element of the power that she possessed as a female monarch. Elizabeth Lane Furdell suggests that this choice was a canny political move: “the queen retained the ceremony that brought her into direct contact with her suffering subjects and jettisoned the one that did not” (69). James initially caviled at—or at least appeared reluctant to perform—the service, but was convinced by his counselors to continue the custom, though he did stop making the sign of the cross with the gold coin. Daniel Fusch argues that, in fact, “far from doing away with the ceremony, with this rite James initiated an extensive program of reviving and preserving ceremonies while simultaneously divesting them of the language of magic

“Strange Virtue” 101 and wonder.” Arthur Wilson’s 1655 account calls the practice “a Device, to aggrandize the Vertue of Kings,” claiming that James understood the practice as an appeal to superstition in which his subjects would “find[] the strength of the Imagination a more powerful Agent in the Cure, than the Plasters his Chirurgions prescribed for the Sore” (par. 2). The “aggrandiz[ing]” possibility of the healing touch included, most obviously, national and theological analogies: James Maxwell’s 1612 “Poeme shewing the Excellencie of our Soueraigne King IAMES his HAND” opens by asserting that “King IAMES is called of God to be the Curer of the Kings Euill; in priuate persons corporally; in the Body of this Ile politically; in the Pope and the whole Catholick Church Ecclesiastically” (D2v). The argument of the poem fashions a title for James from the ceremony’s crucial verb, shifting from “curing” to “Curer” to scale up in power and scope. Charles I’s successful exercise of royal touch was touted as proof of divine election, especially after his death: describing “a Cure of two of our Royal Martyr,” William Baron’s extremely partisan defense observes that while Charles “went from Newcastle to Holmby, and was kept there, particularly many came to be Cur’d of the Evil” (I7). Baron asserts: “during his Confinement at Hampton-Court, there were several Healings” in which “he perform’d the Priests Office too: The whole was in this manner: The People kneeling down in two Rows, he went between them, and stroaking every one, us’d this expression, I touch, God heal” (I7v). For Bird, writing in 1661, practice of the touch within the newly restored monarchy occasions a symbolic reading of the “apostemous Swellings” (G4) that characterize the symptoms of scrofula and an affirmation of the “dignity and descent” (G4v) of the office  of king. All of these interpretations add up to proof that Charles II is “that Physician to cure those wounds and putrified sores, which our State-Physicians (as they have been often called) have made and caused” (H2). Although it is no surprise that the English monarchs made political use of a ceremony that shored up their power—as Jonathan Goldberg reminds us, James insists in Basilikon Doron that “royal existence is representation” (98)—the representational stress on the English monarch’s efficacious touch makes a forceful physical demand. If Shakespeare’s play leaves the act of the royal touch offstage, the century of accounts that follow demonstrates that the king’s “Body natural,” to follow Ernst Kantorowicz’s influential distinction, was a crucial site of encounter and display. According to Kantorowicz, who quotes Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries or Reports, the legal fiction distinguishes between the king’s Body natural, “subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People,” and the king’s Body politic, “a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government” (7). Thus, Kantorowicz explains, the Body politic has the power to “reduce, or even remove, the imperfections of the fragile human nature” because, in the king, “His Body politic, which is annexed to his Body natural, takes away the Imbecility of his Body natural” (9–10).

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Kantorowicz notes in his footnote: “That the body politic wipes away imperfection was common opinion,” and cites Bloch, among others, as scholarly evidence for this point. The notion of the king’s two bodies, then, allows for the Body natural to be “defective” or “infirm,” because the Body politic has the power to cover over these frailties. However, although theoretically this Body natural may be subject to infirmities, English representations of monarchs in the act of the royal touch repeatedly foreground the cure’s promise through the ideal appearance of that Body natural. Browne describes the monarch’s “Sacred Hands” as “sweetned with that sacred Salutiferous gift of Healing, which both supports the Body Politick, and keeps up the Denizens and Subjects thereof in vigor and courage” (2B3v– 2B4). The treatises that describe and orders that dictate the ceremony put this body on view as the obvious contrast to the sick patient (recall Tooker’s description of Elizabeth’s “exquisite hands”). Furthermore, accounts measure the success of healing by the proof of the patient’s changed appearance, emphasizing the social implications of scrofula’s effects. Seventeenth-century accounts detailing the ceremony do acknowledge the potential of readers to doubt tales of the monarch’s touch, but they premise their defense on bodily restoration: in the case of Clowes’s former patient, the man is altered beyond recognition. In stark contrast to the “loathsome filthinesse” of the sores of the man’s earlier appearance, Clowes confesses that, upon their meeting, he “did not wel-know him, his Colour & complexion was so greatly altered & amended” (H1v). While Bird  refers readers to Tooker’s treatise for Elizabeth’s “notable Cures” (G2v), he urges his own audience to “behold multitudes touch’t by [Charles II’s] Royall Hands, and comparing the condition of such who have been touch’t afterward with what it was before...finde this vertue ascribed to his Majesty, true, and so resolve their doubts” (G2v). This explication of the cured patient’s appearance puts pressure on the distinction that critics in disability studies have made between disease and impairment etiologies of disability, which are difficult to distinguish in early modern conceptions of health. Though understood as disease, the social effects of scrofula testify to a disabling of health that makes “strange” the bodies of those who experience it—even, potentially, the body of the king. The same reliance on touch that foregrounds the king’s body in the ritual, that is, puts this body at risk. Charles I was perhaps the monarch most vocally insistent about the threat the ceremony posed to his person because of the crowds: he issued repeated orders, titled with only slight variation, “A Proclamation for the better ordering of those who repayre to the Court, for their cure of the disease called the Kings Evill,” that remind his sick subjects of the potential danger of interaction and forestall their assembling. Judith Richards suggests that Charles I’s increasing orders to restrain subjects from importuning him for cures is the “area where subject’s expectations and monarch’s performance were most conspicuously at variance in the years before 1640” (86).

“Strange Virtue” 103 Each proclamation begins by reinforcing the power of the custom: “the Kings and Queenes of this Realme, by many ages past, have had the happinesse, by their sacred touch and invocation of the Name of God, to cure those, who are afflicted with the disease called the Kings Evill” (Crawfurd 164).6 If the first clause asserts the monarchical privilege inherent in the ritual, the next claims the continuance of tradition: “his now most Excellent Majestie, in no less measure than any of his Royall predecessors, hath had good successe herein,” in order to justify the proclamation that prevents subjects from coming to the court to receive the royal touch. Postponing the ceremony until a later date, the order remains keenly aware of the king’s health, calling for “times more convenient, both for the temperature of the season, and in respect of any contagion, which may happen in this neere accesse to his Majesties sacred Person,” though taking pains to underscore that Charles “in his most gracious and pious disposition is as ready and willing as any King or Queene of this Realme ever was...to relieve the distresses and necessities of his good subjects” (Crawfurd 164). This concern about the vulnerability of the king’s “sacred Person” was made more urgent by outbreaks of the plague: while a 1631 order cites the “generall health of His people” (Crawfurd 171) to justify suspending the ceremony during plague seasons, successive orders extend the sanction with a whiff of worry, continuing to “inhibite resort to be made unto His person for Curing of the Malady called The Kings Evill” (Crawfurd 172), given the proximity to the king’s body upon which the ritual depends. The performance of the royal touch represented in these accounts draws attention to the monarch’s body as the guarantor of promised health that cannot be immediate; yet this body, like the cure it authorizes, risks the vulnerability of physical encounter.

“THE TIME OF REPEATING”: MARKING THE PROMISE OF CURE To return to the offstage curing action to which Macbeth gestures, this essay closes by considering how the printed text of the ceremony renders the inevitable delay of restored health.7 The Ceremonies for the Healing of them that be Diseased with the Kings Evil, Used in the Time of King Henry VII (1686) was printed in both Latin and English in the reign of James II. The form of the ceremony was altered according to theological shifts: Elizabeth’s Protestant version eliminated references to the Virgin and Saints in the prayers, for example, and James II’s text attempted to restore the Catholic elements of the ceremony that intervening monarchs had dropped, signaling historical return in the title’s gesture to Henry VII. The Ceremonies opens with the King’s invocation and continues with the chaplain’s responsive liturgy, gospel readings, and prayers. Although the rite for the royal touch used during the reign of Charles II, “At the Healing,” was sometimes added to the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), it is unclear to what extent James’s version of the ritual was adopted: Brian Cummings points out that “single-page sheets in black-letter of this rite began to be bound in to

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individual copies of the BCP from 1633,” but this extended version “is never found in a BCP” (795). The text reads as a script for performance, describing and cuing action in red-letter print, while the words spoken in the ceremony appear in black. The visual effect is that of textual apparatus for a play; the descriptions function effectively as stage directions. Taken together, the ceremony makes legible a “perspective” on cure, to follow Cheu’s insight, one that mediates between the communal, iterative dimension of the ceremony and the singular, sick body that receives the monarch’s touch.

Figure 6.1 Williams. Excerpt from The Ceremonies for the Healing of Them that be Diseased With the Kings Evil, Used in the Time of King Henry VII, 1686. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The text publicizes the monarch’s private role—and significance of his Body natural—in the performance of the ritual. At the end of the Gospel reading, which concludes, “they shall impose Hands upon the Sick, and they shall be whole” (A6), the direction reads: Which last Clause, (They shall impose, &c.), The Chaplain repeats as long as the King is handling the sick Person. And in the time of

“Strange Virtue” 105 Repeating the aforesaid Words, (They shall Impose, &c.), The Clerk of the Closet shall Kneel before the King, having the sick Person upon the Right-hand; and the sick Person shall likewise kneel before the King: and then the King shall lay his Hand upon the Sore of the Sick Person. This done, the Chaplain shall make an end of the Gospel. (A6r–v) The scripted protocols of the ritual underscore the complexity of the interaction upon which the act of cure depends: the chaplain speaks, the clerk ushers, the sick person kneels, and the king touches in an ongoing sequence before the audience who watches and waits. The second gospel reading repeats the synchronized reading and movement as the “sick Person” receives the gold coin, before a series of prayers concludes the service. The “last Clause” in the reading narrates the space of bodily interaction through the phrase the Chaplain recites. The text itself marks the space between the wholeness the language promises and the time of performance, a gap that is stitched up by the person of the monarch in “laying his hand upon the sore of the sick person.” The “time of Repeating” discloses the repetition built into the ritual itself, and, by doing so, stages the not-yet cure, promising the “shall be” of healing through the evidence of physical touch in order to confirm the “whole” the Chaplain pronounces. Focusing on the singular “sick Person” who approaches the king to receive the “handling,” rather than the crowds of supplicants, the ceremony foregrounds the king’s touch as both act and sign of anticipated yet ephemeral cure. The final red-letter direction in this liturgy reframes the space of the ceremony, shifting the scope from the public scene of cure to some moment after: “This Prayer following is to be said secretly, after the Sick Persons be departed from the King, at his Pleasure” (A10v). Not quite within the ceremony yet equally as scripted, the King’s personal prayer reinforces the connection between bodily interaction and health. Giving thanks that it “is granted unto the Kings thereof, that by the sole Imposition of their Hands a most grievous and filthy Disease should be cured” (A11), the prayer to be spoken by the King asks: “And grant, that on whose Bodies soever We have Imposed Hands in thy Name, thro’ this thy Vertue working in them, and thro’ our Ministry, may be restored to their former Health” (A11v–A12). The prayer after the ceremony, rendered as if offstage, frames an otherwise invisible act that will follow the encounter (and sneaks in a further didactic point, to be sure). But if the language that informs the ceremony for healing the King’s evil—and defenses of the practice—proclaims the power of the royal touch, the text qualifies this power through the conditional plea, the “may be” of cure’s appeal. Although the apparatus of print stabilizes the ritual by declaring a cure, this moment belatedly reveals the pronouncement as a presumptive gesture, always potentially incomplete. If Macbeth refuses to produce the embodied display of the interaction but cannot help worrying its absence, the scripted ritual foregrounds the body of the king but betrays the space

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between the monarch’s proclamation of well-being and the patient’s experience of illness. The terms for kingship are negotiated offstage, by a king whose physical presence is engaged in an interaction named as a cure, a performance that, like the exigencies of the theater—and health, for that matter—is embodied but never quite recuperable. NOTES 1. I am grateful to Sujata Iyengar for her work to envision and assemble this volume and to Emily Bartels, Debapriya Sarkar, Stephanie Hilger, and members of the “Literature and Medicine” seminar at ACLA 2014 for their thoughtful responses.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

The classic studies of the royal touch are those by Crawfurd and Bloch, which offer extensive and painstaking treatment of the historiography and reproduce primary documents related to the practice; see also Thomas, which situates the ritual within a broader context of magical healing, esp. 227–35; see Hoeniger’s extended discussion of literary representation of the historical practice, esp. 276–86; see also Iyengar’s entry on “evil” (123–25), which places the practice within medical and literary contexts. Recent critical work has tended to focus on particular monarchs and how their exercise of the ritual responds to the political pressures and possibilities of the moment: on Elizabeth I, see Levin and Willis; on James I, see Fusch; on Charles I, see Richards; on Charles II, see Weber and Schmidgen. This and all further quotations are from the Norton edition of Shakespeare’s plays. See, for example, Kerwin’s study of the emerging and contested shape of early modern medicine; Pettigrew discusses the physician who diagnoses Lady Macbeth at length (pp. 83–91), but only mentions this moment briefly. Deng also identifies this moment as crucial and overlooked in critical discourse, but he reads the description as articulating the conflict between the mystical and financial economies of the play. The stage direction at the 4.3 heading reads: “Enter Malcolme & Macduffe / The Scene Birnam Wood.” Davenant’s adaptation was probably performed in 1663/4, early in the reign of Charles II; the quarto is dated 1673. Texts quoted here from the 1626 and 1631 orders are reproduced—along with all other available orders—in Crawfurd’s Appendix, “King’s Evil Proclamations.” See also Daniel Swift’s useful discussion of Macbeth in relation to the rite, which came to my attention too late to be incorporated into this argument.

WORKS CITED Barlow, Frank. “The King’s Evil.” The English Historical Review 95.374 (1980): 3–27. Print. Baron, William. Regicides No Saints nor Martyrs. London, 1700. EEBO. Web. Accessed 1 July 2014. Bird, John. Ostenta Carolina. London: Fra[nces] Sowle, 1661. EEBO. Web. Accessed 1 July 2014.

“Strange Virtue” 107 Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England. Trans. J. E. Anderson. New York: Dorset, 1961. Print. Browne, John. Adenochoiradelogia. London: Tho[mas] Newcomb for Sam[uel] Lowndes, 1684. EEBO. Web. Accessed 1 July 2014. Cheu, Johnson. “Performing Disability, Problematizing Cure.” Bodies in Commotion. Ed. Carrie Sandhal and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Print. Clowes, William. For the Artificiall Cure of that Malady Called in Latin Struma, and in English, the Evill, Cured by Kinges and Queens of England. London: Edward Allde, 1602. EEBO. Web. Accessed 1 July 2014. Crawfurd, Raymond. The King’s Evil. London: Clarendon Press, 1911. Print. Cummings, Brian, ed. The Book of Common Prayer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. Deng, Stephen. “Money and Mystical Kingship in Macbeth.” Macbeth: New Critical Essays. Ed. Nick Moschovakis. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Furdell, Elizabeth Lane. The Royal Doctors, 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2001. Print. Fusch, Daniel. “The Unmiraculous Miracle.” APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture. 14 May 2008. Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2014. . Goldberg, Jonathan. “Speculations: Macbeth and Source.” Macbeth: New Casebooks. Ed. Alan Sinfield. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “The Smell of Macbeth.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58.4 (2007): 465–86. Print. Healy, Margaret. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Print. Hobgood, Allison P. and David Houston Wood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. Print. Hoeniger, F. David. Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992. Print. Iyengar, Sujata. Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. Print. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The Kings Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Print. Kerwin, William. Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2005. Print. Laneham, Robert. A letter whearin part of the entertainment vntoo the Queenz Maiesty at Killingwoorth Castl in Warwik sheer in this soomerz progress 1575 is signified. London, 1575. EEBO. Web. Accessed 1 July 2014. Levin, Carole. “Would I Could Give You Help and Succour: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Touch.” Albion 21.2 (1989): 191–205. Print. Maxwell, James. The laudable Life and Deplorable Death, of our Late Peerlesse Prince Henry. London: Edw[ard] Allde, for Thomas Pauier, 1612. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Nunn, Hillary. “The King’s Part” James I, The Lake-Ros Affair, and The Play of Purgation.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 127–141. Paul, Henry N. The Royal Play of Macbeth: When, why, and how it was written by Shakespeare. New York: Macmillan, 1950. Print.

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Pelling, Margaret. “Appearance and reality: barber-surgeons, the body and disease.” London 1500–1700. Ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay. New York: Longman, 1986. Print. Pettigrew, Todd. Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage. Newark and London: U of Delaware P, 2007. Print. Richards, Judith. “His Nowe Majestie and the English Monarchy: The Kingship of Charles I before 1640.” Past & Present 113.1 (1986): 70–96. Print. Schmidgen, Wolfram. “The Last Royal Bastard and the Multitude.” Journal of British Studies 47.1 (2008): 53–76. Print. Scot, Reginald. The Discouerie of Witchcraft. London: William Brome, 1584. EEBO. Web. Accessed 1 July 2014. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print. Spencer, Christopher, ed. Davenant’s Macbeth from the Yale Manuscript: An Edition, with a Discussion of the Relation of Davenant’s Text to Shakespeare’s. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961. Print. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1985. Print. Stiker, Henry Jacques. A History of Disability. Trans. William Sayers. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Print. Swift, Daniel. Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. The Ceremonies For the Healing of Them that be Diseased With the Kings Evil, Used in the Time of King Henry VII. London: Henry Hills, 1686. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Penguin, 1991. Print. Traister, Barbara Howard. “Note Her a Little Farther: Doctors and Healers in the Drama of Shakespeare.” Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage. Ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Print. Weber, Harold. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1996. Print. Willis, Deborah. “The Monarch and the Sacred: Shakespeare and the Ceremony for the Healing of the King’s Evil.” True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and AntiRitual in Shakespeare and His Age. Ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry. Urbana-Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1992. Print. Wilson, Arthur. The History of Great Britain. London: Printed for Richard Lownds, 1653. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014. Woodall, John. The Surgeons Mate, or Military & Domestique Surgery. London: Rob[ert] Young for Nicholas Bourne, 1639. EEBO. Web. Accessed 30 June 2014.

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Shakespeare and Civic Health Matt Kozusko

Shakespeare for some time has served a secular need for sacralized texts: we afford the plays and to some extent the poems a status similar to that we ascribe to scripture and to other ritualized or revered texts such as the Bill of Rights from the U.S. Constitution. The words are agreed to have a particular power over the audiences and other readers or users they address, first as a means of capturing something essential and timeless about an audience’s lived reality, and second as a means of validating and guaranteeing the fundamental humanity of that audience. The user can connect to the language because it articulates the component features of the user experience in such a way that is beyond the user’s own powers of articulation but that seems profoundly to supply the right words in the right combination: such words provide an index to an experience that cannot otherwise be adequately captured. When the user connects to those words, his or her status as a member of the user group is validated, because the words in their sequence are sensible and intelligible only to a member of the group they address. If revered secular texts such as the Bill of Rights are thought to articulate rights fundamental to and (in most cases) inherent in the human condition, and in so articulating to guarantee such rights, Shakespeare serves the similar function, perhaps complementary or supplementary, of articulating the human condition itself. In this chapter, I discuss the semi-sacred status of Shakespeare’s texts as a matter of public or civic health. In instances in which Shakespeare serves a secular need for wisdom, guidance, and validation, we can see how the well-being of bodies—personal and politic—intersects with the canonized texts in which relevant principles are coded. Recent scholarship on the public sphere sketches the challenges of negotiating a private and a public self. If we can think of the public sphere in terms of civic health, we can look at encounters with Shakespeare as an opportunity for members of a public to locate within themselves the characteristics that are both private and public, both individual and collective. A healthy public is one that both requires and celebrates the identifying markers of the human condition in its constituent members. Shakespeare is one space in which this cycle operates.

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VANISHING SHAKESPEARE Anxiety about Shakespeare disappearing from public circulation ran high in the 1980s and 1990s, as the campus culture wars in the United States and the United Kingdom debated the value and purpose of Shakespeare on the national syllabus. The anxiety peaked in the United States somewhere in the mid-1990s, when the National Alumni Forum (NAF) published a report exposing the turn of college curricula away from “Great Authors” toward courses covering such trivial material as “social conditions, sexual topics, and non-literary documents” (NAF 8). The NAF report offers Georgetown University as a representative case, noting that incoming students who major in English “will be free from the burdens of the great writers, allowing more opportunity to study ‘Hardboiled Detective Fiction,’ ‘AIDS and Representation,’ and ‘History and Theory of Sexuality’” (3). If the report’s attitude almost seems more quaint than offensive or dangerous, it is only because this curricular turn has gained traction and, a mere two decades later, topics such as identity and social crisis no longer seem like “less substantial content” than great books reading lists or courses on Shakespeare. Although higher education is still under attack, especially from social and intellectual conservatives, critics generally no longer find it objectionable that core curricula across the United States require students to reflect on contemporary social and cultural issues affecting communities at all levels, from local to global. But such critics are still worried about the disappearance of Shakespeare. The 2014 version of this anxiety ran as an opinion piece in or on various regional newspapers and news sites, from The Denver Post to The Suncoast News to NorthJersey.com. Written by Daniel Burnett, it covers familiar points—i.e., Shakespeare is not required at many prominent American universities; even English majors do not have to take Shakespeare at Yale or NYU—before branching out to lament the result of this curricular recklessness and whimsy: the shortcomings of graduates today. It turns out, students have the same cultural literacy problems they had in the 1980s and 1990s. They don’t know what the Emancipation Proclamation did, they don’t know about term lengths for elected officials, and so forth. A “recent survey” shows that the matriculating populace is less prepared now than at some idealized point in the past to answer questions about history and politics and other subjects evident in the enlightened mind. The article invites readers to register appropriate disbelief, and complains that Justin Bieber returns more hits on Google than does William Shakespeare. “Too many of today’s graduates are more familiar with the Kardashians than the Kennedys, with Lady Gaga than Lady Macbeth,” it mourns. It also offers as its opening sentences a wonderfully ambiguous mis-quotation of Romeo and Juliet—“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo? Sorry, Juliet. He’s hard to find on many college campuses”—in which “wherefore” is used to mean “where.” Is the mistake intentional or not? The Denver Post

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presumably didn’t want to risk what could be read as ironic ignorance of Shakespeare in an article about the importance of Shakespeare: it ran the piece without the first two lines. The piece’s central anxiety revives the Bloomian notion of the “dumbing down” of America, an unsurprisingly persistent claim that kids these days have no interest in good books, don’t care about schoolwork, have no respect for their elders, and so on.1 The fear that each successive generation is progressively degenerative has a kind of allure in its righteousness, even if it is ultimately untenable. “It is simply reckless when colleges don’t require such meaningful, fundamental courses,” Burnett observes, implicitly linking the failure of today’s college graduates to know that the Battle of the Bulge was fought in World War II with the absence of required Shakespeare courses in core curricula. On the surface, Burnett worries that without Shakespeare, graduates of higher education face an intellectual deficit, but the article’s deeper fear is about public health. It is a civic problem, not merely a personal one, or it is a personal problem whose implications for civic health are perhaps too vast to be addressed directly. A healthy public comprises healthy citizens. The reader of the article infers that Shakespeare, in producing the latter, will generate the former. The “Shakespeare” Burnett imagines recalls the Shakespeare under revision by professional scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s: Burnett calls him “arguably the greatest figure in English literature, who forever transformed theater, influenced great thinkers and shaped the English language by inventing or popularizing now-common vocabulary.” There is some truth in these observations, but it is a partial truth, and oddly, it hasn’t kept up with those advancements in Shakespeare scholarship that are most objective, and least free of what conservative critique would see as driven by radical ideology. In ascribing the transformation of theater to Shakespeare alone, for instance, it ignores decades of recent scholarship emphasizing the collaborative and cooperative reality of early modern popular drama, in which enterprise Shakespeare was not the only prominent figure. Was theater (all theater everywhere?) “transformed forever” by a half-century or so of popular drama in which Shakespeare played a part, and if so, was it Shakespeare, or even primarily Shakespeare, who effected the transformation? Some credit is due to Marlowe and his mighty line, cited and imitated by his own contemporaries for its importance, and to Queen Elizabeth I and the patronage system, and to proto-capitalists like the Burbages or Henslowe— all of whom played a part in generating the circumstances in which Shakespeare flourished. In celebrating Shakespeare’s vocabulary, the article again credits Shakespeare alone for a linguistic phenomenon properly ascribed to pretty much everyone writing in the particular historical circumstances of an emerging national language to which words were added freely. It also suggests ignorance of recent work in statistical analysis that corrects the notion that Shakespeare’s vocabulary was unparalleled. And as the article’s backward-looking image of Shakespeare invites academic rejoinder, its

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backward-looking social politics invite snark. “Where would we be without words like swagger? Or eyeball? Or puppy dog? Or kitchen wench!” Burnett wonders. Indeed, where would we be without kitchen wenches? The twenty-first century, perhaps? If the 2014 piece eerily resembles the 1996 piece, there is good reason. It turns out that Daniel Burnett is the press secretary for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), formerly the National Alumni Forum, and the same organization that published the 1996 NAF report. ACTA/NAF’s positions and arguments have, at least as far as publications go, hardly changed. Given ACTA/NAF’s impressive database, the result of decades of analysis of core requirements and “recent surveys,” one might hope for at least a basic causation argument linking the intellectual deficits run by today’s graduates with higher education’s “assault on Shakespeare and great authors” (ACTA 3). Perhaps their own mastery of Shakespeare has engendered in them a kind of human decency that prevents such crass tactics. It is easy and satisfying to argue with these kinds of pieces at the level of newspaper editorial, but the echo of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s suggest a more pressing question with a less satisfying answer. What is the civic value of Shakespeare, really? And does the answer we can offer as academics today differ from the answer offered by our counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s, when the critique of ideology undertaken by leading scholars articulated so precisely the power of Shakespeare’s perceived universality to be deployed in the service of conservative social and academic policies? Is Shakespeare good for users and the user communities of which they are a part? At the level of civic health, that is, can Shakespeare actually serve the kind of function he is popularly imagined to serve? If so, why? And how should Shakespeare be distributed or governed or curated or mediated for public use? Denise Albanese’s recent book Extramural Shakespeare provides a careful and thorough reappraisal of the cultural place of Shakespeare, noting that he “is part of a public culture in the United States precisely because the mass-educational project of the twentieth century made him so” and that the “culture wars” that politicized Shakespeare in the 1980s can no longer account for Shakespeare’s importance or status (5). I take up a related topic in the following sections, with specific attention to the way we talk about Shakespeare when we want to reaffirm and celebrate that he can help bring about and maintain civic health.2 I am particularly interested in the story of Shakespeare as good for us, and I will sidestep the question of what actually happens to people who encounter Shakespeare in order to focus on how we talk about those encounters in narrative form. Although we can assess the uses to which Shakespeare’s mythic universal appeal and accessibility has been put, no amount of complex math will tell us as a matter of fact whether reading Shakespeare is good for us. Assessing Shakespeare’s value for public health means looking not at how Shakespeare brings about personal or civic health in the communities who use him, but at our hope that

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he indeed does this; that hope is visible in the stories we tell when we talk about encounters with the plays and the poems. Below, I glance briefly at some of the arguments at the heart of the critique of ideology with regard to Shakespeare, and then turn to a recent phenomenon of storytelling to consider what has changed.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE SUBJECT Alan Sinfield, one of the most eloquent and incisive writers on the question of Shakespeare and education curriculum, argued in 1985 that “Shakespeare has been made to speak mainly for the right” in the UK educational system, and called for a re-appropriation: “he does not have to be a crucial stage in the justification of elitism in education and culture. He has been appropriated for certain practices and attitudes, and can be reappropriated for others” (135, 137). “The main move” in the rhetorical ideology of college entrance exams in the United Kingdom, he continued, “is the projection of local conditions on to the eternal”: This move is built in to the structure of the whole exercise, through the notion that Shakespeare is the great National Poet who speaks universal truths and whose plays are the ultimate instance of Literature. It is made also through the ways the [GCE] questions invite the candidates to handle the plays. Almost invariably it is assumed that the plays reveal universal “human” values and qualities and that they are self-contained and coherent entities; and the activity of criticism in producing these assumptions is effaced. (138) The critique of universalism, like the critique of “self-contained and coherent entities,” took up much of the volume from which Sinfield’s essay comes, Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. The “effacing” of criticism was, of course, a move addressed expressly by Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, which sought to draw attention especially to the critic’s own role in producing knowledge in the encounter with texts. For students in Sinfield’s account, however, it was not a matter of disciplinary self-awareness so much as a set of assumptions that mistake a prescribed outcome as an inevitable outcome: The effacing of the activity of criticism works mainly through the assumption that the candidate will discover the true response or meaning in the manner established by literary criticism as appropriate to the text. Not only are these assumptions not exposed for inspection, they are drawn forth naturally, as it appears, from the interaction between the candidate and the text. The fact that between those two comes the learnt procedures of literary criticism is obscured. (139)

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The act of reading needed to be exposed as a learned behavior with serious political and ideological value. It was not a neutral and natural activity, and its validating results were not inevitable. This final effect of the curriculum and the questions was especially insidious: Candidates are invited to interrogate their experience to discover a response which has in actuality been learnt...what actually happens is that candidates are required to take up a certain system of values— those we have been identifying—in order satisfactorily to answer the question. (139–40) Enjoined to a personal response that will reveal the plays’ universal values already at work in the reader’s subject experience, the exam questions are inevitably coercive, implicitly defining any response outside of a particular range as wrong or inadmissible. In summary, Sinfield’s critique took aim at four targets: the notion of universalism, the stability of meaning in Shakespeare’s texts (partly a matter of erasing their historicity), the tendency of the critical reading process to erase itself, and the exhortation to readers of Shakespeare to make a personal connection with the plays in order to produce themselves as successful subjects. The component ideologies of the grand ideological project are effaced in each step, as the highly structured process of reading and responding offers itself instead as natural appreciation of the universal value accessible in the stable text to anyone. Again, though, most insidious is that the production of a validated self depends on the production of an appropriate response. Because students are “persuaded to accept appropriate attitudes to Literature as a criterion of general capacity,” engaging with Shakespeare in the right way becomes a goal and a demand, and failure to succeed is understood and internalized not as a shortcoming relative to a “particular and relative social code” but as “an absolute judgment of [a person’s] potential as a human being” (136). Cultural Materialism and New Historicism so successfully took up the problem of criticism effacing itself that academics have begun to push back against the futility to which awareness of our own textuality and historicity can lead. Book history and bibliography unsettled the notion of the master text, and the idea of a single “correct” reading of any text has little currency today, especially on campus. The degree to which the critique of universalism—part of a wider project undertaken by Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, Jean Howard, Lisa Jardine and others—succeeded is debatable. Indeed, the plenary session at the 2014 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, attended by many of the persons whose academic, pedagogical, and political work was part of that effort, suggested a lack of easy consensus. In some sense, though, the dynamic Sinfield charts here had already ceased in 1985, and a depoliticized, open-access Shakespeare was already available. The Shakespeare story I turn to next comes from a program of prison rehabilitation and therapy already well established in the United States in the

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1980s. Whatever the case, the Shakespeare dynamic Sinfield critiques was just one of many different cultural dynamics, each making different use of Shakespeare with different standards and requirements and ideological vectors. Some are always more prominent than others. The prominent dynamic today, I suggest, retains basic assumptions about Shakespeare’s universal appeal, but makes significant adjustments to the other components. In 1985, Shakespeare’s public importance was most visible in his curricular prominence and was understood as a proving ground for those most fit to move from general education to advanced study. Three decades later, his public importance is most visible not necessarily on campus or in core curricula, but in the popular imagination to which that importance has been transferred—in part, as Denise Albanese argues, by the “mass-educational project” that took popularizing Shakespeare as its goal (5). Another key effect of this educational effort was to broaden access and open up the field of what counted as an appropriate response to Shakespeare. On the one hand, the characteristics governing the production and consumption of Shakespeare are in some way similar to those discussed above. Shakespeare is still universal, and the importance of a personal connection is even more pronounced today. But on the other hand, the reading produced by that personal connection is now likely to be accepted without judgment, or indeed, as I will argue below, celebrated despite the kind of judgment it would have been assigned if given as a response on an entrance examination. This new dynamic also involves the process of critical reading, which has been transformed from a matter of learned procedure to a matter of scripted behavior. Users of Shakespeare today are not expected to produce a particular reading of Shakespeare; they are expected to participate in a particular storyline about how reading Shakespeare makes you a better person and, consequently, a better member of the public to which you belong. Rather than offer a reading that reveals a healthy understanding of Shakespeare and validates readers as worthy, users are expected to encounter Shakespeare and then exhibit a healthiness that validates whatever reading of Shakespeare they have offered. The injunction to a personal connection has become so strong that subjects ultimately need only to display the effects of that connection. The details of the reading are then managed in narrative recollection or retelling.

SHAKESPEARE AND REDEMPTION We can see these new dynamics at work in the NPR radio documentary show This American Life, episode 218, titled “Act V.” It is a standard story of Shakespeare and personal and civic health pitched as a documentary look at Agnes Wilcox’s prison Shakespeare program, conducted at Missouri Eastern Correctional Facility. In terms of documentary accounts of Shakespeare programs, from prisons to primary schools, it is the first in what has arguably become

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a minor industry. I say it is standard, however, not because it establishes a pattern followed elsewhere; rather, it reproduces the narrative contours and deploys the central tropes and topoi of a particular, and formally regular, genre traceable to nineteenth-century melodrama in narratives that resolve themselves on the vindication of occluded innocence (terminology derived from Peter Brooks’s work on melodrama and Linda Williams’s use of Brooks). And I say it is pitched as a documentary because although it proposes to traffic in reality and to engage circumstances in the lives of real people, its subjects take on the profiles of standard character types, with specific character functions. Like most stories of Shakespeare and health, the narrative is free to develop quirks, but it is ultimately circumscribed by fixed plotlines and set conventions. The formal qualities of such stories are easily identified and enumerated: a misfit cast of ill-prepared players appears headed toward disaster as personal and interpersonal problems mount and threaten to mar opening night (or whatever culminating performance marks the story’s conclusion). Instead of derailing the performance, however, those problems are resolved—on stage, off stage, or in the audience—in a series of personal and interpersonal triumphs. The result of the culminating performance, or match or game or other agon—this story has an easy analogue in sports movies such as Bad News Bears (1976 and 2005) or Major League (1989)—is success. The mode of such stories is melodrama, and the dramatic peroration provides audiences the satisfaction of watching innocence vindicated, deficits filled, uncertainties cleared up: of watching characters whose challenge was to succeed do so spectacularly. In terms of personal and civic health, the result is a person fit to join a community, and a community whose index of health is both validated and celebrated. What makes the Shakespeare version of these stories distinct is the use specifically of Shakespeare’s characters and Shakespeare’s language to draw problems to the surface and then effect their resolution. The occasion of the performance, that is, supplies the challenge, as the story’s characters’ deficits or shortcomings manifest in a certain inability to be adequate to Shakespeare: they can’t remember their lines, they fail to understand the language, they can’t connect properly with a character, a verbal tic mars line delivery, and so forth. But, as I have discussed elsewhere at greater length, the performance also provides the occasion on which those deficits and shortcomings are met or overcome, and that happens when a character, in that final triumphant performance, connects to his Shakespearean analogue by making use of Shakespeare’s language (Kozusko 2010; Kozusko 2012). The episode of This American Life that I discuss follows only act five. Because of restrictions governing the congregating of prisoners, this production of Hamlet had to be performed one act at a time; the role of Hamlet was divided among four actors, who shared the stage and the lines. “Act V” begins with audio of a read-through of Hamlet 5.1. A prisoner playing the

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first gravedigger struggles to introduce Yorick’s skull, while the program director, Agnes, helps: a pestilence on him for a mad rouge— “rogue” rogue...he poured a flax— “flagon” A flagon of... “Rhenish” ...Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was, shur, Yorick’s skull—the king’s gesture...3

ACTOR: AGNES: ACTOR: AGNES: ACTOR: AGNES: ACTOR:

The episode’s narrator, Jack Hitt, notes that “most read-throughs with any cast are terrible. This one is terrible, too. The actors know it, but they plow on through the script.” A terrible read-through, though, is also a very particular topos, a regular structural feature of a narrative whose final structural feature is a successful performance. The presence of this read-through at the outset of the narrative is precisely what guarantees a complementary closing gesture in which disaster is averted and characters for whom our sympathy has been evoked shine in triumph. The play does eventually come together, of course, but the centerpiece of Hitt’s account concerns what we can learn from prisoners performing Shakespeare. Hitt discloses at the outset of the episode that he has “seen Hamlet a dozen times.” He lists productions of note and then asks, “what else is there to learn from watching another Hamlet?”: The truth is, this production was different, because this is a play about a man pondering a violent crime and its consequences, performed by violent criminals living out those consequences. After hanging out with this group of convicted actors for six months, I did discover something: I didn’t know anything about Hamlet. The notion that Hitt learns something about Hamlet is disingenuous at best—Hitt is performing his own lack of knowledge as part of the Shakespeare redemption story he is telling. His own series of discoveries as a narrator, that is to say, is part of the script. But whereas everybody goes on a transformative journey in the course of these narratives, the players themselves are the focus. Toward the middle of the episode, Hitt introduces Derek “Big Hutch” Hutchison, the prisoner cast as Horatio. In the story’s containing narrative, Hutch is the cast’s grumpy holdout. In the end, he will give in to the part of Horatio, but for now, he is defiant. He resists, and argues with, Horatio. Hitt offers Hutch’s reading of the character by way of illustration: I think Horatio is just somebody—a sounding board for Hamlet. I mean, the majority of his lines is ‘ay, my lord’; ‘yes my lord’ ... I mean,

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Matt Kozusko if we’re friends, we’re going to communicate better than that. I mean, you’re going to tell me your deepest secrets. I want to know what you and Ophelia did last night. I believe that he should’ve been a little bit— show me that I’m truly Hamlet’s friend. Don’t wait to get to the end of act five, and I’m getting ready to drink a cup of poison, and you stop me. You know, let me know down the line, man, that I’m really your friend.

“Have you ever heard anybody talk about Shakespeare’s characters this way?” Hitt asks. The question is another topos in its own right, part of a celebration of the ability of prisoners to form a unique and profound connection to Shakespeare, and it moves the story toward a central observation: Hutch was always doing this: talking tough, but then betraying a real gift for literary criticism...in fact, he pointed out a weakness in the structure of the story I’d never heard before in all my experience with the play: that Hamlet’s dilemma over killing Claudius isn’t really much of a dilemma. At this point, the narration cuts back to Hutch: I don’t see the conflict; I don’t see what Hamlet is dealing with, man— “I should kill the king now; I shouldn’t kill him now.” Aw, you knew once your father said “revenge”—you knew you was going to do this. So what’s the hubbub about? Do it! I mean, that’s the same way I couldn’t see somebody raping my daughter or something, and just sitting around. No, no, no, no, no, no. I got to do you man, and that’s just—“ppptht”—you done. Hutch rejects the notion than Hamlet has reason to hesitate. Hitt offers the obvious challenge, noting that Hamlet spends much of the play trying “to make sure that Claudius is the bad guy”—a challenge that of course belies the notion that Hutch has a gift for literary criticism and that sits uneasily with Hitt’s claim that “Hamlet’s dilemma over killing Claudius isn’t really much of a dilemma.” On the one hand, Hitt’s account of Hutch’s reading as astute literary criticism is needlessly patronizing. By current critical standards—and without taking anything away from Hutch’s insights—this reading might properly be called an appropriation. Hutch’s misreading of the play helps it speak to his perspective. He doesn’t see what Hamlet is dealing with because he replaces Hamlet’s circumstances with the hypothetical but more familiar circumstances of contemporary analogue—horrific violence done to a family member that calls for immediate and unconsidered revenge. On the other hand, Hutch’s reading misses a significant (perhaps the significant, in terms of the last two centuries of critical commentary) point about Hamlet’s dilemma and his dithering. Hitt essentially invents a structural problem for Hutch’s reading to solve, construing Hamlet’s reluctance to move into action as a flaw of the play rather than as a feature of the

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play. To ask what the hubbub is about is fundamentally to ignore one of the play’s central projects, where the build up to vindicta mihi—another formal requirement of a genre—is complicated by uncertainty. It is not that Hamlet lacks the strength to believe in ghosts; rather, Hamlet is not reckless enough to believe in ghosts. Hitt does not acknowledge the moments at which prisoners’ readings work against the grain of the text, not because he doesn’t notice them—having established himself as an authority on Hamlet, he cannot simply shed that authority later—but because they don’t fit the narrative he is crafting. Here is Hitt’s own final act, the account of the prisoners’ public performance, with interspersed audio clips from the performance edited out: In all, there were three performances, and on the final night, before family and dignitaries, the entire cast found the magic that Paul said would happen, during that first read through...when Danny and Stan came out for their final grave-digger appearance, somehow, those Elizabethan jokes worked...Having seen every performance, I can testify the actors rose above their talents in that last show...you could feel the mutual support...the gang of Hamlets came together in a way they hadn’t before. That little mob seemed like one voice. That Hitt’s account conforms to the “theater disaster” narrative, in which a comically bad read-through is always paired with soaring success in the final performance, does not mean that it is merely a fantasy, but it draws our attention to the powerful gravity of the contours of that narrative, and to the way accounts of particular Shakespeare performances are edited together, re-remembered in a particular order with a particular outcome. With his final observation, Hitt returns to Hutch: But the real surprise for me that last night was Hutch: [clip of Hutch speaking] “I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. / There’s still yet some liquor left” [sic]. It’s here that Hutch’s Horatio delivers his most famous line. The play is almost over. He’s surrounded by corpses and speaks to his dying friend, Hamlet. In the other performances, I always thought Hutch had been plagued by what you might call the Jack Nicholson syndrome: the actor’s persona is bigger than any role he might play. But tonight, Horatio has Hutch under control, and the audience in his hand. He has the one great line to deliver, and as Hutch might say, he nails it: [clip of Hutch speaking] “now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” Horatio has Hutch under control here because the actor has finally shaken off his headstrong objections to the play and allowed Shakespeare to take over. Hutch has ceased to be Horatio’s critic, or Hamlet’s and Hamlet’s, and he has enfranchised himself from some perverting passion that has

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prevented a full experience of the moving beauty of Shakespeare. Hutch joins the cast dynamic of “mutual support” and finds himself swept up in the power of the ensemble. Thus, the performer must relinquish his ego and submit to the character, and there is a distinctly mystical quality to the experience that suggests a partly secular and partly sacred function in which the user’s connection to Shakespeare is a kind of communion with Shakespeare. But note the balance Hitt strikes as he celebrates Shakespeare’s language and Hutch’s: Hutch has Horatio’s “one great line” to deliver, and Hitt joins that distinguished line with Hutch’s own distinct, personal lexical signature. The story is eager and even anxious to represent this communion partly in Hutch’s terms. As with the GCE exam, the result of the encounter with Shakespeare is the successful subject it produces, but whereas the user of Shakespeare is visible in the exam text or answer at best in placeholder pronouns such as “you” or “your” or “I” or “my,” the user of Shakespeare in the prison documentary is always a participant with a personal history that frames and informs the encounter in the narrative recollection. The focus on the user’s identity allows the story to highlight Shakespeare’s accessibility, and suggests the principal difference between the use of Shakespeare to validate students in the exam setting and the use of Shakespeare to establish an occluded humanity in the prison Shakespeare program. The parallel to the rights and privileges taken up by successful students is the healthy subject positions taken up by inmate performers, but Hutch’s reading of Shakespeare, and Hitt’s reading of Hutch, with its interest in a particular story about what Shakespeare can do for us, must keep both Shakespeare and the user in focus simultaneously. All users of Shakespeare come through the experience having addressed a deficit, which here is a matter of learning the relative value of the self versus the community and the community space, opened and organized by Shakespeare, that brings people together. For other inmate performers in Hitt’s story, the encounter is about redemption or rehabilitation or some other particular form of personal health. For Hutch, personal health is a matter of civic health: he needs to join the community.

THE SHAKESPEARE STORY But to what degree is Hutch’s story really about Hutch? Whereas other inmates’ stories tend to resolve themselves in monologues detailing the performers’ reflections on what the Shakespeare encounter has meant to them, “Act V” does not give Hutch a final monologue. Instead, Hitt fills in the gap. What we see in “Act V” is a series of readings—of texts, of people, of situations—in which the reader (Jack Hitt, Ira Glass, NPR) offers the listener (the NPR audience) a story of Shakespeare being good for you and good for civic health: good, that, is, for all users and the user communities in which Shakespeare’s texts circulate. Reading such texts is fundamentally

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a matter of appropriation, in which the desire for a particular story brings about in the text—here, Shakespeare’s text or Hutch’s text—the features necessary for a personal connection. First, Big Hutch misreads Hamlet. At least as represented in Hitt’s story— and it is that representation that is important, not what might “really” be the case—Hutch misses something crucial about Hamlet’s dilemma. The reservations Hutch has about the play, which are the basis on which Hitt constructs him as a grumpy holdout, are the product of the kind of appropriation I suggest has replaced the type of reading required by entrance examinations. Instead of a focus on finding a personal connection to the plays by performing a particular, learned kind of reading, such appropriations focus upon using any kind of reading in order to demonstrate a personal connection. It turns out that the all-important personal connection with Shakespeare often requires appropriation. Famously flexible, the plays have to be even more flexible than they actually are in order to serve so wide a population with so various an assortment of needs. To put it another way, Shakespeare has not become more accessible in the terms implied by students answering exam questions. The “mass-education project of the twentieth century” has broadened Shakespeare’s user base, but it has not done so by teaching the learned critical practice of reading to a wider base of users. Instead, it has simply broadened the scope of what is acceptable in readings of Shakespeare, and shifted the focus from Shakespeare to the user. In a second misreading or appropriation, Hitt reads Hutch so that Hutch is won over by Horatio during the production’s final performance. There is no hard evidence to demonstrate that this is actually a misreading, but that is partly the point: nobody knows what really happens to Hutch. We don’t know whether he does indeed undergo the transformative submission to Shakespeare and join the ensemble, or whether such a notion is just a satisfying way to end the plotline begun when Hitt, or anybody else who participated in “Act V,” chose to put together a particular kind of story. But listening to Hitt’s account, we can see how he has artfully remembered his conversations and interactions with Hutch so that they observe that story’s contours. Ambiguities and anomalies are ignored or perhaps edited out, unremembered in recollection. Given the presence of the central components—those tropes and topoi—the allure of the redemptive story is difficult to resist. We will it to be told; it wills itself to be told. Even though the distance between a story and the events it depicts is hard to know in detail, it is nonetheless apparent as distance. Indeed, this particular story, of Shakespeare being good for you, of a user restored to a position of health through Shakespeare, is so difficult to resist that it can be onerous or cumbersome. It can precondition an encounter with Shakespeare and crowd out other kinds of experience, foreclosing the opportunity for other relationships, for other kinds of Shakespearean knowledge. I suspect this is the case with Hutch, whose own account of his Hamlet experience, even if it did not match Hitt’s account or the larger plan of “Act V,” would

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be unlikely to unfold in new narrative territory. It should be no surprise that people experience Shakespeare according to the “redemption” script. When you expect Shakespeare to take you on a certain kind of journey, you will find yourself passing required landmarks, arriving at prescribed destinations. At its worst, this story reifies a Shakespeare who speaks to all human perspectives equally and is equally accessible to everyone—the universal Shakespeare about which academic critique is so anxious. On the negative side, then, we have a narrative that amounts to a kind of script in which participants have fixed roles. This script ensures a desirable outcome, but in prescribing that outcome, it shuts down the possibility of other outcomes. The totalitarian and the universal are joined in the same dynamic and offered as a vision of open-access Shakespeare that is good for everyone. Privileging the desired outcome over the learned process of critical reading, such stories of Shakespeare as healthful make good on the promise of Shakespeare’s power put in the service of progressive agendas, but come with the kinds of deep structural flaws we associate with utopian narratives and wishful thinking. Users of Shakespeare are still expected to form a profound connection to Shakespeare’s poetry, and though the space in which that connection takes place has been enlarged and cleared of many of the obstacles toward which Sinfield and others directed their critiques, the new, accommodating, demotic, and user-friendly Shakespeare doesn’t allow the user or the producer to defuse the mechanisms of social and economic difference, or dismantle the machinery of ideology. And again, the most alarming structural flaw in this practice of appropriation is that the story isn’t even about Hutch in the end. It is about the listening audience’s need to feel good about the centrality of Shakespeare to a healthy community, and the fantasy of prison system that rehabilitates and (re)unites inmates with the human values we see encoded in Shakespeare. So while new kinds of Shakespearean knowledge are foreclosed and readings that don’t fit the script disallowed, that is only the beginning: any kind of substantive social change is deferred as the narrative draws attention away from the far less pleasant story of the U.S. prison system and the social imbalances that sustain it. As we celebrate these local stories of civic health, a larger civic sickness falls out of focus. Despite all these problems and flaws, it seems ungenerous, and maybe even unwise, not to embrace the “Act V” reading, which, like other documentary accounts of prison Shakespeare programs, promises at the very least the kind of Shakespeare encounter that an examination setting would discredit. In this story, an encounter with Shakespeare yields a result that can’t be wrong, even when it does not square with the text; and even if such stories require a whole dynamic of interrelated misreadings, the hopefulness that drives them has real civic value. This type of story imagines Shakespeare as public property available especially to those without the education that Sinfield figures as part of a “justification of elitism in education and culture” (137). Thus, beyond the progressive revisions it makes to more exclusive models of Shakespeare as an index of social standing or civic health, such a story also keeps in circulation a Shakespeare tuned to progressive agendas generally.

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So before we jump to the obvious academic conclusion and say that we need to do the real work of kindling the revolution ourselves—that we can’t rely on a mystified, universal Shakespeare to do the difficult job of creating and maintaining a healthy society through a collaborative, demotic agenda of equality, fairness, goodwill, compassion, and so forth—we should ask ourselves whether this mystified Shakespeare is not just as effective a tool as the other narratives we rely on to validate and effect such civic work. Perhaps Shakespeare doesn’t actually contain equality, fairness, goodwill, and compassion. And perhaps if he does, it is mostly because we put these values there, allowing Shakespeare, like all other sacralized texts, to carry the particular message so important to us that we want it to be self-evident and to have its origins elsewhere, from outside and above us. If it is inevitable that a narrative of some sort is going to install itself in this ideological position, why not Shakespeare? A program of Shakespeare, used responsibly to empower and enfranchise occluded humanity, fills that ideological function with texts whose perceived human value is resilient, if not quantifiable. Even from the academic perspective, concerned as it is with the critique of ideology, the responsible use of Shakespeare to further and support healthy social, political, economic, and spiritual agendas should be attractive. Responsible use involves recognizing the limits of such stories, consistently remembering both what they cannot do and what they forestall when they threaten to obscure the need for other initiatives; it means acknowledging that in telling stories about encounters with Shakespeare, we run the risk of conscripting or even silencing users whose personal experience, in part always unknowable, cannot be assumed to be familiar; and it means recognizing that the way we talk about Shakespeare is extensively (and perhaps inevitably) troped. But replacing the story in which Shakespeare helps us achieve personal and civic health with some other story would be premature. We need only remember that stories are indeed in the end about the people who tell them, and that they should change as the needs of those user communities change. If the campus culture wars discussed at the outset of this essay suggest something about change and the anxieties it generates—especially when it involves Shakespeare and higher education—it is that academic stewardship of Shakespeare is amenable to change, even under critique. It is also evident that despite curricular revision, Shakespeare under academic stewardship has not disappeared from college syllabi. Indeed, we are likely to be teaching Shakespeare long after curricular watchdogs have forgotten all about him.

NOTES 1. In this context, the distinction between Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom is, sadly, difficult to make. The latter has begun grumbling ever more audibly about falling standards in the teaching and studying of literature. See, for example, his Boston Globe editorial, “Dumbing down American Readers,” in which Bloom

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responds to the National Book Foundation’s decision to present an award to pop horror writer Stephen King (2003). 2. Albanese independently discusses “Act V” at length in an excellent chapter, but with a rather different focus. 3. This American Life, episode 218, “Act V.” Italics are mine. All quoted material from this episode is transcribed generally word-for-word, though I have elided or tidied verbal tics in the interest of clarity. Emphasis added here to suggest the mispronunciations. Subsequent quotations are not cited individually.

WORKS CITED “Act V.” This American Life. Host Ira Glass. Public Radio International. WBEZ, Chicago, 9 Aug. 2002. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. . Albanese, Denise. Extramural Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print. American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). “The Vanishing Shakespeare.” 2007. Web. Accessed 10 May 2014. . Bad News Bears. Dir. Michael Ritchie. 1976. Film. Bad News Bears. Dir. Richard Linklater. 2005. Film. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. 1987. Repr. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Print. Bloom, Harold. “Dumbing down American readers.” The Boston Globe 24 Sept. 2003. Web. Accessed 10 May 2014. . Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. 1976. Repr. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print. Burnett, Daniel. “Shakespeare AWOL from many U.S. campuses.” The Suncoast News 5 May 2014. Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2014. . Kozusko, Matt. “Monstrous! Actors, Audiences, Inmates, and the Politics of Reading Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Bulletin 28.2 (2010): 235–51. Print. ———. “Shakesqueer, the Movie: Were the World Mine and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 169–80. Print. Major League. Dir. David S. Ward. 1989. Film. National Alumni Forum (NAF). “The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying.” 1996. Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2014. . Sinfield, Alan. “Give an account of Shakespeare and Education, showing why you think they are effective and what you have appreciated about them. Support your comments with precise references.” Political Shakespeare. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1985. 134–57. Print. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.

Part II

Sex

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“The King’s Part” James I, The Lake-Ros Affair, and The Play of Purgation Hillary M. Nunn

According to Laurie Shannon, happiness in the early modern period depends on a fortunate “convergence between what the world offers and what the creature needs” (151). Human beings, she argues, do not enjoy the natural happiness often associated with animals; instead, as her reading of King Lear shows, people are not born with what their environments require, and as a result, they begin their time in the world as King Lear begins his wanderings on the heath—in the state of the exposed and “unaccommodated man” (3.4.98–99).1 The description highlights the vulnerability of the naked human body, yet it also points to its ability to eventually come to terms with its surroundings. In early modern usage, definitions of the word accommodate consistently invoke phrases such as “to fit” or “to make apt,” suggesting that humans can not only change their own bodies, internally as well as externally, but the environments in which they move. Among the definitions for accommodate listed in The Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) are Robert Cawdreys’s in 1617 (“to make fit too, or conuenient to the purpose”) and Henry Cockeram’s in 1623 (“to make fit”). The Oxford English Dictionary emphasizes these definitions for accommodate, and makes no mention until 1995 of the word’s meaning within disability studies: according to the amended Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the term “reasonable accommodation” may be used to describe efforts toward (A) making existing facilities used by employees readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities; and (B) job restructuring, part-time or modified work schedules, reassignment to a vacant position, acquisition or modification of equipment or devices, appropriate adjustment or modifications of examinations, training materials or policies, the provision of qualified readers or interpreters, and other similar accommodations for individuals with disabilities. (ADA) Yet the early modern notion of accommodation looks forward to the meanings now current in discussions of disability in the United States, where the legal concept of reasonable accommodation works to ensure that all individuals have access to public facilities.

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Only when the body and the environment surrounding it reach accord can an individual become accommodated, and happiness can only occur within this harmonic balance. The word resonates with notions of fleshly comfort, involving both sustenance and pleasure, as when Shallow considers accommodation’s meaning in 2 Henry IV. Bardolph explains that the unmarried Falstaff, like most good soldiers, is “better accommodated than with a wife,” prompting Shallow to mull over the phrasing: “‘Better accommodated’... ‘Accommodated!’—it comes of ‘accommodo.’ Very good, a good phrase” (3.2.61–62; 64–66). The men banter about the word, but never define it precisely, yet Bardolph nonetheless manages to proclaim it a “soldier-like word” (69) before mumbling that being “thought to be accommodated... is an excellent thing” (72–73). As Bardolph’s words hint, accommodation’s meanings can suggest adjustments not just in an individual’s external comforts but also in projected attitude and internal thoughts. William Segar, for example, swears in 1602 that it is the duty of an honest knight to model his outward behavior through good companionship, to “accommodate himselfe to the humour of honest company, and be no wrangler” ([E6v]). Such instances signal an awareness of the impact environment can have on a person’s inner being, yet they insist that the individual can resist the temptations to change internally in the face of external alterations of circumstance. In extreme cases, the word accommodate can signal disingenuous change, a sort of shape-shifting that originates from the deepest humoral recesses of the physical body. In Judith Man’s An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus (1640), for example, the princess Theocrine “can so artificially accommodate Her humour unto that of Argenis, that in a short time She doth purchase a full power over Her mind” ([B5v]). Only Theocrine is actually a man, Polyarchus, whose ability to consciously modify his inner humor—which, of course, suggests not just internal mood but the bodily substances of blood, phlegm, choler, and bile that create that mood—to not only pass as Theocrine but to gain access to Argenis and become her confidante marks him as a particularly accomplished master of accommodation. Because humors constitute “the stuff of emotions,” Gail Kern Paster points out, “to alter the character and quantity of a body’s fluids is to alter that body’s passions and thus that body’s state of mind and soul” (Humoring 52). In a complicated early modern case of mind over matter, Polyarchus modifies his inward physicality to not only appear female, but to gain influence over another’s thinking. Self-directed inner bodily accommodation, in this respect, becomes key to Polyarchus’s acting; without the ability to control his humors, he would not be able to successfully embody his role and gain influence over Argenis’s inner emotional world. King James I’s deliberations regarding the Lake-Ros affair provide a vivid illustration of the ways such active use of accommodation, both internal and external, intersects with public life in the early modern period. Unfolding between 1617 and 1619, the scandalous affair began when Anne Cecil, Lady Ros, accused Frances Cecil, the Countess of Exeter—a woman

“The King’s Part” 129 renowned for her medical expertise—of attempted murder via a poisoned glister (a clyster, a medicine administered rectally, like a modern-day suppository or enema). The involvement of the politically powerful Cecils on one side and Lady Ros’s father Thomas Lake, James’s secretary of state, on the other ensured that the scandal dominated court gossip, and eventually forced James to hear the case. In February of 1619, after the scandal had interfered with the government’s workings for months, the investigation ended thanks to what may seem a remarkably modern solution: James’s personal reenactment of the countess’s alleged confession while investigating the scene of the crime.2 The events surrounding the sensational story reveal the complicated consequences of striving to accommodate the body—that is, to optimize its comfort and its relationship to its surroundings, whether through fine tuning its inner functions or altering its place in the larger social world. In particular, the king’s investigations offer a glimpse of the peculiar powers both medical care and dramatic performance can exercise over an individual’s efforts to seek accommodation within the public and private realms. Although Lady Ros, her mother Mary Lake, and their accomplices were ultimately condemned as criminal social climbers, others might see their scheme as an attempt at radical self-accommodation, a misguided effort to adjust the fit between self and environment. The accounts of bodily purgation and penetration that saturate stories of the affair condemn Lady Ros for her attempts to influence the delicate social and physical equilibriums that govern early modern power structures. At the same time, the scandal’s end reinforces drama’s power to diagnose the lies that turned the family dispute into government-clogging gossip, while also underscoring drama’s power to purge the body politic and set its functions aright. According to two accounts of the scandal, King James’s willingness to play a personal role in testing the stories of those involved—a process that drew him to investigate whether the alleged crime scene could accommodate the events said to unfold there—even shows him echoing Hamlet in his theatrical attempts to rebalance state power. The accounts of the countess’s medical ministrations and of the king’s performance, I argue, demonstrate cultural fears and pleasures associated with bodily purgation—ones that both illustrate and complicate notions of drama as diagnosis commonly associated with performances like The Mousetrap within Hamlet. The Lake-Ros scandal also makes explicit the trust inherent in ingesting a purgative medicine, one designed to penetrate the body’s exterior and influence its inner workings. At least one manuscript poem attacking Lady Ros, meanwhile, illustrates the extreme exposure that can result when talk of bodily purgation goes public. The poem offers up the Lady Ros’s stripped body for display, allowing readers to envision its repeated exposure and penetration, reinforcing cultural certainty regarding her guilt in the process. The images of purgation and penetration involved in the Lake-Ros affair, together with the authority the king’s body carries

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in the interpretation of sensory evidence, grants drama the power to police the individual’s efforts to secure the bodily accommodation so vital to early modern happiness.

MEDICAL DRAMA The Lake-Ros affair comes to an abrupt end in a scene that conjures comparisons to Hamlet, but the events that began the scandal’s narrative, as well as several of its key characters, mirror those of the play as well. While both incorporate journeys abroad and forged letters, perhaps the most vital connection between the dramas is their tendency to invoke women’s relationships to the bodies of others to gauge female virtue. In the Countess of Exeter’s case, such relationships create what can be seen as both her most and least honorable characteristics. Like Gertrude, the countess is a young widow who consents to what could be considered an “o’erhasty” marriage to a politically powerful man. In the words of William Sanderson (1650), “A youthful widow she had bin and vertuous; and so became Bedfellow to this aged, gowty, diseased but noble Earle” (H3r). In fact, the countess’s marriages seem to outnumber Gertrude’s, since Thomas Cecil was her third in a series of much older, wellconnected husbands. Furthermore, accusations of incest follow both women; Lady Ros, after all, asserted that her husband William Cecil and the countess, who was his step-grandmother, were involved in a long-term affair that motivated the alleged poisoning. On the other hand, in an interesting addition that reifies Hamlet’s language of humoral balance and bodily health, the countess also enjoyed a modest fame for her expertise in medical matters. In 1617, for example, John Chamberlain takes comfort, in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, that the countess, with her “great skill in phisicke,” attended his ailing friend, and several of her medicinal recipes appear to have been in circulation at the time (Chamberlain 2.107, October 25, 1617).3 Her reputation for virtue thus stems at least in part from her ability to alter, in the name of health, the inner humoral balance of the bodies surrounding her. Lady Ros, as we shall see, aims to change public perception of these reported good works, accusing the countess of seizing control of her own personal inner workings through the prescription of poisonous medicine—an element that suggests further resemblances between the scandal’s plot and that of Hamlet. Lady Ros’s central charge against the Countess of Exeter involves the prescription of a poisoned purge. At the time, Lady Ros lodged at Wimbledon, at the home of the Countess and Earl of Exeter. The pair had agreed to host the younger couple during the already troubled early days of their marriage, which was solemnized in 1616; the earl apparently hoped to prevent the Lakes from publicly carrying through their threat to label his grandson impotent, thus nullifying the marriage, if he did not sign over the lucrative manor of Walthamstow to their economic control. In a letter to the king, the Earl of Exeter outlines the troubles springing from

“The King’s Part” 131 the close living arrangements. He specifies that Lady Ros had accused the countess of attempting to commit murder “by puttinge the poysone into a glister then alleadged to be receaved by the said Ladye Roos, and also by puttinge poyson into syrruppe of roses then taken ther [at Wimbledon] by the said Ladye Roos.” The earl goes on to protest that his wife gave no such purgative treatment to Lady Ros, though he adds that she “desired to have some sirrupp of rooses” because she was “not well at ease,” and that a member of the household fulfilled the request without the countess’s knowledge. He contends that the syrup could not have been poisoned, since he had used the same cup to take the same medicine.4 The Lady Ros’s accusations underscore the extent to which the processes of accommodation affect not just her external comforts in the Earl’s home, but her inner physical workings and humoral balance as well. First of all, the story unfolds when Lady Ros is a guest at Wimbledon, and she implies she is helpless in the unfamiliar atmosphere; she is “not well at ease” internally or externally. The accommodations, in short, only reinforce her anxiety and discomfort; presumably, gaining title to the Walthamstow manor might help. According to early modern medical thought, the administration of medicine in such an unforgiving atmosphere could indeed lead to unintended consequences, since the harshness associated with some humoral treatments could be exacerbated when the body was not made ready to receive them. Francis Bacon underscores the importance of bracing the body for the often harsh impact of humoral medicines, especially purgatives, noting that “Physitians do wisely prescribe, that there be Preparatiues vsed before Iust Purgations; For certaine it is, that Purgers doe many times great Hurt, if the Body be not accommodated, both before, and after the Purging” (1627; D2). Properly administering a purgative to Lady Ros at Wimbledon would thus have involved two different kinds of accommodation. Bacon’s instructions insist that Lady Ros’s body would first need to be “accommodated”—in the sense of “made fit”—for treatment, through the use of appropriate preparative medicines. Whether Lady Ros’s story addressed such treatments before or after the administration of the purge is unclear; what remains obvious, however, is that Lady Ros does not feel accommodated, at ease, in the countess’s house. Instead, Lady Ros suspects that her body’s inner workings are being altered for the benefit of those around her, specifically to fulfill the countess’s wishes to eliminate her as competition for the affections of Lord Ros. Hamlet’s play-within-the-play, Paster argues, marks a similar attempt to seize control of his uncle’s humors, using a logic of purgation in hopes of flushing out the guilty Claudius. “[T]he sense of what will take place in Claudius’s mind is a physical one,” Paster argues, “with the words and actions inserted by Hamlet into the text of the play as a probe intended to make so deep an impression on the king’s brain that, tentlike, it will keep the impression open” and therefore more prone to “express corrupt bodily matter” (Humoring 52–53). The Mousetrap’s performance, she holds, results in “a commotion simultaneously physical, psychological, and political in

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nature” that “affects the onlookers’ bodies, minds, and sense of well-being” (53). As Tanya Pollard argues, “Hamlet identifies poison—in this case, the poison of theatrical performance—with the purgative power of medicine” (138). The play-within-the-play certainly disturbs the atmosphere, but whether it succeeds in purging the troubled body politic remains unclear. It spurs Claudius’s desire to purge his guilt, though he cannot bring himself to a successful confession, even if Hamlet suspects that this occurs. Lady Ros’s accusations reframe what later writers call the countess’s “charity” “in physic and surgery” into a source of suspicion (Goodman 194). Such associations certainly enjoyed a long history. Lady Ros’s linking of poisoning and purgation, however, also has the unintended effect of exposing her own body, inviting others to imagine her as damaged, penetrated, and erotically compromised. Purging, as Paster observes, offers in its everyday form “an alluringly ambivalent bodily experience—of pleasure and shame, of erotic release within the sanctioned precincts of current therapeutic practice” (Body 161); when it is relabeled as poison, as in Lady Ros’s case, the elements of both bodily release and suffering become heightened, exposing her internal imbalance of humors to be imagined with increased vividness. Through her accusation, Lady Ros thus establishes her body as vital to the narrative, in much the same way that the ghost in Hamlet situates the dead king’s flesh as the play’s center. Howard Marchitello notes that the ghost’s account of his poison, administered through the ear, joins the image of the “organs of sense under siege and attack from the material world” with that of “the smooth body imagined as having preceded the attack, standing thereafter as the lost ideal” (143). As Lady Ros soon learns, there are consequences for underestimating the power of this formula’s second half.

ACTING AS PHYSICIAN At least two early modern retellings of the Lake-Ros affair link James’s verdict to his personal examination of one of the scandal’s alleged crime scenes: the Great Room of the house the Countess of Exeter shared with her husband at Wimbledon. Accounts of the king’s acting out of the countess’s alleged confession at Wimbledon encourage readers to see James taking up his role as physician to the body politic with theatrical gusto, immersing himself in a staged drama to diagnose and treat the ills of the kingdom. The charges against the Countess of Exeter provided the king an opportunity to exercise his role as physician of the body politic, one that he most famously claims in the opening pages of A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604). There, James writes that [I]t is the Kings part (as the proper Phisician of his Politicke-bodie) to purge it of all those diseases, by Medicines meete for the same: as by

“The King’s Part” 133 a certaine milde, and yet just forme of government, to maintaine the Publicke quietnesse, and prevent all occasions of Commotion. (281) As Sandra Bell points out, James’s medical metaphor allows him not only to treat the body politic, but to examine “the individual, physical bodies of his subjects” (326). In the Lake-Ros affair, he does so without reservation, undertaking an investigation in which he appropriates the bodies of his subjects in his efforts to restore a healthy balance to the political system. His prescription, moreover, is a purge, one designed to keep the body in a state of commotion-less peace. The accumulating humors of the body politic have slowed its inner processes, he reasons, and his job is to purge its inner workings in order for its functions to be set aright. In this sense, James follows Jean Bodin’s directive that sovereigns take into account the constitution of the body politic before launching into treating its ills. Like Bacon’s good physician, the wise sovereign must be sure that the body politic is prepared to accommodate any adjustments to its inner balance. Bodin declares: [A] wise gouernour of any Commonweale must know their humours, before he attempt any thing in the alteration of the state and lawes. For one of the greatest, and it may be the chiefest foundation of a Commonweale, is to accommodat the estate to the humor of the citisens; and the lawes and ordinances to the nature of the place, persons, and time. (Aaa 4) To effectively eliminate the Lake-Ros scandal and return the body politic to smooth inner workings, James must gauge the current state of its humors; only when he considers the context into which his ministrations operate will he be able to nullify the scandal’s obstructive power. James, in short, must make sure that his efforts to accommodate the body politic acknowledge its current drama-loving proclivities even as it seeks to purge its scandalmongering obsession with the Lake-Ros affair. The scandal, James observes, has already kept the body politic from its proper function, and his job is to keep its citizens from indulging in gossip that can render their internal workings even more sluggish. While the actual mechanics of the required purge remain vague, the image of the king ministering to English bodies in such an immediate hands-on way connects him to the medical activities that form the basis for the countess’s good reputation—a reputation that Lady Ros twists to undergird her accusations of poison by purgative. James, of course, is the higher-ranking physician, and he insists on performing his own examination, one that relies on the notion of accommodation, to make a diagnosis. Noblewomen, meanwhile, swarmed to support the Countess of Exeter, riding to the Star Chamber hearings en masse in a traffic-stopping show of

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support (Chamberlain 2.207, January 30, 1619). Lady Ros and her mother stuck to their story, swearing that the countess had written a letter confessing to both poisoning and incest, and had read it to them, aloud, while standing in the Great Room of her house in Wimbledon. Voluminous documentation clogged the system, with rumors of nine thousand sheets of paper in the case file (Chamberlain 2.183, November 14, 1618). King James himself examined the letter the Lakes provided, comparing it to legal documents signed by the countess and determining that the Lakes’ evidence was likely forged. The Lakes countered, however, that they could provide a witness: a servant named Sara Swarton who, they swore, had overheard the confession while obscured behind the arras.5 The family’s testimony prompts King James to investigate for himself whether the setting at Wimbledon could physically accommodate the story. As James undertakes his investigation, the similarities between the Lakes’ account and images from early modern dramas, notably Hamlet, become more and more prevalent. The convention of characters availing themselves of the space behind the arras so they might remain hidden while eavesdropping is indeed a familiar one,6 and it may have had echoes for James as well; the convention certainly could have been familiar for those who read accounts of James’s investigation later in the seventeenth century.7 The documents do not specify that the Lakes planted Swarton, Polonius-like, behind the arras to serve as witness; regardless, the family insists that her situation gave the servant access to the goings-on in the room. And this claim is precisely the one James plans to test. Treating the Lakes’ account as stage directions, James conducts an experiment to see if the room can accommodate the story. In doing so, James tests whether the alleged events can meet Hamlet’s expectations for lifelike drama: will the resulting scene “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action” (3.2.16–17)? According to William Sanderson’s account, James makes an impulsive trip to Wimbledon to examine the crime scene: To make further tryal, the King in a hunting journy, at New Park neer Wimbleton, gallops thither, viewes the Room; observing the great distance of the Window, from the lower end of the Room, and placing himself, behind the hanging, and so other Lords in turn; they could not hear one speak aloud, from the window. Then the House-Keeper was call’d, who protested those hangings had constantly furnisht that room, for 30 years; which the King observed, to be two foot short of the ground, and might discover the woman, if hidden behind them. I may present also, the King saying, Oaths cannot confound my sight. (H5) In his Wimbledon reenactments, James adopts the investigatory strategies that Hamlet models and complicates. Sanderson does not name a date for this dramatic performance at Wimbledon, one that invokes the logic of The

“The King’s Part” 135 Mousetrap but whose action instead suggests more directly those events that come on the heels of the play-within-the-play—specifically, Hamlet’s interrogations of his mother, and subsequent murder of the hiding Polonius. Nor does Thomas Frankland’s similar 1681 retelling offer a specific date for the king’s experiment (26). Both accounts, however, imply that James’s acting out of the scene at Wimbledon brings the investigation to a sudden, satisfactory end. James’s test of the Lakes’ account of events—the way he assesses physical evidence in particular—comes to serve as the measure of truth. The room, he deduces, cannot accommodate the maid’s story. Yet neither the maid’s testimony nor the room’s layout can bring the story to its close; the king’s own body takes up that part. Declaring that oaths cannot confound his sight, James puts himself in the center of the investigation. Even from his position behind the arras, he embodies the power of the panopticon; even more important, his body becomes the measure of whether the room can properly accommodate the Lakes’ story. In Hamlet, the arras obscures Polonius’s identity and prevents him both from seeing and being seen; in the Wimbledon experiment, however, the curtain’s interference with James’s bodily senses establishes a new idealized viewpoint, one that cannot be characterized as exercising anything less than perfect perception. The king can neither see nor hear, and that constitutes what is “normal” in this situation—as the endorsing testimony of the accompanying lords makes clear. The arras in Hamlet separates the youthful body of the revenger from the old man, limiting both characters’ abilities to evaluate what lies on the other side of the curtain. While the barrier impedes both dramatic characters’ proper perception, James interprets his inability to hear through the hanging as itself proper. It is, after all, his failure to hear the voice from the window that solidifies what will be considered true. Nor does James seem to consider that his own feet stick out from underneath the too-short hangings. And why would he? From behind the arras, such a sight would be impossible, utterly beyond his view. Instead, he is spared the embarrassment of depicting himself as somehow ineffectually hidden, and his body can remain comfortably dignified in its sensory authority. The room, in other words, perfectly accommodates James’s interpretation, as would any room he deigned to visit. Such privileges normalize the king’s body, rendering him not only the most elegant in the room, but the most able. The official explanation of the events alleged to have unfolded at Wimbledon must accommodate the fact that James cannot see or hear from that position. This episode is particularly interesting when trying to put together a narrative for disability studies. The question of what constitutes a “normal” body, notes Lennard Davis, is one that would never have arisen before the modern period; before 1840, he argues, the prevalent notion of an “ideal” body contained elements that no one human could possess (1). Davis’s analysis considers the idea of the body politic, noting that “If individual citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the

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national body will not be fit”—but he does not consider the ruler’s body as exemplifying the nation’s character (6). As the king takes up his part as the spying chambermaid, his body becomes the measure of what is normal, establishing what perceptions are not merely acceptable but correct. His sensory conclusions stand without examination, even when they are based on what a body cannot sense. The king’s inability, in short, is not a disability. His diagnosis holds. It is important to notice that the king is not the only one whose body is involved in this performance. The other lords who accompany the king test out the scene’s alleged blocking, experimenting to see if anyone else could hear the confession that supposedly took place. Even if James and his men did not attempt to sound like the countess during these experiments, it’s difficult to avoid seeing an element of fun in their play as the men swap places and alternately hide behind and emerge from the curtain. Like Polonius, so proud of his own acting past, the king and his men willingly take up roles in a reenactment that has real-world consequences. Sanderson does not specify whether the countess is part of the king’s investigations at Wimbledon, nor does he offer any hints as to how much effort James and his cohort put into projecting the voices or otherwise adopting the mannerisms of the women allegedly involved. Instead, Sanderson quickly ends the scene with James the physician issuing a confident diagnosis of the accusations’ falsehood. The countess could never have been overheard and the servant would certainly have been seen; therefore, the king concludes that the story is utterly without merit. Like Hamlet, he takes his own version of The Mousetrap as offering an incontrovertibly accurate account of the way events unfolded in the past. And by encasing them in an investigation that requires acting, James, like Hamlet, has brought those events to light through purgative mechanics of dramatic performance. The truth will out. His efforts have unleashed the real story, shaken it loose from the obscurity of written testimony to test its fit with the surroundings, and allowed the body politic to return to its proper functions once again.

INVADED AND SMOOTH: BODIES IN MOTION As Howard Marchitello argues, the ghost in Hamlet describes the image of the sensible body under attack and, in the process, calls attention to the “smooth” youthful body of Hamlet’s father that existed before his poisoning. Smooth bodies are not accommodating bodies; they are sealed, youthful, and full of unyielding power. They demand accommodation from others, rather than give way themselves. But once he is poisoned, Old Hamlet loses that image of impenetrability. In the Lake family narrative, Lady Ros casts herself in a position similar to that of the wrongly attacked king; however, this comes at a cost to her. When she describes herself as the victim of a poisoning, she names the Countess of Exeter’s home-distilled purgatives as

“The King’s Part” 137 weapons, ones administered through the erotically charged anus and mouth rather than through the ear. Her accusations thus call attention to these openings, and her smooth body gives way under the pressure of highly gendered dynamics. She paints herself as an unaccommodated woman, in unfamiliar surroundings and unable to defend herself from the Countess of Exeter’s aggressive, penetrating medicine. Aside from the fact that such accusations involved a well-regarded woman of standing, Lady Ros’s story further damages her public image by providing her unsympathetic listeners with the sensory evidence they need to reenact, through gossip, the repeated penetration of the body her testimony helped sexualize. Portraying her body as helplessly unprotected and vulnerable, Lady Ros exposes herself to the examining eyes of others. It is no surprise, then, that even though the poems that condemned her mother enjoyed wider circulation, it is Lady Ros’s body that suffers the most humiliating exposure through verse. William Davenport of Bramhall, Cheshire records the following slanderous verses in his commonplace book under the title “A Lybell uppon the Ladie Rosse”: Waste not a signe that courtlye Rosse should fall when that her Mirkine lost his Coronall what tricke in dancinge could the devill produce to fitte her too a haire and make it loose Twas no Caper. for she hath ofte bene boulder when she advancte her legge on one mans shoulder Sure some crosse poynte: for in open waye her Mirkine nere was foundered or made straye who had the harder chance I praye you reade the Page that founde or she that lost her bearde. (“A Lybell” n.pag.) The poem subjects Lady Ros to several degrees of exposure, not only accusing her of promiscuity but of a hairlessness that could be linked to syphilis. Her body, in short, is suspiciously smooth, and readers are invited to imagine it wound into a sexual position that the language of dance can barely account for. The pubic wig that serves as key evidence of her bodily smoothness, moreover, proves not just visible but unusually tangible; the speaker, after all, asks us to picture the household page happening along and picking it up after it becomes unattached. Yet the verses themselves contrast her exposed smoothness with the reenacted penetration of her body, something that occurs anew with every rereading of the poem. The effect that the episodes surrounding the Lake-Ros affair have on perceptions of James in action, however, is perhaps even more significant. The scandal’s events allow us to see him assessing evidence, on paper, in interviews, and through the acting out of written testimony. We not only watch him examine the accord, or lack thereof, between testimony and

Figure 8.1 “A Lybell uppon the Ladie Rosse.” ZCR 63/2/19 f 20r. Reproduced by permission of Cheshire Archive and Local Studies.

“The King’s Part” 139 setting; we consider his ability to trace such connections while evaluating his capabilities as a detective. His declaration that “Oaths cannot confound my sight” asserts, in effect, that his perfect senses cannot be swayed by the words that fill the gap between the current moment and the events alleged to have unfolded in the past. He can see how they should fit together, yet the story and his environmentally informed vision of the past cannot accommodate one another. He asserts that his senses can penetrate through the rhetoric, the gossip, and the legalese; the very fact that his ears remain untouched by any voice during the drama at Wimbledon, moreover, underscores his bodily invulnerability. The king’s assertion ultimately functions as a judgment on the mismatch between the story and the scene he has just experienced. His experiments result in an unconvincing play, one that cannot “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” The mismatch between the story and the physical environment where it is said to unfold proves simply too great. In no way can the setting accommodate the story said to have unfolded there. James’s assertion that “Oaths cannot confound [his] sight” thus closes more than just the case, sealing off the spirit of exploration that has characterized the scene, and marking a return to his absolute, ironclad authority. The openness required for the purgation of the body politic is over. The experiment thus endorses the enduring rule of the king’s perfect authority, a rule that is already spoken and repeated, if not completely believed. And, just as importantly, it anchors kingly authority in an infallible, undoubted, and smooth body. Now that James has done his part, the body politic, purged of the scandal that had clogged its inner workings, can return to its smoothly functioning self.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank Kevin Kane for his help in preparing this chapter for publication. All quotations from Shakespearean plays will come from The Norton Shakespeare. 2. Star Chamber proceedings regarding the scandal are noted on February 2 and 5, 1618, according to a letter from Robert Naunton noted in The Calendar of State Papers and dated February 4 (10); several entries regarding sentencing for the Ros party are mentioned on February 13 (13). The scandal is helpfully and briefly summarized in Bellany’s book. See Bellany, 252–54. I have also drawn on The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries for Frances Cecil, Thomas Cecil, Thomas Lake, and Anne Cecil for general information regarding the scandal. 3. References to Chamberlain’s letters come from McClure’s edition and will henceforth be cited parenthetically by volume, page number, and date. See also Wellcome MS.1794/21; College of Physicians of Philadelphia MS 10a 214 also contains several recipes attributed to the countess. 4. See the account of the scandal that unfolds in “Cecil Papers: January–June 1618.” Ralph Josselin mentions the purgative effect of syrup of roses. See Paster, Humoring 51.

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5. In the documents cited in the Cecil Papers, the servant’s name is recorded as Swarton; Sanderson and Frankland name her as Wharton. 6. See Dessen and Thomson for a list of over fifteen such uses of the term arras, in plays ranging from The Jew’s Tragedy to Honest Man’s Fortune (12); see also their entries for curtain (62–63) and for hangings (110). 7. The play seems to have been experiencing a revival in 1618–1620, and it may be among the entertainments performed at court in the 1619/20 season. In 1619/20, the King’s Men received payment for performing ten plays at court; unfortunately, their names were not attached to the transaction. G.E. Bentley records the names of 29 plays listed in the Revels Office waste papers, seconding E. K. Chambers’ argument that they must have been “thought sufficiently interesting” for court performance, and he repeats without question the 1619/20 date. Among those plays listed: “The Tragedy of Ham.…” See Bentley 95 and Chambers 481.

WORKS CITED Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as Amended [ADA]. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . Bacon, Francis. Sylua syluarum: or A naturall historie in ten centuries. London, 1627. EEBO. Web. Accessed 25 March 2014. Bell, Sandra J. “‘Precious Stinke’: James I’s A Counterblaste to Tobacco.” Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I. Ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2002. 323–43. Print. Bellany, Alastair. “Cecil, Anne, Lady Ros (1599x1601–1630).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; online edn., May 2006. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . ———. “Cecil, Frances, countess of Exeter (1580–1663).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; online edn., May 2006. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . ———. “Cecil, William, sixteenth Baron Ros (1590–1618).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; online edn., May 2006. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . ———. The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News, Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1666. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1941. Print. Bodin, Jean. The Six Bookes of a Common-weale. London, 1606. EEBO. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I. Vol. 10. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1858. Print. “Cecil Papers: January–June 1618.” Ed. Owen G. Dyfnallt. Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, Volume 22: 1612–1668. British History Online. Institute of Historical Research, 1971. 56–77. Web. 25  Mar. 2014. Chamberlain, John. The Letters of John Chamberlain. Ed. Norman Egbert McClure. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. Print. Chambers, E.K. Review of The King’s Office of the Revels, 1610–1622. By Frank Marcham. London, 1925. Review of English Studies 1 (1925): 479–84. Print.

“The King’s Part” 141 Davis, Lennard J. “Normality, Power, and Culture.” The Disability Studies Reader. 4th ed. Ed. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2013. 1–14. Print. Dessen, Alan C., and Leslie Thomson. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Frankland, Thomas. The Annals of King James and Charles the First. London, 1681. EEBO. Web. Accessed 25 March 2014. Goodman, Godfrey. The Court of King James I. London: R. Bentley, 1839. Print. James I. A Counterblaste to Tobacco. King James VI and I: Selected Writings. Ed. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 281–92. Print. Lexicons of Early Modern English. Ed. Ian Lancashire. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . Lockyer, Roger. “Lake, Sir Thomas (bap. 1561, d. 1630).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; online edn., May 2006. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . “A Lybell uppon the Ladie Rosse.” Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources. Ed. Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae. Early Modern Literary Studies Text Series I (2005). Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . Man, Judith, trans. An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus. London, Henry Seile, 1640. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Printed Writings, 1500–1640: Series I, Part Three, Volume 2. Ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Print. Marchitello, Howard. “Artifactual Knowledge in Hamlet.” Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition. Ed. Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman. Basingstoke, Hamps.: Palgrave, 2010. 137–53. Print. Milward, Richard. “Cecil, Thomas, first earl of Exeter (1542–1623).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; online edn., Jan. 2008. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. . Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. ———. Humoring the Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print. Pollard, Tanya. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Sanderson, William. Aulicus Coquinariae. London, 1650. EEBO. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. Segar, William. Honor Military, and Ciuill. London, 1602. EEBO. Web. Accessed 25 Mar. 2014. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2008. 1696–1784. Print. ———. King Lear. Conflated Text. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2008. 2493–2567. Print. ———. 2 Henry IV. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2008. 1333–1405. Print. Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2013. Print.

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“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” Falstaff, Will Kemp, and Impaired Masculinity Catherine E. Doubler

The same man who first played Falstaff accomplished the most publicized and perhaps greatest athletic feat of early seventeenth-century England. Upon leaving the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s theater company, in 1600, the actor and dancer Will Kemp undertook a feat for which he sought financial and social capital: dancing a morris for 130 miles from London to Norwich. Most scholars agree that the name of the dance takes its name from the Spanish moresca, or “Moorish” dancing; the dance requires a number of steps taken to music from a pipe and tabor, and this music is accompanied by the sound of bells worn by the dancer as he or she performs the dance. Kemp details his journey in the pamphlet Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600), which was written both to prove that he undertook the journey and to publicize the event. However, not even a year or two before Kemp drew crowds along the road from London to Norwich, he most likely played Falstaff, the “fat-witted,” “fat rogue” the future Henry V befriends and then publicly renounces in 1 Henry IV (written and performed in 1596–97; published in 1598) and 2 Henry IV (written and performed in 1598–99; published in 1600). So much of the dialogue in Henry IV depends upon references to the girth of Falstaff’s belly that we cannot but speculate about the state of Will Kemp’s body while he performed this now infamous role, even though few present-day scholars have said anything about Will Kemp as Falstaff. But, if Kemp could play the corpulent knight, how could he then perform such a rigorous athletic feat only months later? I pose this tongue-in-cheek question in order to disrupt the suppositions behind the present-day “fat but fit” dilemma in discussions of fitness and wellness. The questioning manner in which a number of popular news blogs have posed this dilemma—“Getting fat but staying fit?” or “Can people really be ‘fit and fat?’” (Greatist; Reynolds)—reveals a dichotomy that has been constructed to bring order to the instability and constant change of our bodies. The idea that a body can be healthy and carry extra pounds is posited as an impossibility or curiosity in the titles of these blog posts. We can see this dichotomy developing in the example of Kemp and the changing nature of his body. What do Kemp’s performances show us about how present-day cultural discourses maintain that fatness and fitness are mutually exclusive opposites? This essay will address this question concerning the significations of Kemp’s body by reassessing how early modern discourses, ranging from

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 143 anatomy texts to dramatic literature, constructed notions of the ideal male body. My reassessment considers how the two seemingly contradictory presentations of corporeality we see attributed to Kemp—the fat body and the athletic body—are actually two sides of the same coin. Both athleticism and obesity were beginning to be seen as bodily conditions that could lead quickly to deformity; both conditions act as measures by which we can make out emerging understandings of disability. Furthermore, athleticism and obesity are tied up in anatomical discussions of muscularity. Physiological discourse on muscle presupposes that the body has certain movements and abilities that it can perform, and implicitly suggests that those who are unable to perform these movements are incompetent and weak—in other words, these discourses begin to mark certain variances from the standard conception of the body as disabling. And as early modern writers attribute these standards of bodily movement to muscularity, these writers do the work of planting the physical source of masculinity underneath the surface layers of the body. In order for an early modern individual to maintain his masculinity, he has to maintain the illusion of bodily and subjective layers that are difficult to penetrate. As physiological texts on muscularity presuppose a body in motion, we then have to allow ourselves to consider how bodies are in flux, how they change, and how they can develop or erode. Facing this reality of the changing body, we come to a tenet central to the contemporary study of disability—that in order to understand the experience of embodiment, we have to understand and accept the fact that the body is always changing, and usually in ways that have been deemed undesirable. Lennard J. Davis and Susan Wendell have claimed that the ways in which disability studies take the malleability of the body as its central focus are its greatest strength as a discipline (Davis 26; Wendell 60). Nine Daies Wonder and the Henry IV plays are linked not only by Kemp’s embodiment of roles in both texts, but also by portrayals of male bodies in flux. Both texts, then, become models for understanding how early modern literature contributes to a history of disability and bodily malleability. In this essay, I will read these two texts in dialogue with early modern anatomical and gymnastic manuals so that I can assert a more nuanced understanding of early modern masculinity. These physiological texts further illustrate how early modern masculinity was affirmed and diminished by impairing bodily changes and fluctuating bodily conditions. Early modern masculinity becomes an ideal not just defined against notions of femininity, but against and along with nascent understandings of disability. THE BIG ASSEMBLANCE OF A MAN: FALSTAFF AND IMPAIRED MASCULINITY IN 2 HENRY IV A key element of Kemp’s performance in his role as Falstaff is his active and dominating role in determining and then playing with standards of

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masculinity and ability. Linking these two factors of identity that were emerging in the early modern period, Falstaff discursively manipulates youth and age, health and ability—dualities that figure prominently in determinations of masculinity. Jonathan Goldberg, Barbara Hodgdon, Wyndham Lewis, and Patricia Parker have already said much about the portrayal of Falstaff in terms of gender signification and cross-dressing, especially in The Merry Wives of Windsor, written and performed in 1597–98; published in 1602 (Goldberg; Hodgdon 155; Lewis 28; Parker 20). 2 Henry IV, however, additionally shows the cunning and wisdom of Falstaff as he redefines and then destabilizes notions of the man as able-bodied. Even in Falstaff’s first scene in 2 Henry IV, it is made very clear that Falstaff’s primary function in the play is to act as the center of attention for the play’s concerns with how masculinity, ability, and health are linked. Facetiously calling his diminutive page a giant, Falstaff inquires about a doctor’s testing of his urine, to which the page gives the paradoxical response, “He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water, but, for the party that owed it, he might have new diseases than he knew for” (1.2.2–4.). Hearing about his healthy-diseased body, Falstaff immediately senses the doctor poking fun at him, responding, “Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me. The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent” (1.2.5–7). With these few lines, Falstaff establishes the social dynamic he will adopt throughout the play. As Falstaff suspects that the doctor is using medical/physiological discourse to “gird at” him, Falstaff decides to use the (male) body as his main talking point when mocking others. Falstaff takes as his comic fodder the fluctuations of health, ability, and masculinity as they play out on the male bodies in 2 Henry IV. Falstaff’s line above is just the beginning of his use of physiological discourse for his ends. Within the same speech, he starts to defend himself by commenting on the physicality of Prince Hal: “The juvenal the Prince your master, whose chin is not yet fledge. I will sooner have a beard grow in the palm of my hand than he shall get one off his cheek” (1.2.16–19). Belittling Hal, Falstaff reformulates the prince’s possible masculinity as a monstrosity; by stating that he is more likely to develop a “freakish” beard in his palm than Hal is to develop an actual beard, Falstaff reformulates Hal’s maturation into a man as a strange and rare physical deformity. And Falstaff’s discussion of Hal will circulate around classifying this notion of deformed masculinity that will eventually prevail within the context of the play. In 2 Henry IV, Falstaff makes two large assessments concerning Hal: one relating to his inherited family traits and another relating to the kind of masculinity popular with younger men. First, Falstaff, like King Henry in the very beginning of 1 Henry IV and towards the end of 2 Henry IV, notes the cold-bloodedness of Bolingbroke and its effects on Hal and his brothers: “There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof; for thin drink doth so overcool their blood, and making many fish meals, that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness; and then when they marry, they get wenches.

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 145 They are generally fools and cowards” (4.2.81–85). Green-sickness, a disease discussed by Hippocrates (460 BCE – 370 BCE) in the short treatise On the disease of virgins (and by Ian Moulton’s essay in Chapter Thirteen of this volume), was a kind of lovesickness thought to afflict girls with melancholy and a lack of appetite, and this passage can easily be read as Falstaff simply effeminizing the likes of Bolingbroke and his sons. In her analysis of the passage, Helen King emphasizes how Falstaff’s language works by exploiting the difference between male and female (17). But this passage and the rest of Falstaff’s speech also revolve around notions of motion and stagnation, action and idleness, valor and cowardice, in such a way that the physical state of Bolingbroke and his sons is pathologized as an illness that leads the body into idleness—as a physical state that impairs these men and that Falstaff disparages to the point of disabling these men as “fools and cowards.” Falstaff belittles Bolingbroke’s sons as effeminate in this speech, but he demeans their masculinity through other means, as well: by addressing the problem of their physical lethargy and spinelessness in battle. Acting as physician, Falstaff prescribes sherry in order to relieve Bolingbroke and his sons of their ailments—the liquor will make their wits “apprehensive,” “quick,” and “nimble” to the point when the tongue can give birth to this wit (4.2.89–91). Sherry also warms the blood, which was beforehand “cold and settled,” to such an extent that the heart is mustered to do valorous deeds (4.2.93–101). Falstaff’s language does not just rely on distinguishing the feminine and masculine; it works with the opposites of stasis and action, or quickness and sluggishness, in order to diagnose Bolingbroke’s sons not only as effeminate, but also as inactive and impaired by their condition. Moreover, Falstaff’s idea of mental agility being necessary to ideal masculinity comes up again when Falstaff comically disparages the fashions of young men such as Hal. Falstaff’s major explication of Hal’s manliness occurs in the first scene in 2 Henry IV, of which Doll Tearsheet is a part— and this is not just coincidental. The scene thrives off a major comic irony: Doll, a woman who “knows” many men, is forced to listen to Falstaff as he explains to Doll many, and often contradictory, notions of manliness— notions of manliness that do not necessarily make themselves clear in the bedroom. When Doll inquires about the affection between Poins and Hal considering Poins’s slow wit, Falstaff instructs Doll on the fashionable display of courtly masculinity that Poins and Hal share: Because their legs are both of a bigness, and a plays at quoits well, and eats conger and eel, and drinks off candles’ ends for flap-dragons, and rides the wild mare with the boys, and jumps upon joint-stools, and swears with a good grace, and wears his boot very smooth like unto the sign of the leg, and breeds no bate with telling of discreet stories, and such other gambol faculties a’ has that show a weak mind and an able body. (2.4.219–26)

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Falstaff’s disdain for what I call “gambol masculinity” betrays an anachronistic and disparaging attitude toward the increasing popularity of sport and athletic games among upper-class men in the Elizabethan era. This ideal of masculinity stems first from the ability of the man to display muscularity and strength—we see this in Falstaff’s mention of the big, strong legs that were fashionable, and the ability to play a game like quoits, which required a certain amount of physical strength. Bruce R. Smith notes how portraiture dating from 1590 to 1610 in England emphasized particular features of the male body, most notably, the head, groin, and thighs (31). Smith details the importance of these first two body parts in marking masculinity, but has comparatively little to say about thighs and legs. Phyllis Rackin also addresses how early modern clothing was cut to reveal a man’s legs. This positive emphasis on the muscularity of legs among aristocratic men provides an interesting counter-discourse to mappings of the individual body upon the body politic, in which the legs usually signify members of the lower classes that support the “heads” of state (Harris 42). But what is key to this kind of masculinity that Falstaff has been defining in 2 Henry IV is the way in which this “able-bodied” masculinity, so called by Falstaff, is actually a deformity of masculinity. The signs of masculinity that Falstaff extols—a beard, a quick wit, and hot blood—have been trumped by a masculinity  that writes itself explicitly on the able muscularity of the male body. Falstaff’s scornfulness for gambol masculinity has affinities with non-dramatic early modern texts that consider the effects of athletic training upon men. A few early modern writers sought to reformulate Western cultural history by taking the stance that many well-regarded Greek and Roman cultural institutions and values, such as athletics, signaled the decay of the form of the human body, as well as the proliferation of diseases and deformities. For this alternate discourse, one should consider the work of Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale (1530-1606). Mercuriale’s book, De arte gymnastica libri sex (1569), was the first history of exercise of its kind, drawing on a vast number of ancient Greek and Roman sources, and its influence is felt in a number of English books, most notably Richard Mulcaster’s Positions Concerning the Training up of Children (1581). De arte begins with the supposition that in ancient times, there was no need for medicine, but When that abominable plague of intemperance, the refined arts of the cook, the exquisitely subtle spices used at feasts and the foreign ways of mixing wine invaded mankind, multifarious kinds of diseases began to proliferate, and necessitated the discovery of medicine: it would certainly have been possible to do without it for ever, had not human— or rather bestial—gluttony, the offspring of all vices, rendered its use most necessary of all. (11)

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 147 Mercuriale creates an alternative fall of mankind in which, once again, forbidden eating becomes the source of all bodily woes. And it is intemperance [intemperantiae] that spurs the fall. Failure to find a medium in eating and consumption leads to illness. Mercuriale is of the opinion that the number and kinds of illnesses have proliferated since humankind fell for the sin of gluttony, and he lists some of these horrifying diseases and their debilitating effects (17). In many ways, Mercuriale is linking diseases that cause impairments to “the offspring of all vices,” suggesting that there is a link between gluttony and impairment. Intemperance and muscularity figure in compelling ways into Mercuriale’s description of the bodies and lifestyles of athletes. Mercuriale distinguishes three types of gymnastics: military gymnastics consists of practices soldiers use to gain skill in warfare; medical or legitimate (legitima sive medica) gymnastics consists of exercises meant to help a person develop a healthy constitution; and perverted gymnastics (vitiosa gymnastica) or athletics were practiced by those wishing to develop strength and win competitions. One must note how Mercuriale’s terminology reveals his desire to cast out athletics from the more acceptable forms of gymnastics. In his use of the term vitiosa, which can mean perverted or defective, Mercuriale ascribes a proto-ableist label to athletics and especially athletic competitions, linking it to deformity and corruption. This is not to say that all early modern analyses of athletics and Olympic-style games were polemical; Richard Wilson’s readings of texts about the Cotswold Olympics of the early seventeenth century reveal an attitude that athletic games inspired amity amongst competitors (85). Mercuriale’s important critique, however, creates a link between athletics and deformity by creating a history of athletics that mirrors the degenerative history of the body that he outlines at the beginning of De arte gymnastica. At this point, I must clarify that I am neither arguing that Mercuriale’s account of athletics is the same as Falstaff’s description of the practices of gambol masculinity, nor that Mercuriale directly influenced Shakespeare’s writing of Falstaff’s character in 2 Henry IV. There are obvious differences; Falstaff, for instance, would not take issue with gluttony and excessive eating in the ways that Mercuriale does. Both Falstaff and Mercuriale, however, tell cautionary tales about athleticism and manliness. For both, sculpting an able, athletic body impairs men in other ways. Citing Galen, Mercuriale claims that athletes were “over-concerned with beefing up their bodies and gaining greater strength, and produced minds and senses that were dull, torpid, and slow. Hence athletes were called dozy, slow, cowardly, lazy by Plato, and were subject to vertigo and other diseases” (177–79). This criticism leveled at athletes parallels some of Falstaff’s sentiments toward gambol masculinity. Both Mercuriale and Falstaff argue that too much focus on athleticism as proof of masculinity can weaken a man’s wits and tongue, and that bodily strength does not necessarily mean that a man is brave or valorous. Rather, athleticism can make cowards of men, and this fear of

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death or bodily harm becomes central to Falstaff’s idea of true masculine comportment. I call Falstaff’s ideal masculinity “abrasive masculinity,” not only because this type of masculinity is performed through battles of wit, but also because it puns upon the word “abrasion,” signaling a masculinity that is exhibited through wounds and impairments. We see this when Falstaff picks out soldiers to draft in Act 3; selecting men with names such as Feeble and Wart, Falstaff consciously uplifts a version of masculinity not based on muscularity or apparent able-bodiedness: “Will you tell me, Master Shallow, how to choose a man? Care I for the limb, the thews (sinews), the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man?” (3.2.236–38). Falstaff attempts to show Shallow that manliness and ability do not depend on muscularity, and his didactic technique here shows how these three traits—manliness, muscularity, and able-bodiedness—are linked to such an extent in the minds of men such as Shallow that Falstaff has to instruct others on this alternative masculinity. Rather, Falstaff’s attitude toward the male body is defined by one overarching claim: manliness is not denigrated, but is actually affirmed, by impairment and illness. For instance, when Falstaff tells Doll “to serve bravely is to come halting off” (2.4.43–44), he valorizes the limp caused by courage in battle, or the venereal disease resulting from sexual promiscuity, as signs of an active and exercised masculinity. These changes in the male body—impairing changes—become markers of that body’s inherent manliness. Paradoxically, bodily malleability signifies a nonmalleable, innate masculinity within. Aspects of male bodies that suggest physical solidity and thus masculinity, such as bulk and bigness (recall Falstaff’s dismissal of Poins’s and Hal’s big legs and men of “big assemblance” in the mustering scene), are undermined as signifiers of a person’s manliness. Furthermore, Falstaff’s dismissal of bigness and bulk also destabilizes his own physical bulkiness as a sign of his masculinity (or femininity) and personhood. Falstaff undermines physical bulk, whether fat or fit, as a false signifier of gender; rather, Falstaff determines manliness according to the impairments by which a man’s body changes. What Falstaff’s abrasive masculinity does is help us come to terms with our own late modern biases about fat and fit bodies. Most recently, Elena Levy-Navarro’s work on early modern constructions of obesity has fully exposed such biases, especially when those biases pertain to the body of a character as infamous as Falstaff. In her analysis of the Henriad, LevyNavarro notes how Shakespeare differentiates a fat, magnanimous bodily aesthetic, represented through Falstaff’s body, from a lean, mean aesthetic promoted by Hal. The fat versus thin dichotomy in the Henriad has also been noted by Jonathan Goldberg: “Hal’s new regime of trim reckonings... would cut the body down to size; it is mobilized against decaying aristocratic corpulence—the fat body that will come to be the body of the malnourished poor—and the woman’s body” (172). In an even earlier essay, Jonathan Hall claimed that the antagonism between Hal and Falstaff mirrored the

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 149 struggle between the Fat and the Thin that was a part of Lenten festivities (75). Hal, in his insults and jokes about Falstaff’s body, marks that body to represent an older feudal order, the excesses of society, and an inertia that forecloses the possibility of forward movement in time and imperialistic progress. At the same time, Shakespeare critiques the lean aesthetic promoted by Hal because it quietly advocates the consumption of the bodies of those in the lower classes so that Hal can achieve his imperialistic aims (Levy-Navarro 67–109). In the early modern period, however, muscle and fat (or flesh) were not mutually exclusive categories. Most surprisingly, fat and flesh were seen as constitutive parts of the muscles of a human body. The anatomist and physiologist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) made these observations from dissections he performed as part of his research. Vesalius wrote a sevenvolume treatise on human physiology while holding a post as a lecturer of anatomy at the University of Padua. This treatise, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), marked a shift away from the Galenic physiologic model that had dominated the field of medicine for centuries. The text of the Fabrica, along with the detailed illustrations that accompanied it, had an impact on anatomy and depictions of the body for centuries after its publication. While Shakespeare most likely did not read the Fabrica, the influence this book had on the early modern imagination was widespread, and it is often cited as having the largest impact on the changing early modern conceptions of the human body (“Vesalius, Andreas”). In his breakdown of the parts of muscle, Vesalius makes it clear that flesh is the part of the muscle that actually “contains and strengthens” the ligaments. Flesh is also the “special organ of movement” within the muscles; moreover, flesh will and must contain fat in order to perform its muscular functions (118). Vesalius does imply, however, that there is a difference in the ratio of fat to muscle between men and women. In Book 2 of the Fabrica, which describes the muscles, Vesalius opens his discussion of dissection with his description of what one must do in order to cut through the layers of dermis properly. Vesalius notes that one will not have much difficulty separating the skin from the layers of muscle and fat underneath: You will have no trouble doing this in the human, especially if the person is rather plump, since often, and especially in women, the thickness of the fat in the thorax and abdomen measures more than the breadth of two fingers; and in public dissections we have seen around the hips and buttocks, in women who were not excessively obese, fat measuring more than a palm in thickness. (146, emphasis mine) Vesalius claims that women’s bodies, whether they are thin or more corpulent, are easier to dissect because they possess more fat. The implication, then, is that men’s bodies have less fat and are harder to dissect as a

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consequence. Regardless of body type or gender, muscle needs fat in order to move with ease, but there is a difference between men and women regarding the ratio of fat to muscle. Vesalius remarks upon this difference in terms of the ease and difficulty of dissection; women’s bodies are easier to penetrate with scalpel and needle than men’s bodies. The manner in which Vesalius frames this gender difference constructs the male body as stratified and more complex than the female body. Both men and women have layers, but the layers of male bodies speak to the complexity and impenetrability of that gender. Vesalius affirms a bodily, hypodermic masculinity that depends upon the maintenance of physical and subjective layers. If we return to the relationship between fat and muscle, we see that Falstaff also does not abide by this duality between fat and muscle, nor does he simply signify a kind of physical and political inertia. Rather, Falstaff’s corporeality is built up, teased, and discussed ad infinitum in Henry IV so that corporeality, physical bulk, and mass itself can be exposed as a false signifier of gender and ability. After being rejected by Hal, Falstaff falls into denial and attempts to explain the situation to Shallow, assuring the Justice that “I will be the man yet that shall make you great” (5.5.75–76). Shallow cheekily responds, “I cannot perceive how, unless you give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw” (5.5.77–78). Patricia A. Cahill reads this passage in a manner that reemphasizes Shallow’s leanness, which parallels the leanness of Hal and thus makes Hal vulnerable to critiques of his masculinity: “this acknowledgement contains within it the awareness that the great men who, like Hal, are marked by their leanness and parsimonious regimens, may be something less than ‘select’ male specimens” (100). Although I believe that the passage certainly reasserts the similarities between and instabilities of Hal and Shallow’s thin subjectivity, I also think that Shallow’s joke, delivered during the last scene in which we see Falstaff, does the work of exposing Falstaff’s fatness as a fiction—a fiction in the form of a straw-stuffed doublet worn by Will Kemp. Kemp’s costume loses its ability to signify Falstaff’s fatness, and, consequently, we see fatness and physical bulkiness emptied of its capacity to signal something about a person. Both leanness and fatness are conflated as fictions that insufficiently determine manliness.

DANCING FOR THE CONGRUITY OF HIS HEALTH: WILL KEMP’S NINE DAIES WONDER Despite the ways in which both fat and lean, muscular bodies are conflated and then both emptied of signification in 2 Henry IV, one could easily surmise how the specter of the fat knight haunted Will Kemp in the months following his performances as Falstaff. Kemp, known for his extemporaneous jokes and physical comedy, acted as the headlining clown for Shakespeare’s playacting company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for approximately

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 151 six years (Nielson 466; Thomas 511). During his tenure as an actor with this company, Kemp’s reputation as a dancer grew; he was best known for the post-play jigs common in the Elizabethan theater, and several of his jigs were published. But it was with the Chamberlain’s Men that he was likely the original player for some of Shakespeare’s best known comic roles: Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. Moreover, many scholars—most notably, Andrew Gurr and Jean E. Howard—have suggested that Kemp was the first actor to play Falstaff, beginning around 1596 or 1597 with the production of 1 Henry IV (Gurr 107; Howard 1301). Kemp describes his own body in Nine Daies Wonder, a pamphlet that was published very shortly after the first performances of 2 Henry IV, in order to affirm values of temperance and sobriety that were alien to the portrayal of Falstaff. In this sense, Kemp tries to reestablish the binary between bodily excess and temperate leanness that Falstaff disturbed with his abrasive masculinity. Kemp praises his own body’s athletic exceptionalism (in contrast to Falstaff’s exceptionalism as a fat man), and this exceptionalism, made possible by bodily regulation and temperance, manifests itself when Kemp’s body is in flux and motion. Scholarly analyses of Kemp’s pamphlet tend to focus upon how Kemp situates himself in comparison to the rural, common folk that he encounters during his journey. Kemp’s translation of the plebeian, carnivalesque morris into a written form suggests that he had colonized the dance, transforming it into an urban, proto-capitalistic venture, as Daryl Palmer suggests; in addition, Kemp’s unwillingness to drink and his rebuffing of any commoners who wish to dance with him mark his willing exclusion from the carnivalesque activity with which the dance is associated (Thomas). Overall, the scholarly consensus reads the publication of the pamphlet in Bakhtinian terms, marking it as one more instance of rural, folk culture being squelched to serve the needs of an ascendant urban, capitalistic culture. As useful and important as these readings are, what happens when we focus upon the event narrated—that of an athletic feat? What happens when we look to the overriding preoccupation of Kemp during this narrative (even beyond moneymaking)—that of defining the health and the fitness of his body against the bodies of the rural men and women with whom he interacts? In this vein, I take inspiration from Sujata Iyengar’s argument that early modern writers used the Moorish connotations of the morris dance “to trope geographical, temporal, and literary alterity within [early modern English] culture,” and in particular, the “exoticism of the rural—especially rural women” (86). Kemp’s morris dance creates opportunities for him to mark his own physical exceptionalism against the rural bodies upon which he projects fatness, femininity, brownness, and also impairment. Kemp’s exceptionalism shows itself as he encounters people in the countryside who attempt to dance with him. Kemp narrates an episode in which a “lusty” town butcher “would in a Morrice keepe mee company to

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Bury: I being glad of his friendly offer, gaue him thankes, and forward wee did set; but ere euer wee had measur’d halfe a mile of our way, he gaue me ouer in the plain field, protesting, that if he might get a 100 pound, he would not hold out with me; for indeed my pace in dauncing is not ordinary” (9). Kemp uses the butcher, a seemingly energetic man, to highlight his own exceptional physicality and athleticism; he dismissively notes how the butcher has to stop the dance “ere euer wee had measur’d halfe a mile” in order to place emphasis on the fact that his own dancing ability is not “ordinary.” The anecdote about the butcher contrasts sharply with an episode concerning a dancing “Maydemarian” girl with her fat sides and legs. Kemp makes it crucial to his story to note the girl’s fleshiness, yet also commends the girl for “foot[ing] it merrily to Melfoord, being a long myle.” The girl’s athletic accomplishment is commemorated with a song: A Country Lasse, browne as a berry, Blith of blee, in heart as merry, Cheekes well fed, and sides well larded, Euery bone with fat flesh guarded, Meeting merry Kemp by chaunce, Was Marrian in his Morrice daunce. Her stump legs with bels were garnisht, Her browne browes with sweating varnish[t]; Her browne hips, when she was lag To win her ground, went swig a swag; Which to see all that came after Were repleate with mirthfull laughter. Yet she thumpt it on her way With a sportly hey de gay: At a mile her daunce she ended, Kindly paide and well commended. (10) In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the morris incorporated characters from the Robin Hood stories, and the “Maid Marian” was often a man dressed as a woman who accompanied the main male dancer (Brissenden 2; Swann 20). Here, an actual woman plays the Maid Marian role, but the poet here does indeed cross-dress her—as a Falstaffian figure. Despite the vivaciousness and energy of the girl’s performance, she tellingly has to lose some agency by becoming the focus of the poet’s embellishment. The use of participles marks how the girl’s body becomes a site of ornamentation; just as her legs are “garnisht” with bells, her body comes to wear fat and sweat as a suit of clothes that parallels the morris bells—her brow is “varnisht” with sweat, her sides and bones are “larded” and “guarded” with flesh. Fat, flesh, and sweat become less tied to the body and are increasingly externalized as the suit that the girl cross-dresses in to perform the morris

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 153 dance. What is more, her bodily fat and sweat cannot help but evoke the facetious, yet disparaging, descriptions of Kemp’s famous character Falstaff. As Falstaff is known for his “fat paunch” and “sweat” that “lards the lean earth,” it becomes clear that the poet’s descriptions are meant to displace Kemp’s identity as Falstaff onto the dancing girl. Kemp’s reputation as the performer of Falstaff—and his adoption of the knight’s fatness—become disembodied and re-embodied onto the body of an Other, and not only an Other when it comes to corporeality, but also when it comes to gender and her “brown” skin tone. Despite the song’s tendency to “other” the girl and adorn her with the physical attributes of Kemp’s Falstaff, the song also makes a turn with the “Yet” beginning the thirteenth line. Until this point, the description of the girl has honed in on her fatness, sweat, hips, and flesh that jiggles when she dances. But at this point, which offers the first pause in the song, the “yet” undoes the work of building up the girl’s fleshiness. The songwriter notes how despite her corporeality, she “thumpt it” along with Kemp; this is the first time that the girl is given an active verb in the poem, which gives readers the impression that the girl has overcome potential physical limitations—her fatness, her stump legs, etc.—in order to become an agent who can act, who can thump on her way and dance with Kemp. This shift in tone is predicated on the idea that this body type is a liability when it comes to movement and projecting agency. I see a resemblance between the powerful narrative of the body told in this poem and the present-day narrative of a person with a disability who overcomes that disability. Concerning this latter narrative, Simi Linton has noticed this implies that “the person has risen above society’s expectation for someone with those characteristics [of disability]. Because it is physically impossible to overcome a disability, it seems that what is overcome is the social stigma of having a disability” (17, emphasis original). While I do not suggest that the dancing girl has a disability that twentyfirst century readers would recognize, a narrative pattern emerges in this song in which a person possessing certain physical characteristics exceeds the expectations of those around her. In the last two lines before the shift at line thirteen, it is noted that “all that came after” the girl “were repleate with mirthfull laughter” upon seeing her. Although one could argue that this “mirthful” laughing from the others does not signify hostility, it suggests that the girl presents a paradox—that of a brown, chubby woman performing a rigorous, athletic dance. The “yet” signifies a turn in which the girl sportily and successfully performs the dance despite her physicality and despite the reaction to her physicality that those around her express. As the song presents a story of bodily exceptionalism in the dancing, fat Maid Marian, the text’s main purpose is to present Kemp’s rather different physical exceptionalism. Relating to this aim of the pamphlet, a refrain throughout the Nine Daies Wonder is Kemp’s resistance to drink and merriment for the sake of maintaining salubriousness and agility: qualities for which Falstaff is not known. After the first day of dancing, Kemp makes sure

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to note how he has “to giue rest to my well-labour’d limbes.” After the third day of dancing, Kemp recalls how “The good cheere and kinde welcome I had at Chelmsford was much more than I was willing to entertaine; for my onely desire was to refraine drinke and be temperate in my dyet” (7). On the fifth day, a friend advises Kemp to “obserue temperate dyet for my health” (9). Kemp approaches this dance as an athletic feat requiring a rigid bodily regimen of abstinence and rest, all for maintaining “temperance.” If we look to explanations of the humors, temperance is most closely associated with the act of regulating the temperature of the body; the body can experience unnatural levels of heat, for instance, if one drinks excess amounts of wine. David Houston Wood has productively discussed the effects of alcohol on the temperature of the body, as well as a consideration of drunkenness as disability in early modern discourse. But the contradiction here is that Kemp needs to maintain a regularized, temperate balance of the humors to succeed at a very unusual, maybe even intemperate athletic feat. Salubriousness, however, even seems alien to Kemp; in describing one moment in which he needed to resist drinking, Kemp narrates, “With Gentlemanlike protestations, as ‘Truely, sir, I dare not,’ ‘It stands not with the congruity of my health.’ Congruitie, said I? how came that strange language in my mouth? I thinke scarcely that it is any Christen worde, and yet it may be a good worde for ought I knowe, though I neuer made it, nor doe verye well understand it; yet I am sure I have bought it at the word-mongers at as deare a rate as I could haue...Farwell, Congruitie, for I meane now to be more concise, and stand upon eeuener bases” (4). Language that signifies the health of the body is alien to Kemp; he takes up the word and promptly abandons it “to be more concise.” Moreover, the word “congruity” is not a Christian word, certainly not a Christian word to describe one’s health. Congruity seems to expand beyond Kemp’s vocabulary, despite the fact that his body often expands beyond “normal” boundaries, and he feels the need to keep his vocabulary as trim and temperate as his appetite. As Kemp is temperate in drink and food, and does the same for his vocabulary, keeping it “upon eeuener bases,” it is as if he is heeding Hal’s weight-loss advice at the end of 2 Henry IV to “make less thy body” and “leave gormandizing” (5.5.50–51). In adopting temperate eating and drinking habits, and in also tempering his vocabulary to make it more even-keeled, Kemp purposefully rejects the ideas that Falstaff put forth in 2 Henry IV. As I see it, Kemp was trying to remake his public image, placing more emphasis upon the skill that made him famous—his dancing—and less on the verbal dexterity and corpulence for which Falstaff was known. In dismissing able bodies, shapely legs, and physical strength as false signs of masculinity and even as monstrous, Falstaff empties the body of its ability to signify manliness; Kemp’s self-portrayal in Nines Daies Wonder, however, reinstates this physical core to masculinity. Fatness, stumpiness, physical passivity, and so on are imposed onto the Maid Marian, a body othered by gender, class, and skin color. Like Hal, Kemp looks to temper the maintenance of his limbs—his legs specifically—to prove his ability and his masculinity.

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 155 As much as Falstaff is known for his “quick” and “nimble” wit, which is delivered “o’er to the voice, the tongue” (4.2.89–91), by declaring that he will “be more concise” in the Nine Daies Wonder, Kemp means to redirect the focus away from the strength of his tongue and toward the strength of his legs. One can see this shift foreshadowed in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV, in which Kemp comes onstage to ask the audience, “If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs?” (15–16). What we see here is a devaluation of the muscularity of the tongue and an increase in esteem of the muscularity of the leg. The notion of the athletic, masculine body, asserted through an ability to temper and control the movements of the body, undergoes a number of reassessments and transformations in the roles that William Kemp adopted in the years that saw his performances as Falstaff and as a morris dancer. As much as Hal and other characters obsessively discourse about Falstaff’s fatness, Falstaff himself resists this overdetermination of his body in 2 Henry IV by calling attention to a kind of masculinity that is determined by able-bodiedness and then offering another masculinity to counter it. Falstaff incorporates bodily “imperfections” into his construction of abrasive masculinity, which is built around the idea that the scars and impairments displayed on male bodies grant that body narrative depth. These scars and impairments tell stories about that body’s martial and sexual conquests, confirming the body’s masculinity. Kemp, however, undoes this work of Falstaff. He displaces Falstaff’s physical qualities onto the Maid Marian dancer, and rewrites his own physicality in terms of temperance, able-bodiedness, and muscularity. Kemp’s rhetorical stance in the pamphlet acts as one repetition of a discursive pattern that has created the category “disability” in literary and cultural representations. As Kemp establishes himself as the bodily standard by explicitly marking the differences and deficiencies of the bodies around him, he enacts the key tenet to representing disability: to form and affirm what Rosemarie GarlandThomson calls “social relations between people who assume the normate position and those who are assigned the disabled position” (10). Kemp adopts an ideal, yet temperate, corporeality by making those around him passive to his depictions of their bodies. What matters to my understanding of an early modern emergence of disability is not so much that we see characters who have what we would consider to be “disabling” features, but that we see the emergence of power structures, rhetorical stances, and social dynamics that mark these kinds of differences between bodies, especially male bodies.

WORKS CITED Brissenden, Alan. “Shakespeare and the Morris.” Review of English Studies 30.117 (1979): 1–11. Print. Cahill, Patricia A. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

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Davis, Lennard J. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and other Difficult Positions. New York: New York UP, 2002. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992. Print. Greatist. “Can People Really be ‘Fit and Fat?’” Greatist. Forbes.com. Forbes, 20 Feb. 2014. Web. 30 May 2014. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage: 1574–1642. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Hall, Jonathan. “Falstaff, Sancho Panza and Azdak: Carnival and History.” Falstaff. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1992. 73–76. Print. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Howard, Jean. Introduction to The Second Part of Henry IV. Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. 1293–1303. Print. Hodgdon, Barbara. The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Iyengar, Sujata. “Moorish Dancing in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): 85–107. Print. Kemp, William. Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich. 1600. Ed. Alexander Dyce. Camden Society: London, 1839. Repr. Project Gutenberg. Web. Accessed 8 Jan. 2013. King, Helen. The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Levy-Navarro, Elena. The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Print. Lewis, Wyndham. “Falstaff.” Falstaff. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1992. 28–29. Print. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York UP, 1998. Print. Mercuriale, Girolamo. De Arte Gymnastica. 1569. Trans. Vivian Nutton. Florence: Olschki, 2008. Print. Moulton, Ian Frederick. “Catching The Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 212–22. Print. Nielson, James. “William Kemp at the Globe.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44.4 (1993): 466–68. Print. Palmer, Daryl W. “William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder and the Transmission of Performance Culture.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (1991): 33–47. Print. Parker, Patricia A. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print. Rackin, Phyllis. “Dating Shakespeare’s Women.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 134 (1998): 29–43. Print.

“Gambol Faculties” and “Halting Bravery” 157 Reynolds, Gretchen. “Getting Fat but Staying Fit?” Well. The New York Times 7 Mar. 2012. Web. Accessed 30 May 2014. Shakespeare, William. “The Second Part of Henry the Fourth.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. 1293–1380. Print. Smith, Bruce R. Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Swann, Elizabeth. “Maid Marian and the Morris: The Connection of the Morris with the Robin Hood Legend.” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 7.1 (1952): 20–25. Print. Thomas, Max W. “Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market.” PMLA 107.3 (1992): 511–23. Print. “Vesalius, Andreas.” Chambers Biographical Dictionary. 1997. Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2013. Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body, Book II: The Ligaments and Muscles. 1543. Trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman. Novato, CA: Norman, 1999. Print. Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Wilson, Richard. “Like an Olympian Wrestling: Shakespeare’s Olympic Game.” Shakespeare Survey 66 (2013): 82–95. Print. Wood, David Houston. “‘Fluster’d with Flowing Cups’: Alcoholism, Humoralism, and the Prosthetic Narrative in Othello.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009). n. pag. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014.

10 Flower Imagery and Botanical Illustration Health and Sexual Generation in Romeo and Juliet Darlena Ciraulo To those familiar with Shakespeare as the poet of Nature, a writer who describes in richly-jeweled detail the contours of the natural world, Shakespeare’s widespread inclusion of flower imagery in his narrative and dramatic works is well known. Early studies of flora in Shakespeare include those of Sidney Beisly (1864), J. Harvey Bloom (1903), Henry N. Ellacombe (1884), Leo H. Grindon (1883), Esther Singleton (1933), and Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (1935). Yet that Shakespeare uses the word “flower” and its grammatical forms (flowers, flowered, flowering) more times in Romeo and Juliet than in any other play or poem is, however, less commonly appreciated. The only other work to equal Romeo and Juliet in the number of incidences in which the generic term “flower” or the derivate terms “flowerets” or “flowery” appear is, not surprisingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a play where the lush flora of the Athenian green world, including the magical love-in-idleness pansy, embellishes the landscape of the setting. The lyrical descriptions of nature so abundant in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a drama about star-crossed love as well, are conspicuously absent in Romeo and Juliet. Instead of describing delicately ornate vegetation, Shakespeare uses the image of the flower in Romeo and Juliet as a botanical metaphor to explore the “contingent and constructed nature of ‘normal’” bodies (Hobgood and Wood 3), specifically the normative life cycle of female and male reproduction. The female or male sexualized body mirrors the life cycle of the gynandrous flowering plant, even though sexual generation in the tragedy is ultimately thwarted by the death of young love. The term “flower” in this study is used in both its popular and botanic meanings. As the OED states, “flower” commonly refers to “a blossom considered independently of the plant,” but it can also signify the total female/male reproductive unit of the flowering plant itself (angiosperm). This seed-bearing vegetation often consists of stamen and carpel, both of which are typically enveloped by a brilliantly colored corolla (petals) and a green calyx (sepals). The reproductive structure of the flowering plant can be further broken down into its sexualized parts: the “male” stamens are each comprised of the anther (where pollen is produced) and filament (the slender stalk supporting the anther); the “female” carpel is constituted by the pistil (stigma and style) and the ovary (where ovules are produced). The mature ovary is designated a fruit, while the mature ovule a seed (Gray 72–84). In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the development of

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the adolescent reproductive body reflects the evolution of the flowering plant in its tripartite process of bud, blossom, and seedpod. To elucidate this correspondence, it is helpful to consider the relationship between sixteenth-century botanical illustrations of flowering plants and representations of flowers in Shakespeare’s tragedy. What is particularly interesting about this floral analogy (conventionally applied to states of ideal womanhood) is that it relates to the generative health of the male body as well. ROSES AND POTATOES The practise of illustrating the life cycle of flowers, though not new to the Renaissance, arises in the mid-to late sixteenth century with newfound enthusiasm in printed books on plant life (Hobhouse 96–135; Lack 54). The movement toward illustrative realism in botanical illustration, a trend that departs from the pictorial symbolism of medieval manuscripts and incunabula, coincides with the rise of scientific observation, as well as the advent of wood engraving as an esteemed art (Arber 185–246). Although a standard nomenclature of flower morphology did not occur into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Green 149–291), a mixture of classical and vernacular terms is frequently employed in the sixteenth century to describe some of the anatomical features of flowering plants (Pavord 2005). Despite the lack of systematic classification, empirical observation and investigation of the natural world were important tools, as well as the philosophic purview of the early modern botanist and draftsman. These early researchers studied plants meticulously to depict vegetation as truthfully and charitably as possible (Boas 50–67). English herbalists of the period borrowed freely from the woodcuts of foreign artists—derived mostly from the printing houses in Antwerp and Frankfurt—and these detailed images of nature reflect an interest in scientific accuracy and direct observation of florae (Rohde 75–119). The most widely read English herbal guide of the late sixteenth century, John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), is a compendium of medicinal and practical uses of plants, expanded by the apothecary Thomas Johnson in 1633, and based largely on Rembert Dodoens’s Stirpium Historae Pemptades Sex (1583; Arber 129–30, de Bray 23–36, Anderson 225). The title page of the Gerard-Johnson Herball, engraved by John Payne, shows a portrait of the herbalist Gerard holding a single delicate stem of a flowering plant, “Virginia Potato,” from the genus and species Solanum tuberosum. Gerard is the first to describe in English the white potato, although he mistakenly believed it derived from Virginia rather than South America. John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent suggests that Gerard overlooked this detail “to ingratiate himself with Queen Elizabeth I by claiming that this new food plant was the first fruit of a colony which Sir Walter Raleigh had named after the Virgin Queen herself” (84).1 In this engraving, the threefold growth phases of the flowering plant are simultaneously depicted on the sprig: bud, blossom, and seedpod.

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This very image of Gerard depicted with a spray of potato flower also accompanies the 1597 Herball, but it is placed separately after the introductory and epistolary matter and, hence, highlights the very picture itself.

Figure 10.1 Portrait of John Gerard with potato flower. Herball, 1597. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In both editions, the portrait of Gerard with stem in hand suggests a vital correspondence between the flowering plant and human form, for the image serves as a symbol of the naturalistic process of birth and decay to which both plant and humankind inevitably succumb. In Book Two of the Herball, Gerard describes the floral specimen of the potato flower head in careful and loving detail, which depiction reads in part: “The whole flower is of a light purple color, stripped downe the middle of every folde or welt, with a light shew of yellownes, as though purple and yellow were mixed togither” (Ccc7). Along with this lively passage of floral beauty, a woodcut of Virginia Potato enhances the description. The illustration exhibits the flowering plant in various phases of maturation and fruition, presenting its life cycle in a visually appealing frame. If one of the aims of Gerard’s herbal is to include colorful and enchanting vegetation from the New World (Rohde 120–41)—thereby expanding as well as distinguishing itself from the Dodoens’s Flemish book—its emphasis on the purple-yellow American potato gives prominence to the inclusion of novel and exotic plant life in Renaissance herbals.

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Figure 10.2 The life-cycle of the potato. John Gerard, Herball, 1597. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Significant to this study, however, the woodcut of the flowering potato that accompanies Gerard’s description displays the various stages of progression in the flowering plant’s life cycle. The practice of circulating and reusing woodcuts and engravings is complex and layered in the midsixteenth century. Gerard appropriates the vast majority of his approximately 1800 figures from the German herbal, Eicones plantarum of Tabernaemontanus (1590), whereas the illustrations in that herbal were pirated from various continental artists, such as Fuchs, Mattioli, Dodoens, de l’Écluse, and de l’Obel. The 1633 Gerard-Johnson herbal, which contains well over 2700 images, used illustrations largely from the printing house of Charles of Plantin (Hall 18–20). The illustration of the Virginia Potato, however, remains original to Gerard’s 1597 text, and it is reprinted in the influential and widely-read Gerard-Johnson Herball of the seventeenth century, as well.

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Yet the flowering plant that Gerard places in highest estimation is the “plant of Roses”: one of “the most glorious flowers of the worlde” (Aaaa1). Even as far back as antiquity, the Greek poet Sappho extols the Rose as “Queen of Flowers” (Grieve 684). Over and beyond its splendor, Gerard celebrates the Tudor Rose as the national flower of England: “it is the honor and ornament of our English Scepter,” symbolizing the unification of the houses of Lancaster and York (Aaaa1). Politically and aesthetically, then, the “plant of Roses” stands out from the pulchritude of all the other flowering plants. Not surprisingly, the greatly admired “Rosa” was regularly depicted in various stages of reproductive growth—from bud, to blossom, to seedpod—in English and Continental herbals of the sixteenth century. The Elizabethan William Turner, who is designated as the father of the science of botany in England, identifies several species of rose, including the red and white variety, although he only includes a single generic illustration of this particular flower. In A New Herball, published in three installments from 1562–68, Turner, accentuating the rose’s remedial and utilitarian usages, places the beautifully-detailed woodcut of “Rosa” next to his description of the flowering plant’s virtues and powers. Turner demonstrates an interest in the utilitarian properties of plants in the New Herball, marking a departure from his earlier books on the naming of plants (Jones 55–82). Drawing on ancient herbal authorities, such as Galen and Dioscorides, Turner demonstrates how the different parts of the rose plant could be utilized for human therapeutic and curative purposes. In that same illustration, the flower is portrayed in distinct phases of simultaneous development. The image of Rosa depicts the gradual blooming and fading of the plant, proceeding from rosebud to fruit all in one composition. The vivid illustration of Rosa in Turner’s A New Herball distinctly pictorializes the seedpods, or rosehips, of the flowering plant: the reddish, round fruit that occurs after successful pollination of the flower. By the nineteenth century, the seedpods of the rose plant are frequently referred to as rosehips, but Turner calls the pods “sede vesselles” (Uiii), poetically connoting the procreative womb of the fruit itself. The Elizabethan herbalist Henry Lyte, who translated Dodoens’s Latin 1554 herbal into English in 1578 (based on the French translation by Charles de l’Écluse), uses the term “knoppes” or “buttons” (Kkkv) to delineate the seed-bearing vessel of the flower. About this aspect of the white flower’s structure, he writes, “the flowers fallen there come up rounde knoppes, and red when they be ripe, within which is a hard seede wrapped in heare or wooll” (Kkk). The wilting petals of the fertilized rose transform into the seed receptacle, rosehip, usually in late summer and fall, pointing to the reproductive pattern of the flowering plant. Paradoxically, the dying petals of the flower signal new life: successful pollination of the rose. The woodcut illustration of Rosa in Turner’s A New Herball derives, as do many others in his book, from Leonhart Fuchs’s 1545 octavo herbal based on his influential 1542 folio version, De Historia Stirpium (Arber

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122; Rohde 82–83). The German botanist Fuchs—scrupulous in composition, as well as drawing from actual specimens in nature—pays rare homage to the artists of his herbal by including their portraits and names in the front matter of his work; Albrecht Meyer created original drawings of the plants, Heinrich Füllmaurer served as the copyist, and Veit Rudolf Speckle assisted as woodcutter (Oglivie 48–58). The full-page woodcut of “Rosa” in Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium depicts the flowering plant in gradual phases of development as the rosebud is illustrated progressively from inflorescence to seedpod. This very image of Rosa resurfaces in Turner’s book, and it not surprisingly reappears in Lyte’s English rendering of Dodoens’s herbal. The phases of the flowering plant are shown together in the reproductive process of budding, wilting, and formation of seedpods. Although this floral configuration may not appear seasonally realistic, the picture of Rosa privileges the overall generic reproductive cycle of the flower, over and beyond any individual particularities. Gerard’s Herball contains, by far, more illustrations of Rosa than occur in previous English herbals. The herbalist identifies fourteen species of Rosa,

Figure 10.3 “Of the Rose: Rosa.” William Turner, New Herball, 1568. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

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dividing them roughly into three categories of cultivated, garden, and wild roses. In the Gerard-Johnson Herball, an additional four types of Rosa appear in the section, while one is omitted. Although the Gerard and GerardJohnson texts generally utilize different woodblocks for illustrations, they both incorporate images that clearly portray the reproductive stages of the rose. In the illustration of the Velvet Rose (Rosa Holosericea), for instance, both editions use the same woodcut, one that foregrounds the triadic phases of the flower’s growth. Under “The description” to the illustration, Gerard outlines the basic features of the Velvet Rose, noting the plant’s lush texture and opulent mix of hues: the blossom brandishes “a deepe and blacke red colour, resembling red crimson velvet” (Aaaa5). Explaining the evolution of the rose in its advancement and decay from flower to rosehip, he states: “when the flowers be vaded, there followe red berries full of hard seedes” (Aaaa5). In this entry, Gerard links the pictorial illustration of Velvet Rose with a narrative account of its structural development and degeneration.

Figure 10.4 “The great Musk-Rose and the Velvet Rose.” John Gerard, Herball, 1633. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In the Gerard-Johnson Herball, the illustration of “The great Muske rose” (“Rosa Moschata species maior”) reveals the continuous progression of the flowering plant from bud to seedpod. The artist of this woodcut (the Gerard Herball of 1597 uses different etchings for the musk rose varieties) accentuates the growth stages of the rose even more acutely by picturing the flower’s gradual efflorescence. In the image, the draftsman draws a bud that has not yet burgeoned, and three flower heads are shown in different states of unfolding. Finally, there is a decaying flower head, turning ever so slowly into the seed pod.

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Figure 10.5 “The Single Musk-Rose.” John Gerard, Herball, 1633. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This visual depiction calls attention to the procreative sequence of the musk rose, and the representation is virtually repeated in Gerard-Johnson’s woodcut of “The single Muske rose” (“Rosa Moschata simplici flore”). In this instance, four flower heads are illustrated in various manifestations of fullness; one bud is beginning to pullulate, and a withered flower head is transforming into a rosehip. These woodcuts are especially significant since they articulate the healthy growth pattern of the rose plants: they heighten the viewer’s awareness of floral maturation by stressing the measured evolution of the flowering plant in its progenitive life. Given this emphasis on budding, flowering, and fruiting, botanical illustrations of flowering plants, particularly from the genus Rosa, provide a conceptual apparatus for analyzing images of flowers in Romeo and Juliet.

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FLOWERING AND FADING Writers and artists have conventionally utilized flowers as time-honored symbols of the idealized female. Fragile, delicate, and sweet, a flower possesses the requisite characteristics for transcendent womanhood. As one recent critic has commented, “Floral analogies have been employed to describe various attributes of femininity in art, literature, and thought at least since the Middle Ages” (Stott 60). Indeed, longer—Rufus C. Camphausen notes the association of flowers with the female in ancient cultures. The rose was the sacred flower of Venus as well as the Virgin Mary (Impelluso 118–27). The poetic commonplace of comparing women to flowers occurs famously in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in a metaphor that fittingly also sheds light on representations of flowering plants and sexual generation in Romeo and Juliet. In Act 2, Duke Orsino equates females to perhaps the most exquisite of all plant life, the rose in full bloom: “For women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour” (2.4.37–38).2 Not only are women associated with “roses,” traditional symbols of love and beauty, but their physical and sexual bodies are related to the botanical growth process of the flowering plant itself. In this passage, the pinnacle of womanly desirability and sensual attractiveness takes place when a young woman (the “flower”) has only just blossomed (“once displayed”). According to Orsino, a woman shines at the very height of loveliness when her body, the flower, attains full bloom. Yet this state of florescence is inexorably fleeting, as the metaphor suggests: a woman’s beauty (bloom) “falls” or wilts, so that as she ages, she is no longer alluring or, in terms of procreation, serviceable to men in a reproductive capacity. Orsino’s exemplary female is physically developed, hence, fertile and salutary, but not so mature as to be withered, thereby lacking in desirability or fecundity. However, this rose metaphor harbors a peculiar irony. From a botanical perspective, the fallen rose signifies the effective fertilization of the plant and ensuing fruit. The “withered” woman has lost her erotic titillation precisely because she has ripened past her virginal “bloom.” In Twelfth Night, Viola reinforces this paradox by expanding on Orsino’s observation: “And so they are. Alas that they are so: / To die even when they to perfection grow” (2.4.39–40). Similar to a rose, a woman’s bloom, her “perfection,” inescapably leads to decay, for her sexualized body after deflowering is a body in deterioration. Moreover, “to die,” an early modern term for orgasm, points to the act of copulation and, to continue the flowering plant analogy, her despoilment. This conceit embodies several important concepts that are applicable to images of female flowering in Romeo and Juliet. The correlation between a young woman and a bud appears in the first act of the drama, and it sets the stage for Juliet’s marriageability. Although Capulet initially dissuades Paris from considering his juvenile daughter as a potential bride—since she has not yet attained fourteen years—he nonetheless encourages Paris to attend the masque that very evening to relish

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in the festive array of delectable ladies. Paris seems solely interested in Juliet as a spouse, but old Capulet emboldens Paris—the extremely eligible nobleman—to survey all the young women at the night’s festivities: “Among fresh female buds shall you this night / Inherit at my house” (1.2.27–28). Although Q2 of Romeo and Juliet reads “fennel buds” rather than “female buds,” both interpretations underscore the sexual viability of the maturing girls. Capulet’s metaphor equates feminine bodies with buds: virginal women who have, figuratively speaking, not yet spread their petals. On the one hand, “female buds” strengthens the association between maidenhood and virginity, stressing feminine chastity and girlish modesty. On the other hand, “fennel buds” suggests a parallel between youth and amorous passion, as the fennel plant boasted aphrodisiac qualities, among other applications (Evans 80n.29). Capulet imaginatively captures the pubescence of these Verona maids, who, in their girlhood innocence and sexual curiosity, are only just awakening to the desire for romantic love and the realities of wifedom and motherhood. Indeed, viewing young women as buds coincides with their future utility in marriage. In Gerard’s Herball, the Latin name for the construction of the bud in the genus Rosa is called “alabastri” (Aaaa3), Latin for rosebud: “those parts of the cup which are deepely cut, & that compass the flower close about before it be opened” (Aaaa3). The term “alabastri” derives from the masculine singular “alabastrum,” which word denotes a “conical box for perfume” (Oxford Latin Dictionary 92). This etymology invites a compelling series of associations that suggestively link buds with females in marriage. In Pier Andrea Mattioli’s sixteenth-century herbal, Medici Senensis Commentarii (1554), the illustration “Rosaceum” grandly features a similar alabastrum-type receptacle: an ornate two-handled vessel sitting at the base of a plant species of Rosa. The urn is boldly inscribed with the words “Rosaceum,” a Latinate adjective that designates a substance made from roses (Oxford Latin Dictionary 1661), such as an ointment or perfume— which fragrance, of course, was regularly produced from the distillation of roses (Lehner and Lehner 79). Perhaps a similar Rosaceum container holds the “old cakes of roses” that Romeo cites among the items housed in the Mantuan apothecary’s shop (5.1.47). However so, the age-old practice of making balm and scents from roses sets the stage for at least one dramatic comparison between pressed flowers and a maiden’s employment in the domestic wedded sphere. The relationship between a budding woman and a distilled rose arises notably in Romeo and Juliet’s sister play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Act 1, Theseus invokes the image of the “rose distilled” to suggest Hermia’s use and serviceability in matrimony: “But earthlier happy is the rose distilled / Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness” (1.1. 76–78). These lines compare the mechanical process of making perfume to a woman’s efficacy in marriage. The rarefication of the rose produces, for instance, the cherished products of attar

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of roses and its byproduct, rose water (Aftel 48–56). Hermia’s use will be her commodification in matrimony. Yet the image of the wilting rose, one atrophying on the lone thorn, is also correlated with a maiden’s death. This death, however, is quite literal. If Hermia does not wed Demetrius, then she will be executed or sent to a nunnery “To live a barren sister” all her life (1.1.72). The possible ramification of a young woman’s disobedience to patriarchy is sterile annihilation. Lifelong virginity threatens to disrupt a procreative teleology, and this fear of female celibacy is exacerbated by the “virgin thorn” that pricks but is not pricked. (As Romeo teasingly puts it, sexual love “pricks like thorn” [1.4.26].) Similar to Hermia, Juliet’s budding sexuality functions as a signpost of her reproductive value and eligibility as a potential spouse. Yet in Romeo and Juliet, there is every indication that Juliet has already budded, reaching an appropriate age for betrothal. Lady Capulet stresses her daughter’s suitability for conjugality and reproduction when she discloses Paris’s intent to wed Juliet: “I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid” (1.3.74–75). Juliet’s physical preparedness for an espousal with Paris naturally implies her ability to menstruate. In the early modern period, a female’s menses was colloquially referred to as her “flowers” (Iyengar 37), carrying the feminine nuance of vaginal openings and crevices of soft folding. Apart from this anatomical connotation, a visual picture of Juliet’s flowering into sexuality can be found in Friar Laurence’s prediction of Juliet’s death-like appearance after she drinks the poisonous vial: “The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade / To wanny ashes” (4.1.99–100). The roseate coloring of Juliet’s face not only infers health and well-being, but it also reifies the sense of her physical blooming. John Vyvyan in Shakespeare and the Rose of Love argues that the rose is actually an allegory for Juliet’s love and beauty in Romeo and Juliet (141–86). Yet the juxtaposition between Juliet’s blossoming and her fake demise, one that will cause her vibrant features to fade, puts into play a critical crux that Orsino’s rose metaphor in Twelfth Night makes plain: a woman’s flowering into connubial maturity is inescapably tied to her physical deterioration after deflowerment, just as the flowering plant withers to decay after florescence. It is no surprise, then, that Capulet selects the imagery of flowers to convey this double sense of life-in-death, or what Juliet calls being a “maidenwidowèd” (3.2.135). Believing that Juliet has died, he states, “there she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowerèd by him. / Death is my son-in-law, death is my heir” (4.4.63–65). With the advent of Juliet’s blossoming, Capulet’s statement acknowledges his daughter’s sexual maturation within the boundaries of wifehood. The flowering and deflowering that define Juliet as a bride, however, become intrinsically inseparable from the destructive force of Death. Regarding the expression “deflower,” one art critic aptly notes that it directly links a “woman’s sex and the world of botany” (Holm and Bencard and Tøjner 66). This botanical association recalls the anthropomorphic analogy between a woman and flowering plant, and its relevance

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appertains to the wane of the blossom after pollination and fruitage. Laid out on her bed—where she has earlier consummated her marriage to Romeo unbeknownst to her family—Juliet’s flowery decay does not produce ostensible fruit, as Capulet’s morose remark, “Death is my heir,” confirms. But the conflation between Juliet’s flowering and her dissolution remains a powerful theme in this scene. “Death lies on her like an untimely frost,” says Capulet, “Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” (4.4.55–56). The unseasonable frost that kills the flowering plant and its consequent fruit is compared to Juliet’s supposed corpse. Necrophilious Death copulates with Juliet (“lies on her”) and simultaneously destroys the bride and her potential offspring. Juliet had earlier even expressed the fear that “death, not Romeo, [will] take [her] maidenhead” (3.2.137). The placing of flowers at Juliet’s grave site further underscores the relationship between Juliet’s blossoming and death. Realizing the incongruity between wedding celebrations and funeral sadness, Capulet declares: “Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corpse” (4.4.116). As symbols of female ripening, blooms not unusually represent the aperture of vaginal openings, and their traditional association with nuptial festivities is concomitant with the idea of a young woman’s flourishing sexuality. Yet the custom of decorating a deceased body or tomb with flowers points to an interrelated meaning. Flowers as memento mori serve as potent reminders of mortality and the impermanence of all things. In Q1 of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo equates Juliet with the flower’s transience. As Juliet hurriedly enters Friar Laurence’s cell before her impending marriage, Romeo says, “See where she comes / so light of foote nere hurts the trodden flower” (Evans 133). The interchangeability of bridal and funeral flowers calls attention to the transience of life, as well as to the ephemerality and fleetingness of a woman’s sexual flowering. This double meaning can be seen when Paris, believing Juliet has just died, “came with flowers to strew his lady’s grave,” along with “sweet water,” a substance regularly made from the distillation of roses (5.3.280, 5.3.14). Ordering his page to “Give me those flowers” (5.3.9), Paris combines the image of Juliet as a vulnerable blossom with the picture of death as her spouse: “Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew” (5.3.12). The correlation between Juliet as “Sweet flower” and the crypt as “bridal bed” conjoins a woman’s flowering and subsequent deflowering with the idea of her attendant mutability. Even though Capulet believes that Juliet has flowered, he initially advises Paris to abstain from seeking Juliet’s hand in marriage: “Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride” (1.2.10–11). Capulet uses floral language identified with the flowering plant (“wither” and “ripe”) to suggest the passage of time: Juliet’s growth and fertility. Analogous to a flowering plant that withers to produce fruit, Juliet is figured, before she dies, as a fresh plant ripening into fecundity. When Capulet confuses Juliet’s dislike of Paris with erotic melancholy or greensickness (3.5.156), his botanical comparison suggests corrupted reproduction. If her

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seed failed to germinate, “a woman’s health as well as her looks” might be damaged (Dawson 53; see also Iyengar, King, Moulton). A similar process of maturation can be found when we look at flower imagery in relation to the masculine body. The botanical process of budding, flowering, and fruiting is also indicative of the healthy male form.

PINKS OF COURTESY In Act 1, Montague draws a parallel between Romeo’s self-imposed seclusion from the world and a budding flower. At the beginning of the play, Romeo is jejunely obsessed with Rosaline, a youthful noble lady of Verona who emphatically doesn’t return the young lover’s overwrought affection. This unfortunate situation has resulted in Romeo’s lovesickness and his exile from friends and family. Montague is befuddled regarding his son’s sorrow and retreat from society, and he describes the unfathomability of Romeo’s comportment by invoking a floral image. Apparently, Romeo’s conduct is So far from sounding and discovery, As is the bud bit with an envious worm Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. (1.1.143–46, my emphasis) The relationship between Romeo and the crippled bud, one that has become contaminated with a worm, controverts the usual distinction between a woman and blossom. The flowering plant imagery is now reversed: Romeo is likened to a “bud,” but one that is unable to prosper, or “spread his sweet leaves to the air.” Montague’s use of the masculine pronouns “he” and “his” lays stress upon the male identity of the flowering plant. Not realizing that the cause of his son’s solitude is grounded in and nourished by the woes of adolescent infatuation, Montague couples Romeo’s self-imposed isolation with a hidden malefaction in nature that threatens his child’s spirited and healthy maturation. Romeo’s daily retreat to his dark bedchamber (seemingly inscrutable and destructive) is compared to the concealment in creation of an invisible worm and its corrosive potential. This metaphor suggests that Romeo’s attraction to Rosaline will remain unrequited and therefore generatively unfruitful. Like a bud, Romeo—shut up in his chamber—is encased in “artificial night” (1.1.133). The bud’s blossoming is inhibited by the canker that impedes growth by preventing its petals from opening to the sun. The word “canker” is “an obsolete term for caterpillar or other insect larvae which attack plants” (Thomas and Faircloth 69). The impending death that awaits the ailing bud is counterbalanced by the light of the “all-cheering sun” whose rays stimulate the plant’s full bloom (1.1.127). Similar to a bud whose flowering is thwarted by the cankerworm, Romeo’s sexual bloom will be hindered and even arrested by Rosaline’s rejection of his affection.

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As the worm ravages the youthful flower, so, too, will Rosaline extinguish her future progeny: “O, she is rich in beauty, only poor / That when she dies, with beauty dies her store” (1.1.208–09); or “For beauty starved with her severity / Cuts beauty off from all posterity” (1.1.212–13). Rosaline is the debilitating worm who encumbers the development and vital progression of the blossoming flower. This image predictably takes on an ironic undertone if one takes into consideration that the Latin noun “Rosa” is ensconced in the name Rosaline.3 By resisting courtship, by forswearing romantic love, and by showing no interest or care for Romeo, Rosaline stymies sexual flowering and fruitful reproduction. The likelihood that Montague has in mind the familiar canker-rose trope in his lyrical depiction of Romeo’s dejection is probable, for Shakespeare usually writes about cankers in the general context of their damaging effect on roses (although Alanna Skuse’s essay in Chapter Fifteen of this volume argues that this botanical metaphor refracts early modern understandings of the disease of cancer, too). For example, Titania in A Midsummer Night Dream—to ensure safety and well-being in the Athenian forest—orders her fairies “to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds” (2.2.3); the speaker in Sonnet 95 detects the deleterious harm of a “canker in the fragrant rose” (2); and Richard Plantagenet insinuates Somerset’s consuming falsehood with the rhetorical question: “Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset?” (1 Henry VI 2.4.68). In Romeo and Juliet, Montague’s rhetoric is indebted to the conventional canker-rose conceit, and his use of the male pronoun “his” to describe the (rose) flower coincides with another masculine engenderment of this flowering plant. In the Herball, Gerard, assessing the various properties of Rosa, calls attention to the diversity of the flowering plant’s many happy attributes. According to Gerard, “the Rose” plant is “esteemed for his beautie, vertues, and his fragrant and odoriferous smell” (Aaaa1r, my emphasis). Exalting the rose’s elegance and bouquet, as well as its medicinal properties, Gerard places Rosa at the apex of the flower world. He also invests this epitome of flowery perfection with a masculine form. The rosebud, upon flowering, reveals his full merit and redolence. The OED lists a pertinent definition of “flower” as “The brightest and fairest example or embodiment of any quality.” This male idealization of Rosa mirrors the language of men’s sexual blossoming in Shakespeare’s play. In Act 1, Lady Capulet and the Nurse speak of Paris as the “brightest and fairest example” of manhood. Both characters appropriate the flowering plant metaphor to indicate that Paris, as a blossomed flower, has reached a state in his physical and emotional development opportune enough to seek the bonds of matrimony. Symbolizing the quintessence of bachelorhood, especially since he is kinsman to the Prince, Paris not only possesses an attractive stature, but he also bears an aristocratic title with the honors and entitlement that accompany the elite position of nobility. Keeping in mind such worthiness and eligibility, Lady Capulet invites Juliet to consider Paris as her future husband: “Verona’s summer hath not such a flower” (1.3.79). Lady Capulet’s high estimation of Paris corresponds to a flower

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head in summertime, one that has already realized its most striking point of florescence. The normative period of a flowering plant’s full maturation is summer, a season that is traditionally associated, no doubt, with vibrant adulthood in human development. The Nurse reiterates the notion of Paris’s seasonableness for married life and desirability as a husband: “Nay, he’s a flower, in faith, a very flower” (1.3.80). Likened to a blown flower, Paris is an ideal groom; his economic and social éclat only augment his patent qualifications for fatherhood and married life. However, the image of Romeo’s “flowering” centers on his outward charm over and beyond his social eligibility. Distraught that Romeo has slain her cousin, Tybalt, Juliet apostrophizes Romeo’s seeming hypocrisy: “O serpent heart hid with a flow’ring face” (3.2.73). Romeo, blessed with a “flow’ring face,” is the paragon of handsomeness, and Juliet can hardly believe that such murderous villainy can live in a “gorgeous palace” whose spirit is encased in “sweet flesh” (3.2.82–85). Juliet’s language in her description of Romeo’s duality is sensual and erotically charged, insinuating her readiness and eagerness to consummate a marriage with Romeo. As a young man who has flowered, Romeo’s winsome allure and good looks bear witness to his physical preparedness for sexual generation. Yet underneath the flowering plant metaphor is the poignant reality of impending destruction and worldly vanitas. Reproductive teleology in Romeo and Juliet is a delicate balance that seizes upon grace and timing to disrupt the immitigable force of “unsubstantial death” (5.3.103). The frenetic rush to wed Paris with Juliet—and Romeo and Juliet’s feverish elopement—suggests the stalwart progression of time and its ruinous force on both male and female bodies. The ill-fated sense of time passing, and with its passing, the certainty of loss and degeneration, is ultimately realized in the premature demise of Paris and the lovers’ double suicide. Wilting and decay are the natural outcome of the flowering plant that renews itself though pollination with the ensuing production of fruit. This idea of organic process, however, has a cultural component in the play’s human sphere, especially for males. The movement toward sexual generation for Romeo depends upon social equilibrium: the transition from a male-bonded realm (represented by Mercutio) to a heterosexual rapport and propagative sexuality (Juliet). This equanimity is also characterized by the image of men as flowers. When the Nurse jokingly opines that Romeo is “not the flower of courtesy” (2.4.42–43), she yokes together the idea of male perfection with social civility. The “flower” alludes to a flower head, symbolizing the fairest example of courteousness and gentility. This statement hints that Romeo’s eligibility as Juliet’s spouse is double-edged; although he has a handsome face and body, according to the Nurse (2.4.39–42), Romeo’s adolescent behavior—especially evident in his puerile romping about with Mercutio and Benvolio in 2.3—leads the Nurse to put in question whether or not Romeo has a disposition ripe enough to perform the role of husband. Social equilibrium in the play is a twofold process of moving toward romantic love, while at the same time keeping poise with the social community—here, the young Veronese men—that constitutes Romeo’s

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fraternity. Mercutio jests that he is “the very pink of courtesy”: the word “pink” here has the meaning of possessing a perfect condition usually in health. Romeo retorts, “Pink for flower” (2.3.51–52). In Romeo’s pun, “pink” not only pertains to the rosy hue of many flowers and female vulva, but it also denotes a flowering plant of the Dianthus genus, to which the carnation and gillyflower also belong. In the Herball, Gerard lists all the above flowers as “Caryophyllus” (Gg4v), although this term is actually the species name for a carnation, or clove pink. In the early modern period, pinks often came to symbolize marriage (Fisher 69). Romeo may have this particular flower on his mind since, following the banter with Mercutio, he meets up with the Nurse to arrange the clandestine union with Juliet. Earlier in the scene, Romeo quips, “then is my pump well flowered”: a rejoinder to Mercutio’s verbal sparring (2.3.54). This flower pun (“flowered” referring to the act of pinking or decorating apparel and shoes with holes or perforated edges), along with his wordplay and repartee in general, makes Romeo seem sociable to his friends: “Now art thou sociable,” says Mercutio (2.3.77). Such witticism extends back to the Capulet orchard scene when Mercutio imagines that Romeo is a “popp’rin’ pear” and his mistress a medlar or “open-arse” (2.1.38). The fruits of these flowering plants resemble male or female genitalia, suggesting a playful sexual encounter between individuals devoid of adult responsibility and obligation. It is the kind of boyish humor and conduct that Romeo is expected to leave behind in his imminent marriage and fruiting with Juliet. It is no wonder, then, that Shakespeare adopts the metaphor of a flowering plant to illustrate Romeo and Juliet’s sexual attachment. In the balcony scene, Juliet amorously chides Romeo for moving things along too quickly. Juliet compares their incipient love, the awakening of their passions, to a “bud.” She states, “This bud of love by summer’s ripening breath / May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet” (2.1.163–64). The “beauteous flower” encapsulates the idea of amorous attachment in marriage: young lovers expressing mutual adoration for each other in the sanctioned realm of matrimony. The insinuation of tragic decline, however, adumbrates the passage’s tone of buoyant expectancy. As many sixteenth-century herbals pictorially show, especially in illustrations of Rosa, summer will ripen a bud, bring it to fruition, but also move a flower head to decay. In point of fact, the influence of sixteen-century herbals in Romeo and Juliet is powerfully felt (Fleissner 27), especially in Friar Laurence’s culling of simples before Romeo’s arrival; in this scene, the Friar gathers various plants, including “baleful weeds” and “precious-juicèd flowers,” to place in his medicinal basket of vegetation (2.2.8). The Friar’s homeopathic knowledge of herbals lies in ascertaining which flora produces a benevolent or baneful effect on humans: “Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence, and medicine power” (2.2.23–24). There exists a fine line between generative health and deterioration in nature, and the use of the flowering plant metaphor to express female or male propagation evinces this tension. A rose by any other name is still a flowering plant whose flowers bud, bloom, and die into perpetuity.

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NOTES 1. Regarding Raleigh’s alleged role in bringing the potato to England, see Salaman 142–58. 2. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008). All further citations of Shakespeare’s plays refer to this edition and will be cited by act, scene, and line number. 3. Robert F. Fleissner has traced the image of Rosa in the name Rosalind in As You Like It (Fleissner 7–15).

WORKS CITED Aftel, Mandy. Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume. New York: North Point, 2001. Print. Anderson, Frank J. An Illustrated History of the Herbals. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Print. Arber, Agnes. Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. Print. Beisly, Sidney. Shakespeare’s Garden. 1864. New York: AMS, 1970. Print. Bloom, J. Harvey. Shakespeare’s Garden. London: Methuen, 1903. Print. Boas, Marie. The Scientific Renaissance, 1450–1630. New York: Harper, 1962. Print. Camphausen, Rufus C. The Encyclopedia of Erotic Wisdom. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1991. Print. Dawson, Lesel. Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. De Bray, Lys. The Art of Botanical Illustration. London: Quantum, 1989. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Ellacombe, Henry N. The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1884. Print. Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. Romeo and Juliet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Fisher, Celia. Flowers the Renaissance. Los Angeles: Getty, 2011. Print. Fleissner, Robert F. A Rose by Another Name: A Survey of Literary Flora from Shakespeare to Eco. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1989. Print. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Jan. 2014. ———. The Herbal or General History of Plants. Enlarged by Thomas Johnson. 1633; Facs. Repr. New York: Dover, 1975. Print. Gray, Asa. The Elements of Botany. 1887. New York: Arno, 1970. Print. Green, Reynolds J. A History of Botany in the United Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the End of the Nineteenth Century. London: Dent, 1914. Print. Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. Ed. C. F. Leyel. New York: Hafner, 1967. Print. Grindon, Leo H. The Shakespeare Flora. Manchester: Palmer and Howe, 1883. Print. Hall, Bert S. “The Didactic and the Elegant: Some Thoughts on Scientific and Technological Illustration in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science. Ed. Brian S. Baigrie. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1996. 3–39. Print.

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Hobgood, Allison P. and David Houston Wood, eds. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2013. Print. Hobhouse, Penelope. Gardening through the Ages: An Illustrated History of Plants and Their Influence on Garden Styles—from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Print. Holm, Michael Juul, Ernst Jonas Bencard, and Poul Erik Tøjner. The Flower as Image. Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Print. Impelluso, Lucia. Nature and Its Symbols. Trans. Stephen Sartarelli. Los Angeles: Getty, 2004. Print. Iyengar, Sujata. Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary. London: Continuum, 2011. Print. Jones, Whitney R. D. William Turner: Tudor Naturalist, Physician and Divine. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. King, Helen. The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problem of Puberty. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Lack, Walter H. Garden of Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration. Trans. Martin Walters. Hong Kong: Taschen, 2008. Print. Lehner, Ernst, and Johanna Lehner. Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. Print. Lyte, Henry, trans. A Niewe Herbal, or Historie of Plantes. London, 1578. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Jan. 2014. Moulton, Ian. Love in Print. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print. Oglivie, Brian W. “Leonhart Fuchs: The Value of Illustrations.” The Great Naturalists. Ed. Robert Huxley. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007. 48–58. Print. Oxford Latin Dictionary Ed. P. G. W. Glare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Print. Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print. Reader, John. Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. Yale UP, 2009. Print. Rohde, Eleanour Sinclair. Shakespeare’s Wild Flowers: Fairy Lore, Gardens, Herbs, Gatherers of Simples and Bee Lore. London: Medici Society, 1935. Print. ———. The Old English Herbals. London: Minerva, 1974. Print. Salaman, Redcliffe N. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1949. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Singleton, Esther. The Shakespeare Garden. London: Cecil Palmer, 1933. Print. Skuse, Alanna. “The Worm and The Flesh: Cankered Bodies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 240–59. Print. Stott, Annette. “Floral Femininity: A Pictorial Definition.” American Art 6.2 (Spring 1992): 60–77. Print. Thomas, Vivian, and Nicki Faircloth. Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print. Turner, William. A New Herball. Collen: Arnold Birckman, 1568. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Jan. 2014. Vyvyan, John. Shakespeare and the Rose of Love. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960. Print.

11 Shakespeare’s Embodied Ontology of Gender, Air, and Health Sujata Iyengar

One of the so-called “non-natural” factors that, Galenic medicine held, contributed to bodily health, air—its fragrance, temperature, humidity, movement, translucence, and pressure—could communicate disease and healthfulness. Carla Mazzio has elegantly argued that what she calls “the history of air” must also be a “history of affect,” since air can reach us only through “indirection or metonymy,” immeasurably (in both the word’s senses: air can neither be quantified, nor limited [153–54]). At the same time, we might also say that air is immediate when it becomes foggily visible, fragrantly olfactory, breezily aural, or, most frequently, moistly, coldly, or warmly tactile; this last sense informs Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which broadcasts the fanciful Latin derivation of woman (mulier) from “soft air” (mollis aer). Matthias Bauer briefly provides a corrective to the facile statement, familiar to most of us, that Cymbeline’s derivation of the Latin word “mulier,” meaning “woman,” from “mollis aer,” meaning “tender air,” is farfetched, outlandish, or utterly false. Bauer notes that the etymology is not entirely “false”—mulier may indeed derive from the comparative “mollior,” tenderer, softer—what Shakespeare adds, macaronically, is the air (188). Metaphysically, he observes, air serves as the medium to unite body and soul. Moreover, he suggests, air in Cymbeline is important as the medium for the sound that imparts the “true meaning of the letter,” the association between the piece of air and the peace brought by air throughout the play and by the play, which is itself a “piece of air,” language borne on breath for a short time (190); this peace/piece “transforms the (at least potentially misogynistic...etymology into something entirely appreciative” (189). Although Bauer aptly associates tenderness, uprightness, and femininity in the play through the quality of air, air in Cymbeline not only bears the truth (as Bauer suggests), but additionally punishes those who betray it. This paper takes seriously the derivation of woman from air by considering the figures of Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the witches in Macbeth; Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra; and Innogen in Cymbeline as gendered beings mediated through the early modern and Aristotelian element of air. In these plays, drawn from different points and genres in Shakespeare’s career, air communicates disease or health, and also, I will argue, gender and sexual deviance in women. I will suggest that the ubiquity,

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necessity, and invisibility of air make it an apt metaphor for both health and sexuality on the Shakespearean stage as states that are processes or performances that take place through the body’s encounters with the social and natural environment. Writing about disability studies, sociologist Tom Shakespeare suggests that we modify what has become a standard distinction in the “social model of disability” between “impairment” and “disability” (in which the former refers to physical debility or variation of some kind, and the latter to the consequences in society or the lived environment that, this model argues, render human beings “disabled” or unable fully to function in the world). Instead, he suggests, we might imagine an interactive relationship between impairment and disability, as we find ourselves in various “predicaments” in which gender, race, disability, and our other material attributes can either temporarily or permanently “disable” us or make us uncomfortable. (We might also say that a predicament in his terms is a situation in which we might potentially experience what Mary Rowe, developing Chester Pierce’s term “micro-aggressions,” has analyzed as “microinequities.”) In his often-reprinted essay, he and Nicholas Watson suggest that an “embodied ontology” of the human condition allows us to understand all human beings as to varying degrees impaired; by extension, all humans are subject to major or micro-aggressions, and we can therefore comprehend in our understanding of socially contingent disability attributes such as gender, rank, healthfulness, fertility status, even primogeniture. The plays of William Shakespeare, I suggest, associate air with both supernatural powers and as a shifting, contingent, enabling, and disabling vector for sexuality in order to establish an ethics of early modern humanity that is fundamentally impaired, and of gender that emphasizes its changing status as a predicament: simultaneously attribute, impairment, and disability. Let me pause here to clarify the role of air in the early modern body. Air fuelled and fired the early modern body and bonded body and soul through the medium of “spirit.” While food and drink entered the body through the mouth, being “concocted” or refined first in the belly, then in the liver (where they were turned into “nutritive blood,” a mixture of all four humors), air turned nutritive blood into “pure blood,” the sanguine humor, in the right ventricle of the heart, and “spirituous blood” in the left ventricle. Authorities differed on whether this aerated, spirituous blood required an additional purification, this time in the brain, in order to render it into the animal spirit that served as the vehicle of the soul, or whether spirituous blood itself united body and soul in this way. Early modern texts understood air as a potential vehicle of “contagion,” but while early moderns used the word contagion as we do casually today to describe both the transmission of disease through encounters with an infected vehicle and to describe the illness itself, early modern patients (at least in Galenic humoral theory) caught contagions and infections not through external agents but through a predisposing humoral imbalance—a preexisting condition, to adapt the language of the present-day medico-financial

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establishment. “Airs, Waters, Places,” in Hippocrates’s phrase (Lloyd), served as the primary sources of contagion through a kind of mirroring effect of a body’s own innate tendencies: the cold, moist draughts of a marsh might provoke a phlegmatic temperament to produce excessive phlegm and develop a cold, or might encourage a choleric individual to run a fever as the body heated itself up with an excess of hot choler to counteract the cold of the environment. Foul-smelling or pestilential air might transmit infection by encouraging the body to produce either too much of a particular humor or humors that were in themselves corrupted (because they had settled in the wrong part of the body, because they had become “adust” or burned, or because food, air, water, or emotional perturbation eaten, breathed, imbibed, or experienced had been too sharp, hot, cold, dry, etc., for the subject). Fragrant or clean-smelling air, in contrast, protected the body by inspiring delight, which in turn dilated the heart so that it could make more pure blood or vital spirit, thus renewing the body’s vigor and its ability to maintain a balanced complexion or humoral composition even when surrounded by fogs, miasmas, and other environmental distemperatures. Emerging Paracelsianism complicated this humoral belief system, as Jonathan Gil Harris and Margaret Healy have argued independently, and certainly the mercury cure for syphilis and public health measures against leprosy and plague implied that such diseases were indeed transmitted through external agents, not through humoral imbalance or moral insufficiency. We can track the conflict between Galenic and Paracelsian understandings of how air, breath, winds, and miasma contributed to contagion through Shakespeare’s plays, together with the plays’ increasing sophistication or even progressiveness about femininity and sexual relations. This pattern does not progress straightforwardly, but we can follow it in roughly chronological order, from the marital mayhem of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the sexual swapping of Cymbeline. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, the presence of powerful female characters ally themselves with the supernatural through air through both its elemental nature and/or its movement. These invisibly powered, mighty female figures suggest that all human beings are impaired in comparison to fairies and witches. Human women in these plays, however, are disabled by men’s violence or beliefs. Cymbeline breaks the pattern. It attempts to recuperate both air and femininity through Posthumus’s remorse, which manifests even before Innogen, a very human piece of tender air, is shown to be innocent of adultery.

AIR, DISEASE, AND THE LOVE OF WOMEN: MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, air connotes cultural activity (especially, but not only, women’s uttered, sung, or breathed performances); “miasma,” the Hippocratic, imitative vector for love- and other sicknesses; and, somewhat

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paradoxically, the ability of cultural performances to cure ecological ills. More precisely, the air serves as medium and vector for the friendship between women. This friendship tends towards healthful reproduction (physical fertility) or cultural production (expressed through song, words, breath) until such companionship threatens to destabilize normative heteroerotic unions between male and female characters, at which the air begins instead to menace bystanders with disease. Of the two staunch female friendships in the play, it seems as though one is presented to us directly (between Hermia and Helena), and one is only narrated (between Titania and her unnamed vot’ress). Yet companionship between the two human women is likewise narrated rather than shown to us. Helena’s famous speech describing the two girls “sitting on one cushion” sewing “one sampler,” “like two artificial gods” or a “double cherry” appears within the context of envious female competition (3.2.206, 204, 210).1 Helena betrays Hermia’s confidence to Demetrius and, prompted by Oberon’s plot and Robin Goodfellow’s stolen love-juice, both young men attempt to woo Helena in the wood. Even before the fairies intervene, the women’s friendship as we witnessed it is characterized by sexual comparison. When Helena blazes Hermia’s charms, she puns on “air” as a song carried by the breath and as a medium for disease transmission through Hermia’s “tongue’s sweet air”: Sickness is catching. O, were favour so! Your words I catch, fair Hermia; ere I go, My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody. (1.1.186–89) The lines associate Hermia’s mellifluous voice with the springtime and then to the sicknesses that accompany that season in a parody of humoral processes. The lines mimic the contagion as it spreads from one organ to another in a pun on how we “catch” someone’s words or someone’s eye. The rhymed couplets, too, suggest this mimicking, mirroring movement of early modern contagion, and the last two lines I quote contain only monosyllables until the mellifluous polysyllable “melody.” Titania, named for Ovid’s moon goddess, similarly conflates love, disease, and romantic “dissension” in a series of detailed ecological and humoral explanations that establish the consequences of heteroerotic disagreement. These explanations point out the dependency of natural features upon human and fairy intervention in order to maintain temperature or complexion. Oberon’s “brawls,” Titania claims, have disturbed the fairy dances in honor of the winds, which As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea Contagious fogs which, falling in the land, Hath every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents. (2.1.89–92)

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The “whistling” or piping breath of the winds (86) should have been received and countered by the fairies’ footing and song, presumably even-tempered, evenly balanced among all the elements and humors. Undispersed, the winds receive instead of song or air cold, wet, fog, an abundance of water. The fog turns into rain that aggrandizes the rivers so that they wash over the land and become incontinent in both Renaissance senses of the word, over-reaching their ordained rank or boundary and breaching the barrier between land and water. Titania continues to describe the activities that human beings would normally carry out but that are disabled by the pelting rivers. The farmers cannot plough because the fields are flooded; rural games and dances cannot take place because mud has overwhelmed the playing grounds; and “No night is now with hymn or carol blessed” (102). Just as the absence of fairy dances and songs angered the winds and turned the breeze into cold, wet, fog, so a dearth of human respiration provokes the moon, “the governess of floods, / Pale in her anger [to wash] all the air, / That rheumatic diseases do abound” (103–05). The moon attracts water, tides, and the watery phlegm of the body to the head; a normally healthy person exposed to too much moonlight might find his nose stuffed with the thin, salty, rheum we still call catarrh (when the brain itself was drawn to the top of the skull by the moon’s pull, it resulted in “lunacy”). Dance and, especially, song interject earth (dance) and air (song) into the fiery and watery elements of the atmosphere; human and fairy performance temper or moderate, as allopathic medicine, the excesses of the moon. Unchecked, however, “this distemperature” or imbalance will make “The seasons alter,” a reversal that Titania expresses through a catachresis or mixed metaphor of disguise, sumptuary law, and reproduction: The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter change Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world, By their increase now knows not which is which; And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original. (111–17) “This same progeny of evils,” “childing” and “increase” make metaphorical but not necessarily syntactical sense, at least not in any straightforward way. Are Titania and Oberon the parents and original of the seasons or of the evils, or both? Does the phrase “progeny of evils” mean “the results of evil actions” or does “evils,” transferred, qualify “progeny”? Clearly, both senses emerge through the phrase; the point is that Titania and Oberon are begetting bastard offspring through their “debate” and “dissension” rather than the legitimate “childing” that their union should produce.

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Threatening to replace or disable such heteronormative reproduction appears Titania’s relationship with the “changeling boy,” the child of her now-dead friend. When Oberon demands the child, she retorts: Set your heart at rest. The fairyland buys not the child of me. His mother was a vot’ress of my order, And in the spicèd Indian air, by night Full often hath she gossiped by my side, ........................................... When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind, Which she with pretty and with swimming gait Following, her womb then rich with young squire, Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles, and return again As from a voyage, rich with merchandise. But she, being mortal, of that boy did die; And for her sake do I rear up her boy; And for her sake I will not part with him. (121–37) I quote the speech at length in order to unpack the movement of both air and gender throughout it. Titania presents the “spiced Indian air” as the medium through which her friendship travels, fueled by the “gossip,” a word that both names the female friend (originally, as Caroline Bicks points out, the god-sib, or god-parent, of either sex, but by Shakespeare’s time coming to mean a female companion present at a lying-in or other women-only gathering) and that references the conversation that cements the friendship. The “wanton wind” impregnates the sails, which imitate the “big-bellied” bodies of pregnant humans; in a kind of metalepsis, Titania’s friend then impersonates the mimicking sails. During her pregnancy, the votaress and her mistress are peers; although, unlike Titania, the votaress cannot fly through the air or control the waters, she can “sail upon the land,” turn the earth itself into an ocean through her “swimming gait,” and return with gifts for her mistress. One of those “rich” presents is Titania’s “young squire,” paralleled through the repetition of the phrase “rich with.” Titania and her votaress, like the legendary Amazons, can rear and give each other children outside the structure of heterosexual marriage, just as Titania’s refusal to hand over her squire to Oberon for “breeching”—the custom of removing a boy from the care of women at age six or seven and entrusting his upbringing to his father—interrupts the child’s socialization into early modern manhood. Titania’s concluding lines reach the center of the human predicament, specifically through a phrase that is both a participial phrase and a noun phrase in apposition—“being mortal.” She—the friend—is a “being

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mortal”—(a human being); but “being mortal” also describes the state of existence of humans. “Mortal” opposes both “fairy,” that is, non-human, and “immortal,” or ever-living. To be human is to be mortal, to be in a predicament; the unnamed votaress finds herself at the intersection of gender and disability, where Titania can present human (mortal) childbirth as inevitably enabling (mortal) death. Titania later imagines making Bottom, himself bottom of the heap in status within the play, an “airy spirit,” “purge[d from] mortal grossness” (3.1.143). Air as element in MND can connote both freedom from materially disabling conditions and emphasize the ways in which those conditions impair human existence. Thus Theseus grants the “poet’s pen” the ability to “give to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name”: to materialize and instantiate what is potentially infinite because of its “airy nothing[ness]” (5.1.15–17).

AIR, SEXUAL INDETERMINACY, AND CONTAGION: MACBETH Macbeth associates the witches with both the air and with sexual indeterminacy. They inhabit the air as a dwelling, and their superpowers render Macbeth and his wife disabled in comparison. Lady Macbeth sees her womanhood as a disability, and believes that it is only by “unsex[ing]” herself (1.5.39) that she can call forth the supernatural superpowers that seem to obey the witches. The play ultimately, however, punishes her attempt to escape from the human limits of sex when she breaks down into madness in Act 5. At the same time, the play suggests that the air itself—and the witches, too—transfer the contagion of evil via a hybrid of humoralism and germ-theory: evil exists as an outside force, but it attacks only those who are already susceptible. The witches open 1.1 with the litany, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair; / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (10–11); Macbeth echoes their language in 1.3, commenting, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (36), right before he encounters them. They vanish “Into the air” (79), having “Melted as breath into the wind” (80). Those lines form Macbeth’s description, which he repeats in modified form in his letter to his wife: “they made themselves air, into which they vanished” (1.5.4–5). Shakespeare uses this formulation of “vanishing into air” elsewhere, usually to refer to the disappearance of supernatural creatures. Prospero’s spirits vanish with a confused noise, “melted into air, into thin air,” a description that associates the supernatural beings or spirits with the “thin” physiological spirit in human blood that serves, in early modern anatomy, to unite body and soul (The Tempest 4.1.150). Another later play, The Winter’s Tale, presents in Antigonus’s reported dream the spirit of Hermione, which, having delivered its message, “melted into air” (3.3.36). Here Antigonus’s description of his vision confirms our belief that Hermione is dead, both because he calls her one of “the spirits o’ th’ dead” and because the figure seems to possess knowledge of the future, and warns Antigonus he “ne’er shalt see/ [his] wife Paulina more” (34–35). Cymbeline

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breaks the pattern, however, as Innogen imagines herself straining her eyes to see her husband depart “till he had melted from / The smallness of a gnat to air”(1.3.20–21). In this instance, the analogy of Posthumus to the gnat makes him tangibly material, not metaphysical; the space encompassed by the gnat also suggests that, although it is beyond human eyesight to see him, he is still there, in the world (unlike the witches, the spirit of Hermione, or Prospero’s spirits, which have entered another realm). Macbeth’s witches fall somewhere in between the materially embodied Posthumus and the dream-world Hermione. Thomas Lodge’s dialogue, The Diuel Coniured (1596), asserts that witches and devils are souls whose “prison, is the darksome air” until the day of judgment, placed there in order to “impugn” and tempt us to sin (C4v). Such a creature could “corrupt... the air with her sight” (D4). Thomas Ady’s 1655 A Candle in the Dark itemizes and debunks a longer list of popular lore about witches, including the effects that a witch’s familiar, or one possessed by witches, could have upon the air. Shakespeare’s witches perform many of these tasks. Ady’s witches can “thicken the air” (V4v) so that human sight proves unreliable and miracles appear to have taken place (“Light thickens,” says Macbeth as he conceals from his wife his plot to murder Banquo [3.2.51]); “kill any particular Man or Beast with looks, by poysoning the Air in a direct line” or “infect the air” (Ady M3v) with disease; “raise Winds and Tempests” (Q), as Macbeth’s wayward sisters claim to have performed against the sailor whose wife “munched” chestnuts and incurred their wrath (1.3.4); “fly in the air” (Ady N2v) where, Hecate claims, her spirit calls her from a “foggy cloud” (Macbeth 3.5.37); “be lifted away in the Air by drinking the broth of a sodden Infant” (Ady P4), perhaps the “hell-broth” with “Finger of birth-strangled babe” that Macbeth’s witches stir in their bubbling “cauldron” (4.1.19, 30, 11). Ady also suggests that witches were thought to “pull down butter and other provision from the air” (O4v), an accusation of supernatural speed and efficiency that persisted against intelligent housekeepers right through the mid-twentieth century, albeit in comic mode. The 1960s television series Bewitched imagined the young and beautiful witch Samantha disobeying her husband in order to complete her chores with magic and without physical toil, as Walter Metz observes. We do not see this particular charge of slovenly housekeeping in Macbeth, but Shakespeare transfers it to his supernatural beings in Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which it is Robin Goodfellow who “sweep[s] the dust behind the door” and can ease the housewife’s labors if she “call[s him] ‘hobgoblin’...and ‘sweet puck’” (5.2.20, 2.1.40). Lambert Daneau’s dialogue (1575) explains how witches can fly through the air: “if Satan...could take...Christ vp, & carry him in the Ayre, the saucie presumer will not be afrayd to handle & carry [the] bodies of Sorcerers, knowing that before they haue geuen them selues vnto him, both body and soule.” (Daneau, Hv). Daneau takes us at length through the reasons witches were able to infect the air despite the air’s “moving” constantly, so that you might think “such infection can neuer breed in the ayre” (E6v). Both air and water, he argues, are impressionable, and “yeeld to the external qualitie.

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As for example, the...ayre in one day is hot, in the same warme, and cold ... and the ayre being more thin and liquide then the water, and more vnable to resist, is sooner and more easily affected by external and agent qualities” (E6v–E7). Just as the human, humoral body could take on the attributes or complexion of its surroundings, including the emotional temperature of other persons, so the moving medium of air, argues Daneau, can easily mirror the complexion of witches when they are close by. Note, however, that Banquo offers a slightly different explanation for the witches’ disappearance and also a different origin and ontology for them: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them” (Macbeth 1.3.77). Lucinda Cole helpfully unpacks the associations among witches, rodents, and contagion to uncover the crossover between Galenic or humoral explanations for infectious disease and emergent Paracelsian germ-theory; she suggests that the witches are bubbles of miasma or bad air, spreading contagion. Perhaps the witches cannot be water-bubbles and must be earth-bubbles because of the known antipathy of witches to water, as in trial by water, as documented in John Cotta’s Trial of Witchcraft (1616). But other sources claim that witches can infect anything at all, including water: “a brute beast...an Hearbe, a Tree, Corne, the bolt of a doore, the scales of a ladder, Wyne, Water, and the Ayre” (Daneau E3v). We might find a theatrical explanation for Banquo’s association of the witches with “earth” rather than with “air.” If the witches descend into a trap, Banquo alludes to their descent into hell, in contrast to Macbeth’s emphasis on the suddenness of their disappearance. Their different explanations for the witches’ elemental natures are thus characteristic: Macbeth considers the witches’ prophecies as words that “[c]annot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.130)—like the air, they are morally neutral for him, whereas Banquo associates them with the downward descent of stage-characters into “Hell.” Sweet or fresh (“tender”) air enables fertility for Banquo, with an implicit pun upon air and heir that it anticipates from Cymbeline. Duncan praises Macbeth’s homestead for its “pleasant seat” where “[t]he air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses” (1.6.1–3). Rich in dramatic irony, the speech belies the audience’s prior knowledge that air in this play bears not the fragrance of health but the stench of mortality. Banquo’s addendum to Duncan’s speech connects the sweetness of the air to fertility: having noticed the house-martins nesting under the eaves, he comments: this bird Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle; Where they most breed and haunt I have observed The air is delicate. (1.6.7–10) Appropriately, it is Banquo who notices the “pendant bed and procreant cradle”; the air for him enables fecundity, as the witches have told us at the beginning of the play.

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In contrast, Macbeth curses, “Infected be the air whereon [the witches] ride” (4.1.154), which suggests that he imagines them as perhaps taking bodies of air although they themselves are not composed of it (much as, Bauer observes in a different context, Donne imagines angels do in “Air and Angels”: “Then, as an angel, face, and wings / Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear”). As Cole suggests, the witches on some level do act as external infectious agents. The play, however, uses the witches in order to imaginatively reconcile humoralism and germ-theory. The witches, as external disease-bearers, contaminate Macbeth even as Banquo proves resistant to both germ-bearing witches and humorally-predisposing weather. He succumbs instead to decidedly human hands, “[w]ith twenty mortal murders on [his crown]” (Macbeth 3.4.80). Indeed, the air, like Macbeth’s version of the witches in this play, seems to carry moral neutrality, bearing both good and evil. Lenox comments on the ill omens at night, the high winds that “[blow] down” their chimneys and that carried “Lamentings heard i’th’ air; strange screams of death” (2.3.51–52). Ross, breaking the news of the murder of the Macduff family, distinguishes between the fruitful air that bears good tidings and his own words, that belong on the barren plain: “But I have words / That would be howled out in the desert air, / Where hearing should not latch them” (4.3.194–96). Macbeth famously complains, shortly before he sees what his wife later calls the “air-drawn dagger” that leads him to Duncan’s bedroom (3.4.61), that his “vaulting ambition” might not be able to o’er-leap his feelings of “pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast.” Moreover, both pity and heaven’s cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.27, 22–25) Macbeth imagines a map in which the four winds appear as cherubim on horseback. The air can bear both disease or evil and sorrow or compassion, which in turn is powerful enough to “drown the wind,” to conquer the witches’ medium and their airy weapons themselves. Macbeth, however, forgets that elemental air can mediate good as well as evil, identifying his “charmed life” with his charmers’ vehicle when he retorts to the challenger Macduff: As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed. Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmèd life, which must not yield To one of woman born. (5.10.9–13)

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“Intrenchant” is a unique usage in Shakespeare, and, in fact, a hapax legomenon and the only citation in OED. EEBO gives us one other, but that example is from Poole’s seventeenth-century manual for poetry, a thesaurus-like dictionary of nouns with adjectives one might use to find words that rhyme or scan. OED helpfully points out that Shakespeare’s coinage is “irregular”—the word ought to mean something that does not cut, but here it seems to be something that cannot BE cut. It also echoes the word “intrenched,” which Shakespeare uses in 1 Henry VI, to mean fixed in place, in the earth, like those earthly bubbles, the witches.

AIR, EROTICISM, AND THE ELEMENTS: ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA The moral ambiguity of air in Macbeth implies that evil lurks potentially in any creature. Antony and Cleopatra uses the ubiquity of air to turn the inconsistency of Shakespeare’s heroine into a charge literally elemental, first through her association with the astrological elements of “fire and air,” and second through her influence on the events of the play. The plot hinges in several places upon Cleopatra’s breaths, sighs, and winds (1.2.134–35), if she is indeed the “charm” or “witch” that Antony believes her to be (4.13.16, 25, 47). Where the air-fuelled superpowers of Macbeth’s witches render them sexually indeterminate, however, Cleopatra rejects cross-gender impersonation as she attempts to turn herself into the transcendental or unearthly, into “fire and air” (5.2.280). Enobarbus first associates Cleopatra with the air in his speech about her arrival in the barge at Cydnus: From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthroned i’th’ market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to th’air; which, but for vacancy Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature. (2.2.217–24) The perfume is “strange” precisely because it is invisible; it has no evident source, unlike the fumes or perfumes created through the burning of incense, or the scented pomanders, gloves and other items impregnated with scent that might be wafted hither and thither to confer fragrance upon the air. The air itself desires to “gaze on Cleopatra too,” “but for vacancy”: the air fills the skyey void, but carries only Antony’s solitary whistle (sound), not Cleopatra’s diffuse fragrance. We can contrast this delightful “perfume” to the abhorrent “thick breaths, / Rank of gross diet” (5.2.207–08) within

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which Cleopatra fears she will be “enclouded” if led in triumph by Caesar. She parallels her rejection of dangerous or foul-smelling air to her denunciation of the boy-actors, the “squeaking Cleopatra[s]” whom she imagines parodying her on-stage (216). Antony finds Cleopatra more necessary to him than the air itself. His petition to Caesar via Euphronius begins with the request that Antony may live in Egypt; which not granted, He lessens his requests, and to thee sues To let him breathe between the heavens and earth, A private man in Athens. (3.12.12–15) That phrase, “between the heavens and earth,” suggests a state almost of suspension or indeterminacy, as though Antony, like the air, will be invisible and incoherent when driven to privacy. As such, it is a favorite Shakespearean formula for unassuaged love or even for the condition of being human. Cesario pleads with Olivia, ostensibly on behalf of her master, but thinking of Viola’s love for Orsino: “O, you should not rest / Between the elements of air and earth / But you should pity me” (Twelfth Night 1.5.243–45). Hamlet, in the “nunnery” scene, asks, “What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?” (3.1.128). Antony’s moral and military dissolution mirrors the breakdown of clouds, vapours, breezes—visible, auditory, olfactory, and tactile forms of air—into seeming silence, stillness, and nothingness. When Antony’s spirit of courage or presiding genius leaves him, the music heard by the two soldiers manifests “I’ th’ air” and “Under the earth” (Antony and Cleopatra 4.3.11). Air (in its sense as music and as element) becomes perceptible only as it tricks the sense-organs that experience it, a process that Antony himself describes: Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A towered citadel, a pendent rock, A forkèd mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon’t that nod unto the world And mock our eyes with air. (4.15.2–7) And later, he comments: “That which is now a horse, even with a thought / The rack dislimes, and makes it indistinct, / As water is in water” (9–11; Folio Y5v). “Racks” are cirrus clouds, high in the sky, the edges becoming almost imperceptibly fuzzier until the shapes fade into hazy incoherence. It’s slightly different from Macbeth’s witches vanishing into the air or Prospero’s spirits disappearing into “thin air” and leaving not a rack behind; both those are sudden disappearances noticeable to all, but Antony’s dissolution (personal and environmental) is subjective; only the individual can determine the moment at which the rackcloud stops being a recognizable shape and becomes a formless mass.

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I understand the Folio’s “dislimes” to mean “dislimns” (to lose its outline), in preference to the Oxford editors’ “distains” (to grow progressively dimmer or weaker). In this, I follow Rhodri Lewis, who helpfully references cloud-images indices to subjectivity in early modern theories of the visual arts. Lewis suggests, as have almost all critics on this play, that the cloudimage for Antony connotes his own coherence as a thinking human being, but also argues that that word “dislimns” connects that coherence to the ability to synthesize or fabricate art, a creative sense that unifies Cleopatra, too (and I speculate that the connection between “fire and air” for Cleopatra and for Antony, too, might have something to do with the ability of a creative or phantasmic thinker to shape the mutable and flickering figures in cloud and flame into art, as Cleopatra indeed does in her death-scene). Antony, like his own soldiers, would prefer to fight “i’th’ fire or i’th’ air,” rather than at sea, in a formulation that prefigures Cleopatra’s dying “I am fire and air” (4.11.3, 5.2.280). Although Cleopatra herself claims, “I have nothing / Of woman in me” (5.2.234–35), she herself, and those around her (the Clown who brings the figs, and Charmian) continue to re-sex her as conventionally feminine in her death, as if to counter the imaginary boy-actor who will “squeaking[ly]” impersonate her in the future. Even after she rejects the title of “woman,” Cleopatra is a “woman” in the Clown’s words, a “nurse” in her own, and a “lass unparalleled” in Charmian’s (5.2.265, 301, 306). She finally invokes death, or the asp’s poison coursing through her veins, as “soft as air, as gentle” (302). Softness and gentleness refer perhaps to the popular etymology Shakespeare uses in Cymbeline to derive the word “mulier” or woman, mollis aer or soft air, especially given the maternal imagery, the “baby at my breast” upon which Cleopatra also draws (300). In what Charmian calls “this vile world” (5.2.304), only death can transform women’s impairment from disability to attribute.

AIR, LEGITIMACY, AND BLOOD: CYMBELINE If A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth associate women with air and suggest that only the supernatural can make up female deficiencies, and Antony and Cleopatra suggests that only in death can human women access the air that can make them immortal, Cymbeline offers a reading of the air that rejects magic in favor of fundamental social change. Bauer, as noted, uncovers Cymbeline’s redemptive force as its tender “piece of air” turns out also to embody its lost and peaceful heir. The play’s corrective to misogyny extends even further than Bauer suggests, however, through a series of puns on heir/air and the ability of the heir/air to communicate disease as well as health and peace. The First Gentleman introduces Innogen as Cymbeline’s “daughter, and the heir of’s kingdom” and Posthumus, as though he were an epiphyte, a lichen or an air-plant; although he cannot be “delve[d] to

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the root,” he takes in “learnings.../ As we do air, fast as “twas ministred” (1.1.4, 28, 43–45), an image that turns air into what we might now call a nutriceutical, a health-bestowing food. The two opening scenes present air medicinally and contrast the healthful exercise of Posthumus, who, according to Innogen, regularly “ride[s] forth to air” himself (1.1.111) with the stinking “reek” of the air within Cloten’s soiled shirt (1.2.2). The First Lord flatteringly, or more likely, mockingly, suggests that the air without Cloten’s body is less health-giving than that within, but his word “reek” suggests the opposite: “Sir, I would advise you to shift a shirt; the violence of action hath made you reek as a sacrifice: where air comes out, air comes in: there’s none abroad so wholesome as that you vent” (1.2.1–4). The shirt’s malodorous stench prefigures Innogen’s insult that Cloten is not fit to wear Posthumus’s “meanest garment” (presumably his shift or underwear), Cloten’s subsequent obsession with the slander, and Innogen’s own mistaken display of grief over Cloten’s clothed but headless corpse (2.3.138). As Innogen urges a more passionate farewell from her husband at the opening of the play, she accuses him of bidding her goodbye too casually, as if he were trotting off for his daily exercise (“were you but riding forth to air yourself”), and she presses on him an heirloom, the diamond that he is to cherish as long as his wife is alive. Giacomo later presents Innogen’s stolen bracelet to Posthumus with a similar comparison of healthful exercise and marriage: “I beg but leave to air this jewel.../...it must be married / To that your diamond” (2.4.96–98). Like the diamond, the air (AIR) or heir (HEIR) is valuable in herself, but also as a token given in marriage. The later interpolations of the prophecy make the pun more clearly: “the piece of tender air,” is followed in a parallel clause by its explanation, “thy virtuous daughter,” the “most constant” heir/air who has embraced her spouse “Unknown” and “unsought” (5.6.438–51). In 2.3, in contrast, with Cloten’s bawdy commentary on “penetrating” a musical instrument with his “fingering” and his “tongue,” the association of “sweet air” as music with gender becomes obscenely reductive (11–13, 15). In Cymbeline, however, the lost female heir serves not as magic spell or as sexual remedy but as allopathic or Galenic medicine to correct a perceived imbalance. Mollis aer makes tender or soft those who overestimated its gentleness. We might also wonder why Innogen misidentifies Cloten’s corpse, an error embarrassing to present-day audiences, especially because it is as Fidele, the archetype of constancy, that Innogen makes her confounding mistake—an error that leads her to what Roger Warren in his introduction to the play calls “the turning-point of the play,” from despair to determination, from dejected conjugal abasement to resilient solitary independence (Warren 18). Critics have historically paid much attention to Shakespeare’s crossdressed heroines Rosalind and Viola, but clothing physics sexuality in this play, too. At the beginning of the play, Cymbeline and Posthumus’s rigid and patriarchal masculinity equates female obedience in daughters and sexual

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fidelity in marriage with the sum value of a woman’s life. A cross-dressed heir/air is tendered or given back to them as a corrective. Giacomo himself makes the pun in 5.2: “I have belied a lady, / The princess of this country, and the air on’t / Revengingly enfeebles me” (2–4). And in 5.6, he expresses the physiological consequences of being deprived of vital air: “my heart drops blood, and my false spirits / Quail to remember—Give me leave; I faint” (147–49). As I have written at greater length elsewhere, Shakespearean characters faint or swoon when too violent an emotion crowds their bodies and deprives the brain of the animal spirit required for consciousness (“Why Ganymede Faints”). Regret or sorrow constricted the heart and deprived it of vital spirit too quickly, even as an abundance or plethora of blood rushed to it from the liver; the only prevention was quickly to “vent” or release the blood in the form of sighs, tears, and expressions of grief, even though such expressions in turn consumed vital blood. Cymbeline develops the paronomasia on heir/air and the physiological analogy when he laments about the loss of the unrecognized Posthumus (“To my grief, I am / The heir of his reward” [5.6.12–13]) and typifies his disguised sons and Belarius as “the liver, heart and brain of Britain, / By whom I grant she lives” (13–15). Liver, heart, and brain housed the three parts of the early modern soul—the vegetative, vital, and rational or animal spirits respectively. Cymbeline may not realize it, but he has characterized the three men accurately. Guiderius/ Polydore functions as the valiant liver, the seat of bravery, because it generates the choler or yellow bile essential for physical courage. He acts out “in posture” “the war-like feats” Morgan narrates (3.3.94, 90). Arviragus/ Cadwal serves as the idealistic heart, hearth and home of the sanguine humor or blood that is enspirited or aerated through its chambers, who aerates the blood of Britain by “strik[ing] life into...speech” (97). Belarius/ Morgan indeed serves as the rational or guiding spirit of the enterprise. Guiderius describes the naiveté of his brother and himself by comparing themselves to fledglings unaware “what air’s from home,” but they are also innocent of their parentage, unknowing of what heir’s from home (3.3.29). Cymbeline first extends and then retracts other kinds of deviance, too, notably the movement away from male primogeniture (or primogeniture at all); the romance-plot restores the lost, first-born, male heirs. Innogen has “lost...a kingdom” by her brothers’ return; the “valiant race” she will beget will pay tribute to Rome (5.6.374; 5.5.177). How then has the play physicked gender through the woman-heir who is a piece of air? Let us return to mollis aer/mulier, but this time, I will track the uses of the Latin word mulier. Early commentators note a potential paradox: although sometimes the word “mulier” connotes a woman who is not a virgin (both a married woman and one who has known a man illicitly), in English common-law, a “mulier” denotes a child of either gender born within lawful wedlock as distinct from a bastard (OED adj. 1, n.2; LEME, “mulier”). The “gentlewoman” in William Bullein’s dialogue against the plague (1564) complains, “Mulier is a naughtie woorde” (marginal note, H6v). John Rastell’s book of “difficult...words and termes of the laws” (1579) writes:

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Mulier, is a word vsed in our lawe, but howe aptly I cannot tell nor doe wel knowe howe it should come in [th]esence as wee there take it: For accordinge to the proper signification[n], mulier is a defiled woman like as it is vsed by vlpianus in a certen place after this sort, if I thought that I had bought a virgin, when it was a defiled woman, the bargayne was not good. Hereby you may see [th]at mulier is a woman that hath had [th]e company of a man. (V3v) Rastell expresses puzzlement at this dual signification, but later commenters observe that its sense of “legitimately-born child” might derive from the adjective mulieratus, born of a wife. Philip Edwards’s New World of Words (1658) explains the legal sense, but then declares “the most proper signification of Mulier is a woman that hath had the company of man” (Cc8v, col. 2), and Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1661) carefully comments, “Mulier (Lat.) signifies a woman that has had the company of a man; but in our Law it signifies one that is lawfully begotten and born; contradistinguished to Bastard” Cc8v, col. 2). The restoration of Innogen, then, asserts both the legality of the heir, regardless of gender, and the ability of women to be mulier: love-worthy regardless of their sexual status. Posthumus, unlike the jealous Othello, Claudio (Much Ado) or Leontes (Winter’s Tale) in the slandered lady plot, forgives Innogen for putative adultery, calling it “wrying but a little” (5.1.5). In the end, in this play, a wife’s taking one man for another, dead or alive, doesn’t matter. Having, as he believes, murdered her, Posthumus’s own “life / Is every breath a death,” each respiration a reminder of the sexual double standard that disables women (5.1.26–27). Air in this play thus provides not only a “history of affect,” in Mazzio’s phrase, but also a mechanism for restoring or enabling equitable sexual relations. NOTE 1. Quotations from the works of William Shakespeare come from the Norton edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., except when otherwise indicated.

WORKS CITED Ady, Thomas. A Candle in the Dark. London, 1655. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Bauer, Matthias. “Language and the Suspension of Reality in Cymbeline.” Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings. Ed. Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999. 183–98. Print. Bicks, Caroline. Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England. Aldershot, Hamps.: Ashgate, 2003. Print. Blount, Thomas. Glossographia. London, 1661. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014.

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Bullein, William. A Dialogue both Pleasaunte and Pietifull. London, 1564. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Cole, Lucinda. “Of Mice and Moisture: Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.2 (2010): 65–84. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. 10.1353/jem.2011.0007. Cotta, John. Trial of Witchcraft. London, 1616. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Daneau, Lambert. Trans. Thomas Twyne [attrib.] A dialogue of witches, in foretime named lot-tellers, and now commonly called sorcerers. London, 1575. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Donne, John. “Air and Angels.” c. 1601. Repr. Poetry Foundation. Accessed 3 July 2014. Edwards, Phillip. The New World of English Words. London, 1658. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Harris, Jonathan Gil. Sick Economies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print. Healy, Margaret. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Hughes, Bill. “Being Disabled: Towards a Critical Ontology of Disability Studies.” Disability and Society 22.7 (2007): 673–84. 2014. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. Iyengar, Sujata. “Why Ganymede Faints and the Duke of York Weeps: Passion Plays in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 265–78. Print. Lloyd, G. E. R., trans., ed. and compil. “Airs, Waters, Places.” Hippocratic Writings. Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1983. 148–69. Print. LEME: Lexicon of Early Modern English. 2014. Ed. and compil. Ian Lancashire. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. Lewis, Rhodri. “Shakespeare’s Clouds and the Images Made by Chance.” Essays in Criticism 62.1 (2012): 1–24. Print. Lodge, Thomas. The Diuel Coniured. London, 1596. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Mazzio, Carla. “The History of Air: Hamlet and the Trouble with Instruments.” South-Central Review 26.1–2 (2009): 153–96. Print. Metz, Walter. Bewitched. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2007. Print. Rastell, John. An Exposition of Certaine Difficult and Obscure Words. London, 1579. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Rowe, Mary. “Barriers to Equality: The Power of Subtle Discrimination to Maintain Unequal Opportunity.” 1973–1989 [“Saturn’s Rings” and “Glass Ceiling”]. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 3.2 (1990): 153–63. Repr. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. . Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014. Print. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nicholas Watson. “The Social Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology?” Exploring Theories and Expanding Methodologies. Ed. Sharon Barnartt and Barbara M. Altman. Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2001. 9–28. Print. Shakespeare, William. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, histories & tragedies. London: 1623 Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 2011. Web. Accessed 30 May 2014. Warren, Roger, ed. Cymbeline. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. Print.

Part III

Emotion

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12 Speaking Medicine A Paracelsian Parody of the Humors in The Taming of The Shrew Nathanial B. Smith

Long skeptical of the role of language in the evaluation and treatment of patients, physicians over the last several decades have been encouraged to take patients’ speech more seriously and even to engage in “narrative medicine” (Charon). Dr. Joanne Gordon, in a recent piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics, puts speech act theory to work exploring the issue of verbal consent in a 2011 British legal ruling, W v M, that denied a family’s request to withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration from a minimally conscious family member (M) who had not given any formal advanced directive concerning end-of-life care. The family’s testimony relied on past statements from M that, they argued, indicated she would not wish to continue life in her condition. But to what extent, Gordon wonders, did M’s past statements describe her actual feelings about end-of-life care? Words not only describe but, as J. L. Austin put it, “do things,” as when couples utter the words “I do” during a marriage ceremony, Austin’s most famous example of illocutionary speech, when “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (Austin 6). Whereas physicians and patients routinely perform illocution (for instance, promising and warning), Gordon asks whether M’s past statements might be examples of another of Austin’s categories, “perlocutionary” speech, i.e., “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading” (Austin 109), a rhetorical and affective conception of language emphasized in Judith Butler’s work on speech act theory (Excitable). Gordon speculates that “[w]hen a statement such as ‘I don’t want to be dependent on others’ is uttered, an individual could conceivably be acting insincerely to generate a perception of him/herself as a fiercely independent person in an audience’s mind” (2). Gordon’s appropriation of speech act theory echoes a contemporary interest in discontinuities and instabilities between speech, intention, and action that Austin acknowledged but labored to minimize and contain. For Austin, speakers of speech acts “must in fact have those thoughts or feelings” about which they are speaking, “and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves.” Without this key requirement, speech acts are “unhappy” failures (15). Saying “I do,” however, has force whether or not you intend to stay with a partner until death. When patients speak about

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symptoms, medical histories, and requests for care, these words participate in a variety of historical, social, rhetorical, and emotional contexts to which physicians must attend. Austin’s theory of performative language has resonated with contemporary thinkers in its emphasis on the force and power of language, the well-known fact that words—like the sticks and stones of the old rhyme— really can hurt. Doctors, too, know how to use speech for effect; encounters between physicians and patients have since antiquity been understood as performative, with both parties assuming roles (Leder; Toulmin). Decisions about how to name and describe symptoms, for instance, can have profound influences on patients. “Medicine abounds with examples of careful naming,” writes Ayelet Kuper. “Physicians may, for example, tell patients about ‘growths’, ‘lumps’, ‘masses’, or even ‘tumours’ before they have a definite pathological cause, despite knowing the nearly certain diagnosis” (77). “When you enter a sick man’s room,” advises the Hippocratic “Decorum,” “bear in mind your manner of sitting, reserve, arrangement of dress, decisive utterance, brevity of speech, composure, bedside manners, care, replies to objections, calm self-control to meet the troubles that occur, rebuke of disturbance, readiness to do what has to be done” (295). For the Hippocratic author, speech exerts powerful effects on a patient’s emotions and, vicariously, health: Perform [the initial examination] calmly and adroitly, concealing most things from the patient while you are attending to him. Give necessary orders with cheerfulness and serenity, turning his attention away from what is being done to him; sometimes reprove sharply and emphatically, and sometimes comfort with solicitude and attention, revealing nothing of the patient’s future or present condition. For many patients through this cause have taken a turn for the worse. (297–99) Medical practitioners throughout the Middle Ages and early modern periods—as today—cultivated such performative and rhetorical techniques to effect treatment: as Stephen Pender argues, “healing depends, in part, on discursive therapy” (7). The Hippocratic physician’s attention to speech—a kind of “verbal psychotherapy” (Entralgo 160)—echoes the strongest formulations of rhetoric as not merely persuasive but a “virtually magical” sort of “power, control, and coercion” (Rebhorn 304, 295). In Hippocrates and his Roman, medieval, and early modern adaptations, words—more like medicines and diseases—heal or harm the body, working across and between minds and bodies, causing patients to develop emotional trust and confidence in a physician or even to “tak[e] a turn for the worse.” In its most extreme elaborations, physicians’ language follows what Butler has termed a “fantasy of sovereign action” that conceives of speakers able to utter words that immediately wound—or, in the Hippocratic example, heal. For Butler, the concept of “wounding words” grants speakers more power

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than they actually have, as when racial slurs, to use her example, are considered capable of exerting an immediate, inescapable force that can wound their addressee-victims (Excitable 12, 71–102). However attuned to narrative medical practitioners may become, scientific advances will never allow physicians magically to utter words that perform “sovereign,” illocutionary acts of healing. But early modern Europe witnessed a movement that asked whether the period’s orthodox remedies for illness only worked (when they worked at all) because of the patient’s emotional confidence in the words and performances of medical practitioners. The most authoritative varieties of sixteenth-century Western medicine still relied on theories propounded in the ancient Greek Hippocratic Corpus, as interpreted and expanded by the second-century C.E. physician Galen and a number of medieval Arabic commentators, about humoral imbalance as the cause of disease, and the principle of allopathy, or cure by opposition, as remedy. Orthodox humoral medicine, however advanced from earlier supernatural theories, had a poor reputation for actually curing disease, and early modern “physicians and surgeons were impugned in both learned and popular fora for breaking sabbath or atheism, indifference, incompetence, or lucre” (Pender 3), making Galenic allopathy ripe for the attack that came from the sixteenth-century Swiss-German medical practitioner, Paracelsus (Ball; Debus; Pagel). Under the influence of alchemy and Neoplatonism, Paracelsus dismissed the antique notion of humors and instead developed homeopathic chemical remedies that treated diseases as “entities in themselves,” rather than the result of humoral imbalance (Pagel 137). Paracelsian adherent Adam of Bodenstein, discussing chemical remedy, implicitly contrasts the two medical systems: “If administered throughout the year in appropriate dosage, [chemical remedy] acts in reality and not by suggestion or the confidence the patient has in his doctor” (quoted in Pagel 127). Where Paracelsian remedies act on the disease itself, Adam finds Galenic remedies to be mere placebos, operating solely—if powerfully—in linguistic, performative, and emotional registers. The Taming of the Shrew, a play replete with humoral language, levels just such an attack on orthodox Hippocratic and Galenic medicine. Katherine’s final speech, for many critics, has offered proof that her medico-behavioral “taming” has been successful—that Petruccio’s allopathic remedies cure her of the choleric humoral condition determining her emotional constitution and behavior. But the play’s practitioner-figures, Petruccio and the trickster lord of the Induction, do not actually use humoral techniques to cure or even attempt to treat their patients. Their medical practice relies solely on performance and speech acts—including intentional misdiagnoses and misleading therapeutic advice—that manipulate rather than cure. The play’s Induction parodies pseudo-medical language by comparing it with “magical” anti-theatrical notions of theatrical power, the (apparently laughable) idea that plays—like Galenic medicine to patients—can alter the beliefs and

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behaviors of audiences. In the main plot, Petruccio starves Katherine and deprives her of sleep not in order to treat her allopathically, in an attempt to regulate her hot and dry temper with coldness and moisture, but in order to bully her into submission. While eschewing direct physical violence, Petruccio performs an abusive rhetorical strategy that appears allopathic, but in fact is structured homeopathically—anger attempting to cure anger. But neither Katherine nor Sly undergo any humoral transformation over the course of the play; their shifts in speech and behavior are parodic and performative, as a number of recent discussions of gender and patriarchal critique in the play have shown. In light of the play’s parody of medicine, these strategies of citation and imitation resemble a form of homeopathic rhetoric, mirroring the language of powerful manipulators in an attempt, if not to cure, at least to regain a measure of agency and control. Far from supporting the tenets of Galenism, The Taming of the Shrew parodies humoral medicine and its implicit notions of medico-behavioral modification even more thoroughly than the more conventional stage satire (discussed by Tanya Pollard and Herbert Silvette) of medical practitioners as ineffective charlatans or mercenary murderers who harm and even kill patients. Shrew cites humoral language much the way drag performances and cross-dressing cite conventional gender stereotypes, parodying and destabilizing essentialist categories of “natural” or physiologically-defined gender identity (Butler, Gender). Just so, The Taming of the Shrew deploys the language of medicine to parody overly deterministic and potentially essentialist accounts of behavior, humoral behaviorism, where—as in any theory that takes anatomy for destiny—the body’s particular blend of blood, choler, phlegm, and melancholy determines one’s emotions and actions. In the spirit of Paracelsus, The Taming of the Shrew mocks any theory—humoral, theatrical, or otherwise—that affords performative speech absolute power to control and manipulate bodies, behaviors, emotions, and health.

“ILL-SEEMING”: THE PRETENSE OF ALLOPATHY From Sly’s opening remark that the Hostess “go to thy cold bed and warm thee” (Ind.1.7–8) to Katherine’s likening disobedient women to “a fountain troubled, / Muddy, ill-seeming” (5.2.146–47), the humoral language of temperature and humidity infuses The Taming of the Shrew, a fact long recognized by historians of literature and medicine.1 Petruccio tells Katherine they are both “choleric” (4.1.154), that is, influenced by the hot and dry humor of yellow bile predisposing sufferers to the traditionally masculine attributes of anger and aggression (Paster, “Unbearable”; Purnis). One of the first critics to focus on the play’s “psycho-medical background,” John W. Draper, argues that Petruccio successfully applies contemporary medical knowledge “to cure the high-spirited and violent Kate of her dangerous

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choler and subdue her to wifely obedience” (52), a reading that, in its equation of humoral cure with behavioral modification, has remained largely unchallenged. Katherine’s “taming,” in this view, occurs through allopathy, as when Petruccio subjects the “hot...shrew” (4.1.17) to the elements on a cold, long, and physically exhausting journey, and then denies her food and rest. For Gail Kern Paster, Katherine’s final speech reveals that she has become “a product of Petruccio’s transformation of her environment through manipulation of the six Galenic nonnaturals of air, diet, rest and exercise, sleeping and waking, fullness and emptiness, and the passions” (Humoring 88). “Petruccio,” as Draper puts it, “is a successful practitioner, for [Kate’s] cure seems to be complete and lasting” (53). Petruccio’s allopathic terminology, however, is neither descriptive nor therapeutic; his allusions to the humors are what Austin calls perlocutionary: attempts to manipulate Kate as one part of a larger performance. The clearest instance of Petruccio’s humoral “taming,” for example, is itself mere pretense, an excuse for temporary starvation. When the newlyweds first return home after their journey and want something to eat, Petruccio, according to the Folger edition’s stage directions, “throws the food and dishes” (Mowat and Werstine SD 4.1.165.1) at his servants: I tell thee, Kate, ’twas burnt and dried away, And I expressly am forbid to touch it, For it engenders choler, planteth anger, And better ’twere that both of us did fast, Since, of ourselves ourselves are choleric, Than feed it with such over roasted flesh. (4.1.150–55) The food’s qualitative properties of heat and dryness, however, do not actually underlie his dietary prohibitions, as he tells the audience in his key fourth act soliloquy: “She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat, /.../ As with the meat, some undeserved fault / I’ll find about the making of the bed” in order to keep her awake all night (4.1.177–80). His reference to the food’s choler-inducing properties, he admits, is “undeserved” and, frankly, irrelevant. Medical explanations serve Petruccio instead as a performative excuse for forcing Katherine’s submission to his control. These strategies of taming, we discover, operate without regard to Katherine’s actual physiological condition. Humors—as they were for Paracelsus—are beside the point. Characters in the main plot refer to the humors, whether seriously or in jest, to describe behavior, either as explanations for Kate’s (or Petruccio’s) unruliness or as justifications for Petruccio’s “taming” treatment. In the Induction, however, the language of illness and disease is explicitly a ruse, part of the lord’s performative trick staged to “practise on this drunken man” (Ind.1.32). A costumed servant (with prompting) “mourns” Sly’s make-believe “disease” (Ind.1.58); the lord directs his servant-actors and teaches them their lines in order to “Persuade [Sly] that he hath been lunatic”

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(Ind.1.59). Sly, however, suffers neither lunacy nor any other disease; his actual humoral well-being—discussed throughout the Induction—is explicitly beside the point. Paster notices similarities between Sly’s treatment and classic exercises in “Galenic stimulation”: “the sensual inducements” the lord offers to Sly as part of the trick—“the soft bed, the invitation to hunt, the visual stimulation of erotic scenes from Ovid—are intended literally to warm him into activity from the lethargy associated with lowness and drink” (Humoring 128). Galenic physicians certainly advised such allopathic therapy, “designed to raise the slothful man’s radical heat and moisture and clear the vapors of confusion from his sodden brain” (Humoring 127–28). Sly is drunk, however, and not sick. David Houston Wood explains that drunkenness was a condition more often associated with heat—the “adustion” of the humors—than cold, since medical writers worried about alcohol’s “propensity to emotional rousing through sudden caloric escalations”; in particular, the consumption of wine and ale caused “adustion, the sudden scorching of the humors due to a range of possible causes either inwardly or externally derived. Allopathy here, therefore, offers comedic rather than medical value. Allopathic treatment again figures prominently—and equally extraneously— in a speech act near the end of the Induction, when one of the lord’s servants explains to Sly why he should watch the show about to be staged by travelling players. The passage offers yet another humoral diagnosis: Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment, Are come to play a pleasant comedy, For so your doctors hold it very meet, Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy. Therefore they thought it good you hear a play And frame your mind to mirth and merriment, Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life. (Ind.2.124–31) As Pollard and other critics have shown, this passage expresses commonplace notions about medicine and theater expounded by critics and defenders of the early modern public stage. Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), for instance, echoes the servant’s suggestion that comedies—in addition to curing melancholy and refreshing the “weary spirits” of audience members—can offer images impelling audiences to “reform” their behavior (F3v–F4), an idea, as Louis Montrose has shown, that merely “revers[es] the judgments of the theatre’s detractors” (44). Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (1579), for instance, likens the poet to a “deceitfull Phisition [who] giueth sweete Syrropes to make his poyson goe downe the smoother” (A2r–v). Dramatists, too, “studie to make our affections ouerflow,” effectively turning audience members into “brute beastes” with whom humans share “that part of the minde” that attempts—and fails—to control leaky “affections” or passions, what we

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call emotions (Gosson, Playes F1v). Gosson and other anti-theatrical writers attack the early modern stage based on its perceived influence on audience members, whose minds and bodies were considered impressionable in part due to the porousness and permeability of the humoral body (Paster, Body Embarrassed). This perceived impressionability makes audiences easy targets for theatrical manipulation, as Gosson and others describe elsewhere, with recourse to stories of how, as Laura Levine puts it, “the audience can be made compulsively to imitate what happens in the play,” a “magical idea that watching leads inevitably to ‘doing’” and even “to ‘being’—to assume the identity of the actor” (13). Gosson expounds humoral behaviorism in its purest form, a “mechanical” notion of the self as a kind of “robot” (Levine 15). The servant’s Galenic description of the play’s therapeutic efficacy echoes theatrico-medical discourses from the period. But the speech completely fails to predict what actually happens to Sly, who, at the end of Act 1 Scene 1, joylessly falls asleep and wishes for an abrupt end to the play: “Would ’twere done” (1.1.246–47). Sly is not sick and undergoes no humoral transformation at any point in The Taming of the Shrew, as Paster finally admits. Sly’s humoral treatment is, for Paster, “both fictional (since Sly is not, in fact, a distracted lord) and real (since the means resemble actual practice on the insane)”; “the evidence of transformation in Sly’s case” is “equivocal,” given that the player’s play finally functions less as a cure than as “a kind of erotic surrogate, a therapy of gratification through deferral whose ultimate impact on Sly’s transformation is left unresolved” (Humoring 126, 128). The servant’s description here—like the lord’s repeated misdiagnoses of Sly—is not intended to “constate” a set of facts, in Austin’s terms (3), but rather to perform an effect: to cause Sly to consider himself sick with melancholy and thus in need of the treatments the lord administers. Humoral diagnoses in the Induction, then, do not result from underlying illness, but rather, are presented as speech acts attempting to cause changes in behavior. For Paracelsus, too, humoral diagnoses mistake symptomatic effects of illness (such as the heat of a fever) for causes. For Paracelsus, “heat and cold are after-effects, products of the disease, rather than primary factors in its causation” (Pagel 132). This reversal of cause and effect recurs throughout the Induction, nowhere more memorably than in another metatheatrical passage when the lord’s page—costumed as Sly’s “aristocratic” wife—deftly side-steps the tinker’s sexual advances: pardon me yet for a night or two, Or if not so, until the sun be set, For your physicians have expressly charged, In peril to incur your former malady, That I should yet absent me from your bed. (Ind.2.115–19) Paster assures us that the page here offers “a plausible medical explanation, given that ejaculation was understood as a sometimes dangerous expenditure of spirit” (Humoring 128). The account, however, is not offered as helpful

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therapeutic advice, but rather, to lampoon the early modern transvestite stage (Shapiro). The misleading sexual prognosis reinforces for Sly that he has an underlying (“former”) “malady,” the purported cause necessitating abstinence. Sly takes sex not as the remedy for his lust, as many medical texts on lovesickness such as Jacques Ferrand’s (discussed in Ian Moulton’s essay in Chapter Thirteen of this volume) advised, but as the potential cause of more illness. But to what extent is Sly convinced? The Induction’s emphasis on linguistic confusions of cause and effect, illness and symptom, leave open the possibility that the lord’s speech acts—like Petruccio’s—may not be effective in quite the way he wishes.

“SAY AS HE SAYS”: HOMEOPATHIC PARODY The lord’s apparent ability to make Sly ill (or, amounting to the same thing, to make him think himself ill) using the language of humoral disease and cure might remind us of Hippocrates’s wordy physician, Pender’s doctor rhetor, or Butler’s “sovereign performatives” (Excitable). But speech acts themselves make up the preponderance of evidence for such a diagnosis, and as Gordon’s discussion of W v M should remind us, we need to attend carefully to the speech acts’ larger contexts—what Austin calls the “total speech situation” (52)—before jumping to conclusions. What we find when exploring these contexts is that “speech,” as Butler puts it, “is always in some ways out of our control” (Excitable 15), a condition of language relevant not only to the lord’s and Petruccio’s seeming rhetorical power, but also to the speech acts of their “patients,” Sly and Katherine. For speech not only describes, but also can repeat, cite, and parody, homeopathic strategies that both the “patients” in Taming of the Shrew use to their benefit. Sly’s key speech in scene two of the Induction uses citation and iteration to perform a part that corresponds to his own desires, a strategy that will recur in the play’s main plot. A crucial moment for determining whether Sly’s identity has actually been transformed (as, Zackariah Long suggests, anti-theatricalists feared would happen to forgetful theatrical audiences) occurs almost immediately after the lord and a servant tell Sly he has a wife who has been mourning his illness. He wonders, Am I a lord, and have I such a lady? Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now? I do not sleep. I see, I hear, I speak. I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things. Upon my life, I am a lord indeed, And not a tinker, nor Christopher Sly. Well, bring our lady hither to our sight, And once again a pot o’th’ smallest ale. (Ind.2.66–73)

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“I am what you say I am,” Sly implies, “not what I know I am.” Sly’s act of self-naming casts doubt on whether he is actually tricked, and his own erotic motives (“bring our lady hither”) add to the “total speech situation” here. He throws himself into his performance and professes acceptance of his tentative subject-position in a speech act that reverberates with language spoken earlier as part of the theatrical ruse: “banish hence these abject lowly dreams” (Ind.2.30); “Or wilt thou sleep? We’ll have thee to a couch / Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed / On purpose trimmed up for Semiramis” (35–37)—an echolalic tapestry of others’ words. If Sly’s speech act functions according to repetition and similitude, giving back to the lord his own words, the lord structures his charade around oppositions. Sly is told he is not who he is. The beggar’s purported melancholy can be cured by watching a cheerful play. The main plot echoes this structure of oppositions: the pretense of allopathy saturates Petruccio’s and Katherine’s courtship, not only in Petruccio’s use of allopathic terminology, but more broadly in his rhetorical technique. Petruccio’s courtship speech operates according to allopathic principles, contraria contrariis curantur (the opposite is cured with the opposite), even while his underlying behavioral approach draws on the Paracelsian, homeopathic theory of similia similibus curantur (like cures like). Maurice Hunt describes Petruccio’s wooing strategy as an attempt “to cure extreme shrewishness by a contrary sweetness” (48), a kind of allopathic rhetoric: Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly washed with dew. (2.1.168–71) Petruccio here “woos by contradiction” (Dolan 19), a performative “sweetness” often understood—particularly by critics sympathetic to his cause—as offering Katherine a glimpse of the more generous and better self she needs to become in order to function happily in society (Baumlin; Henze; Huston). Petruccio’s allopathic rhetoric goes so far as to deny Katherine’s humoral imbalance altogether, as when he suggests to Baptista that “She is not hot, but temperate as the morn” (2.1.286). Rather than shifting from allopathic sweetness to homeopathic sourness mid-way through the play, as some critics maintain, Petruccio’s strategy from the beginning implies the use of allopathic rhetoric for the purposes of a rough and unforgiving homeopathy: to drive out one poison (anger and aggression) with more of the same. The play, that is, again offers up humoral medicine as mere excuse, while the sort of homeopathy advocated by Paracelsus—Petruccio’s abusive language and behavior—“acts in reality” (Pagel 127). Not sweetness but the performance of aggressive malevolence underlies Petruccio’s attempted obliteration of Katherine’s beliefs and behaviors, in favor of his own imaginary projections of ideal feminine conduct.2

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In his early interview with Baptista, Petruccio admits that “I am rough, and woo not like a babe” (2.1.135); his approach will be explicitly homeopathic: “where two raging fires meet together / They do consume the thing that feeds their fury” (2.1.130–31; Tilley 355). Petruccio, then, “kills her in her own humor,” as one of his servants says (4.1.160), using aggressive speech to “tame” her aggressive tongue: Ay, and amid this hurly I intend That all is done in reverent care of her, And in conclusion she shall watch all night, And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl And with the clamour keep her still awake. This is a way to kill a wife with kindness, And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour. (4.1.183–89) Evoking a range of meanings, Petruccio’s “to kill a wife with kindness” can among other things signify his desire “to give her a taste of her own medicine” (Morris 251), a Paracelsian strategy wherein one dose of poison “kills” a disease of similar virtue. As Emily Detmer notices, Petruccio here “giv[es] back the same ‘kind’ of shrewishness Kate embodies” (293); in other words, he administers a homeopathic treatment under the guise of allopathy. Katherine’s behavior does change in Acts 4 and 5: she follows Petruccio’s whims (“the moon changes even as your mind” [4.6.21]) and, in the play’s last scene, comes when called. But before we ascribe these changes to medical reconditioning, we need to consider the possibility that she has not been “cured” or humorally changed any more than Sly has. As it turns out, a speech act uttered by Hortensio, accompanying the newlyweds on their return journey to Padua, exerts a strong and almost immediate effect on Katherine. As the couple argues over whether the sun is the moon, Hortensio advises: “Say as he says or we shall never go” (4.6.11). As does Sly when he learns he has a wife, Katherine changes her tune abruptly: “be it moon or sun or what you please, / And if you please to call it a rush-candle / Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me” (4.6.13–15). Katherine relentlessly pursues this iterative strategy throughout the remainder of the play, as when she echoes Petruccio’s “First kiss me, Kate” (5.1.123) with “Nay, I will give thee a kiss” (5.1.128), and again, still more explicitly, when she quotes the widow’s remark, “‘He that is giddy thinks the world turns round’” (5.2.27, 20). Originating in Hortensio’s gently pragmatic advice, Katherine’s decision to “say what he says” shapes the “total speech situation” of her long lecture.3 Petruccio has demanded that she “tell these headstrong women / What duty they do owe their lords and husbands” (5.2.134–35), but she is also aware of a secondary audience composed of men, including her husband and father. These multiple audiences must be accounted for when using the speech as evidence of transformation. A number of studies in recent decades read the

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speech as a performance, finding ironic gaps between her words, behaviors, and intentions. Karen Newman, for instance, situates the speech in terms of Luce Irigaray’s concept of mimeticism: “Kate’s self-consciousness about the power of discourse, her punning and irony, and her techniques of linguistic masquerade, are strategies of italics, mimetic strategies” that “deform” patriarchy “by sub-verting it, that is, by turning it inside out” (99). Amy Smith uses Butler’s Gender Trouble to read Katherine’s speech as a “knowing performance of subjection” that offers her “a measure of power over the very husband to whom she subjects herself” (290, 297). Holly Crocker reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that, for Katherine, “female submission must be a performance, because her autonomy derives from redirecting agency through the guise of passivity” (144), and Melinda Kingsbury reads Katherine’s submission at the play’s end as “a role she must play in order to get what she wants, as well as a role necessary for social stability” (77–78). But four decades of so-called “revisionist” (Bean 65) attempts to locate in Katherine’s speech a critique of patriarchy have failed to persuade many of the play’s readers and spectators, who feel that the play still offers “an overall endorsement of Kate’s taming” (Paster, Humoring 129). Read in light of the Induction, however, Katherine’s final speech reveals that she has fashioned her own version of homeopathy that attempts to heal—or at least to tame—Petruccio by giving him a potent dose of his own misogynist rhetoric. The presence of multiple audiences allows Katherine to speak on a number of levels, and for characters to hear different things from the lecture, which is less purely iterative than Sly’s “Am I a lord” speech, but still knit from borrowed fabric. The opening, doubled exclamation of disgust, “Fie, fie!” (5.2.140), for instance, exactly mimics Petruccio when he blasts the Haberdasher for a (purportedly) poorly-made cap: “Fie, fie, ’tis lewd and filthy” (4.3.65). Kate’s “Fie, fie” similarly seeks to evoke shame in her female audience for the benefit of her male audience. But Petruccio’s “Fie” itself echoes Hortensio, who, fewer than twenty lines earlier, uses the exclamation to reprove Petruccio’s harsh treatment of Katherine: “Signor Petruccio, fie, you are to blame” (4.3.48). Which better characterizes her own “Fie,” Petruccio’s misogynist “Fie” or Hortensio’s anti-misogynist one? Katherine’s “Fie” most immediately echoes the very first word spoken by new bride and newly aggressive Bianca, just eleven lines earlier: “Fie,” Bianca explodes after her sister puzzlingly obeys Petruccio’s orders to throw off (what else?) her cap, “what a foolish duty call you this?” (5.2.129). In mimicking Petruccio, Hortensio, and her sister in a single word, Katherine both reveals the complex situatedness of her speech act and speaks severally to her different audiences. A great deal of Katherine’s final speech concerns not only performance but also, specifically, appearance, an issue at the heart of the speech’s interpretive difficulties: “Fie, fie, unknit that threat’ning unkind brow, / And dart not scornful glances from those eyes, / To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor” (5.2.140–42). The imperative “unknit,” the first of three negatives

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in two lines, may seem directed at Katherine’s sister and the widow, who are hereby told to smooth their furrowed brows. But the term also evokes a moment from her first interaction with Petruccio, at the height of his allopathic oratory: “Thou canst not frown. Thou canst not look askance, / Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will” (2.1.240–41). As this echo demonstrates, Katherine herself was once “unkind” in this way: angry, frowning, and unlike Petruccio’s ideal of feminine appearance. But has she really changed? Such a disposition, she continues, “blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads, / Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds, / And in no sense is meet or amiable” (5.2.143–45). For Katherine’s male audience, such “blots” truly are not “meet,” and do not correspond with ideal standards of femininity. But as her opening “Fie, fie” demonstrates, she herself appears angry while delivering this advice to the women about avoiding the appearance of anger. Look happy, she says angrily, appeasing the men with her speech while in fact imitating the women’s “unkind brow” in her appearance. These complexities of speech, performance, and audience make it difficult to discern what Kate actually professes. Her descriptive statements (an “unkind brow...blots thy beauty”) often seem to have performative intent, but they also may merely describe patriarchal notions of ideal feminine conduct. Katherine’s speech at points reads like a straightforward “constative” description of patriarchy masquerading as perlocution: A woman moved is like a fountain troubled, Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty, And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it. (5.2.146–49) Drawing on the familiar humoral images of women as leaky vessels (Paster, Body Embarrassed), Katherine again might as well be describing herself: before she mimicked the men in her life, no one would dare touch the “illseeming” shrew. But now that she knows the right words to say—“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee” (150–51)—she is married, delivering witty speeches, and the center of attention at her darling sister’s wedding. Where the men hear perlocution, the women might just as easily hear Katherine telling them her story of the way patriarchy operates. Listening to Katherine’s final speech with theories of performative language in mind predisposes audiences to find ironic moments in the final speech (Burns). But Paster argues against any ironic or “revisionary” reading of Taming of the Shrew because it operates in an environment of “psychological materialism” wherein “The Minds inclination follows the Bodies Temperature” (Humoring 13, cited from Selden B4). “We may not believe Kate’s private capitulation” in Acts 4 and 5, and, particularly, her final lecture, “to be anything other than strategic, external compliance only for the sake of self-preservation” (Paster, Humoring 129), that is, mere performance.

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But in a cosmology governed by psychological materialism, where the psychological is not yet divorced from the physiological, Kate’s soul is thus proved to have followed her body’s temperature, whether the compliance is external or internal. In the reciprocities of humoralism, external compliance means internal alteration and internal alteration manifests itself in behavior. For Petruccio and Shakespeare’s audience, watching the tamed Kate is humoral comedy, a ratification of male dominance, no matter how ironic we understand that ratification to be. (Humoring 134) Paster hears in Katherine’s submissive language an expression of the cold and moist phlegmatic temperament “meet” for women, and thereby finds that the new bride’s fiery yellow bile has been doused by Petruccio’s treatment: “Kate—introduced as a humoral subject distempered by too much heat—must be cooled in order to be socialized as a wife” (Humoring 129). But such a reading becomes more difficult to uphold when seen in light of the play’s unrelenting parody of humoralism. What is the “temperature,” after all, of Kate’s final speech: obediently cold or aggressively hot? In the play’s final scenes, she displays proudly her usual masculine-coded aggressive tendencies and powers of reasoning. As Crocker suggests, “Katherine’s final speech deploys tropes of submission aggressively” (155); the play’s longest speech, that is, retains strong elements of the choleric humor supposedly purged from her body during Petruccio’s taming. Kingsbury similarly argues that “her choler, her anger, which is merely redirected towards wives, is still very evident not only in the speech’s violent imagery, but also in its vehemence” (77). And if Katherine’s body remains unaltered during the course of Petruccio’s humoral regimen, the play holds open the possibility that any attempt to control bodies using allopathic notions of disease and cure—any implementation of humoral behaviorism—is mere wish-fulfillment fantasy. Shakespeare wrote his plays in an environment that took seriously the connections between minds and bodies, emotions and actions. But The Taming of the Shrew repeatedly critiques the notion (to modify Selden) that the “Bodies Temperature” dictates the “Minds inclination,” an essentializing form of humoral behaviorism. The humoral body in many ways troubles and resists essentialist notions of bodies and selves, particularly in its emphases on the lability of the humors and rejection of a simplistic postEnlightenment separation of body, mind, and soul. Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson suggest that The very structure of essentialist logic works in fundamentally different ways in the humoral model. Elaine Scarry defines what we think of as modern essentialism: an appeal to the ‘sheer material factualness of the human body,’ that lends a given cultural construction ‘the aura of realness and certainty.’ By contrast, the early modern body that grounds social facts is radically labile, prone to biological alterations

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Yet even if physio-psychological humors are understood to be in perpetual flux, a form of essentialism arises when the humors are ascribed the power to shape one’s behavior. Some early modern poetry and medical writings voiced concern about “an alarming rise in materialist theories of the passions” and cautioned “against hard-line Galenic readings of the body because these readings potentially support a ‘humoral’ account of the soul” (Trevor 49). Katherine’s final speech raises similar concerns and posits discontinuities between bodies and minds, “external compliance,” and “internal alteration” (Paster, Humoring 134): Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts? (5.2.169–72) Bodies and minds, that is, “Should” ideally correspond to one another, but often do not; “external compliance” does not necessarily mirror one’s “internal” condition, as demonstrated in the characters of Bianca and Katherine, neither of whom are very “soft” or “smooth” (“unknit”) in the play’s final act. We need not respond to these discontinuities, of course, by returning to a form of post-Enlightenment body-mind dualism, a denial of psychophysiological interpenetrations. Rather, Shrew critiques what Paster calls the “fantasy of ownership of...bodily substance from the inside out” (Humoring 133), parodying humoral determinism and holding open a space of agency and volition amidst the swirling influences of humors and passions circulating between bodies, minds, and souls. For Austin, speech acts cannot be called true or false, only successes or failures, “happy” or “unhappy” (14). Speech acts in The Taming of the Shrew occupy a range of positions between these simplifying extremes. Some parts of Katherine’s final speech offer evidence that Petruccio succeeds in his performative strategy to make a model wife, whereas other elements cast doubt. Katherine’s final speech itself is both “happy” and “unhappy” in Austin’s sense. Whether or not she has other, more ironic motives, it succeeds in convincing Petruccio of her loyalty and obedience, even while certainly failing to convince the women in the audience to change their behavior. This ambiguous outcome strategically allows her at once to mouth patriarchal notions of gender roles while simultaneously parodying them with “counter-speech, a kind of talking back” (Butler, Excitable 15). The relentless parody of medicine in The Taming of the Shrew allows us to laugh at grandiose theories of behavioral manipulation, while at the same time inviting modern medical practitioners and their patients to explore

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and test speech acts that can be caring and productive without seeking domination and control.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank Sujata Iyengar and all the participants of the 2013 SAA seminar, “Health, Well-Being, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body,” for their generous feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Thanks, as well, to Hillary Nunn and Joseph F. Ceccio, who invited me to present a version of this material at the University of Akron’s 2014 “Shakespeare in the Spring” festival. All citations of Taming of the Shrew are from The Norton Shakespeare. 2. On female conduct and Taming of the Shrew, see Mikesell. 3. See Smith for a thorough reading of the speech’s performative context.

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Entralgo, Pedro Lain. The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity. Ed. and trans. L. J. Rather and John M. Sharp. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1970. Print. Ferrand, Jacques. A Treatise on Lovesickness. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1990. Print. Gordon, Joanne. “Significance of Past Statements: Speech Act Theory.” Journal of Medical Ethics 39.9 (2013): 570–72. BMJ Online. Web. Accessed 19 Mar. 2014. Gosson, Stephen. Playes confuted in fiue actions. London, 1582. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. ———. Schoole of Abuse. London: for Thomas Woodcocke, 1579. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Henze, Richard. “Role Playing in The Taming of the Shrew.” Southern Humanities Review 4 (1970): 231–40. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 10 June 2013. Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors. London, 1612. EEBO. Web. Accessed 3 July 2014. Hippocrates. “Decorum.” In Hippocratic Writings 2. Trans. W.H.S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 148. Boston: Harvard UP, 1923. 267–302. Hunt, Maurice. “Homeopathy in Shakespearean Comedy and Romance.” Ball State University Forum 29.3 (1988): 45–57. Print. Huston, J. Dennis. “‘To Make a Puppet’: Play and Play-Making in The Taming of the Shrew.” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 73–87. Print. Kingsbury, Melinda Spencer. “Kate’s Froward Humor: Historicizing Affect in The Taming of the Shrew.” South Atlantic Review 69.1 (Winter 2004): 61–84. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 15 Nov. 2010. Kuper, Ayelet. “The intersubjective and the intrasubjective in the patient-physician dyad: implications for medical humanities education.” Medical Humanities 33 (2007): 75–80. BMJ Online. Web. Accessed 14 Apr. 2014. Leder, Drew. “Clinical Interpretation: The Hermeneutics of Medicine.” Theoretical Medicine 11.1 (1990): 9–24. SpringerLink. Web. Accessed 23 Apr. 2014. Levine, Laura. Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and effeminization 1579–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. Long, Zackariah. “‘Unless you could teach me to forget’: Spectatorship, selfforgetting, and subversion in antitheatrical literature and As You Like It.” Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies. Ed. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams. London: Routledge, 2004. 151–64. Print. Mikesell, Margaret Lael. “‘Love Wrought These Miracles’: Marriage and Genre in The Taming of the Shrew.” Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 141–67. Print. Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print. Moulton, Ian Frederick. “Catching The Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 212–22. Print. Morris, Brian, ed. Taming of the Shrew. London: Arden, 1981. Print. Mowat, Barbara, and Paul Werstine, eds. The Taming of the Shrew. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Folger Digital Texts. Folger Shakespeare Library. Web. Accessed 4 July 2014. Newman, Karen. “Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 86–100. Web. Accessed 17 Sept. 2013. Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. 2nd ed. Basel: Karger, 1982. Print.

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Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. ———. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print. ———. “The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy.” English Literary Renaissance 28.3 (1998): 416–40. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 28 June 2013. Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, ed. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print. Pender, Stephen. Introduction: Reading Physicians. Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 1–36. Print. Pollard, Tanya. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Purnis, Jan. “The Gendered Stomach in The Taming of the Shrew.” Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700. Ed. David Wotton and Graham Holderness. Basingstoke, Hamps. and New York: Palgrave, 2010. 185–205. Print. Rebhorn, Wayne. “Petruchio’s ‘Rope Tricks’: The Taming of the Shrew and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric.” Modern Philology 92.3 (1995): 294–327. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 2 Aug. 2013. Selden, John. Titles of Honor. London, 1614. Print. Shakespeare, William. Works. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997. Print. Shapiro, Michael. “Framing the Taming: Metatheatrical Awareness of Female Impersonation in The Taming of the Shrew.” The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Ed. Dana E. Aspinall. New York: Routledge, 2002. 210–35. Print. Silvette, Herbert. The Doctor on the Stage: Medicine and Medical Men in Seventeenth-Century England. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1967. Print. Smith, Amy L. “Performing Marriage with a Difference: Wooing, Wedding, and Bedding in The Taming of the Shrew.” Comparative Drama 36 (2002): 289–320. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 4 Jan. 2013. Tilley, Arthur, ed. A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1950. Print. Toulmin, Stephen. “On the Nature of the Physician’s Understanding.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 1 (1976): 32–50. ProQuest. Web. Accessed 23 Apr. 2014. Trevor, Douglas. The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Wood, David H. “‘Fluster’d With Flowing Cups’: Alcoholism, Humoralism, and the Prosthetic Narrative in Othello.” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009): n.pag. Web. Accessed 1 Aug. 2013.

13 Catching the Plague Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare Ian Frederick Moulton

In Sonnet 147, Shakespeare memorably describes the subjective experience of lovesickness. The opening quatrain focuses on the self-consuming nature of the disease. Love perverts the appetites and creates a condition where the body can no longer judge what is and is not healthy. (Although Sonnet 147 is not explicit about the gender of the person who is “black as hell and dark as night,” its place in the sequence of the sonnets as well as its rhetoric of darkness strongly suggest the reference is to the “dark lady” with whom the speaker is engaged in a troubled sexual relationship.) Love comes to crave the very poison that is killing it: My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease, Feeding on that which does preserve the ill, Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please. The second quatrain builds on the metaphor of disease, equating reason to a doctor who would be able to cure the infection: My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me, and I desperate now approve Desire is death, which physic did except. But the lovesick body will not listen to reason, and is left only with selfdestructive desires. Rejecting physic, the body desires only death. A cure exists, but the patient will not follow it. Instead, he falls into madness, and the poem ends by demonizing the woman who has provoked his passion: For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, and dark as night. (lines 13–14)1 In the popular culture of the twenty-first century, it is a commonplace view that there is a self-evident connection between love and happiness. Such ideas may be unexamined and contradictory, but they are pervasive nonetheless.

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A blog dealing with happiness in the popular magazine Psychology Today puts it this way: Whichever way you find happiness, it is always accompanied by love, for happiness is ultimately the love of life, the celebration of living. The mark of happiness is that you are sensitive to the world around you, that you acknowledge your dependence upon your surroundings and that you are filled with loving-kindness. (Dobrin) “Love” is, of course, an ambiguous term. In this brief passage, for example, the “love of life” is not exactly the same as “loving-kindness.” Although neither term is especially specific, “love of life” seems to imply a heightened appreciation of pleasurable external stimuli, whereas “loving-kindness” seems to suggest a generous affection towards others. Though the passage does not stress this distinction, these two forms of love correspond to two differing notions of happiness—the hedonistic, in which happiness comes from pleasure, and the eudaimonic, in which happiness comes from acting in a virtuous manner. Julia Annas concisely distinguishes between Classical and modern ideas of happiness (43–8). Kevin Laam distinguishes between hedonistic and eudaimonic happiness in Shakespeare, and Emily Smith offers a popularizing present-day discussion of the distinction. The concept of eudaimonia—a Greek term with a range of meaning from happiness and good fortune to prosperity and human flourishing—was most influentially articulated at the conclusion of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (10.6, 1176b–1177a). Both love of life and loving-kindness are different from the combination of sexual attraction and powerful affection associated with romantic love. But romantic love is often similarly seen as a fundamental component of human happiness. Although there is no shortage of songs, films, and novels that focus on the heartache and suffering involved in romance, the goal of happy coupling itself is seldom questioned. The pain comes not from loving, as such, but from failure in love—from loving someone who does not return the affection, or from wanting to be in a relationship but being alone. As Shakespeare’s sonnet suggests, in the early modern period, ideas about romantic love tended to be much more fraught, and the connection between love and happiness or love and well-being was anything but self-evident. Early modern notions of happiness also differ from twenty-first century ones. As its original derivation from “hap” suggests, in the early modern period, “happy” tended to mean “fortunate” rather than connoting pleasure with one’s life and circumstances. That is, it referred to an objective state rather than a subjective feeling. Romantic love was not particularly associated with either. Unrequited love was, of course, a miserable condition; thwarted desire is, by definition, unpleasant. But requited or not, love itself was problematic. After all, Shakespeare’s anguished sonnets about the

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“dark lady” deal not with Petrarchan longing for an unattainable idealized fantasy, but with a consummated relationship. The speaker in Sonnet 147 is not upset because his baby has left him, or because, in the words of the well-known jazz standard, he ain’t got nobody and nobody cares for him (Williams and Graham). He is suffering instead from a disease, a physical derangement of his senses that means that he no longer has any sound basis of perceiving the world around him. As the third quatrain describes it, Past cure am I, now reason is past care, And frantic mad with evermore unrest. My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are, At random from the truth vainly expressed. In Sonnet 147, as in much early modern literature and thought, love is the problem, not the answer. The sixteenth century was a period that saw an unprecedented level of serious writing about love. Love was not only the subject of countless lyric poems and the focus of much drama and prose narrative, it was also the topic of a great number of philosophic treatises; it played a central role in conduct and courtesy books; it featured in letter writing manuals, as well as in medical texts. Sears Jayne provides a list of the major Italian prose treatises on Neoplatonic love from Ficino’s own De Amore (published 1569) to Giordano Bruno’s Degli Eroici Furori (1585; Ficino, Commentary 20). The precise reasons that love was such a frequent and serious topic of intellectual debate in the sixteenth century are unclear. What is clear is that debates that in a pre-print era had been confined to an intellectual elite were now circulating much more broadly throughout literate culture and beyond (Moulton 15–26). Was love primarily physical, emotional, or spiritual? How should one love? Who should one love? What was the relation between love and sexual desire? Was love a positive or a negative force in human affairs? In medical discourse, love was primarily considered a disease. Ideas about lovesickness came from a variety of sources and traditions, and were often contradictory. In general, lovesickness was thought to take two basic forms: love melancholy and love mania. It was primarily an affliction of the young, and could strike both men and women. The leisured classes were most at risk. In some cases, it was difficult to cure, and in extreme cases, it could prove fatal. The notion that love should be understood primarily as a disease was held by medical professionals, but was also commonplace in popular discourses about love, not least on the public stage. As Lesel Dawson has demonstrated, lovesickness is a common trope in early modern English literature, from coterie poetry to popular drama. Certainly, lovesickness is epidemic in Shakespeare, from Venus longing for Adonis to Roderigo suicidal over Desdemona, from the idiosyncratic Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing to the fungible young lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is tempting to see the familiar character of the pining lover

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as a mere stock figure or literary cliché, but as I have argued elsewhere, to do so is to ignore a long tradition of thinking about lovesickness as a serious medical condition (Moulton 145–81, Dawson 28–33). Whereas many Roman and Byzantine authorities had speculated that love was a disease of the soul, early modern medical thought on the disease stressed its physical and material nature (Beecher and Ciavolella 123–38). The notion that romantic love is a physical affliction has two important consequences: First, it implies that love is a fundamentally material phenomenon, rather than being an emotional impulse or a spiritual state. Second, if love is a physical condition, it ought to respond to physical intervention, in the form of diet, therapy, medicine, or surgery. The classic symptoms of lovesickness—a racing pulse, hot and cold flashes, inability to speak or hear properly, and a sense of dread and foreboding—were described in detail as early as the poetry of Sappho in the sixth century BCE (Moulton 162–63). Classical medical authorities, such as Galen, saw lovesickness as a specific ailment (Wack 39–54), and in the medieval period, Classical ideas about lovesickness were elaborated and codified by Arabic medical writers (Beecher and Ciavolella 62–70). These ideas reentered the European intellectual tradition in the twelfth century, primarily through the Viaticum of Constantine the African, a popular compendium of medical lore (Wack). Lovesickness was frequently seen as a form of melancholy, and was understood as a wasting disease that could lead to death in severe cases. Not everyone believed this, of course. As Rosalind famously puts it in As You Like It, “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.91–92). But even though Rosalind is skeptical that anyone could die of love, she nonetheless uses medical analogies to describe love’s effects; at one point, she diagnoses Orlando as suffering from the “quotidian of love”—that is, a recurring fever (3.2.329–30). Rosalind’s inconsistency on the subject is emblematic. Lovesickness was only one way of understanding romantic love in early modern Europe, and although it was not uncontested or universally believed, it was a powerful intellectual and popular discourse, not an empty metaphor. And it stood in opposition to other traditional ways of understanding love, such as Platonic idealism or the various idealizations of courtly love. Medical discourse on love posits that love is not an emotional transport, a spiritual state of heightened awareness, or a sign of innate nobility, but rather, a physical imbalance. Seeing love as a physical affliction raises serious questions about the nature of love as an experiential phenomenon. Is sexual desire a moral choice or a material physical reality? Is it something we will or something we suffer? Robert Burton’s magisterial Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) devotes onethird of its length to a detailed treatment of love melancholy. As with other forms of melancholy, Burton’s interest in lovesickness is primarily psychological rather than physiological, but he does address symptoms and cures at some length (Burton 3.133–84, 3.189–257).2 French medical writers like

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André Du Laurens, doctor to Marie de Médicis and Henri IV, and Jacques Ferrand, a doctor from the town of Agen, near Toulouse, focused more on the physical causes and mechanisms of the disease. They give detailed and evocative accounts of the ways love was believed to physically invade the body. Both Du Laurens’s Des maladies melancholiques (1597) and Ferrand’s De la maladie d’amour (1623) were translated into English (Du Laurens, Discourse [1599], Ferrand, Erotomania [1640]), and the views they elaborate are common in early modern English writing. Love was thought to enter the body through the eye, then pass through the veins to the liver, an organ identified in Galenic medicine as the seat of desire. The liver would burn as a result, drying up the body’s black bile. This dried or “adust” bile was believed to cause melancholy—a Greek term literally meaning “black bile.” Once the liver was infected, the disease moved onward to the heart, the seat of emotion, before finally attacking the brain, the seat of reason. Once the brain was overcome, the primary symptoms of the disease would manifest itself: the patient would become pale and lose his or her appetite. The patient’s eyes would have a hollow look; he or she would weep and sigh continuously. The patient would feel alternately hot and cold; the pulse would race and the heart beat erratically (Du Laurens R3v, Ferrand, Treatise 252–53). In the grip of the disease, the patient would become utterly weak and helpless—“a sillie, loving worme,” as Du Laurens’s English translator puts it. The French simply has “le pauvre amoureux”—the poor lover (Ferrand, Treatise 416n.1). Although medical texts like Du Laurens’s and Ferrand’s tend to assume that the suffering lover is male, as in Shakespeare’s plays, the medical literature on lovesickness makes it clear that women were also susceptible. Ferrand even argues at some points that women are in fact more often affected than men (Ferrand, Treatise 229, but also 311–2). Indeed, differing male and female forms of the disease were posited, including the so-called “green sickness”— suffered by virginal young women whose bodies were craving sexual intercourse (Dawson 49–60, Ferrand, Treatise 311–2, Moulton 164–6). Doctors proposed various therapies and cures for lovesickness, ranging from dietary recommendations to surgery. Ferrand’s De la maladie d’amour, the most detailed work on the subject, gives therapeutic, dietary, and medicinal advice both on how to prevent the disease and on how best to treat it once it has been contracted (Ferrand, Treatise, 313–32, 333–66). Galenic medicine tended to work by contraries; because lovesickness was often seen as a form of melancholy, which was a disease of excessive dryness and heat, remedies for lovesickness tended to stress moisture and coolness. Baths were recommended, and calming music. Because insomnia was a common symptom of lovesickness, opium was often prescribed, as it would induce sleep. Purgation and bleeding were also standard therapies (Beecher and Ciavolella 123–38). Ferrand goes so far as to suggest clitoridectomy and cauterization of the forehead with a branding iron in severe cases (Ferrand, Treatise 356–67). It is unclear if such extreme measures were ever put into

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practice, but they were nonetheless seriously discussed in a learned treatise written by a doctor and dedicated to medical students at the University of Paris. Ideas about lovesickness were often contradictory, and recommended treatments often seem designed to produce contrary effects. For example, because lovesickness was seen as inducing depression, possibly even leading to suicide, patients were encouraged to have friends present at all times who would provide cheerful conversation. Conversely, because lovesickness was characterized by irrational obsession with the supposed beauty of the beloved, doctors also recommended that older and supposedly wiser people should sternly lecture the patient, stressing in particular the disgusting products of the physical body of the beloved, such as urine, feces, and (in the case of women) menstrual blood (Burton 3.200–2; Ferrand, Treatise 348–9). In medieval Arabic medical texts, as in the Classical tradition, the most effective cure for love was often said to be sex. But such advice was not permissible in Christian Europe, at least not in printed vernacular texts (Beecher and Ciavolella 123–6). In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, as we have seen, sex is not the cure. Indeed, in Shakespeare, sex rarely solves anything— a fierce paradox perfectly described in Sonnet 129: sexual consummation is “A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe; / Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream” (lines 11–12). Although all Shakespearean comedies end with marriage celebrations, marriage was not generally believed to be a recipe for contentment in the early modern period. Writing on marriage, from sermons to conduct books, tended to stress the burdens and responsibilities the relationship would place on the couple, and much popular discourse on marriage assumed that married life was an irksome bondage for both husband and wife (Cressy 289). Similarly, the discourse of lovesickness strongly counters any notion that romantic love brings happiness or contentment. The relation between early modern medical discourse and actual social practices is unclear. Doctors and surgeons treated the wealthiest of the population; folk medicine and oral traditions of healing were much more prevalent among the general population, especially in rural areas (Pelling, Common Lot; Medical Conflicts). But there is no question that theories outlined in medical texts were echoed in speeches on the public stage. For example, in Twelfth Night, as she feels herself drawn inexplicably to the page boy Cesario, Olivia marvels at her sudden infirmity: How now? Even so quickly may one catch the plague? Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections With an invisible and subtle stealth To creep in at mine eyes. (1.5.264–67) Olivia catches lovesickness through her eyes, just as the medical texts predicted. Her equation of love with the plague may seem clichéd and

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metaphorical to a modern reader, but may have resonated differently in a city like London where thousands had died of the plague less than ten years before Twelfth Night was written (Theile 187–88). There were significant epidemic outbreaks of plague in London in 1592–93, and again in 1603.3 Many in the original audience would have had grim experience of how just how quickly the plague killed its victims. It is not just Olivia whose lovesickness follows prescribed medical models. In All’s Well that Ends Well, Helen’s pulse races, allowing the Countess to diagnose her ailment (1.3.153), an episode that echoes the iconic story of Antiochus and Stratonice. In this story, which was cited by Galen and dates back to the first century BCE, King Seleucus marries a beautiful young woman named Stratonice. The king’s son, Antiochus, falls madly in love with his young stepmother. He is deeply ashamed of this passion, and resolves to never speak of his feelings. The strain of repressing his emotions causes him to fall seriously ill. His family is frantic, for no one can diagnose the cause of the disease. The doctor, Erasistratus, observes that when Stratonice is in the sickroom, Antiochus alternately blushes and turns pale. He confirms his observation by taking Antiochus’s pulse. When Stratonice is present, his heart beats faster. Erasistratus realizes that the prince is lovesick for his stepmother. He tells King Seleucus, who magnanimously decides to divorce Stratonice and offer her to Antiochus in marriage. This ancient story was widely cited and was interpreted in many ways, not least as an example of filial devotion and paternal benevolence. More importantly, it became a foundational narrative in medical thought, for it was used to prove the value of pulse rates as a diagnostic tool (Beecher and Ciavolella 48–51). Antiochus would not speak his love, but his pulse did. And that message could only be interpreted by a trained physician. The doctor thus becomes the ultimate arbiter of the truth of the body (Ferrand, Treatise, 266). Observation of physical processes can reveal psychological states. In All’s Well, Helena may keep silent, but her body speaks. Similarly, Olivia’s catching the plague is not a moral choice; it is a physical affliction: something suffered, not chosen. In both cases, the characters are not in control; their bodies are. As well as being an unbidden material affliction, in Shakespeare, lovesickness is also a social role, a part to play. When the melancholic Jaques describes the seven ages of human life in As You Like It, he includes, “the lover / Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow” (2.7.146–48). In Jaques’ description, the natural sighs and fever of lovesickness combine with the cultural production of the woeful ballad, complete with ridiculous Petrarchan blazon. Lovesickness in Shakespeare is always a part as well as a plague. As in the case of Hamlet’s bizarre enactment of lovesickness in Ophelia’s chamber (2.1.77–107), it is hard to separate natural affliction from cultural trope. Hamlet’s unlaced doublet, bare head, sagging stockings, his pallor, his pitiful sighs—all signify “the very ecstasy of love” (2.1.103), at least to Polonius. But as the play’s audience

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knows, these are passions that a man might play, and the disordered and disheveled clothing is as much a costume as any inky cloak or a suit of solemn black. The ambiguous boundaries between lovesickness as physical affliction and lovesickness as social performance are perfectly demonstrated in the early scenes of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo’s lovesickness for Rosaline at the outset of the play is famously contrasted with the deeper and more apocalyptic feelings that he later has for Juliet. But the relation between the two is more complex than it seems. In the opening scene of the play, we learn that instead of involving himself in street fights between his family and their rivals, Romeo spends his nights wandering alone in the woods outside the city walls, and his days shut up in his room with the windows closed. He seems the very embodiment of the “silly loving worm” described in the medical literature: instead of dueling in the streets with other young men, he is solitary, effeminized, and weeping. Romeo’s father believes his son to be suffering from melancholy—and although he is alarmed by his son’s “black and portentous” humor (1.1.134), he cannot determine what has provoked the disease. Romeo’s friend Benvolio guesses immediately that Romeo is lovesick, and when he and Romeo are alone, Romeo is only too glad to pontificate at length about his sufferings. He runs through the typical symptoms of the malady: alternating fever and chills, sleeplessness, sighs, weeping, madness, a surfeit of bile or gall, but he also details all the familiar Petrarchan conceits, the hoary Ovidian metaphor of love as siege warfare, and the notion, familiar to any reader of Shakespeare’s sonnets, that beautiful people should perpetuate that beauty in their offspring. Unwittingly concurring with Arabic medical authorities, Romeo believes his physical suffering would end if only Rosaline would sleep with him (1.1.201–10). Unlike his father, Romeo’s friends do not take all this suffering very seriously. Benvolio is gently skeptical, and Mercutio constantly teases him about it. Clearly, the friends are right to tease—Romeo’s undiminished appetite (“Where shall we dine?” [1.1.166]) is an obvious sign that he is bluffing. His lovesickness is feigned—a part that he plays. As he later admits, it is a mask, makeup—scars that never felt a wound (2.1.43). Romeo’s performance of lovesickness and Mercutio’s mocking reaction to it both suggest that there is a disjunction between medical opinions about the disease and popular perceptions of it. Doctors such as Ferrand and Du Laurens write seriously of its perils (Ferrand even proposes surgical remedies for extreme cases). But young men like Romeo and Mercutio see lovesickness as a fashionable series of gestures either to be mocked or aspired to, depending on one’s humor. This disjunction is common with all diseases, of course. Whatever their biological basis or scientific reality, diseases and the discourses around them also represent ways of thinking about and understanding discomfort, misfortune, and bodily decay. The discourse of lovesickness posits that sexual desire and romantic love are dangerous

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external forces for which the desiring individual bears no direct responsibility. Love is something you catch, like the plague, or suffer, like a fever. It is a misfortune—whether tragic (as Romeo feels it to be) or merely ridiculous (as it seems to Mercutio). Friar Laurence’s meditation on medicinal qualities of plants offers a useful metaphor for the place of material analysis in early modern discourses of love. As Darlena Ciraulo’s essay in Chapter Ten of this volume observes, images of plants and flowers pervade this play. Friar Laurence begins by generalizing about the creative and destructive forces that exist in the natural world: “The earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb. / What is her burying grave, that is her womb” (2.2.9–10). All natural organisms contain both life and death within themselves: Within the infant rind of this weak flower Poison hath residence, and medicine power, For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part; Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart. (2.2.23–26) This is a materialist analysis—the flower Friar Laurence gathers contains physical substances whose scent is medically beneficial but which are fatal if ingested. Friar Laurence recognizes the material nature of the plant’s benefits and dangers in his use of terms such as poison and medicine, and his reference to the physical senses of taste and smell. And yet, no sooner has he made this analysis of the material qualities of the flower, than he immediately shifts to a spiritual discourse: the medicinal power becomes “grace,” the poison becomes “rude will” (2.2.28). Ultimately, for Friar Laurence, it is “rude will”—bad moral choices—that will lead “the canker death” to kill the plant (2.2.30). He perceives the material nature of life and death, but that material nature is immediately subordinated to a moralized spiritual understanding. So it is with romantic love—it is a physical condition that Romeo and Juliet, as a play, persists in seeing in emotional and spiritual terms. With what effect? The canker death—an image that Alanna Skuse explores at greater length in her essay in Chapter Fifteen of this volume— famously eats up Romeo and Juliet, but in Shakespeare’s play, their doomed love carries redemptive power that can rid Verona of their families’ violence and hate. This is a new development—earlier versions of the story were not nearly so optimistic. Matteo Bandello’s 1554 version of the story, for example, ends by saying that the reconciliation between the families did not last (Bandello 315; Moulton 184–6). Romantic love is being spiritualized in a new way with a bright future, not least for Romanticism in the nineteenth-century sense. So was Mercutio wrong to jest? Was Friar Laurence right to hope? Romeo insists that his love for Juliet is real, and his love for Rosaline was not. Does that mean the first was a game and the second was a blessing? Or does it mean the former

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was a feigned affliction, the latter a real one? Romeo and Juliet’s love, like the plague, famously leads to the tomb. It brings some ecstasy, but little happiness or contentment (Laam 439). It may be redemptive, but it is not healthy.

NOTES 1. All references to Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2. On the relation of Burton’s Anatomy to medical texts, see Lund 77–111. 3. On plague and metaphor, see Gilman.

WORKS CITED Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W. D. Ross. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Modern Library, 2001. 927–1112. Print. Bandello, Matteo. Novelle. Ed. Luigi Russo and Ettore Mazzali. Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. Print. Beecher, Donald A. and Massimo Ciavolella. “Jacques Ferrand and the Tradition of Lovesickness in Western Culture.” A Treatise on Lovesickness. By Jacques Ferrand. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1990. 1–201. Print. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1621. New York: New York Review Books, 2001. Print. Ciraulo, Darlena. “Flower Imagery and Botanical Illustration: Health and Sexual Generation in Romeo and Juliet.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 158–75. Print. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Dawson, Lesel. Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Dobrin, Arthur. “Love and Happiness.” Psychology Today 28 August 2012. Web. Accessed 24 Apr. 2014. . Du Laurens, André. Discours de la conservation de la veue: des maladies melancholiques: des catarrhes: et de la Viellesse. Paris, 1597. Print. ———. A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight; of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age. Trans. Richard Surphlet. London, 1599. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014. Ferrand, Jacques. Erotomania, or a Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love or Erotique Melancholy. Oxford, 1640. Print. ———. De la Maladie d’amour ou melancholie erotique. Paris: 1623. Print.

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———. A Treatise on Lovesickness. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1990. Print. Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. 1569. Ed. and trans. Sears Jayne. Dallas, TX: Spring, 1985. Print. Gilman, Ernest B. Afterword: Plague and Metaphor. Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. Ed. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman. New York: Routledge, 2011. 219–36. Print. Laam, Kevin. “Shakespeare and Happiness.” Literature Compass 7.6 (2010): 439–51. Print. Lund, Mary Ann. Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Moulton, Ian Frederick. Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print. Pelling, Margaret. The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Operations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England. New York: Longman, 1998. Print. ———. Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. Skuse, Alanna. “The Worm and The Flesh: Cankered Bodies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 240–59. Print. Smith, Emily Estafani. “Meaning is Healthier Than Happiness.” The Atlantic. Web. Accessed 10 May 2014. . Theile, Matthew. “Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta.” Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. Ed. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman. New York: Routledge, 2011. 185–200. Print. Wack, Mary Frances. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990. Print. Williams, Spencer, and Roger Graham. “I Ain’t Got Nobody Much (and Nobody Cares for Me).” Chicago and New York: Root, 1915.

14 Breastfeeding, Grief, and the Fluid Economy of Healthy Children in Shakespeare’s Plays Ariane M. Balizet

The cover of Time’s May 21, 2012 issue features a startling image and provocative headline. A young, slender woman stands with one hand on her hip, gazing serenely at the viewer. The other arm is draped around her three-year-old son, who stands by her side on a small wooden chair. The child is nursing at his mother’s breast. “Are You Mom Enough?” the headline demands, presumably referring to the sight of a child still breastfeeding beyond infancy as an index of the mother’s fortitude. Inside, readers are invited to pass judgment on “attachment parenting,” a philosophy that advocates cultivating deep emotional bonds between parents and children through practices that emphasize physical closeness, including co-sleeping arrangements, carrying children in arms or slings, and extended breastfeeding. According to author Kate Pickert, the rise of attachment parenting “over the past two decades has helped redefine the modern relationship between mother and baby” (par. 5). Time’s story was part of an ongoing and heated debate, waged largely over the internet, on the concept of modern motherhood and the merits of so-called “parenting philosophies” in general (Slaughter; Allen; Rosin; “‘Case Against Breastfeeding’ Overlooks”). Motherhood, in particular, is often touted as a selfless act (the “toughest job in the world”) as well as a singular source of happiness. Jennifer Senior, whose book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Motherhood addresses the disparity between reality and ideologies of parenting, argues that raising children demands that we “redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is.” (241). The image of cover model Jamie Lynne Grumet nursing her three-year-old son seemed to strike a nerve, however, since the practice of breastfeeding a child older than one—indeed, breastfeeding at all in an age of readily available infant formula—has become an opportunity for judgment on everything from a mother’s class, race, and religious beliefs to her feminist bona fides. The “Are You Mom Enough?” cover clearly means to shock with the image of a beautiful mother offering her breast to a boy who does not look like a baby. Of course, breastfeeding into toddlerhood is nothing new. The shock of the Time cover is lessened when we remember that one of English literature’s most celebrated and recognizable heroines— Shakespeare’s Juliet—was also still nursing at age three.

224 Ariane M. Balizet The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw their own version of the “mommy wars,” since the popular practice of sending children to a wetnurse for their early years was largely rejected by religious, domestic, and medical authorities alike. Juliet’s wet-nurse is exceptional; not only was she brought into the Capulet home, she apparently stayed on as a member of the household for eleven years past Juliet’s weaning. More commonly, women in Shakespeare’s England would have sent their infants away to be nursed, and may have had little to no contact with them during infancy. Authors of domestic literature and medical guides argued that “strange” milk could be dangerous to the child (Paster 276–77; Trubowitz 84–85; Wall 134–42), and religious treatises proclaimed that it was a mother’s spiritual duty to nurse her own children (Crawford 148; Fildes, Breasts 98; Fildes, Wet Nursing 68; Wall 135–56). Yet the practice persisted, suggesting that social custom, then, as now, was just as powerful as medical or moral arguments in shaping how parents chose to care for and nourish their children. When we situate representations of wet-nurses and nursing mothers in Shakespeare’s plays within the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes towards nursing, we see that characters such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet or Volumnia in Coriolanus do not fully redeem or reject the practice of wet-nursing, nor do they serve to advocate maternal breastfeeding. What these mothers share is an identification with the lactating body—a body that is itself a site of cultural debate precisely because its ability to nourish and sustain life is rooted in an exchange of bodily fluids that has the potential to destabilize boundaries of gender, class, and bloodline. That each of these women is also characterized by profound grief is essential to our understanding of how the lactating body was understood in the Renaissance. Explicitly in some cases (Romeo and Juliet) and implicitly in others (Macbeth), these plays stage the experience of breastfeeding as intricately connected to the death of a child. Given infant mortality rates of up to 25–50% (King 372) during the period, women of childbearing age were likely to have experienced child loss at some point in their lives, which might in turn forge an association between the joy of a new baby and the grief of earlier losses. In this essay, I want to examine the ways in which grief and breastfeeding overlap in Shakespeare’s plays. The first part of my analysis focuses on historical attitudes toward and practices of maternal breastfeeding and wet-nursing, with an eye toward the emotional toll such experiences took on the bodies of lactating women (both mothers who sent their children away to nurse, and the wet-nurses who cared for their children). I will then turn to Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and Coriolanus to illustrate the degree to which the grief of child loss is imbricated with representations of nursing mothers. This powerful connection between sorrow and nursing ultimately enables, I argue, maternal recovery from child loss. By exchanging tears for milk, mothers and wet-nurses on Shakespeare’s stage suggest that early modern playgoers saw grief as constitutive of infant

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well-being and, paradoxically, viewed breastfeeding as a means of recuperating maternal happiness.

MILK AND TEARS: NURSING PRACTICES AND LACTATING BODIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Nothing estranges us from Shakespeare’s England so much as looking at the relationship between mother and child. Newborns were often sent away to be raised in strangers’ homes shortly after birth, where they would be swaddled tightly for months and only rarely visited by their birth parents (Fildes, Wet Nursing 83). In the first few days of life, infants were not allowed to receive the highly nutritive colostrum from their mothers’ breasts and were instead given laxatives of oil mixed with honey or sugar and even diluted wine to purge meconium from their bowels (Fildes, Breasts 82). Once it was a few days old, a child would begin to nurse from his or her mother (if her milk had come in) or would be given to a wet-nurse whose milk was somewhat “older” (that is, at least two but no more than ten months had passed since her last birth). Freed from the contraceptive effects of lactation—not to mention from the care and feeding of a child—women who employed wet-nurses were thus able to shorten their birth intervals and produce more children and potential heirs (Fildes, Wet Nursing 83; Newall 128–30). Women were advised to wean nurslings gradually, once the children had all their teeth, at around 18 months. Older children who refused to give up breastfeeding were in danger of becoming lazy and spoiled; nurses were advised to force-wean two- and three-year-olds by the application of something bitter (such as mustard, aloe, or wormwood) to the nipple (Paré Hhhh; Pechey B6), to “make [the child] loath it” (Guillemeau Oo). When children died in the care of a wet-nurse, they were buried in the home parish of their nurse family—not that of their birth parents (Newall 124–25; Fildes, Wet Nursing 82). These customs, along with horrifying infant mortality rates, for many years led historians to the conclusion that Renaissance parents simply did not love their children. In 1962, Philippe Ariès suggested that medieval and early modern parents “could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss” (38), and argued that parents viewed their offspring with marked indifference until the nineteenth century. Lawrence Stone argued fifteen years later that “[s]o many infants died that they could only be regarded as expendable” (81). The hire of wet-nurses (especially in the face of medical and religious advice against the practice) seems to confirm what these influential historians proposed: Renaissance women were likely not, according to our standards, “mom enough.” Although some claims made by scholars like Ariès and Stone persist today (especially the notion that the concept of childhood did not exist until

226 Ariane M. Balizet the nineteenth century), in the past few decades, feminist scholarship on the early modern life-cycle has largely disproven the notion that parents did not love their children. Much of this work has focused on expressions of grief across a vast range of genres, from private texts such as diaries to elaborate, public monuments for dead children (Clarke; Philippy, Women 7–15; 143–78; Philippy, “A Comfortable Farewell”). Indeed, it is perhaps because of the high likelihood of losing a child in infancy that the emotion of grief— not its opposite, indifference—is so prevalent in representations of parents’ affection for their children. Thus, we cannot account for the foreignness of early modern child-rearing practices by concluding that those parents did not love their children, whereas we in the twenty-first century unequivocally do. Indeed, early modern medical, domestic, and religious discourses on nursing relied upon the very idea of a mother’s love for her child to advocate for maternal breastfeeding, emphasizing the idea that mothers naturally produce the best possible nourishment for their own child, and thus it is their domestic and spiritual duty to nurse their own children. Nursing was equivalent to motherhood in medical texts; Ambroise Paré, for example, stated emphatically that “[t]hose that doe not nurse their owne children, cannot rightly bee termed mothers: for they doe not absolutely performe the duty of a mother unto their childe” (Gggg4v). Jacques Guillemeau goes so far as to claim that there is “no difference betweene a woman that refuses to nurse her owne childe; and one that kills her child, as soone as shee hath conceiued” (Ii2). The reasoning behind such statements had to do with the belief, rooted in humoral theory, that breast milk was retained menstrual blood that had nourished the fetus in the womb and now—whitened, “perfected”—nourished the child at the breast. Guillemeau continues, For why may not a woman with as good reason, deny to nourish her child with her bloud, in her wombe, as to deny it her milke being born? Since the milk is nothing else but bloud whitened, beeing now brought to perfection and maturity. (Ii2) Many others make the same argument (Fildes, Breasts 112), including Paré: milk is “nothing else but the same bloud made white in the dugges, wherewith before [the child] was nourished in the wombe” (Gggg4). The notion that breast milk was highly refined blood was also the source of a concomitant anxiety regarding wet-nurses, whose blood—in the form of milk— could seep into and pollute a noble or ancient bloodline (Trubowitz 83–84; Wall 137–38). Similarly, for authors of domestic treatises, household order depended upon a clear delineation of the duties of its constituent members. Chief among a wife’s duties was the nursing of children, as Henry Smith writes in his 1591 A Preparatiue to Mariage: “the first duetie is the mothers, that is, to nurse her childe at her owne breasts, as Sara did Isaak” (Fvii). William Gouge also argues for maternal breastfeeding on the grounds that domestic

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labor is a manifestation of divine duty (Kk6r–v). The wealth of scriptural exempla employed in the promotion of mothers nursing their own children underscores the degree to which, especially after the Reformation, breastfeeding was depicted as a spiritual obligation (Crawford 148; Dowd 58; Fildes, Breasts 98; Fildes, Wet Nursing 68; Paster 198). Given these arguments for maternal breastfeeding, what compelled families to hire wet-nurses to care for their children? Answers varied depending on the social status of the mother: women who could afford to wear fashionable garments found breastfeeding unwieldy and disruptive, and many experienced flattened or mangled nipples from corsets (Fildes, Breasts 100–2). Some women believed that nursing would make their bodies look older and less attractive (Fildes, Breasts 98–101). In agricultural areas, many women from the laboring classes had to find care for their children in order to help their husbands in the fields; in these cases, the children of the very poor may have been nursed by significantly wealthier women, who could supplement their husbands’ more ample income with wet nursing (Newall 132–3). According to Valerie Fildes, many women from the middle- to upperclasses probably “used wet-nurses simply because it was the custom or fashion, without thinking very deeply about it—in the same, often unthinking, way that some women today employ bottle-feeding” (Breasts 102). Like the “attachment parenting” debates of the twenty-first century, the tension between medical, spiritual, and domestic authorities’ advocacy of maternal breastfeeding and the pressure from husbands, mothers, in-laws, and friends to send a child away to nurse illustrates a profound cultural ambivalence towards the lactating body. This ambivalence is reflected in the wealth of advice on choosing a wetnurse found in the same medical, religious, and domestic treatises that so heartily advocate maternal breastfeeding. At times, authors like Gouge, Paré, Guillemeau, and Jane Sharp concede, mothers are simply unable—because of illness, general frailty, or injury to the breasts—to nurse their own children. In these cases, special care should be taken to find a nurse that meets stringent requirements of appearance, constitution, and demeanor. The ideal nurse should be between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, with a healthy complexion and cheerful manner. Parents were advised to take into account the size and shape of her breasts and nipples; the quality, viscosity, color, and taste of her milk; the degree to which she resembled the child’s mother; and the sex of her most recent child (Crawford 149; Fildes, Breasts 168–76; Wall 135–6). The wet-nurse, in other words, should be a picture of health. Renaissance wet-nurses were also chosen, as I mentioned above, on the basis of the “age” of their milk. Ideally, the nurse’s most recent child would be close in age to the new nursling, so that her milk would be at its most nutritious. But nurses were expected to devote all of their milk to the child they had in care; medical authorities maintained that a woman would not make enough milk for more than one infant (Fildes, Breasts 178). What happened to the nurse’s child? The most common recommendation was for

228 Ariane M. Balizet nurses to wean their own children at ten months (long before a child had finished teething), so that they might take in a newborn when their milk was still relatively new. In practice, however, families shopping for a wetnurse were suspicious of claims that a woman’s child would be fully weaned at this age if the child was still in her home, and may have feared that the nurse would divide her milk between the two children. It was more likely that a nurse would, in fact, hire her own wet-nurse at an even cheaper rate, sending away her biological child to take in the child of another family (Fildes, Wet Nursing 54). A third option was simply that parents looking for a wet-nurse would specifically choose a woman whose young child had just died, freeing up her time, attention, affection, and breasts for her new charge. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber notes that many families did this openly in Renaissance Florence, where new parents dreamed of “a woman fresh from childbirth whose child had died” (140), eagerly checking in on potential wet-nurses whose children looked sickly and expressing disappointment when those children recovered and thrived. Fiona Newall suggests that such an arrangement may have been common (though not announced) in England (129–30), although the practice of actively seeking out a nurse whose child has died is far less evident in the prescriptive literature, since medical authorities in England usually encouraged examination of the nurse’s most recent child as an index of the nurse’s maternal competence. As I will discuss in detail below, however, the idea that wet-nurses and nursing mothers are in part defined by grief powerfully informs tropes of nursing and child well-being in Shakespeare’s plays. Whether a nurse weaned her child early, sent her infant away (perhaps even abandoning the child to be cared for by the parish), or experienced the child’s death, the act of taking in a new nursling for pay was fundamentally dependent on her separation from a beloved child. The act of nursing a new child and, indeed, the experience of lactation was thus an exchange of tears for milk. For a mother who hired a wet-nurse, the period immediately after sending her baby away was likely very painful physically (as she coped with engorged breasts while waiting for her milk to dry up) as well as emotionally (as she wondered whether she would see her child again). For this woman, the first few weeks of her child’s life were an exchange of milk for tears. As the tension between the ideology of maternal breastfeeding and practice of hiring a wet-nurse shows, there were varied and contradictory opinions on the feeding of infants in early modern England. Excellent research by scholars like Fildes, Crawford, and Newall illustrates the complex and often perilous history of breastfeeding in medieval and Renaissance Europe and England. More recently, scholars of Renaissance poetry and drama have addressed the role breastfeeding plays in discourses of policing gender, transgressing class, and manifesting fears of racial and religious “others” (Paster 215–81; Dowd 70–94; Trubowitz; Wall 134–9). Clearly, the full measure of the wet-nurse’s impact in early modern society has yet to be recovered. Yet we still seem predisposed to see Renaissance mothers and

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Figure 14.1 “Breast-pump.” From Frawen Rosengarten. Von vilfaltigen sorglichen Zufällen und gebrechen der Mütter und Kinder, so inen vor, inn, unnd nach der Geburt begegnen mögenn. Walter Hermann Ryff, 1545. Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only license CC by 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

nurses as participants in a system characterized by an absence of emotional attachment. Many of these scholars, for example, still rely on a distinction between “blood” parents and “milk” parents (i.e., birth and foster/ nurse family) to assert a lack of attachment or affection between parents and their children. For Gail Kern Paster, for example, “[The Winter’s Tale’s Perdita] belongs to and reconciles both of the play’s sharply differentiated environments, one inhabited by her ‘blood’ parents and the other by her ‘milk’ parents” (261). Having been rejected by her father and adopted by a shepherd and his family, Paster argues, Perdita emblematizes “the traumatic experience of the seventeenth-century nurse-child, sent away from home soon after birth and returned months or years later” (261). Perdita’s story, however, is one of cruel abandonment and fortunate rescue by two men; the experiences of women voluntarily sending their newborns away and/ or taking in strangers’ infants to care for is perhaps more usefully understood as an economic exchange structured around both financial and emotional incentives. I propose that looking at the nursing body in Shakespeare reveals a register of maternal emotion that cuts across class lines. Nursing emerges as a means of recuperating infant loss; in the fluid economy of healthy children, representations of breastfeeding reveal the profound degree to which women deeply loved the infants they bore and cared for.

230 Ariane M. Balizet CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK: NURSING AND GRIEVING IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS Who are the nursing mothers in Shakespeare’s plays? In this essay, I am focusing on four women: the Nurse, from Romeo and Juliet; Lady Macbeth, from Macbeth; Volumnia, from Coriolanus; and Hermione, from The Winter’s Tale. One character is specifically defined by her profession as a wetnurse; one describes nursing a child that we never see and must assume has died; one speaks with pride of nursing her own son; one is forbidden from nursing her first child but allowed at least one nursing session with her second. These women’s lives depict a broad spectrum of class and status; their actions within each play elicit varying degrees of sympathy from the audience. Yet they each experience the loss of a child, and they each articulate a powerful love for the children they have nursed. Throughout Shakespeare’s plays, metaphorical use of the term “nurse” is frequent, and is usually employed to describe nurturance by someone (or something), regardless of gender. In 1 Henry VI, Burgundy describes the dead bodies of Talbot and his son as a tableau that reveals the elder Talbot’s blame in his son’s death: “Doubtless [Young Talbot] would have made a noble knight, / See where he lies inhearsèd in the arms / Of the most bloody nurser of his harms” (4.7.44–46).1 According to Escalus in Measure for Measure, “Mercy is not itself that oft looks so. / Pardon is still the nurse of second woe” (2.1.253–54). Richard III’s Duchess of York invites Queen Elizabeth and Clarence’s sons to transfer their grief to her, so that she may serve as a wet-nurse to their sorrow: “Alas, you three on me, threefold distressed, / Pour all your tears. I am your sorrow’s nurse, / And I will pamper it with lamentation” (2.2.86–88). The fact that “harms,” “woe,” and “sorrow” all take the place of the nursling in these moments, I propose, is no coincidence. Even when used figuratively, the notion of serving as nurse was often quite strikingly associated with grief. In All’s Well That Ends Well, for example, the coward Parolles “weeps like a wench that had shed her milk” (4.3.103). Stephen Greenblatt’s Norton edition glosses “shed” as “spilled,” although Sujata Iyengar adds that the maid’s “crying over spilled milk” also suggests “a reference to what we might now call the ‘baby blues’ or weepiness experienced by many women a few days postpartum” (224). Read this way, this image reinforces the potent connection between milk and tears that defined the practice of nursing as a mode of experiencing grief. At the same time, characters who describe themselves as nursing children—or having nursed in the past—typically see this action as a formative one, often for both parties. Volumnia, of course, claims that her breastmilk is the source of Coriolanus’s courage: “Thy valiantness was mine, thou sucked’st it from me” (3.2.129). In The Winter’s Tale, the jealous King Leontes expresses satisfaction that his wife employed a wet-nurse for their young son Mamillius, as this decision years ago meant the child would not receive his mother’s characteristics via her milk: “Give me the boy. I am

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glad you did not nurse him. / Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” (2.1.58–60). Leontes emphasizes the fungibility of blood and breastmilk as two potent means by which women transmit their own character onto children; as Paster notes, by recalling that Hermione did not nurse Mamillius, he underlines the determinative powers of both pregnancy and breastfeeding (269). This process and its reverse appear vividly in Romeo and Juliet. Marveling at Juliet’s precocious response to her mother’s inquiries about marriage, the Nurse exclaims, “Were not I thine only nurse, / I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat” (1.3.69–70). The assumption underlying the Nurse’s lines is that children get their best qualities from the breast, although the Nurse simultaneously cancels this assumption with her assertion that this could not be true in the case of Juliet’s clever words, since she only received milk from a woman who does not see herself as a source of wisdom. That the Nurse still sees Juliet in terms of the earliest manifestation of their relationship, however, suggests that her own sense of identity remains bound up in her term as a lactating body. In these moments, the breast is a site at which children and the women who care for them may exchange nourishment, affection, and identity. Juliet’s Nurse is fundamentally associated with the act of breastfeeding in almost every way. She still sees Juliet as a nursing infant—“Thou wast the prettiest babe that e’er I nursed” (1.3.62)—and retains the title of “Nurse” over a decade after the nursing relationship ended. As other scholars have noted, her lengthy monologue in 1.3 serves as an exquisite catalogue of early modern nursing practices and beliefs (Paster 220–3; Dowd 73–80). As the Nurse asserts Juliet’s age—just shy of fourteen—she recalls the crucial moment of Juliet’s forced weaning at three years old: Even or odd, of all the days in the year Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she—God rest all Christian souls!— Were of an age. Well, 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. Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said, When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, To see it tetchy and fall out wi’th’ dug!

232 Ariane M. Balizet ‘Shake’, quoth the dove-house! ’Twas no need, I trow, To bid me trudge; And since that time it is eleven years, For then she could stand high-lone. (1.3.18–38) The Nurse reminds us of her crucial position within the Capulet household by noting that she alone was caring for Juliet during the earthquake, since Juliet’s parents were visiting Mantua at the time, and must have had a unique arrangement with her employers as she was brought into the Capulet home instead of nursing Juliet in her own house. Her recollection in this scene is not the date of Juliet’s birth—as per her conversation with Lady Capulet—but rather, the event of Juliet’s weaning, performed by the application of wormwood to the Nurse’s breast. This memory is framed by mention of two sources of grief for the Nurse: her husband and her daughter Susan, both of whom are now dead. I want to focus, briefly, on two elements of this narrative that illustrate the crucial overlap between the Nurse’s grief and her milk: the death of her daughter, and the relatively late age of Juliet at the moment of weaning. Shakespeare’s inclusion of Susan’s name answers the question of how this particular wet-nurse was able to devote all her milk to her charge; at Susan’s death, the Nurse became an ideal employee according to early modern advice on wet-nurses. The scenario of a woman losing her infant and immediately accepting a position as a wet-nurse to a wealthy family suggests that the grief the Nurse felt at Susan’s death—a grief she remembers quite pointedly, nearly fourteen years later—was at least in part resolved by her ability to take a new child to her breast. Following Paster, we might be tempted to imagine Susan and Juliet occupying various dichotomies in the Nurse’s life: birth vs. surrogate; blood vs. money; tears vs. milk (221–2). Yet it is only together that these two girls create the conditions for the wetnurse’s employment; in this way, Juliet’s health and survival depends upon an economy of fluids that is predicated on Susan’s death and the Nurse’s grief. Juliet’s age at this moment is also crucial; at three, she would have been well past the recommended age for weaning during this time. The notion that Juliet is “overdue” to be weaned is emphasized by the Nurse’s use of wormwood to make her breast repugnant to the toddler; typically, medical and domestic literatures advised weaning babies gradually and prescribed the use of bitter agents only for older children (Guillemeau, Nn4-Oo; Paré Hhhh; Sharp, Aa8v). Juliet’s extended breastfeeding signifies, according to Paster, the physical interdependence of nurse and baby or—for the Nurse herself—a physical and emotional subordination to the baby directly resulting from her social subordination to the parents. A change in the nature of that bodily subordination is what the weaning may mean

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for the Nurse qua nurse, a transition to the less demanding forms of nurture she has been occupied with ever since. (224) Although I would not disagree that Juliet’s weaning represents a transition to “less demanding forms of nurture” for the Nurse, I would like to raise the possibility that the Nurse’s relationship to Juliet in the early years was not one of physical and emotional subordination, but rather, one of physical and emotional recuperation. Having lost a daughter, the act of breastfeeding a thriving child through toddlerhood clearly represents for the Nurse a source of deep affection and amusement. She remembers Juliet’s weaning with a mixture of fondness (the warmth of the sun as she and Juliet played near the dovehouse; her pride at remembering the moment with such clarity) and regret (“Of all the days of the year,” she recalls, an earthquake struck the very day she had decided to separate Juliet from the comfort of her breast). It is no coincidence, I would argue, that the Nurse is reminiscing about Susan just before this memory appears. The moment of Juliet’s weaning sticks acutely in the Nurse’s mind because it represents a turning point in her own experience of grief; she can laugh at her “pretty fool” turning in disgust from the “dug,” confident that this child will recover from the trauma of weaning and fright of an earthquake on her own. We might then conclude that Juliet’s extended breastfeeding was, in fact, an exchange of well-being between child and nurse; both are made healthier and happier as a result. For the Nurse, this exchange is an example of “cognitive reappraisal,” a term drawn from recent scholarship in psychological approaches to well-being and deployed by Kevin Laam in his analysis of Shakespeare and happiness. Cognitive reappraisal is “the process by which one comes to view [negative] events as neutral or positive—for instance, learning to appreciate how the death of a loved one may improve relationships with the living” (448). Susan’s death, thus, occasions the Nurse’s grief even as it generates the conditions by which the Nurse will recover from the emotional trauma of child loss. The lactating body in effect literalizes the “process” of cognitive reappraisal by transferring the material means of nurturance—breast milk—from one child to another. Similarly, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness argues persuasively that the psychology of happiness is remarkably adaptive in response to even the most potent grief, concluding that “[i]ntense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it” (181). The Nurse’s cheerful, garrulous presence on stage is thus not diminished by the grief in her past; her happiness in the play’s early scenes stems at least in part from the death that led to her employment in the Capulet household. A similar—though troubling—dynamic is at work in Macbeth. For Lady Macbeth to belong within this sisterhood of grieving and nursing mothers, we must take her at her word when she makes a shocking claim to her husband in an attempt to steel his nerve for the murder they have planned. She swears,

234 Ariane M. Balizet I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (1.7.54–9) The act of infanticide she describes here is made all the more repellent if we imagine she has in fact “given suck,” since, given the couple’s childlessness, this would mean she has already lost a child. Lady Macbeth, in this view, has gone against the custom of hiring a wet-nurse in favor of feeding her child herself; such a detail highlights the loss of this “babe” she loves so tenderly, and invites an understanding of Lady Macbeth as a woman whose milk has been replaced by tears. Her brief description of nursing the child, and that child’s palpable absence, echo the profound connection between nursing and loss that defined Juliet’s Nurse. Earlier in the play, however, she famously conjures dark spirits and pleads with them to “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers” (1.5.45–6). Several compelling readings of this line attend to her desire for “gall” in place of the “milk of human kindness” (1.5.15) she fears in her husband (Adelman, 97–8; Swain, 161–2). Yet in making an offer of her milk to the spirits, she implies that she has milk to give—that is, that her “woman’s breasts” are still engorged from a very recent infant loss. The act of calling upon “murd’ring ministers” to take her milk, then, is itself a recuperative form of cognitive reappraisal; she becomes a wetnurse to those “spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts,” assuaging her grief through the acquisition of new nurslings. While we can imagine both Lady Macbeth and Juliet’s Nurse coping with grief through the management of their lactating breasts, we never actually see the children they claim to have lost, and thus our attention is drawn—inevitably—to the embodied sorrow of the nurse figure. Volumnia and Hermione represent a different focus, in which the connection between nursing and grief shapes tragic narratives for children long past the point of infancy. Volumnia, of course, sees her act of nursing Coriolanus as directly responsible for his “valiantness,” and makes a powerful comparison between war and breastfeeding as idealized characteristics of gender: The breasts of Hecuba When she did suckle Hector looked not lovelier Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword, contemning. (1.3.37–40) In extolling the virtues of bleeding wounds—a motif that pervades the entire play—Volumnia also espouses maternal breastfeeding, potently connecting nurturance and violence. At the same time, she sets the terms for her own

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virtue, as she asserts that her breasts are the source of Coriolanus’s valor. Having nursed her own child and raised a legendary warrior, Volumnia seems to have escaped the association between grief and breastfeeding that echoes throughout Shakespeare’s plays. Volumnia will, however, suffer the loss of a child; that loss will be, paradoxically, occasioned by maternal grief. Her tearful pleas to Coriolanus on behalf of Rome are partly successful, since he relents and agrees to have mercy on the city. But Aufidius sees the relationship between mother and son differently; disgusted by Volumnia’s ability to move Coriolanus with tears, Aufidius initiates the conspiracy against Coriolanus specifically in terms of women’s fluid passions. According to Aufidius, “At a few drops of women’s rheum, which are / As cheap as lies, he sold the blood and labour / Of our great action; therefore shall he die” (5.6.45–7). In the gendered order of bodily fluids, men’s blood—both shed and spilled—has been sold cheaply for women’s “rheum.” Aufidius continues, He has betrayed your business, and given up, For certain drops of salt, your city, Rome— I say your city—to his wife and mother, Breaking his oath and resolution like A twist of rotten silk, never admitting Counsel o’th’ war. But at his nurse’s tears He whined and roared away your victory, The pages blushed at him, and men of heart Looked wond’ring each at others. (5.6.94–102) Aufidius’s outrage is specifically targeted towards Coriolanus’s response to the tears of his mother and wife; at drops of “salt” and “women’s rheum,” Coriolanus loses his masculine resolve and thus his status within the Volscian command. Aufidius specifically calls Volumnia Coriolanus’s nurse—not his mother—emphasizing the interchangeability of milk and tears in the manipulation of Coriolanus’s masculinity. Just before Coriolanus’s death, furthermore, Aufidius calls him “thou boy of tears,” asserting his infantilization. Volumnia’s joy in nursing and rearing Coriolanus is thus recast at the end of the play, when she becomes his weeping nurse and, ultimately, his grieving mother. If Coriolanus shows how potent the overlap between breastfeeding and grief can be in the policing of gendered identities, The Winter’s Tale stages the power of this overlap in the nurturance of healthy children. Mamillius, as I discussed above, was not nursed by his mother—although his name, as Jean Howard has noted in her introduction to the play, forces an association with breastfeeding, since “Mamilla is the word for the nipple on a breast or a diminutive form of mamma, the Latin word for the breast itself” (2885). By bearing the name Mamillius, the child clearly serves as a site of many masculine anxieties regarding women’s bodies and chastity (Paster, 260–70;

236 Ariane M. Balizet Ephraim, 49–51). Yet he also represents a poignant loss for Hermione; in addition to serving as a reminder that she was not allowed to nurse him, the connotations of his name acutely convey the fact that she was separated from her child at the beginning and end of his life. When put on trial, Hermione maintains her innocence stoically, insisting that her unfeminine lack of tears is the product of her fiery, righteous zeal: I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities. But I have That honourable grief lodged here which burns Worse than tears drown. (2.1.110–14) Once subject to the horrors of learning of her son’s death and losing her infant daughter, however, Hermione is depicted in Antigonus’s dream-vision as a motherly fountain of grief, upon which “her eyes / Became two spouts” (3.3.24–5). Whereas we know Hermione was not permitted to nurse her son, she asserts that she was able to nurse her daughter, if only once. When detailing her outrageous, unjust treatment, Hermione describes Perdita as having been stolen “from my breast, / The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth” (3.2.97–8). The “mouth” is innocent because it belongs to a newborn baby; the “milk” is innocent because it comes from a woman who is not guilty of the crimes alleged against her. The image is striking in contrast with the rest of the play’s insistence that Mamillius was not breastfed by his mother; Hermione, for reasons practical, physical, and emotional, has taken the role of nurse to her baby daughter. She becomes, for a brief period in act three, the weeping, lactating body associated with infant health and wellbeing. Mamillius’s death—presumably of grief from being separated from his mother—and Perdita’s first few hours of life echo the mingled grief and joy manifest in the figure of the wet-nurse. We may read the joyful reunion of mother and daughter in the final scene as a confirmation of her emotional connection with Perdita before the infant was torn from her breast: You gods, look down And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head.—Tell me, mine own, Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found Thy father’s court? For thou shalt hear that I, Knowing by Paulina that the oracle Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved Myself to see the issue. (5.3.122–9) Both mother and daughter have been “preserved,” which is to say, protected and kept safe from the threat of Leontes. For Hermione, her pres-

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ence in this moment is a manifestation of her own powerful will—“I...have preserved / Myself”—a miraculous act of a mother’s desire to see her own “issue” once again. Looking at the women who nurse children in Shakespeare’s plays reveals a rich and complex picture of the physical and emotional stakes of caring for infants in the Renaissance. Clearly, women such as Juliet’s Nurse, Lady Macbeth, Volumnia, and Hermione adopt and reflect practices that make Shakespeare’s England seem strikingly foreign, especially to a culture so deeply embroiled in debates over “modern motherhood.” Yet this diverse group of women also suggests that mothers loved the children they bore, wet-nurses loved the children they nursed, both groups of women grieved their losses deeply, and nursing provided some opportunity for recuperation and, ultimately, happiness. Paradoxically, Shakespeare depicts the grieving, breastfeeding woman as essential to the health and well-being of children. Thus, the lactating body, in these plays, belongs to a woman whose grief— and love—are more than enough.

NOTE 1. References to Shakespeare’s Works come from The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al.

WORKS CITED Adelman, Janet. “‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth.” Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance. Ed. Marjorie Garber. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 90–121. Print. Allen, Amy. “‘Mommy Wars’ Redux: A False Conflict.” The New York Times 2012. Web. Accessed 24 Feb. 2014. . Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. by Robert Baldick. New York: Knopf, 1962. Print. “‘Case Against Breastfeeding’ Overlooks Big Dirty Secret.” MomsRising.Org. Web. Accessed 24 Feb. 2014. . Clarke, Elizabeth. “‘A heart terrifying Sorrow’: the Deaths of Children in SeventeenthCentury Women’s Manuscript Journals.” Representations of Childhood Death. Ed. Gillian Avery and Kimberly Reynolds. Houndsmills, Basingstroke, Hampshire; London: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 65–86. Print. Crawford, Patricia. Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2004. Print. Dowd, Michelle M. Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Print. Early English Books Online [EEBO]. Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey/U of Michigan, 1997–. Web. Accessed 5 July 2014.

238 Ariane M. Balizet Ephraim, Michelle. “Hermione’s Suspicious Body: Adultery and Superfetation in The Winter’s Tale.” Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 45–58. Print. Fildes, Valerie. Breasts, Bottles & Babies: A History of Infant Feeding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1986. Print. ———. Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Print. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print. Gouge, William. Of domesticall duties eight treatises. London, 1622. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. Guillemeau, Jacques. Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of women. London, 1612. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. Iyengar, Sujata. Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print. King, Margaret L. “Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go.” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 371–407. Print. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy. Trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Print. Laam, Kevin. “Shakespeare and Happiness”. Literature Compass 7.6 (2010): 439–51. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. . Miller, Naomi J. and Naomi Yavneh, eds. Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Print. Newall, Fiona. “Wet Nursing and Child Care in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1595–1726.” In Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren. Ed. Valerie Fildes. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 122–38. Print. Paré, Ambroise. The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey. Trans. by T. Johnson. London, 1634. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Print. Pechey, John. A General Treatise on the Diseases of Infants and Children. London, 1697. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. Philippy, Patricia. “A Comfortable Farewell: Child-loss and Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England.” Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood. Ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 17–37. Print. –––. Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print. Pickert, Kate. “The Man who Remade Motherhood.” Time 179.20. 21 May 2012. Print. Rosin, Hanna. “The Case Against Breast-Feeding.” The Atlantic April 2009. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. . Senior, Jennifer. All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2014. Print. Shakespeare, William. 1 Henry VI. The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 465–538. Print.

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———. All’s Well That Ends Well. The Norton Shakespeare, 2193–2261. Print. ———. Coriolanus. The Norton Shakespeare, 2793–2880. Print. ———. Measure for Measure. The Norton Shakespeare, 2039–2108. Print. ———. Richard III. The Norton Shakespeare, 539–628. Print. ———. Romeo and Juliet. The Norton Shakespeare, 897–972. Print. ———. The Winter’s Tale. The Norton Shakespeare, 2881–2961. Print. Sharp, Jane. The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifry discovered. London, 1671. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The Atlantic July/ August 2012. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. . Smith, Henry. A Preparatiue to Mariage. London, 1591. EEBO. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2014. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper, 1977. Print. Swain, David W. “Languages of the Soul: Galenism and the Medical Disciplines in Elyot, Huarte, and Shakespeare.” Diss. University of Massachusetts—Amherst, 2004. Print. Trubowitz, Rachel. “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain.” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2000. 82–101. Print. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

15 The Worm and the Flesh Cankered Bodies in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Alanna Skuse

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease—because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses. (Sontag 47) In 1977, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor argued powerfully for the modern stigmatization of cancer as a “demonic” malady (45). Narratives around cancer, she contended, blamed sufferers for their illness and cast recovery as a fight in which the patient was deemed responsible for their survival or demise. In the years since Sontag’s bold statement, much has been written on political and cultural attitudes toward people—particularly women— with cancer. Scholars such as Jackie Stacey, Anne S. Kasper and Susan J. Ferguson, among many others, have observed how societal and cultural pressures have shaped the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, and how cancer patients become interpellated into certain narrative roles, serving as exemplars of heroism, tragedy, or forbearance. In the same period, scholars of early modern literature and medicine have likewise embraced the rise of “health humanities.” They have fruitfully explored the era’s attitude to physical and psychological health, focusing on the body and its products as both symptom and cause of individual and collective patterns of thought. Scholars such as Sarah Covington, Jonathan Gil Harris, Colin Milburn and Jonathan Sawday have scrutinized experiences as diverse as excretion, digestion, generation, sex, and physic within a critical discourse that, in its most penetrating guises, recognizes the instability of divisions between text and context. In light of these critical practices—one historicizing and the other resolutely activist—it is perhaps surprising that “canker,” a term that appears repeatedly across the Shakespearean canon, should have escaped closer examination by critics of early modern literature. This essay will seek to redress that balance, and reconstruct Shakespeare’s “canker” as a term of medical significance, which described a terrifying malignant disease and was entwined with debates about religion, gender, and the nature of illness. In doing so, it will show that early modern “canker” was no less potent or complex a term than modern “cancer.” Focusing on Shakespeare’s Sonnet

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95, I will argue that understanding the multivalence of “canker” can help us to uncover this poem’s anxieties about gender, friendship, and the role of the poet. My approach follows a productive mode of literary and historical criticism. Gail Kern Paster, for instance, has advocated an “interpretive literalism” based on the recognition that what is “bodily or emotional figuration for us, preserved metaphors of somatic consciousness, was the literal stuff of physiological theory for early modern scriptors of the body” (“Nervous Tension,” 111). By the same token, Jonathan Gil Harris has described diseases including venereal pox as “pathotexts,” “a diachronic assemblage of competing forms” constituted as much by culture, law, economics, and language as by biological facticity (“(Po)X” 112). Turning their attention to individual diseases or bodily states, scholars such as Covington, Laura Lunger Knoppers, and Joan B. Landes have shown how, for example, woundedness, disability or “monstrosity” could function in imaginative and polemic literature as tools for thinking about nationhood and morality at the same time as they materially influenced people’s everyday lives. By contrast, the “cankers” of early modern canonical literature have infrequently been linked to the “cankers” or “cancers” of the period’s mass of medical writing. Moreover, as this essay describes, both literary and medical cankers have remained largely unstudied. Several medical histories— most notably, Luke Demaitre’s “Medieval Notions of Cancer” and Marjo Kaartinen’s Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century—have detailed the perceived causes of, and cures for, cancer in the pre-modern period. Little work, however, has been undertaken on constructions of the disease in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Accordingly, “canker” is often glossed in critical editions of Shakespeare’s works as referring solely to a horticultural parasite. This convention has been briefly redressed in Sujata Iyengar’s recent Shakespeare’s Medical Language, which describes “canker’s status as both a plant-blight” and a chronic tumour or ulcer, connoting that which “kills or corrupts from within” (51–54). Jonathan Gil Harris’s analysis of “canker” in Gerrard Malynes’s 1601 economic treatise, A Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth, also notes the connection between canker-worms and cancerous disease. As I will argue, however, I believe the material connection between worms and cancers to be more profound than has hitherto been imagined. This essay therefore seeks to demonstrate how detailed attention to medical and cultural histories of “canker” may prompt a critical revision of received readings of that image in Shakespearean texts. First, I consider Sonnet 95, arguing that we may read this poem as reprimanding an unknown beloved whilst tacitly acknowledging the extent to which the narrator is culpable in the situation he describes. Then, I turn from Shakespeare to his cultural context, considering “canker” as a term that signified human as well as horticultural illness. Cancerous disease and horticultural “canker” were linked, I argue, by the idea that cancers might consist of devouring worms.

242 Alanna Skuse Moreover, both horticultural and bodily canker-worms operated in reciprocal relationship to religious, cultural, and even pre-Christian tropes connecting the worm to corporeal frailty, sin, and punishment. Finally, I return to Shakespeare, and consider how pursuing multivalent readings of “canker” might enrich our understanding of the plays and poems, and, in particular, embolden our reading of the enigmatic Sonnet 95.

SWEET SHAME How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! That tongue that tells the story of thy days, Making lascivious comments on thy sport, Cannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise, Naming thy name, blesses an ill report. O, what a mansion have those vices got Which for their habitation chose out thee, Where beauty’s veil doth cover every blot, And all things turns to fair that eyes can see! Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege; The hardest knife ill used doth lose his edge. (Shakespeare 1955)1 Sonnet 95 has largely been neglected by critics. Overlooked in favour of the sweeping romance of the earlier poems, or the eroticism of the Dark Lady verses, this poem, with its seeming absolution of the sinning youth, presents the reader with several difficulties. What does it mean to say that one “Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise” (line 7), or to speak of a veil which both covers and transforms that which lies underneath? The apparent contradictions of Sonnet 95 invite a reading of the poem as conflicted and occasionally vicious, one that is open to—indeed, will benefit substantially from—supplementation in the form of a historically rigorous reassessment of “canker.” Upon first reading, this sonnet appears to describe the narrator’s disappointment at a “shameful” act (or omission) by the beloved, and the way in which that emotion is tempered by the love object’s “beauty,” a quality which makes even “lascivious” gossips praise the transgressing youth despite themselves.2 Beauty and charm are thus, the narrator warns, of great advantage to the youth, but may, like the “sharpest knife,” be worn out by overuse. Each of these apparently self-evident conclusions, however, is problematized at some point in the poem. First, the nature of the “shame” that

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leads Shakespeare’s narrator to chide his beloved is only obscurely detailed: it is a sin and “vice” which may pose a risk to his “name,” but this is hardly specific. The proximity of “lascivious” and “sport” seems to imply that this transgression is sexual in character, consistent with earlier sonnets in which it appears that the youth has had sex with the narrator’s mistress, and with the narrator’s stress on his subject’s fair appearance. Exterior beauty both facilitates seduction and belies interior ugliness, just as the fragrant rose, mansion, or veil may conceal the rot within. If what precisely the youth has done is unclear, the narrator’s reaction is even more opaque. The thrust of the sonnet is that youth, social standing, and looks can atone for, even obviate, certain sins. The repetition of “sweet” and “beauty,” and the enclosure of sins in roses and mansions, supports that idea. Yet this repetition also signals anxiety, and a narrative desire literally to over-write sins, consistent with Paul Hammond’s assertion that the Sonnets’ over-delineation often indicates “a process of translation” and “desperate wishful thinking” aimed at constructing the relationship between speaker and subject as a satisfying one (63). As well as corporeal parts and attributes (beauty, fairness, tongue, eyes, heart), the poem dwells upon its own “forms”: praise, blessing, naming, reporting, and storytelling. That the latter are all, to a greater or lesser degree, performative speech acts, signals the instability of the narrator’s contention that his subject’s beauty transforms insult to praise. The real transformative influence is not—or not only—the youth’s physicality, but language, such that this sonnet accords with David Schalkwyk’s contention that Shakespeare’s poems may not only describe, but seek to transform, a relationship between the narrator and the love object (252). Repeating “thee,” “thou” and “thy” eight times in the first ten lines, the poem at once highlights, and attempts to bridge, the gap between self and other—a gap which inevitably results in the construction of identity as a collaborative exercise undertaken between the love object and those who talk (or write) about him. Problematizing the narrator’s purported belief in the power of physical beauty to shape representation may shed light on this sonnet’s more obscure phrases. The narrator’s closing plea to his “dear heart,” for example, now seems to signal the extent to which he feels his own identity to have become entwined with that of his beloved. Similarly, the circular assertion that the youth’s detractors “Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise” (line 7)—that is, that beauty, with an alchemic magic, turns insults into valorization—may now be seen as indicative of the instability of an identity which is neither singular nor autonomous, and requires continual re-creation in order to appear coherent. Similar formulations of “canker” appear in Sonnets 35 and 70. In the latter, the narrator asserts that the youth makes others jealous of his beauty, but has thus far managed either to avoid or to disprove slanders against him. “Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise” (70.l.11), he explains, because slander is both inevitable, and necessary, to avoid overtaking “kingdoms of hearts” (line 14). The judgments of others are both

244 Alanna Skuse an inevitable consequence of the love object’s physicality, and a necessary supplement to his selfhood. Likewise, in Sonnet 35, we read: All men make faults, and even I in this, Authorizing thy trespass with compare, Myself corrupting salving thy amiss, Excusing thy sins more than their sins are. (lines 5–8) Again, the theme is sin versus beauty, and here the identity-creating role of not only language but the language-shaper—the narrator—is made explicit. Carl D. Atkins argues that these couplets make the speaker “accessory” to the crimes of the love object (106). The mirror-like formulation of self/thee and corrupting/salving, however, implies a more serious collapse of the distinction between self and other. Where does “canker” fit in this equation? Reading “canker” in the sense in which it is most often glossed by scholars, the eating caterpillar, yields an image of the youth’s carapace as concealing inner rottenness that accords with the poem’s concern about beauty “veiling” sin. The implicit threat that this canker will prevent the “budding” flower from reaching maturity is also significant, particularly given the physical dangers attendant on sexual misdemeanour. Nonetheless, “canker,” in its horticultural sense, seems unequal to the confusion of human bodies and selves described in the sonnet, or to the suppressed violence of the final couplet. In the remainder of this essay, I shall argue that a fuller reading of “canker” provides an even better fit to the concerns of this poem, vivifying its complaint with multiple physical and cultural contexts. Understanding “canker” more fully illuminates the possibility of sexual sin at which the poem only hints, and lends a visceral edge to the poet’s caution against veiled spots and blots. Furthermore, in its terminological instability, and its confusion of interior and exterior, literal and figural, “canker” proves a most apposite image with which to describe anxieties about identity, autonomy, and human relationships.

CANKERS AND CANCERS In order to explore more fully the multivalent significance of “canker,” it is necessary to consider what that word meant, in practical and cultural terms, during the early modern period. Foremost in scholarly glosses on the term in Shakespeare’s plays and poems has been the sense of a parasite or worm which eats flowers, particularly roses, from the inside. The 2002 Oxford edition of The Sonnets, for example, footnotes the “canker vice” of Sonnet 70 as denoting a canker-worm (Burrow 520). Drawing on 300 years of analysis for a 2007 critical edition, Atkins likewise says of “canker” in The Sonnets merely that it “refers, of course, to the canker worm,” although he

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adds that there is a sense of its being “malignant”’ (191). A horticultural parasite, however, was not the only or even the earliest sense of “canker.” Rather, this term derives from an alternative sense of the word, dating back to antiquity and very much contemporary to the early modern period. This sense was one of malignant, degenerative, or eating disease: specifically, of cancer. The etymological root of “canker” is the Greek karkinos, or crab, which was translated through the Latin cancer (the ‘c’s being pronounced ejectively) to a number of variant English forms. Karkinos was significant because the visual and behavioural characteristics of the crab were held to correlate closely with those of a certain type of tumour. These tumours were round and red, with dark veins extending from them that looked, according to the sixteenth-century physician Philip Barrough “verie like unto the feete of crabbes, descending from the round compasse of their bodies” (Z5). Furthermore, such a tumour was “verie hardly pulled awaie from those members, which it doth lay holde on, as the sea crabbe doth, who obstinately doth cleave to that place which it once hath apprehended” (Z5). These growths were known as “cankers,” “cancers,” or occasionally, “cancor,” “cancre,” or “kanker.” All these variant spellings were used fairly indiscriminately throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe the malignant disease approximating to what we now call cancer. Only “canker,” however, was also used to signify both horticultural parasites and undifferentiated ulcerative diseases. The disease described as “cancer” or “canker” by early modern practitioners was roughly contiguous with popular ideas of cancer today, and it was described in similarly fearful tones in medical textbooks, casebooks, and in letters and diaries. Ideas about cancerous disease were derived from ancient and medieval sources (Shimkin; Demaitre), and they were remarkably stable across the early modern period, and across Britain and mainland Europe (De Moulin). Usually starting with a small swelling, cancerous tumours expanded at an unreliable rate and sometimes spread to other parts of the body. This growth might continue to increase, “from the smalness of a Vetch [legume] to the bigness of a Pomion [apple],” or—thankfully unlike today— might break the skin to form a stinking cancerous ulcer (Wiseman O3r). In either case, medical practitioners were largely powerless to intervene, and the likely end of cancer was understood to be the death of the patient. With an emphasis on growth and mortality, the defining traits of early modern cancer had much in common with modern perceptions of the disease as a “ruthless, secret invasion” (Sontag 5). The supposed causes of the disease were radically different, however, in line with the early modern period’s overwhelming reliance on humoral and neo-humoral models of health and illness. Like almost all diseases, cancer was understood as originating from bodily imbalance. The delicate interactions of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm were understood slightly differently by each medical practitioner, but in general, they concurred with

246 Alanna Skuse ancient and medieval authors that cancer was associated with an excess of the “cold and dry, thicke, blacke, sowre” substance of melancholy or black bile (Burton B3). Stagnating in the area of the tumour, or becoming (through bodily heat or combination with yellow bile) burned and “adust,” this humour, benign in its normal state, transformed into the harmful and noxious atra bilis, a process that Ian Moulton’s essay in Chapter Thirteen of this volume explains at greater length, albeit in the context of lovesickness. Although “adustion” was established, however, how exactly atra bilis then created tumours was unclear, as were the mechanisms of malignancy, and it was in these conceptual spaces that the most interesting discourses around cancer emerged. One particularly prominent and abiding discourse shaping cancer was the idea that this was paradigmatically a woman’s disease. Few people denied that it was possible for men to suffer with cancers, and they were recorded as occurring on the face and limbs of both sexes. As the anonymous author of a 1670 medical treatise put it, however, “w[h]ere One has a Cancer in any part besides, Twenty have them in their Breasts” (Account, C4v). For early modern medical practitioners, that sex bias made sense, given that females were believed to be naturally colder and more subject to cancer-causing melancholy humours (see Paster, “Unbearable”). Most practitioners also accepted some degree of connection between the womb and breasts. Given that breast cancer was known to occur most frequently in post-menopausal women, whose menses had stopped, it thus made sense to presume that the superfluous or even feculent matter of the courses was now being diverted to the breast in just the same manner as it was transported and transformed into milk during pregnancy and breastfeeding. French physician Pierre Dionis estimated that “Of twenty Women afflicted with Cancers, fifteen will be found to be aged from forty five to fifty Years, when Nature usually puts a stop to the menstrual Evacuations” (R5; Salmon 258). For its part, the “laxe...glandulous” tissue of the breast sucked up those dangerous substances like a sponge, making the feminine body innately vulnerable to cancerous tumours (Paré Bb3). Moreover, women’s lifestyles, in addition to their troublesome bodies, were often understood to render them susceptible to cancers. Speculation about the factors causing generation of atra bilis was rife. Such factors included relatively benign influences, such as an imbalanced diet, alongside darker suppositions, including ill-effects from maternal nursing (Riolan 98; Wiseman 25–26; Account C3), lack of sex (Dionis R5; Miles 110), venereal disease (Cowper 22–23), and domestic violence (Account C3; Sharp 339; Gendron 38). Sarah Cowper, for example, recorded in her diary entry for February 23, 1700, that “Lady Ang” was considered “like to dy of an Ulcer in her Womb and a Cancer in her Breast both caused by the Barbarous Cruelty of her L[ord]” (Diary 64). Moreover, cancer was occasionally identified as a variety of monstrous pregnancy, with “a certaine beating or pulse” and the ability to appear “sleepe, and as

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it were deade” (Barrough, Z6). In such circumstances, we might speculate that early modern people identified cancer strongly with the female body because of its status as a disease defined by a distorted ability to grow new “life”—in modern terms, promising “death by the means of life, death by reproduction” (Stacey 80). However they came about, it was universally agreed that the growth of cancers was both painful and usually inexorable, in the worst instances ending with an open and stinking cancerous ulcer which was, according to a translation of the Workes of Ambroise Paré, “maligne, rebellious, and untractable,” both “contemning” mild remedies and growing worse with the use of stronger ones (Bb3). Most printed medical texts agreed that cancer was normally incurable, quoting Hippocrates’s Aphorism 6.38 that it was best not to attempt the cure of “secret” (internal) cancers, because one was more likely to cut short the patient’s life than to extend it (quoted in Paré Bb2v). In an effort to palliate the disease or stop it in its earliest stages, diverse kinds of internal medicaments were used to purge or redress the melancholy humours, from cleansing senna, endives and rhubarb, to poisons such as hellebore (Read Z3; Jonstonus C4v; Tanner Iv). Topical ointments could also be employed to soothe or “break” the visible tumour, and strict diets designed to restrain the ferocity of the atra bilis. Ultimately, however, some physicians recognized that the most—perhaps the only—effective cure for cancer was surgery, which, given the disease’s perceived sex bias, usually took the form of the “frightful” ordeal of un-anesthetized mastectomy (Handley F3v). This procedure, so dangerous that the surgeon John Browne declared “you had as well cut your Patients [sic] Throat” as attempt it (G4), had nevertheless been practiced on very rare occasions for several centuries (Demaitre, 630–31). Though difficult to quantify, mastectomy operations seem to have become more frequent over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, with one surgeon declaring in 1703 that “This Cancer, or wolf, cannot be cured any other Way than by extirpating of it” (Moyle C4v). Unsurprisingly, given cancer’s effects, early modern medical and lay writers on the disease universally agreed that it was malign in the fullest sense of that word. In common with modern constructions of the disease as “beastly”—as in the campaigning rhetoric of the Washington, DC cancerawareness group “Kill the Beast” (Kaufman)—cancer’s cruelty was often perceived as purposeful, and this notion was expressed through the attribution of anthropomorphic or, more commonly, zoomorphic qualities. “Fierce and raging” (Paré Bb2v), the disease also appeared “ravenous” (Bonet I3), as the expansion of the tumour and fading away of the sufferer led observers to the intuitive conclusion that the cancer must be, in some sense, eating the patient. We have seen the stress that medical practitioners placed upon karkinos, or crab, as an apposite simile for cancer; many writers, including Dionis, also termed the disease “the Wolf” “because if left to itself, ’twill not quit [patients] ’till it has devoured them” (Dionis R4r–v). Importantly, these

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Figure 15.1 “Elizabeth Hopkins of Oxford, showing a breast with cancer which was removed by Sir William Read. Engraving by M. Burghers, ca. 1700.” Wellcome Library, London.

characterizations were not only figurative, but impacted on medical practice in ways which show them to have blurred the boundaries between what was or was not literally true. Lazarus Riverius, for example, recommended “juyce of River Crabs, injected into the womb” to palliate a uterine cancer by sympathetic cure (Kkk3). Similarly, a recipe from Oswald Gabelkover entitled “For the gnawing Wolfe, or Canker” included powdered “wolvestunge” (H4). Explanations of cancer’s visual likeness to the crab were commonplace, and comparisons to the wolf recurred throughout the early modern period. By far, the most prevalent zoomorphic characterization of cancer, however,

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was that of the worm. Building upon the long-standing tendency to describe cancers as acting like animate, independent creatures, multiple early modern medical texts identified worms as literally present in the body of the cancer sufferer. In one particularly striking example from D. Border’s 1651 Polypharmakos kai Chymistes, the author recounts: A Certain Emperick did help many cancers, in divers people (that were troubled with them) after this manner. He took certain worms, called in latine Centumpedes, in english sows: they are such as lie under old timber, or between the bark and the tres. These he stamped, and strained with ale, and gave the patient to drink thereof morning and evening. This medicine caused many times a certain black bug, or worm to come forth which had many legs, and was quick, and after that the cancer would heal quickly with any convenient medicine. (C3v) The empiric’s claim to have seen an escaping creature was fairly unusual, but many printed medical texts and receipt books contained remedies explicitly designed to “kill the worme” (Sleigh and Whitfield 5; Hughes 55v; Corylon 141v). A particularly notable permutation of this theme was the “meat cure,” in which fresh poultry, veal, or other meats were placed upon a cancerous ulcer, “because, say they, these Worms then feeding on the Veal, leave the Patient at rest for some time” (Dionis, R5; see also Read Z4; Smith D2v, D3; Bonet I3v). Indeed, the currency of the image in popular discourse is demonstrated in John Webster’s 1612 The White Devil, in which Flamineo observes that “like a wolf in a woman’s breast[,] I have been fed with poultry” (5.3.54). Though apparently fanciful, belief in cancer-worms made common sense in the early modern period, in which encounters with bodily parasites of various kinds were “not pathological, or even unusual, but an expected occurrence” (MacInnes 256). Intestinal worms were a widespread problem, particularly in children, and, where wounds were packed with materials including moss and sheep’s wool, many medical practitioners and lay people would have seen a human body teeming with maggots at some point. In part because of these phenomena, it was widely believed for most of the seventeenth century that worms could be generated spontaneously from organic and in particular decaying matter (Cobb, 15, 66, 84–89). Furthermore, the worm had for many years been rhetorically linked with illness and bodily frailty. Classicist Calvert Watkins’s investigation of the wyrm image in proto-linguistics, How to Kill a Dragon, describes the idea of the worm or wyrm as implicated in sickness, and the importance for healing of “slaying” the worm, as “mythographic basic formula[e],” traceable in Proto-IndoEuropean and most of the many language cultures stemming from that root (Watkins, 531, 534). Closer to home, even a cursory look to the King James, Geneva, and Great Bibles reveals numerous instances of the worm as an important creature in

250 Alanna Skuse discourses about sin, guilt, and embodiment (Job 19:26, 7:5, 17:14, 21:26, 24:20; Acts 12:23; Psalms 22:6; Isaiah 14:11, 41:14, 51:8; Mark 9:44). Aside from the obvious role of the serpent or wyrm in the Garden of Eden, worms appear at numerous junctures in both Testaments as natural signs of man’s lowliness, as he is either compared to a worm or reminded that worms eat the corpses of kings and peasants alike. Interestingly, both the King James Bible (1611) and the Geneva Bible (1560) translate Joel 1:4 and 2:25 as featuring a “cankerworm,” a reference that is absent from the same passages of the 1539 Great Bible. In turn, the King James Bible translates as “cankerworm” in Nahum 3:15–16 the pest that appears as “locust” in earlier versions including the Geneva, perhaps indicating a greater investment in that term as time wore on. A reference to cancer as a disease in 2 Timothy 2:17, however, remains stable throughout all three versions, as well as the 1526 Tyndale New Testament. Moreover, by the 1611 publication of the King James Bible, the link among canker, horticultural parasites, and human suffering was well established enough that Nahum 3:15 read: “it [hell] will eat thee up like a cankerworm,” in contrast to previous translations assigning a similar role to locusts. Reminders of human frailty, worms were also regarded throughout the late medieval and early modern period as symbols of conscience that “gnawed” the guilty. Marta Powell Harley’s “Last Things First in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale,” for example, finds the worm to have been “frequently invoked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries...consistently regarded as an agent of severest torture” (Harley 6). Jonathan Wright identifies the worm of conscience as an image used in relation to religious conformism during and after the Reformation, and cites in support John Abernethy’s A Christian and a Heavenly Treatise (1622), which held that “[conscience causes] the heart to be pricked and to smite itself: and like a worm to gnaw the heart, stirring up...fear and our own thoughts to trouble and affray” (Wright 121). Such images attest once again to the capacity of the worm image to cross the literal or figural boundary: from the medieval period into the Restoration and beyond, images of the conscience-worm emphasized the physical as well as mental tortures they inflicted as they gnawed both the souls and “Bowels” of sinners in Hell (Keach line 14). Images of cancer and cancer-worms thus drew together somatic experience, scientific curiosity, biblical tropes, and polemic literature in an eclectic discourse which drew widely from ancient and medieval writings, and remained active throughout the early modern period. Humoral explanations of cancerous disease were advanced alongside descriptions of parasites emerging from ulcers, seemingly without conflict. Scientific notions of the body riddled with worms seemed to accord with Biblical assertions of the same phenomena as characteristic of the human condition. Linking all these discourses was the notion that being consumed by a hostile creature was an appropriate metaphor for the experience of bodily degeneration. Acting upon the mortal or immortal self, “eating” worms also shared a

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certain obscurity over their causes and origins. Whether they gnawed at the vulnerable, “spongy” breast, or at the conscience, it was unclear where and why such worms arose, and whether they constituted a part of the self or an enemy thereto. Like the “inward passions” described by Sontag, early modern cancers were home-grown traitors, turning against the body which inadvertently nurtured them. Medical discourses about cancer and cancer-worms thus exposed an indeterminacy that would prove crucial to Shakespeare’s use of the “canker” image.

SICK ROSES [With cancer] the boundaries between subject and object, self and other, me and not-me are perceived to be murky. Where does one end and the other begin? How can the difference be properly recognised? (Stacey, 78–79) Shakespeare never used “canker” in a way that explicitly denoted a bodily disease, even though he, and his audience, would likely have been aware of the term’s use as such. Indeed, many Shakespearean “cankers,” including that of Sonnet 95, are explicitly positioned as horticultural, a circumstance that has undoubtedly contributed to scholarly readiness to gloss all cankers exclusively in this way. Yet, as I have shown above, “canker” was a loaded term, bringing somatic, medical, and moral resonances to the parasitedamaged rose. Furthermore, it is clear that in Shakespearean texts, the rose operates as a metaphor for the human body to the point where the flower’s afflictions can be translated onto the human subject. In this part, I show how a fuller reading of “canker” coincides with the often-used rose motif to vivify themes of somatic threat, uncertainty, and identity in Sonnet 95 and elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon. The “fragrant rose” of Sonnet 95 not only provided a ready analogy for the love object, but brought with it a certain set of assumptions about that individual. Firstly, the rose-subject might be assumed to be youthful. After all, the image of a canker destroying flowers depended on an image of that flower as budding, its rounded petals promising much whilst concealing the rottenness within. Writing on botanical references in Sonnet 54, for example, Katherine Duncan-Jones identifies the rose in this period as associated “with beauty, charm, inward value” (524). The fresh and potentate bud was also assumed to be fecund and fertile, with the youth’s body imitating the fruitfulness of a healthy plant, as Darlena Ciraulo’s illustrated essay in Chapter Ten of this volume examines at length. Roses, in particular, were used to create culinary delicacies, beauty treatments, and medicaments in early modern England; Nicholas Culpeper lists the numerous medical uses of roses in his 1653 Complete Herbal (233–36). More generally, as Elizabeth Harvey argues, the color and scent of flowers

252 Alanna Skuse proclaimed reproduction as encoded in their form, such that “they come to stand by analogy for a less manifest human sexual and reproductive longing” (321). Where flowers were made symbolically to stand for abstract qualities in the poetic subject—youth, beauty, fecundity—their connotations were invariably positive, making comparison to the “fragrant rose” a compliment (Sonnet 95, line 2). These pleasant associations, however, were shadowed by another set of images correlate to the rose, in which immaterial positive traits were replaced by material, even visceral, comparisons. Not only abstractly fecund, in this discourse, flowers were persistently compared with female reproductive organs, a trope with origins as far back as Hippocrates (Harvey 321). This relationship was arguably a closer one than that of youth or beauty to the rose, given that the form of flowers was believed to physically resemble that of the female genitalia, suggesting to some minds a common blueprint (Toulalan 13). Accordingly, from the medieval period, “flowers” had been common parlance for that most maligned of substances, the menses, whilst to be “deflowered” was to lose one’s virginity. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the first use of the term “flowers” for menses as c.1400, continuing into the eighteenth century, and “deflower” for loss of virginity as first used in 1382 (“deflower, v.”; “flower, n.”). Monica H. Green suggests that the image may be even older. When Orsino observes in Twelfth Night that “women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour” (2.4.37–38), he thus does so advisedly, identifying the correlation between female worth and virginity that collapses women’s value and their maidenhood into one image. Adapting this logic, and subverting associations of beauty, charm, and virginity, prostitutes became known as “roses” from whom a “prick” could bring on the ulcers, or canker-sores, associated with the pox (Toulalan 13). The popular Rose playhouse, at which the Lord Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s Men both played, might have been so named for the prostitutes who frequented that area of Southwark (Toulalan 170). Shakespeare and his audience would likely have recognized that the rose could be read as analogous to the human body in more specific terms than simply shared beauty, and careful reading of the rose image thus invites a bolder textual analysis of “canker.” Mapping the botanical onto the human (in particular, feminine) body meant mapping the flower-eating worm onto that body, too—most prominently onto the reproductive organs which were the most explicit point of comparison with the blooming rose. If one understands the canker-worm solely as a botanical pest, that mapping remains firmly rhetorical, and the threat of the worm-eaten body is a figural rather than literal one. That changes, however, when we consider the existence of the “cancer-worm,” a creature intimately connected with its botanical counterpart and believed to have real, tangible effects on the body. Now, the cankered bloom may be re-presented as not only depicting an individual whose

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reputation or morality are damaged, but as possessing a physical correlate in the body which is literally worm-eaten. Extreme, but nonetheless compelling, an image of the body literally eaten by canker-worms might have appealed to audiences fascinated by the body interior and its dysfunctions. Metaphors or analogies of worms eating the body appear in several of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and in each instance, the image moves between the figural and literal, vivifying abstract phenomena such as dissent or concealment, with appeal to a gruesome physicality. When Henry VI, for example, memorably warns that “Civil dissension is a viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth” (1 Henry VI, 3.1.73–74), a seamless connection between bodies politic and natural implies the imminent breaking out of civil disorder in which the full extent of damage to the commonwealth’s “organs” could be discovered. Similarly, Twelfth Night’s Olivia suffers when she lets “concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud / Feed on her damask cheek” (2.4.110–11). Though the worm is ostensibly a rhetorical one, and the damage to Olivia’s cheek a loss of pallor rather than anything more serious, the image is lent force by the fact that the face was a common site of cancers, where “at length the Flesh and the Bone” were “discover’d and consum’d” (Gendron B8). A “real” eating cancer-worm becomes a possibility, and that thought lends “concealment” the frisson of physical danger. Elsewhere, a similar formula played upon the phallic connotations of the worm as noted by Gordon Williams (1549–51). Long before Marvell’s worms threatened to invade “long preserv’ed Virginity” after death (line 28), The Rape of Lucrece describes that creature as intruding upon the “maiden bud” of the living body (line 899), in a metaphor which drew together horticultural and sexual de-flowerings. Although Sonnet 95 is less explicit regarding the somatic dangers of the canker-worm, there are suggestions in this poem, and in several others referencing “canker,” of a related preoccupation with bodily and material disorder. In Sonnet 95, the “beauty of thy budding name” bears a “spot” incurred by shame (line 3). This “blot,” we are told, is covered by “beauty’s veil” (line 11); however, it clearly remains visible to the poet, who highlights both imperfections by situating this assonant pair at symmetrical points in the sonnet. In keeping with the poem’s themes of uncertainty and the disruption of romantic ideals, these spot and blot marks constitute “matter out of place,” or, as Mary Douglas puts it, dirt, with all the connotations of discordance and disorder she observes as belonging to that substance (44). Furthermore, a look to Shakespeare’s use of the same terms in other texts reveals a persistent, sometimes gruesome, somatic context. Spots, marks, and stains reappear in Sonnets 35 and 70, which, as noted above, similarly utilize “canker” as an image for thinking about identity, love, and disappointment. In the plays and narrative poems, meanwhile, “spots” and “stains” frequently describe not only dirt, but blood marks, and more specifically, the physical traces of sin, whether committed by or against the bloodied subject. Aside from the sonnets, there are 32 references to “spot” or “spotted”

254 Alanna Skuse in Shakespeare’s works, of which thirteen pertain implicitly or explicitly to blood (Macbeth 5.1.26–30; The Rape of Lucrece lines 247, 736, 766, 1102, 1221; Richard III 13.281; Othello 3.3.439, 5.1.37; 1 Henry VI, 3.8.57; King John 4.2.254). Of 45 references to “stain,” 15 describe blood marks. From Desdemona’s strawberry-spotted handkerchief and “lust-stain’d bed” (5.1.37), to Lucrece’s “compelled stain” (line 1759), blood out of place— blood shed involuntarily and messily—appears across the canon as a marker of transgression, as recent monographs by Ariane Balizet and Roland Greene discuss. Iyengar reads blood-stained rags in Shakespeare’s plays as markers of gender transition. That the spots and blots of Sonnet 95 likewise signal a serious and possibly irreparable crossing of moral or physical boundaries is suggested by the narrator’s pointed assertion that they may be obscured— but never removed—by “beauty’s veil.” If spots and stains provide the physical evidence of transgression, they may also signal the nature of that transgression, and give substance to the narrator’s roundabout hint at “lascivious...sport.” Given that “canker” in its medical sense was paradigmatically a female affliction, and that the rose was strongly associated with female bodies and genitalia, the “spot” which the youth brings about might readily be associated with hymeneal or menstrual blood, pointing once again toward sexual misdemeanor and undesirable, “unmanly” incontinence in both body and habits.3 Neither of these associations necessitates a reading of the love object as female; as Gail Kern Paster attests, the somatic disorder which female bleeding implies can be translated back to bleeding men, where it threatens identity and self-determination: The male body, opened and bleeding, can assume the shameful attributes of the incontinent female body as both cause of and justification for its evident vulnerability and defeat. At such moments, the bleeding male’s body comes to differ, shamefully, from itself. (The Body Embarrassed 92) The image of the worm-eaten body that is provoked by the correlation of botanical and human cankers thus opens up a landscape of physical chaos. In this landscape, the interior and exterior of the body are no longer reliably separated. Worms may be generated by, or enter into, the interior, and break out again after they have damaged it. Blood seeps out from the body, from wounds or through the mysterious workings of the genitalia. Such chaos is not merely spectacular, although it serves to add a rich extra layer to the poems’ image-scapes. Rather, as with Olivia’s worm-eaten cheek and Lady Macbeth’s blood-stained hands, physical disorder reflects, in magnified form, the uncertainty which the poet expresses about his poetic subject. How can one bridge the gulf between a beloved who is sweet and beautiful and one who repeatedly betrays and disappoints? “Canker” proves an apposite image for thinking about this question. Its terminological instability mirrors the shifting terms on which the narrator is forced to encounter

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his subject, his own “dear heart” (Sonnet 95, line 13). Moreover, while the exterior of a cankered object may be deceptive, what is really at issue is the nature of interiority. Cankers, human or horticultural, could be simultaneously understood as created by the body and “invading” from the outside; in either case, they were supported and sustained by the thing they would eventually destroy. Likewise, the moral unravelling of the poem’s love object depends, at least in part, upon the poet’s continued willingness to apply “beauty’s veil” to every misdemeanor. For the narrator of Sonnet 95, the dilemma presented by his wayward subject remains unresolved, but “canker” helps to illuminate the degree to which the poet who “tells the story of thy days” is no less culpable than the youth he describes.

CONCLUSION In 1597, as Shakespeare was at the height of his creative powers, Peter Lowe described cancer as “the sore of a beast” (L3r). “[R]ound horrible,” the ulcers created by an advanced cancer were “harde, inequall, sordide, turned over, cavernous, evill favoured...voyding a matter virulent, sanious worse than the venim of beastes” (Aa1). Though it was not recorded as a common cause of death, cancer was undoubtedly established in the early modern imagination as a cruel and morbid disease. From a historical distance, we can see clearly how cancerous disease was constructed in this period by intersecting medical, cultural, religious, and literary discourses. Alongside Sontag and others, one can speculate that modern experiences of cancer are subject to similar mediation, and even bear the traces of these earlier beliefs. Moreover, by attending to ‘canker’ as denoting cancerous as well as horticultural disease in this period, literary scholars and cultural historians can thus read cankerous texts, such as the enigmatic Sonnet 95, as sharpening the imagery of roses and worms with reference to intense corporeal suffering, trading on public fears of a disease with mysterious causes and no effective cure. “Canker” also possessed a deep-seated relationship to femininity, feeding on the sluggish humours which characterized the female body and, perhaps, on the hazards which accompanied social, domestic, and biological womanhood. Most prominently, “canker,” whether in its horticultural or medical sense, possessed a troubling relationship to the thing it consumed, in which it was both created by and hostile to that body. Resolutely eating its way through plant or human flesh, yet a product of imbalanced humours or spontaneous generation, “canker” highlighted a body for which wholeness was a tenuous property, and a healthy carapace only cast into relief an interior which was feeding the “enemy”; for human sufferers, a facet of oneself both unknown and unwanted. This instability at the heart of “canker” makes it a challenging term for scholars of the early modern period, but it also rendered it, for Shakespeare and many other early modern writers not discussed here,

256 Alanna Skuse a useful phrase with which to address anxieties about change, identity, and bodily, emotional, and relational integrity.

NOTES 1. This work was generously supported by the Wellcome Trust [SL-04755]. Quotations from Shakespeare’s works come from The Norton Shakespeare, Works, unless otherwise indicated. 2. On the supposed object of these sonnets, see Hyland 149–50. 3. On early modern beliefs about menstruation, see Crawford.

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16 Afterword Ten Times Happier Katharine A. Craik

The UK’s National Wellbeing Programme was launched on 25 November 2010 by Prime Minister David Cameron. Since April 2011, a series of public consultations have set out to measure “our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life” (Cameron). Following a national debate about the desirability (and impossibility) of taking a nation’s temperature by calibrating the happiness of its citizens, a “wellbeing measurement framework” was finally agreed upon. Known to skeptics as the Happiness Index, the framework attempts to tap into people’s experiences of satisfaction, joy and pride through a series of questions about health, environment, employment, family life, and community. The results comprise the country’s official repository of feelings, and are invaluable—we are assured—as a tool for planning improvements in public health (Randall, Corp, and Self ). Strikingly, in the context of the present volume, Britons’ happiness is today imagined to follow a straightforwardly upward trajectory, for the Index was established (according to its own forthright rubric) to record “how well [we] are growing and changing, in the right direction” (United Kingdom, ONS, “Measuring What Matters” 2). Its aim is to measure not how well we are, in other words, but rather how well we are progressing incrementally towards an imagined ideal future state of health, prosperity, and connectedness. To assess the extent to which we are all moving in the “right direction,” we are invited to consult the colourful Wheel of Wellbeing whose segments each speak to one strand of our “real yearning to belong to something bigger than ourselves” (Cameron). Although the framework was established in order to measure the emotional lives of individuals, its real aim is to bring citizens together in the service of Cameron’s Big Society where each subject’s identity is valued insofar as it is sorted and shared amongst others. Properly matched up, the segments of the wheel represent responsible civic life as a form of habitual epiphany. The copious materials generated by the UK’s Office of National Statistics suggest that the Happiness Index can be maintained only through a very significant annual investment of time and money. It is clear, too, that its results are gloriously manipulable for state purposes. However naive or knowing the enterprise may be, however, the Index provides a useful way to

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address Sujata Iyengar’s challenge, posed in the Introduction to this volume, to put into conversation early modern and postmodern ideas about health and happiness. In the absence of an equivalent early modern Index: how may we understand the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men and women expected, hoped for, or strived towards happiness? It is tempting to suggest that joy could only ever have been fleeting, like the experience of health which Katherine Schaap Williams, in her essay on the mysterious rituals of royal cures, finds emerging only as a “brief equipoise” or temporary cessation of discomfort. After all, early modern Englishmen and women suffered privations unimaginable today—or unimaginable, at least, to the originators of our Happiness Index. As Henry Cuffe makes clear in his book about corruption and finitude in both the cosmos and the natural world, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (1607), mortal life appeared hampered and partial—and joy was not regarded as a proper goal of earthly existence. Life was envisaged as a brief stint to be borne, so that when Cuffe points out that each of us has “a determinate date of endurance which hee cannot pass,” he suggests both that life’s term is limited and that its “toylesomenesse” cannot but be endured (Cuffe B2r–v). Instead of our Wheel of Wellbeing, Cuffe’s readers may have been familiar instead with the Wheel of Fortune, spun by the blind and dispassionate goddess; or may, as Anja Müller suggests, have imagined life’s progress as a double set of stairs to be ascended briefly towards mid-life but—invariably—descended thereafter. Cuffe’s subtitle promises consideration of life’s “Originall causes, [and] Progresse,” but the movement imagined here is not towards the realization of our heart’s desires, nor indeed towards any standardized measure of gladness agreed upon by the state, but rather towards the inevitable “End thereof.” As Ian Frederick Moulton notes in Chapter 13, all natural organisms were understood to contain both life and death—and the progress of the former led inexorably towards the latter. Life emerges not so much as an individual’s struggle towards happiness, but rather as a predicament shared by us all. By way of conclusion to this volume on the various colors of early modern health and happiness, I offer here some brief remarks on Shakespeare’s most fully realized account of life’s brevity, and its connection to real or imagined joy: the Sonnets of 1609. Several essays in this volume have considered how impairment and suffering characterize (and corrode) the lives that are drawn in the Sonnets. Alanna Skuse’s essay in Chapter Fifteen on the metaphorical and medical vocabulary of “canker,” for example, explores the permeable boundaries that emerge here between selves and others, and demonstrates the contested nature of bodily “wholeness.” Other essays consider from different perspectives the fragility of health and happiness, sometimes focusing in particular on the vulnerabilities of men. In Chapter Nine, Catherine E. Doubler’s discussion of 2 Henry IV shows how able-bodied or “gambol masculinity” involves impairment rather than maturity, since Shakespeare’s athletic bodies are touched with deformity and decay. Darlena Ciraulo’s discussion of Romeo and Juliet in Chapter Ten sees Romeo’s

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youth revealing not only his physical preparedness for sexual generation but also the seeds of his own destruction. The young man addressed in the opening sequence of Sonnets, too, is enjoying his “golden time”—but the happiness that the speaker imagines (for the youth, and for himself) is inseparable from the sorrows of adulthood (3.12).1 Insofar as life emerges here as a form of progress, it involves a movement—like that sketched out by Cuffe—towards corruption and decay. But although the “procreation” sonnets contain Shakespeare’s unforgettably rebarbative commentary on the ways in which satisfaction must contain its opposite, they also put forward some suggestion, as we will see, of boundless happiness. Sonnet 6 warns the young man that health and happiness are of limited duration. By way of consolation, the poet proposes that present happiness may multiply by as many times as the youth multiplies himself: Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled: Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place, With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed. That use is not forbidden usury Which happies those that pay the willing loan: That’s for thyself to breed another thee, Or ten times happier be it ten for one. Ten times thyself were happier than thou art If ten of thine ten times refigured thee, Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart, Leaving thee living in posterity? Be not self-willed for thou art much too fair To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir. (Shakespeare B2) Elsewhere in the sequence, the young man is praised because he is unparalleled: “you like none, none you, for constant heart.” There are no others like him—for, as the speaker insists, “you alone are you” (53.14; 84.2). In this sonnet, however, the speaker’s happiness rests upon his plurality and his willingness to “breed another thee”—or (happier still) to bring in “ten for one.” The transition away from summer, and out of youth, involves the imperative to capture “beauty’s treasure” before it is lost forever, and to counter winter’s “ragged hand” by copying oneself tenfold. Maturity emerges as a version of personhood which is plural, or shared—and the more times beauty is multiplied and “refigured” for posterity, the greater the promised happiness. The young man’s renewal is of course at the heart of the opening sequence of sonnets. The very first poem sketches out his “tender heir”; the second describes how a son would prove his “beauty by succession”; and the third imagines how a child would bring about his “fresh repair.” In each case, the poet instructs the youth—sometimes stridently—to counter

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the impoverishments of age by replacing himself: “Make thee another self” (10.13). These instructions look different, however, when placed alongside Cuffe’s description of man’s inherent replaceability: his body being made of the first matter, whose inseparable companion is a desire of change, there must of necessitie follow dissolution; for God and nature (according to our presupposition) doing nothing in vaine, thus insatiable appetite of receiuing newe forms, shall not finally remaine wholly frustrate: if therefore we grant an induction of a new forme, we must withal grant an expulsion of that that before was inherent, for as much as two forms of diuers kindes as vnsufferable together in the same subiect, whereupon doth follow the corruption of the whole compound. (F6) It is in our bodies’ nature to desire change—or, as Cuffe puts it, to indulge their “insatiable appetite” to replace one thing with another. But unlike Shakespeare, who repeatedly berates the young man “that thou no form of thee hath left behind,” Cuffe is not here emphasizing the importance of investing in an “uneared womb” before it is too late (Shakespeare 9.6; 3.5). This passage appears instead as part of Cuffe’s description of the ageing process—or what he calls our “naturall proceeding toward the enemy and end of nature, Death” (B3v). Living involves a constant process of dissolution and regeneration as the body keeps making and “receiuing newe forms.” To keep ageing, we must keep expelling our younger bodies and replacing them with new ones. These new, old bodies cannot live alongside the younger ones they have succeeded, for such diversity would be “vnsufferable.” The former, younger body must instead accede to the older as the whole compound inexorably corrupts. Cuffe’s discussion sheds light on the threatening tone of the opening sequence of sonnets that urge the young man towards fatherhood by taunting him with the cruel knowledge that he is reproducible—and hence expendable: “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another.” The process of forming another involves cheating time by renewing, with a child, life’s “lovely April” long after it has gone (3.1–2 and 10). The youth’s imagined son is fresh, golden, and full of “sweets and beauties.” But this re-forming does not simply involve replacing “hideous night” with “brave day,” or substituting melancholy old age with youthful possibility (12.11 and 2). The happiness promised to fathers by their children looks partial and incomplete—for alongside that promise must come the knowledge that “youth’s proud livery” is always fading to a “tattered weed” (2.3–4). As Cuffe makes clear, “the time that face should form another” is all the time, since our younger adult selves are constantly being replaced by older ones. The process of joyful re-generation through children indeed looks indistinguishable in the Sonnets from this gradual “corruption of the whole compound,” for the poet repeatedly confronts the

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young man with a story of maturity which involves the painful acceptance of his several replaceabilities—by his children, but also by his own everolder selves, “each changing place with that which goes before.” The later sonnets on the young man’s mysterious “shame” and “fault” perhaps suggest something of his resistance to the poet’s version of the truth (60.3; 95.1; 96.1). It has often been noted that the maturity which the poet sketches out for the young man in the “procreation” sonnets looks indistinguishable from the urgent imperative to become a father. Less frequently remarked upon, however, is the fact that fatherhood—like ageing—is marked here as a kind of painful loss. Ariane M. Balizet argues persuasively in Chapter Fourteen of this volume that the joy of breastfeeding a new baby was inextricably linked in the early modern period to grief. Fatherhood, too, seems impossible to separate from death in the Sonnets. The poems are addressed to the young man not only by a friend and lover, but also by one who occasionally himself resembles a “decrepit father,” made lame by fortune, who has already witnessed his own painful succession (37.1). By urging the young man to contemplate how he, too, must be succeeded, the sonneteer confronts him with all the futures he will lose. For although the youth may “now stand... on the top of happy hours,” he must relinquish this blissful state—and become instead something plural (16.5). Presently contracted only to his “own bright eyes,” the young man’s singleness shamefully confounds “the parts that thou shouldst bear,” namely the “mutual ordering” of a family (“sire, and child, and happy mother”). To evade this plurality is to risk disappearing altogether: “Thou single wilt prove none” (1.5; 8.8, 10, 11, and 14). And yet, despite all this, fatherhood does not involve happiness, or even any sort of answer to “Time’s scythe,” for the poet’s insistence that fatherhood entails being continually new made sounds more like a threat than a promise (12.13). The replacements of self necessitated by fatherhood will involve the young man not only ceding place to his son—but also acknowledging, with Cuffe, his perishability in common with all “bodily creatures... that had both beginning with time, and shal haue their end in time” (B4v). If neither adulthood nor fatherhood promise any real reparation, the Sonnets do however sketch a different version of happiness. This is realised not through reproducing (or replacing) oneself with children, nor by quietly accepting one’s inevitable changeability. Insofar as the Sonnets invest in happiness, they celebrate instead the promising person of the child who thrives after the youth’s imagined death, thus “leaving thee living” (6.12). The imagined son need not be succeeded, through the passing of time, by something resembling adulthood. For childhood is not understood privatively in the Sonnets as lacking the tokens of adult maturity such as reason, deliberation, or conscience. Rather than symbolizing an early episode of human development, the child appears instead as a figure for plenty and spontaneity.2 Geoffrey A. Johns’s essay in Chapter Three of this volume explores the ways in which prodigious children exposed the limits of human

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knowledge and experience, disturbing the natural order of things and casting into doubt nature’s “determinate end.” In the Sonnets, children again interrupt life’s forward-tending progress—but do so this time not through fear, or aberrancy, but rather through a strength and intensity that looks something like happiness. Scholarly discussion of children in early modern culture has tended to emphasize their place in larger societal structures, especially the family, thanks in part to the residual suspicion—still lingering from work published in the 1960s—that young children lacked identity because they were regarded as expendable copies of one another or their parents. As Kate Chedgzoy notes, writing about the legacy of the work of Philippe Ariès, whose groundbreaking Centuries of Childhood was published in 1960, “the object of study was in fact not childhood so much as parenthood, for the question of childhood was reduced to one of adult perceptions of children” (Chedgzoy 18). The much-discussed practice of “breeching” at around age seven has lent further weight to the suggestion that boys, in particular, lacked individual agency. In Shakespeare’s plays, young boys appear as both disturbingly precocious and pitifully defenseless: Macduff’s son, for example, who is slaughtered in Act 4 Scene 2 of Macbeth, and Leontes’ son Mamillius, who pines away offstage in The Winter’s Tale. As Chedgzoy remarks, these boys reveal Shakespeare’s recurrent and “deeply ambivalent symbolism of childhood as evocative of vulnerability, innocence, and peril” (19). But childhood stands for something quite different in the Sonnets where the young man’s future son is imagined as self-sufficient and limitless. The satisfaction he represents is not eudaimonia, the wellbeing that emerges from virtuous human flourishing, nor Epicurean happiness, centered around bodily pleasure.3 The joy imagined here arises instead through being freed from the necessity to prepare oneself incrementally “against this coming end”—or, to put it another way, through being irreplaceable (13.3). In this way, the resourceful child trumps the poet’s insistent vocabulary of thrift, wills, legacies, and bequests that suggests that adult life repays—or even resembles—a process of prudent investment, as in Sonnet 4. In a life lived according to one’s future “acceptable audit,” each age must look partial or incomplete because it is succeeded by the next. This view of adulthood as a continual process of auditing is altogether different from childhood, though, where “that beauty which you hold in lease / Find[s] no determination.” Had he a son, all accounting would stop—for the youth could declare, “This fair child of mine / Shall sum my count” (13.5–6; 2.10–11). The youth’s imagined son will capture his “golden time” and keep it forever in “eternal summer.” In him, “truth and beauty shall together thrive,” for the child is the very embodiment of limitless “abundance” (3.12; 18.9; 14.11; 1.7). He is imagined as entirely himself, and entirely present, rather than being encumbered by self-division—or the obligation to cast “new forms” from old that looks central to the poet’s version of mature adulthood. Childhood may have been emerging at the turn of the seventeenth century “as a

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stage of life with its own peculiarities,” as Müller has recently argued (1), but it is not represented as such in the Sonnets. Even though the imagined son is described, from the start, as the young man’s “tender heir,” he challenges the idea that life resembles a series of stages. Freed from “devouring time,” the child looks capable indeed of challenging Cuffe’s assertion that since our bodies’ “inseparable companion is a desire of change, there must of necessitie follow dissolution” (19.1). Or, as Shakespeare puts it in the poem where we began, Sonnet 6, “what could death do” in the presence of a child? The fact that this robustly unchangeable child exists only as part of the young man’s imagined future—or perhaps of the poet’s own remembered past—is at the heart of the “procreation” sonnets’ poignancy and power. The embarrassing rhetoric of the Happiness Index bears no comparison to the extraordinary beauty and complexity of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. But the poet’s shrewd, witty voice nevertheless seems in places to speak satirically against the Index’s strange stridency. If the authors of the Index suppose that life resembles a straightforwardly upward trajectory leading towards the realization of our desires, the sonneteer, too, urges the young man to embrace life as a form of incremental progress, inviting him to ruminate over the man he will become “when thou from youth convertest” (11.4). The Index’s criteria for happiness suggest that we are insufficient citizens if we think and act alone, rather than in the service of the structures that bind us—and the poet, too, insists that the young man must embrace life’s “mutual ordering” (8.10). But the Sonnets also admit that this sketch of happiness as simply accumulative, and culturally consensual, is painfully mistaken. To embrace maturity and fatherhood, it turns out, is to recognise one’s perishability; and in pressing home to the youth that he “among the wastes of time must go,” the poet points up the naiveté of the assumption that life progresses towards an ideal future (12.10). Only the young man’s imagined child experiences a state of blissful singularity, free from the pluralities demanded by adulthood—and removed from the ceaseless imperative to replace himself with someone else. Happiness resides elsewhere: in the energy of children not yet born.

NOTES 1. Quotations from the sonnets are taken from Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609), in consultation with John Kerrigan’s edition, and will henceforth be cited within the text by sonnet number and line. Sonnet 6 is quoted from the 1609 edition, although I have modernized spelling and punctuation. 2. Here, my discussion is indebted to Michael Witmore’s study of Renaissance childhood, especially his consideration of children’s often “seemingly automatic or spontaneous actions” in early modern literature (Witmore 20–57). 3. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s understanding of these terms, see Laam 444.

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WORKS CITED Cameron, David. “Speech on Well-Being.” 25 Nov. 2010. Web. Accessed 6 Aug. 2014. . Chedgzoy, Kate. Introduction. Shakespeare and Childhood. Ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 15–31. Print. Cuffe, Henry. The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life Together with the Originall Causes, Progresse, and End Thereof. London, 1607. Print. Kerrigan, John, ed. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. London: Penguin, 1986. Print. Laam, Kevin. “Shakespeare and Happiness.” Literature Compass 7.6 (2010): 439–51. Web. Accessed 6 Aug. 2014. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00711.x. Moulton, Ian Frederick. “Catching The Plague: Love, Happiness, Health, and Disease in Shakespeare.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 212–22. Print. Müller, Anja. “Childhood in Early Modern Stairs of Life: Envisioning Age Distinctions.” Childhood in the English Renaissance. Ed. Anja Müller. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013. 43–56. Print. Randall, Chris, Ann Corp, and Abigail Self. Measuring National Well-being: Life in the UK, 2014. UK Office of National Statistics. 18 Mar. 2014. Web. 6 Aug. 2014. Shakespeare, William. Sonnets. London: 1609. United Kingdom. Office of National Statistics. Measuring What Matters: National Statistician’s Reflections on the National Debate on Measuring National Wellbeing. July 2011. Web. 6 Aug. 2014.. Witmore, Michael. Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. Print.

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Contributors

Ariane M. Balizet is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s 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). Her research focuses on blood, bodies and gender in the literature of the English Renaissance, as well as Shakespeare and contemporary girlhood. Recent publications include articles on domesticity and violence on the Renaissance stage, representations of Jews in early modern poetry and drama, and television/film adaptations of Shakespeare. She is currently working on a book project entitled “Shakespeare and Girl Culture.” Darlena Ciraulo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. Her research devoted to the ancient romance tradition in Shakespeare has appeared in Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England (Palgrave Macmillan). Her publications on Shakespeare and appropriation have appeared in Philological Quarterly, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and Philosophy and Literature. She is currently working on a book-length project that explores botanical images in Shakespeare’s works, as well as in illustration in nineteenth-century appropriations of Shakespeare. Katharine A. Craik, Reader in Early Modern English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, specializes in Renaissance literature and culture, with particular interests in the history of reading, the history of emotions and the body, and the works of Shakespeare. Her book, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2007), explores the power of literature to affect readers’ minds, bodies and souls. She has contributed an archive of the sources of Ben Jonson’s masques to the electronic edition of The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and recently co-edited (with Tanya Pollard) a collection of essays entitled Shakespearean Sensations: The Experience of Theatre in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013). Amrita Dhar is a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Her Ph.D. dissertation project examines the early modern continuum between sight and blindness in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth

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centuries. Her research interests include Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, and early modern popular culture. She is also an active traveller of mountains, and coordinates the University of Michigan Mountaineering Culture Studies Group. Catherine E. Doubler is an Assistant Director of Academic Advising at Emory University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Emory in 2013. Her dissertation project considers how early modern masculinity was defined against developing notions of disability. Her areas of interest include Shakespeare, gender studies, disability studies, and contemporary artists’ books. Allison P. Hobgood is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She is author of Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2014) and co-editor with David H. Wood of Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Ohio State, 2013). She has published articles in journals such as Shakespeare Bulletin and Disability Studies Quarterly, and recently contributed a chapter on affect and Macbeth for Shakespearean Sensations (Cambridge, 2013). Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, teaches Shakespeare, English Renaissance Literature, and Literature and Medicine. She has published two single-authored monographs, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin-Color in Early Modern England (Penn, 2005) and Shakespeare’s Medical Language (Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries, 2011; 2014). Her articles about early modern bodies have appeared in Shakespeare Survey, ELH, MaRDiE, and several essay collections, including Sensible Flesh (Penn, 2003) and Color-Blind Shakespeare (Routledge, 2006). With Christy Desmet, she co-founded and co-edits the online, multimedia scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Geoffrey A. Johns is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Alma College who specializes in the drama and popular culture of late Medieval and Early Modern England. His areas of interest include gender, social order, transgression, and subjectivity, as well as performance theories and print culture. His current book-project is a study of literal and metaphorical “monsters” in Renaissance texts, including Shakespeare’s Richard III, Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler, and others, as well as the anonymous monstrous birth broadsides of the 16th century, broadside “crime” ballads of the early 17th century, and many other ephemeral prints. Matt Kozusko is Associate Professor of English at Ursinus College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early modern drama. His principal research interest is in Shakespeare and performance. Recent publications include articles in Shakespeare Survey, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Borrowers & Lenders, and an essay collection, Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (co-editor,

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Susquehanna UP, 2010). His edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (New Kittredge Shakespeare) is forthcoming. He is currently working on a monograph about Shakespeare as a redemptive or rehabilitative space in contemporary popular entertainment and imagination. He serves as editor for the Appropriations in Performance part of the journal Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Sonya Freeman Loftis is an Assistant Professor at Morehouse College, where she specializes in Shakespeare and disability studies. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Surrogates (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and her work on drama and disability has appeared in journals such as Disability Studies Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, and The South Atlantic Review. She is currently at work on a second monograph (“The Autistic Text”) forthcoming with Indiana University Press. Ian Frederick Moulton, Professor of English in Arizona State University’s School of Letters and Sciences, is a cultural historian and literary scholar who has published widely on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern European literature. He is the author of Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (Palgrave, 2014) and Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), as well as editor and translator of Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria, an erotic and political dialogue from Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2003). Hillary M. Nunn is Professor of English at The University of Akron. Her research focuses on intersections between Renaissance literary culture and the era’s domestic medical texts and cookery books. She is the author of Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Tragedy in the Early Stuart Era (Ashgate, 2005), as well as “On Vegetating Virgins: Greensickness and the Plant Realm in Early Modern Literature” in the collection The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and “Home Bodies: Matters of Weight in Renaissance Women’s Medical Manuals” in the volume The Body in Medical Culture (SUNY, 2009). Alanna Skuse is a Wellcome Trust scholar at the University of Exeter. She has just completed an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at the University of Exeter entitled “Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England” and is now investigating early modern representations of surgery and surgically altered bodies. Her article, “Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the Social History of Medicine. Nathanial B. Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University. His research explores intersections between gender, humoral medicine, and the reading and reception of late medieval and early modern literature. His work

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Contributors

has appeared in the John Donne Journal and Medievalia et Humanistica, and he recently co-edited a collection of essays, “Teaching Medieval Literature Off the Grid,” for the journal Pedagogy. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Dreams of Influence: Embodied Reading in Chaucer’s Visions and Elizabethan Literature.” Lisa Ulevich is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University, currently completing a dissertation on closure in Renaissance lyric. Her research interests include the poetics of allusion, narrative theory, and the mediation of identity through poetic and other formal structures. Katherine Schaap Williams is Assistant Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research and teaching focuses on early modern English drama, disability studies, and performance theory. Her work has appeared in English Studies and Disability Studies Quarterly. She is currently at work on a book project entitled “Irregular Bodies: Performing Disability on the Early Modern Stage.”

Index

Accommodation 15, 127–31, 133, 136, Adelman, Janet 234, 237 Adolescence, onset of scoliosis in 23; development of reproductive body in 158–72; Ady, Thomas 183, 191 Aftel, Mandy 168, 174 Agency in autism 58–75; as lost 152–3, 265; regained through parody 198, 205, 208, 265 Air 15, 176–192, 199 Albanese, Denise 112, 115, 124 Allen, Amy 223, 237 Americans With Disabilities Act, as Amended (ADA) 127, 140 Anderson, Frank J. 159, 174 Anderson, Linda 78, 91 Annas, Julia 213, 221 Arber, Agnes 159, 162, 174 Ariès, Philippe 225, 237 Aristotle 47, 48, 56, 64, 213, 221 Athleticism 5, 261, 142–155; see also Dance Atkins, Carl D. 244, 256 Atwood, Tony 74 Aune, M. G. 36, 37 Austin, J. L. 16, 195–6, 199, 201–2, 208, 209 Autism 14, 58–75 Bacon, Francis 32, 35–6, 37, 48, 56, 131, 133, 140 Balizet, Ariane M. 16, 223–39, 254, 256, 264 Ball, Philip 197, 209 Bandello, Matteo 220, 221 Barker, Francis 8, 17 Barlow, Frank 97, 106 Baron, William 101, 106 Barrough, Philip 245, 247, 256 Bates, A.W. 50, 57 Bauer, Matthias 176, 185, 188, 191

Baumlin, Tita French 203, 209 Bean, John C. 205, 209 Beauty 86, 170, 206, 217, 242, 252; in flowers 160, 166, 242, 243, 251–55; transmitted to potential offspring 170, 219, 262–65 Beecher, Donald A. 215, 216, 218, 221 Beisly, Sidney 158, 174 Bell, Sandra J. 133, 140 Bellany, Alistair 139n.2, 140, 141 Bencard, Ernst Jonas 168, 175 Bentley, G.E. 140 Bible 80, 249–50, 259 Bicks, Caroline 181, 191 Bird, John 100–3, 106 Bligh, John 67, 74 Blindness 5, 14, 76–92 Bloch, Marc 94, 99, 102, 106n.2 Bloom, Allan 123n.1, 124 Bloom, Harold 111, 123n.1, 124 Bloom, J. Harvey 158, 174 Blount, Thomas 191 Boaistuau, Pierre 44–46, 56n.2, 57 Boas, Marie 159, 174 Bodin, Jean 133, 140 Bonet, Théophile 247, 249, 256 Border, D. 249, 256 Brantley, Ben 34, 37 Breast cancer 241, 246 Breastfeeding 16, 223–239, 246, 264 “Breeching” 181, 265 Brissenden, Alan 152, 155 Brook, Peter 77, 89–90, 91 Browne, John 100, 102, 107 Bruce, Yvonne 71, 74 Buchanan, George 78, 91 Bullein, William 190, 192 Burnett, Daniel 110–112, 124 Burnett, Mark Thornton 29, 37, 78, 91 Burns, John 23, 37 Burns, Margie 206, 209

274

Index

Burrow, Colin 244, 256 Burton, Robert 215, 217, 221, 246, 256 Butler, Judith 8, 16, 17, 195–98, 202–208, 209 Cahill, Patricia A. 150, 155 Calendar of State Papers 139n.2, 140, Cameron, David, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 260, 267 Cancer 240–59 Céard, Jean 46, 48, 57 Chamberlain, John 130, 134, 139n.3, 140 Chambers, E.K. 140n.7 Charnes, Linda 37 Charon, Rita 195, 209 Chedgzoy, Kate 265, 267 Chess, Simone 77, 91 Cheu, Johnson 95, 104, 107 Children as source of immortality and joy 262–66; rearing of 29, 146, 181, 265; feeding in infancy 223–239; legitimate and illegitimate 190–91; monstrous or miraculous birth of 29, 45–6, 50–53; intestinal worms in 249 Ciavolella, Massimo 215–218, 221 Ciraulo, Darlena 15, 16, 17, 158–75, 220, 251, 261 Clark, Stuart A. 5, 18 Clarke, Elizabeth 226, 237 Cleaver, Robert 78–81, 91 Clowes, William 99, 102, 107 Cobb, Matthew 249, 256 Cole, Lucinda 184–45, 192 Coleridge, Peter 2, 18 Comber, A.E. 26, 27, 37 Corylon, (Mrs) 249, 256 Cotta, John 184, 192 Covington, Sarah 240, 241, 256 Cowper, Sarah 246, 256 Craik, Katherine A. 8, 17, 87, 91, 260–67 Crawford, Patricia 224, 227, 228, 237 Crawfurd, Raymond 100, 103, 106, 107 Cressy, David 50, 57, 217, 221 Crocker, Holly 205, 207, 209 Crowley, Robert 80, 91 Culpeper, Nicholas 251, 256 Cuffe, Henry 261–66, 267 Cummings, Brian 103, 107 Cure 27–28, 41, 61, 93–108; see also Health

Dance 137, 142–157, 179–80 Daneau, Lambert 183–84, 192 Daston, Lorraine 36n.2, 37 Davidson, Michael 37n.11 Davies, Surekha 36n.3, 38 Davis, Lennard 2, 18, 28, 34, 38, 135, 140, 143, 156 Dawson, Lesel 174, 214, 215, 216, 221, De Bray, Lys 159, 174 Deformity 10, 143, 144–47, 205, 261 in Richard III 24, 26–28, 30–36, 45, 47–52, 54–56 De Moulin, Daniel 245, 256 Debus, Allen G. 197, 209 Delight 17, 178 Demaitre, Luke 241, 245, 247, 256 Deng, Stephen 96, 106, 107 Dessen, Alan C. 140, 141 Detmer, Emily 204, 209 Deutsch, Helen 25, 36 Dhar, Amrita 14, 76–92 Dinklage, Peter 13, 25, 32–36 Dionis, Pierre 246, 247, 249, 256 Disability; see also Cure, Health, Medicine and “accommodation” 15, 127–36; as impairment 1–4, 6, 9–12, 26–34, 63, 102, 142–151, 155, 177, 188, 261; Embodied Ontology Model of 6, 176–192; Cultural Disabilities Model of 1, 3–4, 8, 34; Interactive Model of 2, 12, 34, 177; Strong Social Model of 1, 2, 3, 177; Medical Model of 1, 2, 12, 24, 25, 26, 28–31, 36,63, 94 Dobrin, Arthur 213, 221 Dod, John 78, 80, 81, 91 Dolan, Frances 203, 209 Donne, John 185, 192 Doubler, Catherine E. 15, 142–157, 261 Douglas, Mary 253, 256 Dowd, Michelle M. 227, 228, 231, 237 Draper, John W. 198, 199, 209 Drouet, Pascale 70, 74 DuBois, Peter 32–36 Du Laurens, André 216, 219, 221 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 251, 257 Edwards, Phillip 191, 192 Elias, Norbert 7, 18 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 15, 44, 93, 99, 100, 102, 159 Ellacombe, Henry N. 158, 174 Entralgo, Pedro Lain 196, 210 Ephraim, Michelle 236, 238

Index Emotion 16, 86, 171, 195–267 and autism 64–65; and resilience 5–7; as basis for beliefs about physiology 48, 87, 128, 178, 184, 190, 241 Erasmus, Desiderius 7, 18 Eudaimonia 6, 13, 213, 265; see also Happiness Evans, G. Blakemore 167, 169, 174 Eyre, Richard 90 Fatness 142, 150–55; and fitness 142–48 Femininity see Sex Ferguson, Susan 240, 257 Ferrand, Jacques 202, 210, 216–19, 221 Ficino, Marsilio 214, 221 Fildes, Valerie 224–28, 238 Findlay, Alison 66, 74 Fitness see Athleticism; see also fatness Fisher, Celia 173, 174 Fleissner, Robert F. 174 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 8, 18, 207 Foucault, Michel 7, 18 Flowers 158–175, 220, 244, 251–52 Frankland, Thomas 135, 140n.5, 141 Furdell, Elizabeth Lane 100, 107 Fusch, Daniel 100, 107 Gabbard, Christopher 6, 18 Gabelkover, Oswald 248, 257 Galen and Galenism 147, 149, 162, 215; see also Paracelsus and Paracelsianism as allopathy 180, 189, 197, 198–207; and “contagion” 177, 182, 184; six “non-naturals” of 12, 176–78; lovesickness in 215–18 Garber, Marjorie 24, 38 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 3, 35, 86, 155 Gendron, Claude Deshaies 246, 253, 257 Gerard, John 11, 159–73 Gilbert, Daniel 6, 18, 233, 238 Gilman, Ernest B. 221, 222 Glass, Ira 120, 124 Goldberg, Jonathan 101, 107, 144, 148, 156 Goodman, Christopher 78, 91 Goodman, Godfrey 132, 141 Gordon, Joanne 195, 202, 210 Gosson, Stephen 200–201, 210 Gouge, William 226–27, 238 Gowland, Angus 257 Graham, Kenneth, J.E. 88, 91

275

Graham, Roger 214, 222 Grant Study of Ageing 6 Gray, Asa 158, 174 Green, André 60, 74 Green, Monica H. 252, 257 Green, Reynolds J. 174 Greenblatt, Stephen 17, 26, 39, 57, 75, 92, 108, 141, 156, 191, 221, 230, 237 Greene, Roland 254, 257 Greensickness 144–45; see also Lovesickness Grey Friars Friary 23, 37 Grief 44, 49, 78, 82, 85, 87, 89, 98, 189–90, 223–239, 264; see also Melancholy, Sorrow Guillemeau, Jacques 225–27, 232, 238 Gurr, Andrew 151 156 Hall, Bert S. 161, 174 Hall, Edward 23, 27, 38, 43, 56 Hall, Jonathan 148, 156 Hammond, Paul 243, 257 Handley, James 247, 257 Happiness 260–67; see also Accommodation; Joy; Delight and child-rearing 30, 49, 221–25, 233; and cure 103, 127–30; and love 212–13, 217; Gross National 17 Happiness Index 17, 260, 261, 266 Happiness studies 6–7 Harley, Marta 250, 257 Harris, Jonathan Gil 97, 107, 146, 156, 178, 192, 240, 241, 257 Harvey, Elizabeth D. 252, 257 Health see also Athleticism, Well-being bodily 6, 28, 43, 120, 130, 176; “fluctuating” 95–98; mental 59–60, 74; public and civic 47, 110–12, 178, 260; royal 100–06, 133; sexual 130, 144, 158–175, 212–222 Healy, Margaret 94, 107, 178, 192 Heiniger, Abigail 66, 74 Heilpern, John 32, 38 Henze, Richard 203, 210 Herbals 159–175, 251 Heteronormativity 181 Heywood, Thomas 200, 210 Hillman, David 8, 18 Hippocrates 145, 178, 192, 196–97, 202, 210, 247, 252 Hobgood, Allison P., 4–5, 8, 13, 18, 23–40, 41, 43, 57, 63, 75, 94 Hobhouse, Penelope 159, 175

276

Index

Hodgdon, Barbara 144, 156 Hoeniger, F. David 96, 106, 107 Holinshed, Raphael 23, 38, 43, 56 Holm, Michael Juul 168, 175 Hopkins, Elizabeth 12, 248 Huet, Marie-Hélène 36, 38 Hughes, Bill 3, 5, 18, 192 Hughes, Sarah 249, 257 Humoralism 12, 15, 16, 29, 94, 154, 177, 226, 245, 250; and accommodation 128, 130–33; in Cymbeline 190; in Hamlet 60–63; in Macbeth 182–85; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 179–80; in The Taming of the Shrew 195–211 Hunt, Maurice 203, 210 Huston, J. Dennis 203, 210 Hyland, Peter 256, 257 Illustration 52, 149, 158–175 Impairment, see Disability Impelluso, Lucia 166, 175 Iyengar, Sujata 1–19, 94, 107, 151, 156, 168, 175, 176–92, 230, 238, 241, 254, 257, 261 James I and VI, King of England and Scotland 93–108, 127–141 Johns, Geoffrey A. 13–14, 41–57, 264 Johnson, Harriet McBryde 2 Jones, Whitney R.D. 162,175 Jonstonus, Joannes 247, 257 Joy 1, 5–7, 17, 223, 224, 235, 236, 260, 261, 265; see also Happiness, Eudaimonia Kaartinen, Marjo 241, 257 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 101–02, 107 Kasper, Anne S. 240, 257 Kaufman, Donna Guin 247, 257 Keach, Benjamin 250, 257 Kemp, William 142–3, 150–55 Kendall, Paul Murray 24, 38 Kerrigan, John 266, 267 Kerwin, William 106, 107 King, Helen 145, 156 King, Margaret L. 224, 238 King’s Evil 93–106 Kingsbury, Melinda Spencer 205, 207, 210 King, Stephen 124n.1 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane 228, 238 Knoppers, Laura Lunger 241, 258 Kostihová, Marcela 37, 38 Kozintsev, Grigori 85, 90, 91

Kozusko, Matt 14, 15, 109–24 Kuper, Ayalet 196, 210 Laam, Kevin 6, 17, 18, 213, 221, 222, 233, 238, 266, 267 Lack, Walter H. 159, 175 Lady Ros see Ros-Lake Affair Lahr, John 32, 38 Landes, Joan B. 36n.2, 38, 241, 258 Laneham, Robert 93, 107 Laqueur, Thomas 8, 18 Leder, Drew 196, 210 Lehner, Ernst 167, 175 Lehner, Johanna 167, 175 Levin, Carole 106, 107 Levine, Laura 201, 210 Levy-Navarro, Elena 148, 149, 156 Lewis, Rhodri 188, 192 Linklater, Richard 124 Linton, Simi 153, 156 Livingston, Carole Rose 56n.3, 57 Lloyd, G.E.R. 178, 192 Lockyer, Roger 141 Lodge, Thomas 183, 192 Loftis, Sonya Freeman 14, 58–75 Long, Zackariah 202, 210 Lovesickness 145, 202, 212–22, 246; see also Melancholy Lund, Mary Ann 221, 222 Lyte, Henry 162, 163, 175 MacInnes, Ian 249, 258 Man, Judith 128, 141 Marchitello, Howard 132, 136, 141 Marvel 24, 45, 50, 53, 57; see also Wonder Marvell, Andrew 253, 258 Masculinity, see Sex Mason, Karen 91, 92 Maxwell, James 101, 107 Mazzio, Carla 8, 18, 176, 191, 192 Maus, Katherine 88, 92 McDonagh, Martin 74, 75 McNulty, Charles 32, 33, 35–36, 38 McRuer, Robert 26, 38 Medicine see also Galen, Humoralism, Paracelsus, Poison, Purgation allopathic 180, 189, 197, 198– 207, 215; folk 217; herbal 173; homeopathic 197, 198, 202–04; narrative 195–96; Shakespeare as 14, 109; Surgical 99, 132, 247 Melancholy 9, 263; see also Grief Hamlet’s 58–64; and cancer 246, 247; and humoralism 198, 200, 201,

Index

277

203, 246; and lovesickness 145, 170, 214–219 Mercuriale, Girolamo 146–47, 156 Metz, Walter 183, 192 Mikesell, Margaret Lael 209, 210 Milburn, Colin 240, 258 Miles, Margaret R. 246, 258 Miller, Ronald J. 60, 66, 75, 84 Miller, Naomi J. 238, 239 Miller, Naomi Yavneh 238, 239 Mitchell, David T. 4, 9, 18, 77, 92 Moen, Kathleen Y. 27, 39 Monstrosity 14, 144; in Richard III 30, 38, 43, 47, 55; in Falstaff 144; in cancer 241 Montrose, Louis 200, 210 More, Sir Thomas 23, 39, 43, 55, 56n.6 Morris, Brian 204, 210 Moulton, Ian Frederick 16, 30, 39, 145, 175, 202, 212–222, 246, 261 Mowat, Barbara 199, 210 Moyle, John 247, 258 Müller, Anja 261, 266, 267 Murray, Stuart 58, 61, 75

229, 231, 232, 235, 238, 241, 246, 254 Paul, Henry N. 96, 97, 107 Pavord, Anna 159, 175 Pechey, John 225, 238 Pelling, Margaret 99, 107, 221, 222 Pender, Stephen 196, 197, 202, 211 Pettigrew, Todd 106n.3, 108 Phillippian, Mardy, Jr. 62, 75 Philippy, Patricia 226, 238 Pickert, Kate 223, 238 Plague 5, 8, 103, 178, 190 used to figure lovesickness 212–222 Plasse, Marie A. 36n.1, 39 Poison 15, 118, 129–36, 168, 173, 188, 203, 204, 212, 220, 247 Ponet, John 78, 92 Pollard, Tanya 8, 87, 91, 132, 141, 198, 200, 211 Porter, Roy 4, 18 Price, Margaret Purgation 127–141; rectally via glister 129, 131; orally 247 Purnis, Jan 198, 211

Nachemson, Alf L. 27, 39 Nation 109–24, 135–36, 241, 260 National Alumni Forum 110, 112, 124 Neely, Carol Thomas 60, 61–62, 75 Neill, Michael 78, 92 Newall, Fiona 225, 227, 228, 238 Newman, Karen 205, 210 Newton, Hannah 29, 39 Nielson, James 156 Nunn, Hillary M. 15, 16, 99, 126–41 Nussbaum, Felicity 25, 36n.2, 38

Quayson, Ato 37, 39

Obsessionality 58–60, 63, 67, 71, 72, 74 Oglivie, Brian W. 163, 175 Olson, Greta 30, 39 Osteen, Mark 60, 61, 75 Pagel, Walter 197, 201, 203, 210 Palmer, Daryl A. 151, 156 Paracelsus and Paracelsianism 178, 184, 195–211 Paré, Ambroise 11, 27, 44, 57, 226, 247, 258 Park, Katharine 36, 37 Parker, Patricia A. 144, 156 Parody 179, 187, 195–211 Paster, Gail Kern 8, 18, 128, 131, 132, 139, 141, 198, 199, 200–201, 205, 206–207, 208, 211, 224, 227, 228,

Rackin, Phyllis 146, 156 Rastell, John 190–91, 192 Read, Alexander 247, 258 Rebhorn, Wayne 196, 211 Reynolds, Gretchen 142, 156 Richards, Judith 102, 106, 108 Riolan, Jean 246, 258 Riverius, Lazarus 248, 258 Rohde, Eleanour Sinclair 158, 159, 160, 163, 175 Rosin, Hanna 223, 238 Ros-Lake affair 15, 128–141 Richard III, King of England historical personage 13, 23–24; character in Shakespeare 11, 23–40, 41–57 Roas, John 26 Rooney, David 37, 39 Rousseau, G.S. 18 Row-Heyveld, Lindsey 39, 62, 64, 75 Rowe, Katherine 8, 18, 207, 211 Rowe, Mary 177, 192 Ryff, Walter Hermann 12 Saccio, Peter 24, 39 Salaman, Redcliffe N. 174n.1, 175 Salmon, Marylynn 246, 258 Sanderson, William 130, 134, 136, 139, 141

278

Index

Sawday, Jonathan 240, 258 Scarry, Elaine 86, 92 Schalkwyk, David 78, 80, 92, 243, 258 Schmidgen, Wolfram 106n.1, 108 Schwyzer, Philip 25, 31, 33, 39 Scoliosis 23, 24, 27 Scot, Reginald 94, 97, 108 Scrofula, see King’s Evil Struma, see King’s Evil Sedlmayr, Gerold 60, 62, 75 Segar, William 128, 141 Selden, John 206, 207, 211 Senior, Jennifer 223, 239 Service 6, 76–92 Sex 125–192; and binary gender 8, 177, 181, 182, 186, 188, 227, 236, 246; and erotic activity 2, 7, 15, 137, 176, 181, 189, 191, 201, 212–222, 240, 243, 253; and masculinity 148, 155, 158–75, 202; and femininity 16, 17, 158–75, 178, 247; and human reproduction 262, 252, 254, 262 Shail, Andrew 258 Shakespeare, Tom 1, 2, 3–4, 12, 34, 177 Shakespeare, William individual works: All’s Well That Ends Well 218, 230; Antony and Cleopatra 15, 176, 178, 186–88; As You Like It 9, 174, 215, 218; Coriolanus 59, 67–73, 224, 230, 234–35; Cymbeline 176, 178, 182, 184, 188–91; Hamlet 14, 15, 59–67, 73, 74, 116–22, 129–37, 187, 218; 1 Henry IV 142, 144, 151; 2 Henry IV 128, 142, 144–49, 151, 153–5, 261; 1 Henry VI 9, 41, 42, 171, 186, 230, 253, 254; 2 Henry VI 41, 42, 44; 3 Henry VI 28, 31, 35, 41, 42, 46–9; King John 254; King Lear 14, 76–92, 127; Love’s Labour’s Lost 151; Macbeth 95–100, 103–107, 110, 176, 178, 182–86, 187, 188, 224, 233–34, 237, 254, 265; Measure for Measure 230; Merchant of Venice 9; The Merry Wives of Windsor 144; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15, 151, 158, 160, 171, 176, 178–88, 214; Much Ado About Nothing 151, 214; Othello 9, 191, 214, 254; The Rape of Lucrece 253, 254; Richard III 11, 13, 14, 23–36, 230, 254; Romeo and Juliet 16, 110, 158–175, 219–21, 224, 231–33, 261; Sonnet 1 264, 265; Sonnet 2 263, 265; Sonnet

3 263, 265; Sonnet 6 260, 261–62, 264, 266; Sonnet 8 264; Sonnet 10 264; Sonnet 11 264, 265, 266; Sonnet 12 263, 264, 266; Sonnet 13 265; Sonnet 14 264, 265; Sonnet 16 264; Sonnet 18, 265; Sonnet 19 266; Sonnet 35 243–44, 253; Sonnet 37 264; Sonnet 60 264; Sonnet 66 10–13; Sonnet 70 243, 253; Sonnet 95 241–42, 251, 255, 264; Sonnet 96 264; The Taming of the Shrew 16, 195–211; The Tempest 44, 97, 182, 183, 187; Titus Andronicus 74; Troilus and Cressida 17; The Two Gentlemen of Verona 9–10; Venus and Adonis 214; The Winter’s Tale 16, 182, 191, 224, 229, 230, 235–37, 265; Twelfth Night 166, 168, 187, 217, 252, 253; programs in prison 114, 115–122 Shannon, Laurie 127, 141; see also Accommodation Shapiro, Michael 202, 211 Shariatmadari, David 23, 39 Sharp, Jane 227, 232, 239, 246, 258 Shimkin, Michael B. 245, 258 Siebers, Tobin 37, 39, 95, 108 Silvette, Herbert 198, 211 Simpson, Claude M., 57 Sinfield, Alan 113–15, 122, 124 Singleton, Annette 175 Skeleton of Richard III, King of England 23–26, 36n.4 Skuse, Alanna 16, 17, 171, 220, 240–259, 261 Slaughter, Anne-Marie 223, 239 Sleigh, Elizabeth 249, 258 Slotkin, Joel Elliot 37n.13, 39 Smith, Amy L. 209n.3, 211 Smith, Bruce R. 8, 19, 146, 157 Smith, Emily Estafani 213, 222 Smith, Henry 226, 239 Smith, John 249, 258 Smith, Nathanial B. 16, 195–211 Snyder, Sharon L. 4, 9, 18, 26, 28, 36, 77, 92 Society “Big” 260; Civil 7, 86, 172, 253 Sontag, Susan 4, 19, 86, 92, 240, 245, 251, 255, 258 Sorrow 1, 170, 185, 190, 224, 230, 234, 262; see also Grief Speech-act theory, see Austin, J.L Spencer, Christopher 108

Index Sport see Athleticism Stacey, Jackie 240, 247, 251, 259 Stagg, Kevin 9, 19, 36, 39 States, Bert O. 98, 108 Stigma 6, 25, 26, 29–32, 34, 62, 153, 240; in botany 158 Stiker, Henri 1, 7, 108 Stimmer, Tobias 11 Stone, Lawrence 225, 239 Stott 166, 175 Strength 10–12, 146–49, see also Athleticism Strier, Richard 78, 92 “Supercrip” stereotype 61, 63 Swain, David W. 234, 239 Swann, Elizabeth 152, 157 Tanner, John 247, 259 Teeth 28–30, 42, 49, 225, 228 Thomas, Keith 106n.1, 108 Thomas, Max W. 151, 157 Thomas, Vivian 175 Thomson, Leslie 140n.6, 141 Theile, Matthew 218, 222 Tilley, Arthur 204, 211 Torrey, Michael 31, 32, 36n.1, 39 Toulalan, Sarah 252, 259 Toulmin, Stephen 196, 211 Tøjner, Poul Erik 168, 175 Traister, Barbara Howard 96, 108 Traub, Valerie 25, 39 Trevor, Douglas 208, 211 Trubowitz, Rachel 224, 226, 228, 239 Turner, David M. 36n.2, 39 Turner, William 12, 162, 163, 175 Tyndale, William 80, 92, 250 Ulevich, Lisa 14, 58–75 Vaillant, George 6 van den Berg, Sara 34. 37 Vaught, Jennifer C. 8, 19 Vendler, Helen 12, 19 Vesalius, Andreas 149–50, 157

279

Vey-Miller, Marguerite M. 60, 66, 75, 84 Vyvyan, John 168, 175 Wack, Mary Frances 215, 222 Walker, Jarrett 67, 75 Wall, Wendy 224, 226, 227, 228, 239 Warren, Roger 189, 192 Watkins, Calvert 249, 259 Watson, Nicholas 177, 192 Watt, Tessa 52, 57 Whitfield, Felicia 249, 258 Weber, Harold 106, 108 Webster, John 249, 259 Weir, Alison 24, 40 Well-being 1, 5–6, 86, 106, 109, 132, 169, 171, 200, 213, 224, 228, 233, 237, 260 Wellness, see Well-being Wendell, Susan 143, 157 Werstine, Paul 199, 210 Wet-nurse, wetnursing, see Breastfeeding Wheatley, Edward 36, 40 Winston, Jessica 29, 40 Williams, Gordon 253, 259 Williams, Katherine Schaap 14, 15, 31–32, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 48, 50, 57, 93–108, 261 Williams, Linda 116, 124 Williams, Spencer 214, 222 Willis, Deborah 94, 100, 106, 108 Wilson, Arthur 101, 108 Wilson, Richard 147, 157 Wiseman, Richard 245, 246, 259 Witmore, Michael 266, 267 Wonder 45, 46, 60, 100; Nine Daies Wonder 142–3, 150–55; “wonder books,” 44 Wood, David Houston 4–5, 8, 25, 94, 107, 154, 157, 175, 200, 211 Woodall, John 99, 108 Woollasten, Victoria 23, 40 Wright, Jonathan 250, 259 Yergeau, Melanie 62, 64, 75