Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance [1 ed.] 3030776174, 9783030776176

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance Edited by Amy Kenny Kaara L. Peterson

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

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

Amy Kenny  •  Kaara L. Peterson Editors

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance

Editors Amy Kenny University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA, USA

Kaara L. Peterson Miami University of Ohio Oxford, OH, USA

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-77617-6    ISBN 978-3-030-77618-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The Artchives / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank everyone at Palgrave who worked on this book for their support and enthusiasm throughout the process. Some of the essays featured in this collection emerged from a Shakespeare Association of America seminar entitled “Performing the Humoral Body” at the Los Angeles conference in 2018. We would like to thank the organizing committee for their support of the seminar.

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Contents

1 Introduction—Everyday Humoralism  1 Amy Kenny and Kaara L. Peterson Part I Performance and Embodiment  11 2 Humoural Versification 13 Robert Stagg 3 Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage 31 Darryl Chalk 4 “Great Annoyance to Their Mindes”: Humours, Intoxication, and Addiction in English Medical and Moral Discourses, 1550–1730 51 David Clemis 5 Performing Pain 69 Michael Schoenfeldt 6 A “Dummy Corpse Full of Bones and Entrails”: Staging Dismemberment in the Early Modern Playhouse 85 Amy Kenny

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Contents

Part II Art and Material Culture 103 7 Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits105 Kaara L. Peterson 8 Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision in As You Like It125 Kimberly Rhodes 9 Humors, Fruit, and Botanical Art in Early Modern England147 Amy L. Tigner 10 The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern English Domestic Tragedy167 Ariane Balizet 11 Afterword—No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a Sigh Is (Not) Just a Sigh189 Gail Kern Paster Index199

Notes on Contributors

Ariane Balizet  is the author of two monographs—Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies (Routledge, 2020) and Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2014)—and many articles on blood, bodies, and domesticity in the literature of the English Renaissance. Her work has been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Women’s Studies, and Borrowers and Lenders, and elsewhere. Darryl Chalk  is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and Treasurer on the Executive Committee of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. He researches medicine, disease, magic, and emotion in Shakespearean drama and early modern theatre. His most recent book is Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage (Palgrave, 2019), a volume of essays co-­ edited with Mary Floyd-Wilson. A monograph, with the working title Pathological Shakespeare: Contagion, Embodiment, and the Early Modern Scientific Imaginary, is currently in progress. David  Clemis is Associate Professor of History at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada. His research focuses on understandings of alcohol intoxication and conceptions of craving, habit, and addiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of “Medical Expertise and the Understandings of Intoxication In Britain, 1660 to 1830,” in Intoxication and Society: Problematic Pleasures (Palgrave, 2013), “The History and Culture of Alcohol and Drinking: 18th ix

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Century” and “The History of Addiction and Alcoholism” in Alcohol: Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives (SAGE, 2015). Amy Kenny  teaches at University of California, Riverside and has a PhD in early modern literature and culture. She has worked as Research Coordinator at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where she was the chief dramaturge for 15 productions and conducted over 80 interviews with actors and directors on architecture, audiences, and performance, as part of an archival resource for future scholarship. She is co-editor of The Hare, a peer-reviewed, on-line academic journal of untimely reviews, on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin, and has published articles on dramaturgy, the performance of laughter, the senses, and disease in Shakespeare. Her first monograph, entitled Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage, was published in 2019. Gail Kern Paster  is Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Editor Emerita of Shakespeare Quarterly. She is the author of The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (University of Georgia, 1986), The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Cornell, 1993), and Humoring the Body: Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage (University of Chicago, 2004). She co-edited Reading the Early Modern Passions (University of Pennsylvania, 2004), and has written many essays on the history of emotion. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow, and a Mellon Fellow. She has served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America and, in 2011, was named to the Queen’s Honours List as Commander of the British Empire. Kaara  L.  Peterson is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. Exploring the intersections of Renaissance medical history, art history, and literature, she has published most recently in English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly and Studies in Philology, focusing on the representations and iconography of virginity and Elizabeth I.  Her other published work appears in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and Mosaic and includes a monograph on early modern literature and popular medicine (Ashgate, 2010), as well as co-edited volumes with Stephanie Moss on the staging of early modern pathology (Ashgate, 2004) and with Deanne Williams on the interdisciplinary “afterlives” of Ophelia (Palgrave, 2012).

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Kimberly  Rhodes is NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Art History at Drew University. She has written extensively on Ophelia and visual culture, most recently for a monograph of contemporary artist Nadja Verena Marcin’s work. Her new research concerns the representation of deer in British art and literature and includes the essay “‘A haunch of a countess’: John Constable and the Deer Park at Helmingham Hall,” published in collection Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2019). Michael Schoenfeldt  is the John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago, 1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999), and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010), as well as editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2006), and John Donne in Context (Cambridge University, 2019). Robert  Stagg is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute and an Associate Senior Member of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Stagg has published essays in Shakespeare Survey, Essays in Criticism, Studies in Philology, and numerous edited collections, and is finishing a book about Shakespeare’s blank verse. Amy L. Tigner  teaches English at the University of Texas, Arlington and writes about early modern food, gardens, and ecological concerns. Her most recent co-edited books include Literature and Food Studies with Allison Carruth (Routledge, 2018) and Culinary Shakespeare with David B. Goldstein (Duquesne, 2017). She is the author of Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (Ashgate, 2012). Tigner is also the founding editor of Early Modern Studies Journal and a founding member of Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), a digital humanities project dedicated to manuscript recipe books.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 9.1

Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas Cecill, c. 1625. © The Trustees of the British Museum 106 Detail from Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas Cecill, c. 1625 © The Trustees of the British Museum 107 “Dangers Averted” Medal, Elizabeth I (1558–1603), CM.YG.1401-R. Attributed to Nicholas Hilliard (1537–1619), c.1588. Gold medal. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 109 Wax seal, The Great Seal of Elizabeth I, 1586–1603, reverse. The National Archives of the UK, ref. SC13/N3 113 Albrecht Dürer, Saint Eustace, c. 1501, engraving, 35 × 25.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1919. www.metmuseum.org 126 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia 1, 1514, engraving, 24 × 18.5 cm., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943, www.metmuseum.org 132 The Legend of St. Eustace, c. 1480, wall painting, Canterbury Cathedral, International Photobank/Alamy Stock Photo 137 Titian, St. Eustace, drawing, 21.6 × 31.6 cm., © The Trustees of the British Museum 140 “The Tradescant Cherry” from The Tradescants’ Orchard, Ashmole MS. 1461, f.25r, with permission from Bodleian Libraries157

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Fig. 9.2 Fig. 10.1

Nathaniel Bacon, Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, c. 1620–25, Tate 159 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games (1560), detail. Image credit: KHM-Museumsverband. Reproduced with permission177

CHAPTER 1

Introduction—Everyday Humoralism Amy Kenny and Kaara L. Peterson

Beneath the laurel-crowned, winged allegory of Melancholy in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia 1 (1514), several objects are strewn about the floor, including carpenter’s tools—a set-square, a plane, and a few scattered nails—along with pincers, a crucible, and a clyster (used to evacuate plethoric humors). This engraving, a focus of Chap. 8 in this volume, prompts the beholder to consider the humorality and lived experience of melancholy by depicting it through a series of symbolic, scientific, and material objects, capturing an arcane symbolism. Dürer asks the viewer to contemplate the multivalent nature of melancholy, not merely imagined as an inward, corporeal state theorized by Galenism, but also as an embodied experience, linked to the natural, mathematical, and scientific phenomena of the early modern world. While an excess of melancholy humor, or black bile, was associated with insanity and a requisite melancholy complexion,

A. Kenny (*) University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. L. Peterson Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_1

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it was also long alleged to be a source of creative genius in the period, a notion the image refers to through its many objects related to intellectual study. By depicting melancholy in this multi-faceted way, the engraving reminds viewers that the medical instruments and carpenter’s tools scattered across the floor at Melancholy’s feet were all linked to the cosmos, humors, and elements in ways that now seem remarkably strange to modern readers. Objects or inanimate things were believed to contain elemental characteristics, not merely metaphorically, but materially within humoral discourse. Seen in this light, Dürer’s famed image partly suggests one of the central premises of this collection that we invite readers to contemplate: the way in which Galenic humoralityin its different expressions and composition finds exemplification in one of the period’s most iconic works of art as well as in many accessory objects and social practices, all more familiar to early modern viewers’ eyes than to ours. It is now well recognized that Galenic humoral theory underpinned early modern medical practices and the maintenance of health, an antique discourse used to describe interiority and emotion: medical practitioners understood “temperament” or psychological and physiological bodily systems according to a subject’s individual balance of four essential humors— yellow bile (or choler), black bile (or melancholy), phlegm, and blood. But beyond this now-familiar early modern medical framework, how were the humors more broadly understood, constructed, and appropriated to elucidate the experiences of daily life and the broader phenomenological world? For instance, how might Galenic humorality be perceived beyond the immediate example of the human body whose fabric we have grown accustomed to seeing as Galenically inflected? How is Galenism understood by early modern individuals as surprisingly constitutive of and manifest within, if latently so, inanimate objects or physical things, both natural (such as fruit or metal) and manufactured (such as a stage property), or even as intrinsic to particular social practices, such as gaming? Beyond the discourse of the traditional Renaissance medical canon, how did early modern humorality materialize in everyday life? How can the humors be understood to lie within the solid matter of Dürer’s many scattered objects, as analogues to metals that grow underground or to the metalwork in which royal portraits are fashioned, or even to underpin the somatic mechanisms of performing verse or breathing? Our collection seeks to address these questions, among others, examining the representation of the humors from less traditional and more abstract, or materialist perspectives, in order to consider more closely the humorality of ordinary,

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even unremarkable objects, activities, and embodied performance in early modernity. While we cannot recreate the actual lived experience of another era, the essays here explore how works of art, theater, and various physical objects from the period communicate the extent to which Galenic humoralism shaped individuals’ understanding of routine encounters. Despite the inherently inward human experience that is the typical focus of most critical scholarship, the diverse set of things featured in this collection— from poetry and drama, to paintings and metallic/medallic images, to botanicals and deer, to toys and games—reveal and interrogate different facets of the quotidian humoral experience of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What unites our collection’s chapters is a recognition that early modern subjects utilize humoral language to articulate a broad range of experiences and matter frequently external to the body’s borders. Of course, as we emphasize above, Dürer’s Melencolia does not allude merely to the melancholy humor in his engraving—a fact established so long ago by Erwin Panofsky as to be a commonplace—but also depicts a veritable catalogue of objects that are equally worthy of note. Taking up this charge, the essays here are concerned more urgently to explore what we might call a broader “catalogue of humorality” that investigates artworks, material culture, and performance in order to uncover the contours of humoral theory in daily life and to render visible the tangible, external markers of this discourse of interiority in new and compelling ways. Accordingly, our title, Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, highlights how our contributors discuss representations of the humors in highly diverse mediums. Although the collection is separated into two parts, “Performance and Embodiment” and “Art and Material Culture,” in order to distinguish how humorality informs cultural practice and embodiment versus its different manifestation as a form of production within material culture, we recognize that the chapters occasionally and productively overlap in focus, complicating the orderly distinctions between or among physical body, material object, and created artwork. As a totality that is also the sum of its disparate parts, then, the collection attempts to explore alternative forms of Galenism or thinking heavily inflected by Galenism, as well as to reveal just how pervasive humoral theory is in early modern England, underpinning even the most unlikely or unusual things.

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We are honored to have Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt among the contributors to the book, for these scholars stand as undisputed giants who have largely established a field of early modern studies, specifically a body of work demonstrating the reach of Galenic humoral theory as well as a focus on how the culture articulates notions of interiority and affect as a means of self-knowledge. Paster’s ground-breaking The Body Embarrassed (1993) and Humoring the Body (2004) consider the portrayal of the humoral body in drama, perhaps most famously identifying the “leaky” female body (a kind of everyday example of Galenic humoralism) and the importance of affect and the “passions” for early modern subjectivity. Another cornerstone of this collection, Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999) examines the pathologizing of inwardness in humoral bodies in early modern writing. Likewise, Mary Floyd-Wilson’s monographs Occult Knowledge, Science and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (2013) and English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003) introduced to many scholars now-familiar concepts of the Galenic “non-naturals” and the humoral-­ climatological basis for constructions of subjectivity and identity. Beyond analysis of the human body alone, in their important contributions to a growing field Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Vin Nardizzi have also explored the vital materiality of things in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015) and The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), inviting scholars to consider the often fluid boundaries among object, the natural environment, and human subject. Our collection extends  but does not repeat this analysis by extending the scope of humorality to a variety of things or natural phenomena that denote a broader application of the Galenic framework in the period. While medical theory was undeniably influenced by Galen, the Hippocratic corpus, and, to a lesser degree, Paracelsus and anatomical discovery throughout the early modern period, there existed a variety of other competing and heterogeneous medical philosophies and practices. Some recent scholarship has suggested an overemphasis on Galenic precepts can produce a reductive approach to thinking about the early modern body, emotions, and spirituality. Works such as Katharine Craik’s collection, Shakespeare and Emotion (2020); Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker’s collection Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (2015); and Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan’s The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2015) have all contributed to discussions of emotion and

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embodiment beyond humorality, showing  in compelling ways that Galenism is not the sole means of articulating embodiment, affect, and emotion in the period. Galenic humoral theory is a stable if not static body of knowledge in the early modern period, however; its dominance may be perceived as a matter of degree. Notions of interiority, physicality, health, and emotion were constantly shifting, as were phenomenologies of the natural world, though Galenism stubbornly resists eclipsing. Our collection seeks to expand on existing critical considerations of how the humors gain representation in highly varied media—within material culture, performance, and other forms of cultural production and activities—without necessarily shifting the dominant medical discourse. Recognizing the contributions of recent scholarship, Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to expand the perspective of everyday humoral experiences and objects or materials to a range of novel focuses. The essays in this collection accordingly do not seek to challenge the dominance of Galenism, rather to supplement the period’s articulation of it as demonstrated more broadly by early modern culture. Ultimately, the volume offers a different account of the significance of Galenism by examining new manifestations of its deployment instead of limiting analysis to the human body alone, though many of our essays necessarily situate the human actor or individual within its physical environment. As most famously outlined by Paster, Galenic models are predicated on the porous nature of the humoral body or “fungibility,” defined by the body’s vulnerability to the surrounding environment, rendering the discourse of physicality as an exploration of the permeable self.1 Paster’s pioneering work sets out how early modern scientific explanations of animals, plants, and human subjects are deeply informed and characterized by humoralism. Describing the “psychophysiological reciprocity” between a subject and the broader world, Paster notes, “the link between inner and outer is often described in the language of the qualities, since the forces of cold, hot, moist, and dry not only determine a individual subject’s characteristic humors and behaviors but also describe the characteristic behaviors of other living things—animate and inanimate.”2 As she makes clear, Galenic classifications of temperament do not simply define human subjects but interpellate the animal and botanical natural worlds. It is these other aspects of the natural world that several of our contributors explore, within two principal areas of investigation outlined below. The first section, “Performance and Embodiment,” contains five essays, each tracing how the humoral body is in fact performative, both on the

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early modern stage and in daily life. The essays in this section are attentive to the affective influence of the humors in embodiment in various contexts, with each tracing the consequences of performing pain, verse, sighs, dismemberment, alcoholism, or the effect of playing a role on the body, including the actor’s interaction with stage properties. Anti-theatrical tracts from the period often bring together criticism on assorted forms of idleness, playing, drinking, and, as will be explored later in Part II, dicing and gaming, suggesting a range of similar deleterious effects of participating in any of these indulgent revelries.3 Robert Stagg’s chapter, “Humoural Versification,” opens the collection by focusing on how rhythms of breathing and heartbeats cultivate a type of humoral versification in performance. His essay examines the pace and pauses that make up the somatic experience of performing verse, with a particular focus on how caesuras and (un)stressed syllables influence the actor’s body on stage. “Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage,” Darryl Chalk’s chapter, takes up a related thread, focusing on the performativity of sighing and considering how the passions were understood in the early modern playhouse. By connecting the somatic mechanism of sighs to their expression of melancholic afflictions, Chalk questions how repetitive sighing might have affected the actor’s body. These questions set the stage for David Clemis’ essay, “‘Great Annoyance to Their Mindes’: Humours, Intoxication, and Addiction in English Medical and Moral Discourses, 1550–1730,” which considers how humoral language defines the morality of intoxication for individuals in the real world. Clemis traces the early modern Galenic understanding of the unified mind and body to explore how alcohol consumption shifted an individual’s humoral balance, temperament, and character. He then turns to an epistemology of drunkenness and demonstrates how the very malleability of the humoral body is at work in notions of addiction and intoxication in the period, given that humoral discourse asserts that the construction of the self lies in the interplay between naturals and non-naturals. Alcohol consumption, Clemis argues, thus acts as a non-natural that results in a state of very real cognitive impairment for the subject. Like Chalk’s and Stagg’s chapters, Schoenfeldt’s “Performing Pain” shows how the rhetoric of inwardness borrowed from humoral discourse can help elucidate the actor’s emotive performance of counterfeiting pain. While pain is invisible, it must be witnessed by theatergoers, Schoenfeldt argues, and therefore is dependent on the audience’s understanding of humoral physiology. The body of the actor, then, is subject to the

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corrosive consequences of im-passioned performance all the while his task is paradoxically duplicitous, to convince the audience of feigned pain’s authenticity. Drawing on Schoenfeldt’s exploration of how actors performed excruciating dismemberment scenes, Amy Kenny’s essay, “‘A dummy corpse full of bones and entrails’: Staging Dismemberment in the Early Modern Playhouse,” shifts the focus from bodies to objects. Her essay traces how the material composition of disarticulated stage properties—wax, blood, animal products, and paint—retained and were imbued with humoral attributes, capable of exerting their influence on the body of the actor performing in the theater. Kenny’s essay bridges the two sections by exploring the humorality of objects within the theater and in performance, laying the groundwork for the second section’s focus on art and material culture. Part I’s survey of the quotidian experiences of drinking, watching a play, and performing pain broadens how Galenic models of affect are constituted outside of but also in relation to the individual body. The collection’s two parts thus move from a more pronounced focus on bodies to things, demonstrating their complex interplay. Part II, “Art and Material Culture,” explores early modern artistic representations and accounts of the relationship between the humors and objects. Attending to the material histories of the humors expressed through things or objects—such as artworks or coins fashioned of metal or mineral paints; the cultural perception of vision construed as “melancholic” or what determines the social practice of consuming and cultivating fruits and flowers; and the potential humoral risk of playing games—this group of essays considers the relationship between the humoral body and the objects that represent or influence it. In the first chapter in this section, “Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits,” Kaara L.  Peterson investigates what she terms “elemental perfection,” or interpreting Queen Elizabeth I’s embodied material flawlessness as akin to “noble” precious metals of gold and silver. Beginning with Elizabeth’s famous speech from the battlefield of Tilbury and an illustration of the scene by Thomas Cecill in which the queen’s “mettle” is conveyed by her metal armor, Peterson examines the queen’s image  in contemporary metallic  portraits, coins, jewels, and badges. Ultimately, the essay offers an alternative to the typical “leaky vessel” discourse about female bodies in the period, instead demonstrating how Elizabeth’s contemporaries perceived her body as elemental, metallic perfection with a “mind of gold” and a “body of brass,” in the Earl of Essex’s phrasing. Her essay offers a more materialist reading, paving the way for deeper explorations of the humoralism that underlies and

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even constitutes individuals’ relationships to other forms of matter or phenomenological experience. Turning to melancholy stags in Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, Kimberly Rhodes’ essay, “Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision in As You Like It,” investigates religious pastoral paintings in her discussion of Jaques’ conversion from melancholic courtier to religious seeker, focusing particularly on St. Eustace as engraved by Albrecht Dürer. Employing the term “melancholic vision” to define the humoral and affective impact of the play, Rhodes explores early modern religious visual culture, particularly the figure of the hunted deer, through the lens of Topsell’s Historie of Four-footed Beasts. If vision itself can be melancholic, then fruit is frequently perceived as humorally suspect. In “Humors, Fruits, and Botanical Art in Early Modern England,” Amy L. Tigner outlines the shift in medical advice about the healthfulness of fruit, from banning fruit consumption in 1569 after the plague to promoting fruit’s salubriousness at the turn of the seventeenth century. Tracing dietary practices and trends in botanical specimen collecting—some also featured in seventeenth-century illustrated books and artworks, including The Tradescants’ Orchard—Chap. 9 argues that reproducing beautiful images of fruit, some paired with portraits of female sitters, helped to alter the perception of the humoral status of fruit in the period. In the final essay, “The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern English Domestic Tragedy,” Ariane Balizet considers early modern domestic tragedies, primarily Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy, alongside the cultural history and visual culture of toys and game play to demonstrate how playing games stimulated the humors and Galenic non-­ naturals. Her reading situates games as instruments with the ability to regulate the humoral body, posing a potential risk to domesticity by threatening to provoke conflict. Through an intersectional approach that locates specific games such as dice and spinning tops within prevailing humoral precepts, Balizet demonstrates the effect of play on the ever-­ fluctuating body and on domestic households and individuals. Balizet’s essay completes the second section, linking materialist and performative understandings of the humors together. The collection concludes with an Afterword from Gail Kern Paster, “No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a Sigh Is (Not) Just a Sigh,” highlighting the implications for the field of the new scholarship offered by our contributors. We are pleased to close the collection with Paster’s perspective, given that her work as a totality has almost single-handedly created the possibility for novel interpretations of

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the humors in early modern culture, demonstrating just how widely construed and pervasive, how urgently resident Galenic humoralism is within visual objects and things. Like Dürer’s Melencolia, the collection is an illustration of the multivalent nature of humoralism that is now largely alien to our modern, subject-oriented ontologies: like Dürer’s famous engraving, our authors also invite readers to extend the view of humorality further beyond traditional limits, locating an everyday humoralism in the quotidian objects that populate the scene of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century English domestic life.

Notes 1. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 133. 2. Paster, Humoring the Body, 19. 3. See, for instance, Northbrooke, Treatise, and Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses.

Bibliography Northbrooke, John. A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes. London, 1577. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomy of Abuses. London, 1583.

PART I

Performance and Embodiment

CHAPTER 2

Humoural Versification Robert Stagg

There are “clichés of rhythm” as well as of speech.1 One of those clichés, at least as old as the nineteenth century, hears blank verse adopting the rhythm of a heart. Thus a popular TED-Ed video purporting to explain “Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter” cutely concludes that “Shakespeare’s most poetic lines don’t just talk about matters of the heart”—wait for it—“They follow its rhythm.”2 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any equation between the heartbeat and metrical beat would have been more difficult to sustain. Contemporary physicians disputed whether the heartbeat and the pulse were synchronous or alternating (Galen, the fons of much Renaissance physiology, reckoned that the pulse was uneven, sometimes beating rapidly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in an unpredictable mixture of the two) which, if transferred by analogy to the metrical, promises something more various than a two-­ tone, de-dum-de-dum prosody.3 Moreover, the heart was generally conceived of less as a pump than as a “fountain, maintaining the vital economy

R. Stagg (*) Shakespeare Institute, Warwickshire, UK University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_2

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of the body” (while being, as today, “the source of desire, volition, truth, understanding”).4 The relationship between heartbeat and metrical beat—“the cardiac connection,” in Alan Holder’s phrase—is rarely conceived the other way around, but if both heart and metre survive on pulse then why should metre not affect the heart too?5 In the manuscript of The Return from Parnassus (c. 1601), Judicio refers to Shakespeare’s “heart-throbbing lines” (2.1.302; “heart-robbing” in the 1606 printed text) as though the lines provoke the heart’s throbbing rather than the heart the lines’ throbbing.6 The heart’s metre, such as it was, might in fact tell us more about the rhythm of the passions than the rhythm of iambic pentameter. As Thomas Wright had it, writing of The Passions of the Mind in General (1601), “All passions may be distinguished by the dilation, enlargement or diffusion of the heart, and the contraction, collection or compression of the same, for (as afterwards shall be declared in all passions) the heart is dilated or coarcted more or less” (that last verb of Wright’s is now medically specific to the heart’s aorta, whereas in 1601 “coarct” could mean more generally “To press or draw together; to compress, constrict, contract, tighten”).7 The distinguishing done by the heart in Wright’s treatise is far from binary or two-tone, despite its culmination in a twofold division between dilation and coarction. Dilation is earlier distinguished from diffusion and contraction from compression, for instance. The heart’s movements are flexible, plural, improvisational, even, as it seeks or happens to record the action of the passions around the body. Where the “pulse” theory of the heart produces a metrical account of verse, straitening it into two discrete stress categories, Wright’s yields something more rhythmic, which is sufficiently protean to work outside a strict metrical time signature or structure. Another popular physiological account of metre figures it as corresponsive with breath or breathing. There is often said to be a natural relationship between iambic pentameter and breath; specifically, that we can comfortably speak an iambic pentameter line with one breath (though the director Tyrone Guthrie thought that actors should be able to manage twelve syllables in one gulp).8 However, this “cliché of rhythm” is also dubious. Given that the alexandrine (twelve-syllable line) is the French equivalent of the iambic pentameter, and is similarly lauded in France as a natural, breathable form, in order to sustain the cliché “we would have to develop a poetics of respiration that has the French breathing less often than the English.”9

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At least the connection between metre and breath has proper sixteenthand seventeenth-century precedent; it is not wholly anachronistic, as metrical accounts of the pulse often are. Verse (as well as prose) punctuation of the period was “a guide to breathing and pausing rather than […] to the syntactical relationship between grammatical clauses,” a notion that is sometimes expressed with the term “rhetorical punctuation” (which risks being misleading, since it implies that early modern punctuation was designed for oratorical performance).10 Thus for Mindele Treip, Milton’s epic similes in Paradise Lost (1667) should be read “as a single, extended verse period, punctuated not grammatically but rhetorically.”11 They should be read by the lungs as much as by the eyes and ears. Grammarians from Francis Clement to Elisha Coles consistently identified the syllable with breath, and Thomas Campion described how “English monosyllables enforce many breathings.”12 Most notably of all, the caesura was routinely described as a “breathing place.”13 Today we think of the caesura as a pause. This need not, of course, mean that every constituent element of the verse simply stops. The pause could be more analogous to a musical rest, where the momentum of the phrase is unabated; pause “does not necessarily imply a cessation of the voice” since the prolongation of a word can constitute a pause.14 Indeed Shakespeare often treats subclause as a type of pause, where his language seems to pause (or brace) against itself. In the manuscript of Sir Thomas More (c. 1596), for example, he writes the words “Alas, alas!” in the middle of a verse line, separating an exasperated ejaculation, “And lead the majesty of law in lyam/To slip him like a hound” (6.136–37), from a new, steadier phrase, “Say now the King” (137).15 “Alas, alas!” appears interlined above a cancelled syllabic equivalent (“saying,” spelled “sayeng” in the manuscript).16 In revising More for publication, Hand C deleted “Alas, alas!”—suspicious of the long line it created but also, perhaps, of the wordy caesura it effected. If the caesura is a pause, whether of cessation or prolongation, it usually allows for the inhalation or exhalation of breath. Richard Mulcaster, the sixteenth-century headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ and St Paul’s schools, taught his pupils how to breathe their way through verse: “Now in the breathing there are three things to be considered, the taking in, the letting out, and the holding in of the breath” (Mulcaster’s vocal coaching helps us to hear how the caesura can also be a pause in breathing, a “holding in,” rather than or as well as a cue for breathing).17 Accounts of the humours or passions conceived of the body not only as permeable by fluid but by “wind,” “spirit,” and “air”—the body was, as

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Helkiah Crooke put it, “Transpirable and Trans-fluxible, that is, so open to the air that it may pass and repass through” it.18 For Crooke, the body’s spirits have a “motion” which is “sudden and momentary like the lightning, which in the twinkling of an eye shooteth through the whole cope of Heaven” or—he swivels about his simile—“they are like the wind which whisks about in every corner and turns the heavy sail of a windmill, yet can we not see that which transports it.”19 “The air works on all men,” Robert Burton writes, “when the humours by the air be stirred, he goes in with them, exagitates our spirits, and vexeth our souls; as the sea waves, so are the spirits and humors in our bodies, tossed with tempestuous winds and storms.”20 The tightenings and loosenings of the heart, by which we might read the body’s humours, are accompanied by the gusting and buffeting of the winds coursing along and within it. While the humoural body is often considered heavy with fluid, groaning under the weight of its accumulated bile and phlegm, needing drainage for precisely this reason, it can also seem remarkably empty, a sort of corridor through which breezes whizz and skim, with those breezes held back and shaped only by the throat and mouth. The throat supplies “the greater or lesser restraining of the air”; the mouth is “vaulted” such “that the air being repercussed, the voice may be sharper.”21 We might, then, think of the caesura as a porous point in the verse—allowing breath to leak out of or be allowed into the line—but also as a vector by which the flow of that breath (or air or spirit or wind) can be controlled and directed; the caesura may therefore work a little like the Tudor surgeon Thomas Vicary’s extraordinary conception of the hair, in which the hair suppresses the body’s vapours lest “the fumosities of the brain might ascend and pass lightlier out” of the leaky bald head.22 The staging of a play depends on “windy suspiration of forced breath” (as Hamlet bitterly describes it (1.2.79)), where the spirits or winds of the body are ostensibly regulated and expelled by the “propulsive force” of the actors’ mouths, throats and lungs.23 Carolyn Sale has described the 1599 Globe Theatre as “a pair of lungs that scatter throughout its environment” the actors’ particular breath, even as it also draws on and allows space for the breathing lungs of its individual audience members.24 Put this way, the experience of a theatre can seem grotesque—even, during a time of airborne pandemic, dangerous—rather than pleasingly collaborative. In any event, if the theatre itself serves as an “instrument” for the breath, or the various breaths of its constituent peoples, then so too does the caesura.25 It structures and moulds the breathy spirits of an actor’s

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utterances, helping to decide (though without absolutely or unilaterally determining) whether those utterances should be sighed or soughed or panted or wheezed or many other things besides. And what happens when the caesura becomes not a “breathing place” but a place where breathing ends? Knowing that she has been poisoned, John Ford’s character Hippolita (in ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, first printed 1633) inhales as much breath as she can over twelve lines, each of which heave with caesura: “Kept promise, (o, my torment) thou this houre/ Had’st dyed Soranzo—heate aboue hell fire—/Yet ere I passe away— Cruell, cruell flames—” (4.1.89–91; G4r in 1633 quarto text).26 These caesuras pant with desperate, expiring life; we can almost hear Hippolita’s breath escaping through the gaps or pores in her verse lines. All the characters in 5.1 of Christopher Marlowe’s (and Thomas Nashe’s?) Dido Queen of Carthage (first printed 1594) can be heard to die upon their caesuras. Dido pivots on a caesura to make an antithesis between “false Aeneas,” who will live, and herself, who will die, so that the caesura becomes her last breath (at least in English): “Liue false Aeneas, truest Dido dyes” (312; G3v in the 1594 quarto text).27 Iarbas follows Dido onto the pyre through her caesura (“Dido, I come to thee, aye me Aeneas” (319; G3v)). Then Anna follows Iarbus: “Now sweet Iarbas stay, I come to thee” (328; G3v). In the 1594 quarto text of the play, quoted here, the caesuras are relatively “lightly pointed”; in a modernised edition, there would in all likelihood be more punctuated caesuras in the lines (though they would still cluster or hinge around the lines’ midpoint).28 These caesuras are the moment at which the play’s characters decide upon death or, alternatively, they are the characters’ last breaths having made their resolution to die. Doctor Faustus’ dying caesura is likewise both a last gasp and a last gasp attempt at salvation: it comes between his final clutchings at the material world (“I’le burne my bookes,” he says, having promised to “breathe a while” (14.120, 118; F3v in the 1604 “A” text; H3v in the 1616 “B” text)) and the ultimate realisation of his demise (“oh, Mephistophilis” (120; “Ile burne my books, ah Mephastophilis” in the 1604 text)). The caesura allows room for a range of tones to mingle—the “oh” or “ah” that breathes out of it, at the last, is an undecidable combination of regret, consummation, release, and surrender. We might think too of how caesura works (or does not work) in “shared lines”—one line spoken by more than one character—which smudge or fudge the point of breathing, in that it becomes more difficult to determine quite where that breathing happens (the verb “shared” does

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insufficient justice to the range of ways in which verse lines can be divided between their speakers). Where is the caesura, the breathing place or places, in these lines? The shared lines of modern-day Shakespeare editions can seem a textual anachronism—following in the metrical footsteps of George Steevens, the eighteenth-century pioneer of the editorial shared line, modern editors can seem to be “making use of what may be called metrical white space” to present a series of fragmentary or short lines as really being part of a whole, “platonic,” perfect pentameter.29 Yet shared lines do appear in a number of Shakespeare’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century texts. Here is how one episode is formatted in the quarto or “history” text of King Lear (1608): Duke.  Great thing of vs forgot, Speake Edmund, whers the king, and whers Cordelia Seest thou this obiect Kent.       The bodies of Gonorill and Kent. Alack why thus.            Regan are brought in. Bast.   Yet Edmund was beloued, The one the other poysoned for my sake, And after slue her selfe.    Duke.  Euen so, couer their faces. (5.3.235–41; Q 3192–99)

The quarto heaves with shared lines, as though every character wants to participate in one (does Kent’s “Alack why thus” share with Albany’s “Seest thou this obiect Kent” or the Bastard’s “Yet Edmund was beloued” or, somehow, both?). Could we imagine these characters stealing breath from one another, or sharing breath in the space of the caesura as the line relays between voices, or simply speaking in order to allow another to breathe? Edmund’s short line—“Yet Edmund was beloued”—could be an answer to Kent’s question (“Alack why thus”), interposed so quickly as to take Kent’s breath away, but it is not framed as such, for it begins in a syntax of self-disputation not conversational response (“Yet Edmund was beloved”). His epiphanic line appears to share more with the action described in the stage direction (“The bodies of Gonorill and Regan are brought in”) than it does with Kent’s question. His line is audaciously shared with Goneril’s and Regan’s corpses, which cannot breathe. But then, as Jean-Thomas Tremblay has put it, “no one is ever just breathing.”30 As printed in a modern Shakespeare edition, the shared line exists both horizontally and vertically. Readers’ eyes will run up and down the page, putting the component elements of the line together, and from gutter to

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margin, reading along the length or duration of the line. The humoural body is oriented more vertically than horizontally, however. For example, Gail Kern Paster opened her germinal 2004 book about the humours with a “surprisingly vivid comparison” towards this point.31 The comparison belongs to Edward Reynolds, specifically his Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640), and it is between the passions of Christ and those of ordinary men: “The Passions of sinfull men are many times like the tossings of the Sea, which bringeth up mire and durt; but the Passions of Christ were like the shaking of pure Water in a cleane Vessell, which though it be thereby troubled, yet it is not fouled at all.”32 One of the striking things about this “anti-Stoic defense of emotion” is its “depth ontology,” the ways in which “The Passions of sinfull men” get “bringeth up” from some undisclosed location beneath.33 The sentence has, Paster notes, a “dense metaphorical layering” and, with it, a syntactical layering that subdues the “mire and durt” of the deep sea in a subclause that itself exists vertically, in grammatical terms, layered as it is beneath the main clause.34 In their myriad imaginings, the humours are frequently subtended by the vertical. Thus, Helkiah Crooke conceives of “the faeculunt excrements” of digestion having “free and direct ascent to the upper parts,” only to be “smothered” downward “in those gulphs of the guts.”35 In fact, the very notion of the humours depends on a “depth model” of somatic truth. It takes the inner meaning of the body, ultimately manifest in its surface symptoms, “to be hidden, repressed […] in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter” (in this case, primarily a physician).36 Thomas Fienus, the Flemish professor of medicine, warned how “the humours and spirits are borne upwards, downwards, within and without” while Thomas Rogers, writing an Anatomy of the Mind (1576), saw a possibility to “subdue” these “coltish affections.”37 It is possible, albeit with some strain, to map or graft this humoral vocabulary onto a more modern sort of (particularly Shakespearean) character criticism. As Lorna Hutson has noted, character criticism (in its more blatant and its more implicit forms) thrives on “the sense of the inner life implied by words like […] ‘depth.’’’38 So: Shakespeare’s characters have a “deeply physical sense of self” (Michael Schoenfeldt), a “deep subjectivity” (Wes Folkerth), and a “depth” which suggests “all sorts of possibilities in them” (Imtiaz Habib), even if those possibilities are—as one of the first, eighteenth-century character critics observed—“those parts of the composition which are inferred only and not directly shown,” lingering

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somewhere below the surface of expression.39 Shakespeare’s characters are routinely figured as both horizontal, “rounded,” and vertical, plunging from surface simplicity to deep complexity.40 They are psychologically or characteristically voluminous, with “Inner selves,” “inwardness” or “an interior space capable of containing a complicated inner self.”41 “[D]epth,” “deep,” and “deeply”—those keywords of character criticism—all rely on a perception of verticality supervened by authorial pressure (early moderns likewise kept the word “character” very “close to its etymological roots: it meant a brand, stamp or other graphic sign,” something authorially pressed or stuffed down into an otherwise “flat” persona).42 We might find one connection between the humours and a particularly twentieth-century character criticism in the earliest phase of Freudian psychoanalysis, as Freud worked out “the corporeal topography of interior and exterior,” yielding a Tiefenpsychologie or “depth psychology” (a term first adopted by Eugen Bleuler and promptly adapted by Freud).43 By the 1920s, Freud was figuring consciousness as “the surface of the mental apparatus; that is, we have ascribed it a function to a system which is spatially the first one reached from the external world—and spatially not only in the functional sense but, on this occasion, also in the sense of anatomical dissection.”44 Both psychoanalysis and character criticism can therefore seem to be modes of humourality in centuries that no longer had a strict positivist use for the humours; they re-purpose the vertical language of humourality to new, but also old, effect. Versification is likewise often a matter of depth, for prosodic lineation has a vertical as well as lateral dimension. We have seen and heard how the caesura figures breath as coming up out of or down into the line. This seems true, too, of prosodic stress, which pressures us to think of “style as though it had an altitude.”45 The sixteenth-century prosodist George Puttenham defined “the sharp accent” as “that which was highest lifted up and most elevated” in the ear; contrarily, “the heavy accent” was that which “seemed to fall down rather than to rise up.”46 Seventeenth-century pedagogues like Charles Hoole and Edward Coote afforded stress a similar verticality, defining it as “the manner of pronouncing a syllable by lifting it up, or letting it down” and “the lifting up of the voice higher in one syllable than in another.”47 Even Derek Attridge, a modern prosodist, who uses the term “beat” rather than the word “stress,” writes of syllables being “promoted” and “demoted,” up and down, in a reader’s ear.48 Both character and stress depend on a sense of virtual space: the depth of a character (or “the psychological depth to which we have given the

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name ‘character’”49) is partly related to the depth of stress rhythm in the lines that they speak—such that when we hear a character talk a verse of incessant binary, of de-dum-de-dum, we tend to find them obvious. Metrical complexity can entail and inculcate other sorts of complexity. For example, when we make our way through one of Shakespeare’s verse lines we are often vibrating between what George T. Wright calls “the marked syllables of the meter [de-dum-de-dum], and the stressed syllables of the line [a more natural or speech-like stress]” (Wright is indebted to Halle and Keyser’s effort “to differentiate actual stressing from the abstract metrical scheme”).50 We sometimes bestow natural or speech stress on a syllable which the metre (in, as it were, official terms) downplays as unstressed. Conversely, the metre sometimes foists emphasis upon a syllable which might otherwise have gone unstressed (and unnoticed). As such, we sometimes feel in Shakespeare’s stresses and unstresses “less the immediacy of statement, and more the preventions that lurk just behind what is being spoken,” a metrical undertone, or what A. D. Nuttall called “undermeaning” and Constantin Stanislavski called “subtext […] the meaning lying underneath the text.”51 This is keenly the case in Hamlet (c.1601), a play of “corporeal inwardness”52 that is busily preoccupied with “The inward service of the mind and soul” (1.3.13). Characters in the drama dwell obsessively upon Hamlet’s interiority, and do so often in terms of depth. Claudius thinks about Hamlet’s “inward man” (2.2.6) and his “deep grief” (4.5.74), Polonius of what exists “Within the centre” of Hamlet (2.2.161). “There’s something in his soul,” reckons Claudius, “O’er which his melancholy sits” (3.1.167–68). For his own person, Hamlet speaks about his “heart’s core” (3.2.71) and his “lowest note” (355). He wants Gertrude to see her “inmost part” (3.4.20) and knows Claudius is deceiving him “as deep as to the lungs” (2.2.577). The play stages its own sorts of depth: the ghost crying from beneath the stage (1.5), the submerged and buried Ophelia (4.7), the gravediggers digging (5.1). Modern productions have laboured to represent Hamlet’s depth with physical space—in the case of Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, almost literally zooming in and out of Hamlet’s head. In 1964 Richard Burton’s Hamlet soliloquised entirely to himself, recessed within the proscenium arch of New  York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, whereas in the next year David Warner’s Hamlet moved to the lip of the Stratford stage and addressed the audience directly—these being dramaturgical manifestations of Hamlet’s psychological amplitude, employing the depth of the set to communicate the depth of the character (an older

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model of locus and platea exists behind the arras of these stagings).53 Yet, as Katherine Maus puts it, “inwardness as it becomes a concern in the theatre is always perforce inwardness displayed: an inwardness, in other words, that has already ceased to exist.”54 Like the humours, the play’s rhetoric of inwardness is strung on a vertical axis; this can help it make audible “the symptomological effects of the humors” as they reach the surface of the verse line.55 To take one example: at the end of 4.4 Hamlet pledges to “spur”—or let “occasions” spur—his otherwise “dull revenge” (31–32). His speech (omitted in the Folio text of the play) ends with a vow promising “fresh determination,” concluding “O, from this time forth/My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth” (64–65).56 In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film adaptation, the line became a yell of resolution as the camera zoomed out to reveal Fortinbras’ vast army massing in the distance. The film’s complementarily swelling music suggests that Hamlet’s newfound bloodiness is a match for Fortinbras’ military clout even as what viewers see before their eyes might insist otherwise. If the speech can be a “striking climax,” it also has “a touch of the claptrap”; David Garrick was unconvinced by its ending, revising the final line of Hamlet’s speech to “My thoughts be bloody all! The hour is come” and then adding another: “I’ll fly my keepers—sweep to my revenge.”57 In most performances of 4.4.65, the first major (or “primary”) stress of the line alights on “bloody” (with a much gentler stress on “thoughts,” this being a moment when an “apparently heavy beat surrenders its metrical precedence to other syllables elsewhere”).58 Such a voicing emphasises Hamlet’s official line, as it were, that his thoughts will be realised in blood and therefore, presumably, in action. Thoughts will turn into bloody deeds. Hamlet figures his bloodiness, or bloody-mindedness, in terms of what Paster has called “Laudable Blood,” a blood awash with benignly energetic “vital spirits.”59 For Ambroise Paré, the royal barber surgeon, this blood “runs forth as it were by leaping, by reason of the vital spirit contained together within it.”60 However, if we exclusively hear the line’s metrical stresses a different Hamlet emerges—or rather, the tentative, vacillating Hamlet of critical legend. When reading only with the metre’s stresses in our ears, we find that emphasis settles not on Hamlet’s promise of action but (once again) on his thoughts: “My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.” Hamlet’s newfound conviction will manifest not (or not so much) in physical action, as we might crave by this late point in this long play, but in a “somatic consciousness,” a kind of deep humoral blood that is by contrast “sluggish” or “inanimate.”61 However humoral

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Hamlet’s thoughts, on this stressing of the line they will scarce translate into deeds. If this is a prosodic slip on Hamlet’s part, like the Freudian parapraxis, it is a confession of his essential inertia, but it is also a humoural exudation or secretion of that which “lies hid” in Shakespeare, where the distinction between marked and stressed syllables can (paradoxically) give voice to impulses which are “not speakable at all.”62 How can an actor perform this moment, or any other moment in which the humoural versification of a text rises closer to the surface? Paster speculates that an actor “can offer the image of an affective and physical control so masterful as to quell, if only for a time, the inner turbulence of his own humorality.”63 The actor thereby manages to have a humour or humours “well within his affective command.”64 This would be near to what Erin Sullivan has called “emotive improvisation,” a happening in which the “radically conflicting paradigms” governing or shaping the understanding of emotion in the period necessitate “a corresponding need” to clarify such emotions “through active and wilful interpretation,” an interpretation that could be a species of performed mastery.65 However, a humoural versification such as Hamlet’s could end up cueing the humours of the actor’s body quite independently of his volition, rather than allowing him to perform such humours with careful supervision or indeed pretence. The humours, after all, were “forces […] at once extremely powerful and actually or potentially beyond our control”; they were “always active, always escaping notice, always exceeding the domain of the will.”66 The same might justly be said for prosody, which through its subtle, insinuating rhythms “could control you without your knowledge.”67 A humoural versification could pose a challenge to an actor’s sense of agency: are these performed humours chosen by the actor or is the actor being acted upon by the verse’s humoural prosody (even if the verse’s “pre-articulate command” is “to act—now—in some definitively undefined new way”68)? And where might this leave a reader or audience member, also exercised upon by the humoural energies of verse? Ultimately, after all, “[t]o be in one’s humor or out of it is not always in a man’s power to decide.”69

Notes 1. The phrase “cliché of rhythm” occurs in Steele, “Boundless Wealth,” 95. 2. Freeman and Taylor, “Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter.” 3. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy, 334–37. See also Galen’s commentary on “The pulse for beginners,” Galen: Selected Works, 327. 4. Erickson, Language of the Heart, 15, 11.

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5. Holder, Rethinking Meter, 126. 6. See MS. V.a.355, f.7r. “Lines” may be singular. In his edition of The Three Parnassus Plays, J. B. Leishman’s note for 2.1.302 indicates that “although the scribe almost never employs the common secretary abbreviations for -es, the tail of his -e here has rather more curl than usual.” In The Returne from Parnassus, this line becomes “His sweeter verse contains hart robbing life,” B3v. In one influential edition, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, the line has become somewhat garbled between manuscript and print copies: “His sweeter verse contains hart [throbbing line],” 2.1.305. Leishman speculates that “hart robbing” may have been the original reading in manuscript (he thinks the Folger manuscript a later, revised copy), as an allusion to Spenser’s Amoretti. 7. Thomas Wright, Passions of the Minde, 24. For “coarct,” see Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v., “coarct.” The question of how typical or atypical Wright was as a writer about the “passions” and “humors” is well treated in Sullivan, “The passions of Thomas Wright,” 25–44. Passions was reprinted in 1604, 1620, 1621, and 1630. 8. Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, 154. 9. Menzer, “Lines,” 128. 10. Rokison, Shakespearean Verse Speaking, 51. 11. Treip, Milton’s Punctuation, 91. 12. Clement, Petty School, 11; Coles, Compleat English Schoolmaster, 108; Campion, Obseruations, B2r. 13. See for example Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 248; Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 163–65. 14. Omond, English Verse, 40. 15. Scene/line references for this play are keyed to Shakespeare, Munday, and Chettle, Sir Thomas More. 16. Harley MS. 7368, f.9r. 17. Mulcaster, Positions, I3v. 18. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 175. 19. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 824. 20. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:237. 21. Robinson, Art of Pronunciation, 13; Read, Manuall of the Anatomy, 261 [mistakenly typeset as 361]. 22. Vicary, Profitable Treatise, C3r. 23. Sale, “Eating Air,” 152. All Shakespeare references, except where otherwise noted, are keyed to The Complete Works. 24. Sale, “Eating Air,” 156. 25. Smith, Acoustic World, 207–8. 26. Modern edition citations of Ford plays are from ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays. 27. Modern edition citations of Marlowe plays are from Complete Plays.

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28. Hammond, “Noisy Comma,” 212. 29. Bertram, White Space in Shakespeare, 29, 26. 30. Tremblay, “Breath,” 96. 31. Paster, Humoring the Body, 1. 32. Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, 49. 33. Paster, Humoring the Body, 2; Miller, Stuff, 50. 34. Paster, Humoring the Body, 2. 35. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 94–95. 36. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 1, 10. 37. Fienus, De viribus imaginationis, 62; Rogers, A philosophical discourse, 63. 38. Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare, 41. 39. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 2; Folkerth, Sound of Shakespeare, 26; Habib, Shakespeare’s Pluralistic Concepts, 71; Morgann, “Essay,” 230. 40. Menzer, “Lines,” 128. 41. Bloom, Shakespeare, 11; Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 36. 42. Williams, Keywords, 240. 43. Hillman, “The Inside Story,” 301. 44. Freud, Ego and the Id, 357. 45. Dolven, “Shakespeare,” 3. Dolven is here referring to the notion of a high, middle, and low style. 46. Puttenham, Art, 168. 47. Hoole, Latin grammar, 270; Coote, English School-Master, 26. 48. See Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 164–72. 49. Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare, 44. 50. George T.  Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 195; Tarlinskja, Shakespeare, 4. 51. Nuttall, New Mimesis, 176; Stanislavski, “Subtext,” 134–38. 52. Hillman, “Visceral Knowledge,” 81. 53. See Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition. 54. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 32. 55. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 6. 56. Kaufman, Elizabethan Introspection, 128. 57. Leggatt, “Standing Back from Tragedy,” 118. 58. Hughes, Winter Pollen, 338. 59. Paster, Body Embarrassed, especially ch. 2. 60. Paré, Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 328. 61. Paster, “Nervous Tension,” 111; Paster, Body Embarrassed, 71. 62. Carlyle, “On Heroes,” 7. 63. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 20. 64. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 20. 65. Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, 1. 66. James, Passion and Action, 11; Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 17.

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67. Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter, 20. 68. Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 134. 69. Paster, Humoring the Body, 241.

Bibliography Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. London: Longman, 1982. Bertram, Paul. White Space in Shakespeare: The Development of the Modern Text. Cleveland: Bellflower Press, 1981. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1999. Branagh, Kenneth, director. Hamlet. Castle Rock Entertainment/Columbia Pictures, 1996. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Vol. 1. Edited by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair. 6 vols. 1621. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000. Campion, Thomas. Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie. London: Richard Field, 1602. Carlyle, Thomas. “On Heroes and Hero Worship.” London, 1840. Quoted in Philip Davis. Shakespeare Thinking. London: Continuum, 2007. Clement, Francis. The Petty School. In Four Tudor Books on Education, edited by Robert Pepper. 1587. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966. Coles, Elisha. The Compleat English Schoolmaster. Edited by R. C. Alston. 1674. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969. Coote, Edward. The English School-Master. London: R. & W. Leybourn, 1656. Crane, Mary Thomas. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Crooke, Helkiah. Microcosmographia. London: William Jaggard, 1615. Dolven, Jeff. “Shakespeare and the Problem of Style.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language, edited by Lynne Magnusson, 3–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Erickson, Robert A. The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Fienus, Thomas. De viribus imaginationis. Louvain: [Daniel Rogers ?], 1608. Folkerth, Wes. The Sound of Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2002. Ford, John. ‘Tis pity she’s a whore. London: Nicholas Okes, 1633. Ford, John. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays. Edited by Marion Lomax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Freeman, David, and Gregory Taylor. “Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter.” TED-Ed. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5lsuyUNu_4

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Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, edited by Angela Richards. 1923. London: Pelican Books, 1984. Galen. Galen: Selected Works. Translated and edited by Peter Singer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Habib, Imtiaz. Shakespeare’s Pluralistic Concepts of Character: A Study in Dramatic Anamorphism. London: Associated University Presses, 1993. Hammond, Anthony. “The Noisy Comma: Searching for the Signal in Renaissance Dramatic Texts.” In Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, edited by Randall McLeod, 203–51. New York: AMS Press, Inc, 1994. Harley MS. 7368. British Library. Hillman, David. “The Inside Story.” In Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, edited by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, 299–324. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hillman, David. “Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 81–106. New York: Routledge, 1997. Holder, Alan. Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line. London: Associated University Presses, 1995. Hoole, Charles. The Latin grammar fitted for the use of schools. London: William Du Gard, 1651. Hughes, Ted. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Edited by William Scammell. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Hutson, Lorna. Circumstantial Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kaufman, Peter Iver. Elizabethan Introspection: Prayer, Despair, and Drama. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Leggatt, Alexander. “Standing Back from Tragedy: Three Detachable Scenes.” In Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes, edited by Grace Ioppolo, 108–11. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Linklater, Kirsten. Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: The Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992. Marlowe, Christopher. The tragicall history of D.  Faustus. London: Valentine Simms, 1604. Marlowe, Christopher. The tragicall history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus. London: John Wright, 1616. Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays. Edited by Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin, 2003. Marlowe, Christopher [and Nashe, Thomas?]. The tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage. London: Joan Orwin, 1594.

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Martin, Meredith. The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Maus, Katherine. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Menzer, Paul. “Lines.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 113–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Morgann, Maurice. An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. In Eighteenth-Century Essays on Shakespeare, edited by David Nichol Smith. 1777. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. MS. V.a.355. Folger Shakespeare Library. Mulcaster, Richard. Positions. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1581. Nuttall, Anthony David. A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Omond, Thomas Stewart. English Verse Structure. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1897. Palfrey, Simon. Doing Shakespeare. London: Arden, 2004. Palfrey, Simon, and Tiffany Stern. Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Paré, Ambroise. The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey. Translated by Thomas Johnson. London: Th. Cotes and R. Young, 1634. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Paster, Gail Kern. “Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 107–25. New  York: Routledge, 1997. The Pilgrimage to Parnassus with The Two Parts of the Return from Parnassus. Edited by W. D. Macray. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886. Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy. Edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn. 1589. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Read, Alexander. The Manuall of the Anatomy. London: R. Bishop, 1642. The Returne from Parnassus: Or The Scourge of Simony. London: George Eld, 1606. Reynolds, Edward. A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man. Edited by Margaret Lee Wiley. 1640. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971. Robinson, Robert. The Art of Pronunciation. London: Nicholas Okes, 1617. Rogers, Thomas. A philosophical discourse, entituled, The anatomie of the minde. London: A. Maunsell, 1576.

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Rokison, Abigail. Shakespearean Verse Speaking: Text and Theatre Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sale, Carolyn E. “Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet’s Theory of Performance.” Renaissance Drama, 35 (2006): 145–68. Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Edited by John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William, Anthony Munday, and Henry Chettle. Sir Thomas More. Edited by John Jowett. London: Arden, 2011. Sidney, Philip. The Defence of Poesy. In Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, 212–25. 1595. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Siraisi, Nancy G. Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities After 1500. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Stanislavski, Constantin. “Subtext.” In An Actor’s Handbook, translated and edited by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, 134–38. London: Methuen Drama, 1990. Steele, Timothy. “Boundless Wealth From A Finite Store: Meter and Grammar.” In After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition, edited by Annie Finch, 89–106. Ashland: Story Line Press, 1999. Sullivan, Erin. Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Sullivan, Erin. “The passions of Thomas Wright.” In The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, 25–44. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Sutton, John. Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Tarlinskja, Marina. Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561–1642. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. The Three Parnassus Plays. Edited by J. B. Leishman. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1949. Treip, Mindele. Milton’s Punctuation and Changing English Usage 1582–1676. London: Methuen, 1970. Tremblay, John Thomas. “Breath: Image and Sound, an Introduction.” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16, no. 2 (2018): 93–97. Vicary, Thomas. A Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Mans Body. London: Henry Bamforde, 1577.

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Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Flamingo, 1983. Wright, George T. Shakespeare’s Metrical Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde. London: Valentine Simmes, 1601.

CHAPTER 3

Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage Darryl Chalk

“Why doe such as are in griefe, and in love, and in anger, sigh very oft?” asks The Problems of Aristotle, the 1595 print version of the popular and widely circulated pseudo-Aristotelian “problemata,” works aimed at answering all manner of questions about topical issues in medicine and natural philosophy.1 The response figures the causality of sighing as the product of a soul and mind so fixated, “turned unto the cause” of the overwhelming passion, that the individual effectively forgets to breathe: The soule then being intentive upon that whither she moveth, doth after a sort neglect & forget to give motive vertue and power unto the muscules of the breast. Therefore the heart not receiving aire by opening of the breast, & by a consequent neither blowing nor cooling, nor yet calling forth by shutting and closing, any sighing superfluities, which are bred of the adustion of bloud, whilest it dooth feare suffocation, the heart, I say, doth force the minde and give her warning, that she would give more motion unto the

D. Chalk (*) University of Southern Queensland, Darling Heights, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_3

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muscules, and cause greater breathing in and out, and that she would take more store of colde ayre, and thrust out more excrements, and that often small breathings woulde performe that that great one may effect. And therefore men of old time, called the word suspirio sighing.2

Sighing is here defined as an involuntary, circumstantial kind of deep breathing. Excessive passion triggers an unconscious suppression of regular “small breathings” which is, in turn, rectified after the heart, in fear of suffocating with humoral “superfluities,” sends an emergency signal, forcing “the minde” to “give more motion” in the form of a sigh. In early modern writing on the humoral body, sighing is an indicator of emotional disturbance and often a symptom of underlying disease. Sighs, sometimes accompanied by groans, sobs, and tears, are also everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. Curiously, they have received almost no attention in scholarship on the passions and early modern theater. References to sighing are often taken as a commonplace rather than as potential cues to embodied action or clues to a character’s emotional state and, yet, sighing had anatomical, humoral, spiritual, and pathological significances in early modern culture. In The Passions of the Soul (1649), René Descartes included sighing, along with “gestures of the eyes and face, changes of colour, tremblings, languishing, swooning, laughter, tears, [and] groans,” as among the nine key exterior signs by which passions occurring in the body could be known to an observer.3 Descartes thus assembles a catalogue of the spontaneous external characteristics of inner perturbations, devoting space to each in turn. Yet many of the symptoms of passionate excess can also be willfully manifested or, of course, performed. Given how much Shakespearean drama is devoted to depicting characters undergoing the emotional ravages of grief, love, and anger, playing surely required the repeated display of such telltale humoral symptoms. This raises a question: What happened to actors’ bodies when they performed the extremes of passionate states on the early modern stage? The ubiquity of sighing provides a particularly interesting test case. As Claudius suggests in Hamlet, “there’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves” (4.1.1), and thus, with such ideas in mind, this chapter explores the representation of sighing on the Shakespearean stage in relation to other early modern writings on this respiratory phenomenon.4 Visceral, vital, non-verbal, and affective, sighing was more than merely metaphorical: its use in Shakespeare often signifies the physicality and theatricality of the passions as necessarily performative phenomena.

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Definitions of the term “sigh” explicitly link this kind of breathing to weighty emotions and the vocalization of such profound feeling. According to the OED, sighing, then as now, is “a sudden, prolonged, deep, and more or less audible respiration, following on a deep-drawn breath, and esp. indicating or expressing dejection, weariness, longing, pain, or relief.”5 The “deep-drawn breath” is here a prelude to the sigh as an “audible respiration” laden with emotional sounding. Early modern lexicons suggest an even greater range of possible meanings. For Thomas Cooper, in his Thesaurus Lingae Romanae et Britannicae (1578), “Suspiro” can be defined as “To sigh” but also “to desire fervently.”6 Sighing is here not merely a vocal after-indicator of emotional breathing; it is the very embodiment of longing. Such possibilities are extended by examples of classical usage and derivative terms. While “Suspiriosus” means “Short winded: that fetcheth breath painefully,” a further application of “Suspiro” is “To sigh for love: by sighing to utter his inward love,” and the list for “Suspirium” includes “To fetche deepe sighes: to sigh from the bottome of ones heart.”7 Sighing as word and act is thus imbued with the affective physiology of the passions. Questions about whether sighing was considered positive or negative, voluntary or involuntary in somatic experience are at issue in its depiction on the early modern stage. Yet period writing on the subject often constructs sighing as a predominantly involuntary process with a variety of causations, purposes, and effects. Descartes suggests that sighing, like weeping, “presupposes sadness,” describing it as an anatomical agitation emerging from tumultuous emotional change. He is at pains, though, to distinguish it from weeping: For whereas a man is excited to Weep, when the lungs are ful of blood; he is incited to sigh when they are almost empty and when some imagination of Hope or Joy opens the Orifice of the venous artery which Sadnesse had contracted; because then the final remainder of blood in the lungs, falling all together into the left side of the heart through this venous artery, and driven on by a Desire to attain this Joy, which at the same time agitates all the muscles of the Diaphragma and breast, the air is suddenly blown through the mouth into the lungs, to fill up the vacant place of the blood. And this is called sighing.8

That sighing functions as a response to a depletion and emptiness in the lungs requiring an urgent, automatic refilling is akin to the earlier

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description of the process in The Problems of Aristotle. It is fascinating, and perhaps telling, however, that it is also bound up with the notion of a sudden imaginative “Desire” to attain “Hope” or “Joy” which forces the muscles of the diaphragm into action to counter the contraction caused by “Sadnesse.” This idea of the body naturally seeking respite, and of sighing as a kind of desire that ultimately provides relief during an abject emotional state, seems to be a recurring idea in early modern accounts of sighing. Thus to Francis Bacon, in Sylva Sylvarum (1627), sighing was the inevitable product of “Griefe and Paine […] caused by the Drawing in of a greater Quantity of Breath to refresh the Heart that laboureth: like a great Draught when one is thirsty. Sobbing is the same Thing stronger.”9 It is thus not as distinct from weeping as Descartes contends, though Bacon sees sighing as part of a continuum of vocal reactions to pain and grief, including “Sobbing,” “Groaning,” “Screaming,” and “Roaring,” all of which are “the Impressions” following that which “The Passions of the Minde, worke upon the Body.”10 In an earlier and more detailed examination of the subject, Timothie Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586) views sighing as intrinsically connected to weeping. The latter is “of all the actions of melancholy” the most “manifold and diverse in partes,” including the fact that it “shaketh the whole chest with sighs, and sobbes.”11 While sighs can happen without weeping and “are ordinarie and common upon causes that force no teares, as every one hath experience,” weeping almost never occurs without sighing.12 Sighs and sobs in this formation are effectively coextensive, “differing onely in that sobbes are sighinges interrupted, and sighs sobbes at large.”13 As with the later examples, this is caused when “the heart is affected in griefe and sorrowe […] the Diaphragme, and the muscles receive a weakenes […] whereby respiration is with more difficultie performed […] which bringeth thereto a kind of suffocation.”14 Sighing becomes the vital remedy to a heart asphyxiating and overwhelmed by increasing heat and coagulating humors: The heart being contracted […] delivereth not so freely his sootie and smokie excrementes, whereby the spirites become impure, and it boyleth with more distemper: which necessitie of fresh spirite and coole ayre enforceth a deeper enlargement of the chest then is ordinarie; in which not onely the midriffe playeth his parte, but outward intercostalls and middle muscles of the ribbes, besides certaine of the shoulders, doe their endeavour to this so necessary an office.15

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The enforced action of the sigh harnesses a significant proportion of the muscles in the upper body, providing cooling air and refreshed spirits to the languishing organ. These extended examinations designate sighing as largely pathological: it is a symptom, something that happens to the body as a sudden, critical, and recurring reaction to a particular humoral overload or extreme emotional state. It is important, however, not to miss the potential salutary power of sighing. Bright also emphasizes that, despite its frequent association with the chronically melancholic, sighing has a positive efficacy: “Sighing hath no other cause of moving then to coole and refresh the hearte, with fresh breath, and pure aire, which is the nourishment and foode of the vitall spirits, besides the cooling which the heart it selfe receiveth thereby.”16 It is the sign of a heart overcharged with heat, and yet the primary function of sighing is to provide cooling relief and potentially renewed equilibrium. It is with such possibility that he ultimately concludes: “It may seeme probable that the sobbing and sighing […] if they be not vehement and long by agitation of the chest expelling of the smothered vapours, and drawing in of fresh aire, geve also some comfort: if they be vehement, then shake they the heart and midriffe too much.”17 Although he warns of their capacity to be dangerously “altered” by “vehement” emotions like the “passion of sorrow,” because they are “actions which are animall, and ly in our power […] to do or not do,” sighing and sobbing could be beneficial if deployed intentionally and temperately.18 In a recent reconsideration of the ubiquity of references to sighs and groans in early modern writing about prayer, Naya Tsentourou has argued against the idea that sighing was only viewed negatively in the early modern mind: “Expelled forcefully from the body’s interior and accompanied by recognizable, yet inarticulate, sounds, sighs and groans are distinctly related to human physiology, blurring the boundaries between involuntary symptom and willful expression and complicating cognitive and sensory experiences.”19 She suggests that sighing should be understood as a literal, rather than merely figurative part of emotional experience at this time. As a fundamental part of religious culture, sighs can more profitably be read both as “corporal signs of passions and contributors to a cognitive strategy actively employed by the subject at prayer to facilitate connection with God.”20 Sighing thus occupies complex somatic and semantic territory: More than mere symptom, sighs could be willfully deployed for positive purpose.

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Despite the range of possibilities presented by sighing as a cultural and medical phenomenon in early modern thought, Shakespeare’s representation of sighing tends to be on the negative end of this spectrum—sighs in his plays are predominantly related to embodied grief, pain, or disease. Falstaff attests to this with his dismissive “A plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder” (1 Henry IV, 2.5.304–5). So too the grieving Soldier in Henry VI, Part 3 promises his fallen son that “My sighing breast shall be thy funeral bell” (2.5.117). In the famous sleepwalking scene of Macbeth, though the Doctor ultimately fails to adequately diagnose her “great perturbation” (5.1.8), Lady Macbeth’s cries of “O, O, O!” suggest to him that she is suffering from a swollen and over-heated heart: “What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged” (43–44). Characters often refer to the commonplace idea that each sigh drew forth drops of blood from the heart and could cause pale complexions or even shorten one’s life. Hence Queen Margaret’s rhetorical flourish about “blood-consuming sighs” and “blood-drinking sighs” that would make her look “pale as primrose” (Henry VI, Part 2, 3.2.61–3), or Hero’s mocking suggestion to “let Benedick, like covered fire,/Consume away in sighs, waste inwardly” (Much Ado About Nothing, 3.1.77–8). But it is as an emblem of pathological love that sighing recurs most frequently in Shakespeare. In As You Like It, for example, the lover enters Jaques’ stage-play world “sighing like furnace” (2.7.147), and Rosalind declares that “there is no true lover in the forest, else” the time would be confirmed by their “sighing every minute and groaning every hour” (3.2.273). Such conventional associations of love and sighing are a prelude to the lovesickness subplot that has Silvius plead with Phoebe in terms that recall sighing’s wasting power: “Will you sterner be/Than he that dies and lives by bloody drops?” (3.5.6–7). Later, the smitten Silvius will confirm that “To love is to be all made of sighs and tears” (5.2.73–74). However, sighing here is more than metaphorical, and we get a glimpse of the probable performance of Silvius’ sighs and tears when Rosalind describes his amorous dotage as an actual physiological trait: “You, foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her/ Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain?” (3.5.51–52). Rosalind thus also links the tumultuous humors coursing through Silvius’ body to the premodern notion that the passions are like winds in the body. The distinctly misty respirations of the lover’s body in As You Like It are further suggestive of sighing’s connection to ecological and meteorological ideas, as breath both absorbs and interacts with the surrounding

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environment. In Cooper’s definition of sighing, a further application of “Suspiro” is “Suspirare nebulas. To caste up great vapours.”21 Silvius’ windy suspiration, like “foggy south,” makes his lovesickness the embodiment of the south wind. In premodern thought, according to Shigehisa Kuriyama, wind from the south was “warm and moist” (in opposition to the more “healthful” and dry north wind) and was associated with “cloudiness,” indolence, “putrefaction,” and bringing “pestilence.”22 Sighing occurs because the spirits in the heart and lungs are in dire need of refreshing; thus deeper breaths help both expel putrefying moist vapors and (temporarily at least) replace it with cooler, drier air. In Cooper’s Thesaurus, “Spiritus” means both “breath” and “winde,” and, as one example indicates, “Breath, or sighing deeply set.”23 The permeable, respirating body shared spiritus or pneuma with the environment as all-encompassing elements: taken into the body from outside as air, transformed inside the body as breath, wind is the flow between inner and outer.24 But this movement of air and spirits was also permeated by the passions themselves, becoming “part of the stuff of consciousness,” as Gail Kern Paster has put it.25 This idea has been further articulated by Elizabeth D. Harvey who suggests that The currency between inner and outer air was […] marked by its passion; far from being a neutral interchange, circulation both within the corporeal system and at the interface of the body’s inside and outside was emotionally inflected by spirits that were themselves already imbued with motivation and desire.26

Sighing’s emotional respiration generates a peculiarly intense circulation of “spiritus” that is frequently related to weather effects in Shakespeare’s plays. In The Tempest, where stormy weather and tumultuous passions are often literally conjoined, Prospero recollects the wretched tale of his banishment with the infant Miranda from Milan by boat, “a rotten carcass of a butt” (1.2.146), in just such terms: There they hoist us, To cry to th’ sea that roared to us, to sigh To th’winds, whose pity, sighing back again, Did us but loving wrong. (148–51)

Prospero, overcome with grief, with tears so abundant that they adorn even “the sea with drops full salt,” is sustained “to bear up/Against what would ensue” by the smiles of his “cherubin” daughter (155, 157–58,

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152). As Harvey succinctly reads these passages, “Prospero and Miranda’s sighs fuse them together in non-verbal articulations of woe and breath, even as their human expressions of grief link them to the empathic wind.”27 The link between sighing and empathic emotional exchange carries through to the courtship of Miranda and Ferdinand, who immediately fall for each other: “At the first sight/They have changed eyes” (444–45). The smitten Miranda, disturbed by her father’s stern reaction, proclaims Ferdinand “the first [man]/That e’er I sighed for. Pity move my father/ To be inclined my way” (449–51). In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo’s solitary pining for Rosaline is marked by persistent sighing that is similarly associated with meteorological affect. Spotted in the “grove of sycamore” (because he is sick-amore), he has been regularly moping there, “With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew/Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs” (1.1.125–26). Romeo’s lovelorn vaporous sighs proliferate clouds and an ecological view of his grief also permeates his self-diagnosis: Love is a smoke made of a fume of sighs, Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears. (183–85)

Later, Mercutio’s satirical conjuration constructs the absent Romeo as made entirely of passionate exhalations: “Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover! Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh” (2.1.7–8). In transferring his fancy to Juliet, the “new infection” to his “eye” (1.2.47), Romeo’s puffing demeanor seems the one constant, as the Friar teases: “The sun not yet thy sighs from heaven clears./The old groans yet ring in mine ancient ears” (2.2.73–74). The infatuated young lovers exchange blood-sapping sighs. Juliet laments that Romeo “look’st pale,” to which he counters, “And trust me, love, in my eye so do you./Dry sorrow drinks our blood” (3.5.57–59). Later, when Capulet confronts his distraught, greensick daughter, she becomes an ocean of passionate turmoil: How now, a conduit, girl? What, still in tears? Evermore show’ring? In one little body Thou counterfeit’st a barque, a sea, a wind, For still thy eyes—which I may call the sea— Do ebb and flow with tears. The barque thy body is,

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Sailing in this salt flood; the winds thy sighs, Who, raging with thy tears and they with them, Without sudden calm will overset Thy tempest-tossèd body. (3.5.129–37)

It is a vivid description, potentially hinting at the performance of real humoral states on the Shakespearean stage. Juliet’s body is a ship in tempestuous waters, a “sea” formed by a “salt flood” of “tears,” its sails driven by the “raging” winds of her “sighs.” The language strikingly recalls Levinus Lemnius’ warning in The Touchstone of Complexions (1576) that if the delicate humoral accord of the body and mind are not well attended, “we are haled, and (will wee, nill wee) throwen into sondrye diseases and innumerable affections, and (like a shippe ful fraight with wares in tempestuous and boisterous weather) caryed and dashed uppon the rocks of perturbation.”28 Finally, in perhaps the ultimate display of love’s pathological status in Shakespeare, the veritable lovesickness epidemic in Love’s Labour’s Lost is presided over by “Cupid/Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,/ Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans” (4.1.165–67). In the same speech, declaring his love for (another) Rosaline, Biron again invokes sighing: And I to sigh for her, to watch for her, To pray for her—go to, it is a plague That Cupid will impose for my neglect Of his almighty dreadful little might. Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, groan. (185–89)

Collectively, these examples suggest that sighing is not only the sine qua non of falling in love in Shakespeare, but also the near-ubiquitous involuntary symptom of when sudden (especially unrequited) amorous feelings are revealed as a contaminating infection—lovesickness, “a plague/That Cupid will impose.” Love melancholy was often presented in this period as a serious and potentially fatal illness, and sighing was understood as one its most recognizable symptoms.29 Pierre Boaistuau’s Theatrum Mundi, The Theator or Rule of the World, first printed and translated into English in 1566, includes in its catalogue of “wonderfull examples, learned devices, to the overthrowe of vice, and exalting of virtue,” an extended invective against the

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“affliction of the spirite […] which is named Love.”30 For Boaistuau, love is so virulent, so endemic a condition that he declares it should be “counted among the most grievous maladies” threatening contemporary life in the sixteenth century, “so contagious that al the estates of the worlde doe feele it, an evil so pestilent and venemous, that it plungeth and intermedleth among all ages indifferently.”31 He clearly sees this amorous epidemic as a kind of medical crisis, with love as a specifically curable disease and not merely an errant passion, for the infected “become mad and out of their wits, if they be not wel treated and medcined at the first.”32 Treating it as a contagious disease that can be transmitted by “vapours invisible” from the eye of the beloved to the eye of the victim, he attests to its powerful transformative capacity on the lovesick individual, averring “that [you] never sawe a more straunger Metamorphosi[s], or spectacle more ridiculous, sodenlye you shall see them drowned in teares, making the aire to sounde with their cries, sighes, plaints, murmurings, and imprecations.”33 Similarly, Nicolas Coeffeteau, in A Table of Humane Passions (1621), describes lovesickness as a form of ravishment with like transformative effects on the afflicted since it corrupts and consumes “the whole bloud, makes the face grow pale & wane, causeth the trembling of the heart, breeds strange convulsions, and retires the spirits in such sort, as he seemes rather an image of death, then a living creature. These accidents are followed with passionate and heart-breaking sighes.”34 In his treatise on melancholy (appended to A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, (1599)), André Du Laurens sees sighing as a standard symptom of all melancholic afflictions but positions it as a particular feature of erotic melancholy. He suggests that the “silly loving worm” will become “pale, lean, [with continual] soun[d]ing […]. You shall finde him weeping, sobbing, sighing, and redoubling his sighs, and in continual restlessness, avoiding company, loving solitarines, the better to feed & followeth his foolish imaginations.”35 Lovesickness is thus defined by a discernible set of common symptoms. Those afflicted by the wasting passion of pathological love have sallow complexions, become unsociable, and are as consumed by sighs and tears as their Shakespearean exemplars. According to Boaistuau and his fellow writers, then, you will know a lovesick person when you see one. Accounts of lovesickness, in addition to including sighs as among its key external signs, also consider sighing’s underlying humoral causes. Jacques Ferrand’s treatise on the subject, Erotomania, sees perpetual sighing as one of the “signes diagnosticke” of this disease.36 He identifies the

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sigh as a “doubled respiration” and suggests that “Sighing is caused in Melancholy Lovers, by reason that they many times forget to draw their breath […] so that at length recollecting themselves, Nature is constrained to draw as much Aire at once, as before it should have done at two or three times.”37 As was the case in The Problems of Aristotle, Ferrand’s lovers, so distracted by their all-consuming passion that they neglect to breathe, are compelled to a sudden deeper respiration. This anatomical imperative necessitating sighing is considered in more detail by Marin Cureau de La Chambre in The Character of the Passions (1649). His chapter on “The Characters of Love” treats this passion in much the same way as his earlier compatriot Boaistuau, invoking an epidemic of disordered lovers. Alongside the standard narrative description of lovers’ preferred solitude, constant weeping, lost appetite, and general distractedness, La Chambre catalogues the peculiar chronic features of this condition in some detail: from an “extended” forehead where “wrinkels do scarce so much as break its evenness” to lips that sometimes “tremble […] with a subtil froth” or sometimes are tickled by the tongue that “passeth over them.”38 To this he adds a relentless sighing that cripples the ailing lover’s ability to speak since “his discourse is every moment interrupted by deep and long sighs, which his heart and lungs incessantly exhale.”39 The humoral cause of this unrelenting exhalation is thoroughly explained by La Chambre, similar to earlier, more general accounts of sighing’s interior workings: Even the sighs which every moment cut one another, owe their first original to that great attention of spirit which diverts the soul, and makes it lose the remembrance of the most necessary actions of life; for sending not spirits enough to cause respiration, the lungs beat but slowly, and the heart draws not that help which is expected from their service; forasmuch as they furnish not it sufficiently with air to temper that fire which this Passion kindles, and that they discharge it not often enough of those fumes and vapors which the agitation of the humours raiseth there: Now after this disorder hath continued some time, and that at last it might ruine all the natural economy, the soul being urged by necessity awakes again, and seeks to supply its defect by these great and extraordinary respirations.40

In this account, while sighing can only attempt to remedy malady, it is triggered after the body has suffered this abject state for some time and at the very “last” moment before the “natural economy” is “ruine[d].” In these accounts of lovesick sighing, then, deeper respiration brings only

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temporary relief; the lover’s extreme condition produces a continuing cycle of heavy breathing and vocal exhalation to counter the heart’s recurrent desperation. Sighing simply provides no cure. Like the furnace that needs a constant supply of fresh air, it is a momentary remedy whose persistent recurrence only signifies the distressed state and protracted humoral ailment endured by the lovesick subject. This understanding of sighing’s prevalence and function in writings on lovesickness has implications for the staging of lovesick characters in the early modern playhouse. Perhaps sighing, so repeatedly invoked as among the more identifiable, visible signs of lovesickness, provided a kind of theatrical shorthand to an audience that a character was not just in love but suffering from its correlative pathological condition.41 Such a performative attribute might fairly obviously have been a required part of enacting roles like Silvius or Romeo, where sighing is demarcated as a specific character trait, but perhaps might also have been prescribed for performers of parts where sighing is not readily invoked within speech. Though there is no specific reference to sighing in the first scene of Twelfth Night, it is easy to imagine Orsino letting forth great heaving exhalations before his opening lines and between the ensuing dialogue. Perhaps the strange, sudden metamorphosis of the lovesick victim described in medical literature suggests how Olivia and Viola-as-Cesario perform their accidental, transgressive courtship—characterized by the genuine but “thriftless sighs” that “poor Olivia” shall “breathe” (2.2.37) and superseding Orsino’s overwrought “groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire” (1.5.225).42 But what of the potential impact of the ubiquity of sighing on the bodies of the players? The representation of sighing on stage creates an interesting paradox for actors: Shakespeare invariably shows sighing as the involuntary symptom of a negative bodily state but seems to require players repeatedly to enact this physical process voluntarily. In a culture where physicians and medical pamphlets constantly exhorted people to be vigilant in monitoring the health of mind and body to prevent themselves from falling into dangerous perturbations, surely enacting such emotional states, particularly those considered pathological, would be perilous for the players? As Lemnius, who included “mournefull sighes” as one of the “signes of a distempered brayne,”43 warns: The keepinge of a good temperamente and order, is a singuler ayde and helpe to conserve the naturall faculties, and to cheerishe the spirites. And as unkindely blastes and uncouth whyrlewyndes, doe sondrywise affect our

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bodyes […] Even so the Spirites within us, eyther throughe their aboundance or qualitie, engender & bringe forth sondry affectes in us, and manifestly alter the state aswel of body as of mind.44

For Lemnius, spirits are the winds in the body’s delicate ecology. The “temperamente and order” of each person was prone to disruption and transformation by external “blastes” as much as movement of the spirits themselves could “bring forth sondry affectes” in the body and mind. A regime of “everything in moderation” or maintaining humoral balance was thus the catch-cry of writing on the passions—anything less could be deadly—and yet Shakespeare’s plays constantly call upon actors to play characters with not just immoderate passions, but with eruptive symptoms of various kinds of emotional derangement, the helplessly sighing body equally prominent among them. In The Player’s Passion, Joseph R. Roach documents the history of acting’s uneasy relationship with emotional expression. “Conventional wisdom dictated,” he suggests, “that once the humours course through the body, they cannot be balanced again without the passage of time or the intervention of physic […]. The passions are easily summoned [but] not so easily put back. In this view, the actor […] toys with enormous forces that he can evoke quickly but not easily subdue.”45 Performing the range of passionate states, along with the sudden, precipitous emotional changes, Roach suggests, appears to have necessitated a kind of paradoxical restraint: players keeping their “flammable inner mixtures stable even in the heat of passion.”46 Such inhibiting of emotional force and control over internal energies through disciplined external display produced more convincing performances for early modern audiences: “the restraint itself, the stifling, results in a more forceful evocation of the fires of passion.”47 Paul Menzer has directly addressed the subject in his essay “The Actor’s Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint.” Extending Roach’s examination of moderation in emotional performance, he argues that the stage scripted moments self-consciously where there was an “expressive divorce between interior and exterior.”48 The rhetoric of restraint repeatedly prescribed in early modern medical works allowed the stage to expose over-emoting as inauthentic and illegible, in which the actor metatheatrically disavows indecorous passion as paradoxically artificial, or “player-like.”49 He suggests that early modern drama consistently places characters in positions where they are able, even “urged” to “hide” their “passions, while the actor represents them by staging their

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repression.”50 Although Menzer presents a reasonable set of examples where this may be the case, he avoids examination of the innumerable moments in early modern drama where the overt display of a lack of restraint seems to be the point. There are endless examples just in Shakespeare, of course. What of Leontes’ sudden, deranged jealousy? Timon’s bellicose, misanthropic bleatings? Coriolanus’ ranting selfdestructive rage? And what of the convulsive eruptions of the lovesick that the Shakespearean stage subjected to near-constant representation? Surely sighing is the action itself. To imitate sighing is to sigh. This seems especially pertinent to perhaps the most moving and extreme representation of sighing on the Shakespearean stage. The raped and mutilated Lavinia’s wordless exhalations in Titus Andronicus are described by her father with resonant meteorological metaphors: What wouldst thou kneel with me? Do then, dear heart; for heaven shall hear our prayers, Or with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin dim And stain the sun with fog, as sometimes clouds When they do hug him in their melting bosoms ……………………… If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad? ……………………… I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth. Then must my sea be moved with her sighs, Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge overflowed and drowned. (3.1.208–12, 221, 224–28)

In a play that produces a tsunami of tears, here sighs have hurricane force. Lavinia’s respiratory reverberations (“Hark how her sighs blow”) provoke a somatic response in Titus (“Then must my sea be moved with her sighs”) not dissimilar to that which might have been felt by an audience witnessing the performance of humoral bodies heaving with sighs on the Shakespearean stage. It is hard to imagine this scene working in the theater if the actor playing Lavinia keeps his emotions in check while Titus simply narrates this excess, and, contrary to the recommendations for restraint in acting, there might have been good reasons for the boy player to hold nothing back at this moment. As Michael Schoenfeldt has shown, vocal expression was part of the art of pain management. Indeed, he suggests, “Pain and suffering, first of all,

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induce a series of physical manifestations which are in fact physiologically efficacious. Sighing, groaning, and weeping, for example, were for the most part encouraged in the medical literature, because they were thought to have a deeply therapeutic function.”51 Such soundings, manifestations of deep feeling, emerge as the inevitable product of painful conditions, but they could also be induced by individuals as preventative measures. Thomas Elyot’s The Castel of Helthe (1539) stressed the importance of respiratory exercises, what he called “vociferation,” as a means of maintaining bodily balance and resisting disease: The chief exercise of the brest & instruments of the voyce is vociferation, which is syngynge, redyng, or crienge, whereof is the propertie, that it purgeth naturall heate, and maketh it also subtill and stable, and maketh the members of the body substancial and stronge, resisting diseases. This exercise wolde be used of persones short winded, and them, which can nat fetch their brethe, but holdyng their necke streight upright.52

Just as sighing could provide cool and fresh air to a suffering heart, Elyot advocates these forms of vociferation for their ability to encourage both deep respiration and humoral purgation. Singing was beneficial because “therby moch aire drawen in by fetching of breth,” while “high” crying and “loud” reading help to expel “superfluous humours.”53 As Rebecca Totaro has suggested, regular and purposeful deployment of such vocal practices upheld one of the basic principles of Galenic medicine: “Alternating cool inhalation with hot exhalation maintained the internal temperature most appropriate to optimal bodily functioning.”54 As we have seen, from Bright to Descartes, sighing’s restorative and purgative efficacy is readily apparent and the description of its function certainly fits Elyot’s definition of remedial vociferation. The performance of repetitive sighing, in early modern terms, would have enacted a means of supplying cool air to a heated body overcharged with the playing of extreme emotions, refreshing the spirits while purging excess humoral effluvia. Staged sighs could thus have operated as both an appropriate way of representing a range of emotional conditions as well as a strategic salutary action undertaken by the actor. Early modern actors performed humoral bodies and inhabited them. But whereas the emotionally deranged patient in writings on the passions cannot not help but sigh continuously to provide passing relief to a suffocating heart, the player, like the willfully sighing worshipper, could

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exploit sighing’s potential benefits as a deliberate act. As Bright suggests, if it is not the product of “vehement” emotional disorder, sighing is something we can choose “to do or not do” and thus give “some comfort.”55 In Lavinia’s abject state of suffering, or in the disrupted body of a lovesick person, constant sighing would simply reveal a chronic underlying condition, but in an otherwise healthy person merely enacting extreme or perturbed emotional states, sighing, according to early modern medical thinking, would refresh the heart and mitigate against the deleterious effects of performing the affective body on stage. Roach may be right that actors representing the extremities of passion were conducting the humoral equivalent of playing with fire, at risk of unleashing destructive emotional energies difficult to quell without medical intervention. But as an alternative to stifling emotional excess on stage, purposeful exhalations might have provided the actor with a more immediate and dynamic means of controlling these forces. In such instances, performative excess, counterbalanced with dramatically appropriate and premeditated sighs, may well have formed part of the Shakespearean player’s regular regime of health management. The prevalence of sighing in early modern English drama is perhaps only partially explained by its potential healthful benefits in the enactment of emotional states. Its recurrence as one of the defining symptoms of the grieving, raving, anguished, and lovelorn figures that so frequently haunt the Shakespearean stage is also testament to the embeddedness of humorality in premodern thought and culture. A historicized account of sighing, a ubiquitous but somewhat invisible phenomenon in early modern play-­ texts, as this chapter has sought to offer, provides a crucial reminder of the early modern theater as an artform of embodiment—one in which the representation of emotion was replete with pervasive contemporary ideas about the passions. Acknowledgments  I am immensely grateful to Michael Schoenfeldt, Tanya Pollard, and Reto Winckler for their generous feedback on an earlier version of this essay, and to all of the participants in the “Performing the Humoral Body” seminar at the 2018 Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Los Angeles.

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Notes 1. Problems of Aristotle, K4r. Variant versions of the “Problemata Aristotelis” were widely circulated, in manuscript and print form, throughout early modern Europe and, although often trading on the authoritative classical namesakes of Aristotle or Alexander of Aphrodisias, were anonymous works addressing largely contemporary concerns. See Blair further, “Authorship.’” 2. Problems of Aristotle, K4r-4v. 3. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 88. 4. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays follow Norton Shakespeare, cited parenthetically in the text. 5. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2018), s.v. “sigh.” Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/179449, accessed September 23, 2020. 6. Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae Britannicae, “Suspiro.” 7. Cooper, Thesaurus, “Suspiro,” “Suspiriosus,” and “Suspirium.” 8. Descartes, Passions, 106–7. 9. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 184–85. 10. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 184–85. 11. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 135–36. 12. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 157. 13. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 160–61. 14. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 157–58. 15. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 158–59. 16. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 158. 17. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 160–61. 18. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 161. 19. Tsentourou, “Sighs and Groans,” 264. 20. Tsentourou, “Sighs and Groans,” 265. 21. Cooper, Thesaurus, “Suspiro.” 22. Kuriyama, Expressiveness of the Body, 249. For further consideration of the breath as wind in classical thought and medicine, a view that persisted in early modern culture, see especially 245–51. 23. Cooper, Thesaurus, “Spiritus.” 24. See Kuriyama, Expressiveness of the Body, 246. 25. Paster, Humoring the Body, 41. Paster’s ground-breaking work is foundational to any such consideration of humoral bodies in early modern thought and texts. For more on the deeper interrelations between wind and the passions in the period, see especially 38–43. 26. Harvey, “Passionate Spirits,” 370. 27. Harvey, “Passionate Spirits,” 376. 28. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 4.

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29. For more wide-ranging considerations of lovesickness in the period and in Shakespearean drama see Beecher and Ciavolella, “Jacques Ferrand”; Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender; Neely, Distracted Subjects; Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages; and Wells, Secret Wound. 30. Boaistuau, Theatrum Mundi, O5r. 31. Boaistuau, Theatrum Mundi, O5r. 32. Boaistuau, Theatrum Mundi, O5r. 33. Boaistuau, Theatrum Mundi, O6r-6v. 34. Coeffeteau, Table of Humane Passions, 171. 35. Du Laurens, Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 118. 36. Ferrand, Erotomania, 106. Ferrand repeatedly notes symptoms like paleness, solitude, and weeping and includes “frequent sighings, continuall complaints, importunate praises of their Mistresses, and the like,” as among “the manifest signes of Love” and later contends that: “There is besides, no order or equality at all in their Gesture, Motions or Actions, and they are perpetually sighing, and complaining without any cause,” 104, 112. 37. Ferrand, Erotomania, 132–33. 38. La Chambre, Characters of the Passions, 33–34. 39. La Chambre, Characters of the Passions, 34. 40. La Chambre, Characters of the Passions, 95–96. 41. Dawson, in Lovesickness and Gender, draws a similar conclusion: “In the drama, conventions of lovesick dress and behavior act as a convenient shorthand for characterization, enabling lovers to display their passion without saying a word,” 36. 42. Sighing might also demarcate the drug-induced young lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We certainly get a clue to such when Oberon instructs Puck to seek out Helena, whom he will now know by her current state of being: “All fancy-sick she is, and pale of cheer/With sighs of love that cost the fresh blood dear” (3.2.96–97)—again, with reference to sighing’s blood-draining consumption. 43. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 143. 44. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 15–16. 45. Roach, Player’s Passion, 47. 46. Roach, Player’s Passion, 52. 47. Roach, Player’s Passion, 52–53. 48. Menzer, “Actor’s Inhibition,” 85. 49. Menzer, “Actor’s Inhibition,” 86. 50. Menzer, “Actor’s Inhibition,” 103. 51. Schoenfeldt, “Aesthetics and Anesthetics,” 34. 52. Elyot, Castel of Helthe, 52r-53v. 53. Elyot, Castel of Helthe, 53v. 54. Totaro, “‘Revolving,’” 140. 55. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 161.

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Bibliography Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum: or A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries. London, 1627. Beecher, Donald A. and Massimo Ciavolella, “Jacques Ferrand and the Tradition of Lovesickness in Western Culture.” In A Treatise on Lovesickness, edited and translated by Jacques Ferrand, Donald A.  Beecher, and Massimo Ciavolella, 1–201. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Blair, Ann. “Authorship in the Popular ‘Problemata Aristotelis.’” Early Science and Medicine 4, no. 3 (January 1999): 189–227. https://doi.org/10.116 3/157338299X00148. Boaistuau, Pierre. Theatrum Mundi. London: Thomas Hackett, 1566. Bright, Timothie. A Treatise of Melancholie. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586. Coeffeteau, Nicolas. A Table of Humane Passions With their Causes and Effects. London: Nicholas Okes, 1621. Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus Linguae Romanae Britannicae. London, 1578. Dawson, Lesel. Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul in Three Books. London: A. C., 1649. Du Laurens, André. A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: of melancholike diseases; of rheumes, and of old age. London: Ralph Iacson, 1599. Elyot, Sir Thomas. The castel of helthe. London: Thomas Bertheleti, 1539. Harvey, Elizabeth D. “Passionate Spirits: Animism and Embodiment in Cymbeline and The Tempest.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, 369–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999. La Chambre, Marin Cureau de. The Characters of the Passions, written in French by the Sieur de la Chambre, Physitian to the Lord Chancellor of France. London: John Holden, 1649. Lemnius, Levinus. The Touchstone of Complexions. London: Thomas Marsh, 1576. Menzer, Paul. “The Actor’s Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint.” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 83–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/ rd.3541917443. Neely, Carol Thomas. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. The Problems of Aristotle, with Other Philosophers and Phisitions. Edinburgh: Robert Walgrave, 1595.

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Roach, Joseph R. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Schoenfeldt, Michael. “Aesthetics and Anesthetics: The Art of Pain Management in Early Modern England.” In The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, edited by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel, 19–38. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare [Based on the Oxford Edition]. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Totaro, Rebecca. “‘Revolving this will teach thee how to curse’: A Lesson in Sublunary Exhalation.” In Rhetorics of Bodily Health and Disease in Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Jennifer C. Vaught, 152–68. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Tsentourou, Naya. “Sighs and Groans: Attending to the Passions in Early Modern Prayer.” Literature Compass 12, no. 6 (2015): 262–73. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/lic3.12224. Wack, Mary Frances. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Wells, Marion A. Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 4

“Great Annoyance to Their Mindes”: Humours, Intoxication, and Addiction in English Medical and Moral Discourses, 1550–1730 David Clemis

Sixteenth-century English physicians and moralists saw drunkenness in rather different terms than would their successors in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. To be sure, across the early modern period some characteristics of drunken comportment were always associated with heavy drinking: slurred speech, diminished motor control, along with loud and sometimes aggressive, belligerent behaviour. Nevertheless, prior to what some historians call the “medical revolution of the seventeenth century,” late medieval and early modern medical discourse concerned with intoxication and chronic drinking was rather differently framed and set in a broader context than would be the case by the first decades of the eighteenth century.1 This breadth is evident in Humphrey Brooke’s

D. Clemis (*) Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_4

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characterisation of the chronic drunkard. Brooke, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, ran a very successful London medical practice between 1646 and his death in 1694. In his 1650 medical advice book Ugieine or a Conservatory of Health, Brooke described the effects of drunkenness: Resolutions of the Nerves, Cramps and Palsies. Inflation of the Belly and Dropsies, Renes and Rheums in the Eyes, Tremblings in the Hands and Joynts. Inclination to Feavers and the Scurvy. Sicknesses at Stomack and sowre Belchings. A furious and unmanageable Disposition to Lust. A Subjection to all the Passions, Decay of Memory, and Understanding. Loss of Credit and Reputation. An unfitness for Business, and Dispatch of Affairs. An easy Discovery of all Secrets.2

Brooke’s characterisation of drunkenness spans the physiological, psychological, moral, and social aspects of the drunkard’s life. It is not, perhaps, extraordinary that a medical treatise would include some passing reference to the social and even moral consequences of a patient’s affliction. Twenty-­ first century approaches to the problem of addiction increasingly assert the interaction of the social, medical, psychological, and in some instances, spiritual factors.3 But in the medical discourse of Brooke’s day these matters were not seen as distinct consequences of intoxication, rather as interwoven elements that together constituted the condition of drunkenness. Thus, Brooke was not simply concerned with the consequences and co-­ conditions of alcohol-induced cognitive impairment; his understanding of drunkenness was that it was a singular phenomenon. The state of the drunkard’s mind, body, spiritual life, and social standing were not seen as simply impaired by the effects of alcohol; instead, alcohol’s effects were all cast as manifestations of the drunkard’s ethical self. In this sense, Brooke’s conception of intoxication was characteristic of many English and continental physicians up to the mid-seventeenth century, for he was an adherent of Renaissance Galenic/Hippocratic medicine.4 This essay will show that although language of the new, “modern,” empirical, iatromechanical medicine that emerged in the seventeenth century retained the terminology of the humours, the meanings and applications of those terms were rather different. This difference betrays the profound epistemological reframing of medicine in the wake of the seventeenth-­ century medical revolution. Consequently, this reframing

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also entailed a significant reconceptualisation of intoxication and chronic drinking for both physicians and moralists. Early modern medical writers understood alcohol intoxication within the complex ecology of the Galenic naturals and non-naturals, as well as contemporary conceptions of the soul. The naturals consisted of the body’s key organs (the liver, heart, and brain); the spirits which animated the body; and, most importantly, the four humours: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each of the humours was composed of a different mixture of two of the essential elements, namely earth, air, fire, and water. The particular balance of humours in a given individual produced their distinct temperament or complexion. The temperament of a person, their physiological condition, and their mental states interacted and mutually influenced one another.5 The key to mental and physical health was obtaining and sustaining the correct humoural balance given the state of the individual’s naturals and the effects upon them of the non-naturals, which were six factors that act upon the health of the body: the physical environment, exercise, sleep, food and drink, secretions and excretions, and emotional states.6 It is important to note the great extent of the interaction of the mental/spiritual and material or, as it was put more commonly in the seventeenth century, the connection between the soul and the body. In Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton expressed a common contemporary view of the relation of the soul to the body: The body is domicilium animae [the dwelling of the soul], her house, abode, and stay; and as a torch gives better light, a sweeter smell, according to the matter it is made of, so doth our soul perform all her actions, better or worse, as her organs are disposed; or as wine savours of the cask wherein it is kept, the soul receives a tincture from the body, through which it works.7

For Burton, this relationship was bi-directional, privileging neither the mind nor body: “For as the distraction of the mind, amongst other outward causes and perturbations, alters the temperature of the body, so the distraction and distemper of the body will cause a distemperature of the soul, and ‘tis hard to decide which of the these two do more harm to the other.”8 Conceptions of the interaction of the mind and body became matters of increasing concern for theologians, philosophers, and physicians over the course of the seventeenth century. But such matters as free will, materialistic determinism, and the immateriality and immortality of the soul

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did not significantly concern late medieval and early modern Galenic physicians. While the interaction of mind and body was observed, it was seldom perceived as problematic. Writing in 1650, Humphrey Brooke held that there was a demonstrable “mutual influence from the Body upon the Mind, and from the Mind upon the Body: not necessitating, but inclining.”9 He notes that anger or joy more readily arise when one is in pain or suffers from a fever, and immoderate passions induce a range of physical illnesses. He concludes, “That therefore thou mayest be Vertuous, keep they self in good Health; that thou mayst be in good health, keep thy self Vertuous, and Regulate thy Passions.”10 It is noteworthy that, while the condition of the body might affect an individual’s state of the mind, this was not a purely materialist, determinist position. The individual clearly had agency because choices made about the body, such as what and how much one ate or drank, affected the condition of the mind; similarly, the will, or a person’s thoughts and passions, could affect the condition of the body. Key to this interaction of mind and body, and of particular importance to medical understandings of alcohol intoxication, was the disruption of the processes by which the humours and spirits were generated. For most early modern medical writers, spirit was the finest grade of matter enabling the critically important connection between the soul and the body. As spirit’s vital energy spread through the body, it prompted physiological action, conveyed sense data to the mind, and informed cognitive and emotional states.11 Many early modern Galenists held that the spirits were derived from the humours through the digestive process. Sixteenth-­ century medical writer Levinus Lemnius asserted that the spirits sustained and conveyed natural heat, to which moisture adhered, and which together were the means by which the soul was able to “performeth her powers and faculties, and achieveth all her actions.”12 Lemnius notes the importance of the composition of spirits: if they are “sincere and pure, not mingled with any strange or forraigne quality, [they] causeth tranquillity of minde, frameth manners in good order and fashion, and finally qualifieth and calmeth all affections.”13 The composition of spirits depended on the effectiveness of the digestive process, known as “concoction”: If concoction be hindered, or any other distemperateness happen, then is the meat altered and changed into vaporous belching, stinking fumes, and fulsome breathing, which assending up out of the stomacke, disturbe and hurt the braine and minde, insomuch that such persons are easily and quickly

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provoked to brawling, chiding, strife, and discention. For when the humours bee not sufficiently and enough concocted and attenuate, unpure spirits proceed out of them, enforcing a manifest alteration of the state, as well of the body as of the minde.14

Although there were some minor differences in early modern Galenic authors’ accounts of how alcoholic drinks produced intoxication, they invariably centred on the effects of alcohol upon this process of concoction and the operation of the animal spirits. Lemnius observed that unlike meat, wine did not need concoction to be absorbed into the body. As a consequence, its effects were felt much faster, and the quantity of spirits carried to the brain as vapour was much greater than animal spirits produced through the normal concoction of other foods. Moreover, the spirits of wine were of a different character and inimical to the functioning of normal animal spirits, according to Lemnius.15 Francis Bacon asserted that “the Spirits of Wine oppress the Spirits Animal, occupate part of the place where they are, and so make them weak to move […] they rob the Spirits Animal of their Matter whereby they are nourished.”16 Diminished motor control, vertigo, and slurred speech occurred because the animal spirits were displaced from their role in animating movement and facilitating perception. As Lemnius observed, “drunkards dote, reel and stumble, because their brains are clowded with grosse and thick vapours.”17 Vision impairment was caused by “the swift and unquiet motion of the Spirits visual” that had been “oppressed” or interfered with, by the “spirits of wine.”18 Once spirits of wine had begun to induce these effects, it was difficult to reverse, though James Hart, a seventeenth-century physician in Northampton, believed, like Francis Bacon, that solutions containing sugar, if drunk after consuming wine, “inhibit the hot fumes of a vaporous or strong sacke, apt to flie up into the braines” and thereby prevent or mitigate intoxication.19 In their descriptions of alcohol’s disruption of animal spirits, early modern medical writers often made an easy, almost intuitive analogical connection between the unbalanced staggering and blurred vision exhibited by drunkards (perhaps derived from their own experience of drunkenness) and the physiological, Galenic explanation for intoxication as a whirling and dislodging of animal spirits clouded by the gross, thick vapours of wine. It is noteworthy how the humoural medical language of balance and harmony, disruption and disarray, extends throughout early modern discourse on intoxication, whether it is focused on the

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body’s concoction of humours and spirits or on the drunkard’s comportment and social interactions. It was, of course, the cognitive, affective, and behavioural effects of alcohol that made intoxication a matter of social concern. In early modern popular art and literature, scholars have found a range of beliefs about the capacity of alcohol to induce wit and jollity, as well as bestial stupidity and violence.20 While a similar range of views is evident in Galenic medical accounts of the cognitive and affective effects of alcohol, medical writers were generally less sanguine about the capacity of alcohol to stimulate wit. With some irony, Burton gently mocks literary claims that wine supplies wit when he observes, I am aquae potor [a water drinker], drink no wine at all, which so much improves our modern wits, a loose, plain, rude writer […] idem calamo quod in mente [what my mind thinks my pen writes], I call a spade a spade, animis haec scribo, non auribus [I write for the mind, not the ear], I respect matter not words.21

Clearly, Burton seems to think that while wine might excite creative rhetorical flourishes, it is the sober writer who perceives truth. Other physicians emphasized the cognitive damage alcohol might do. We might recall Humphrey Brooke’s assertion that drunkenness causes the “decay of memory and understanding.”22 Similarly, Marius D’Assigny, a late seventeenth-century Norwich clergyman, believed wine to be dangerous because “Drunkenness is offensive to the Brain, and all its Functions, because it fills it full of Humours.”23 His description of the effects of alcohol on memory is cast in strongly Galenic terms. Intoxication is seen as a moistening of the mind, and moisture is associated with amorphousness and impermanence: The second Temper unfit for Memory is moist, when a too great Humidity seizes upon the Brain, as in Drunkenness, Intemperance, and Defluxions. Memory in such a case may quickly receive an Impression, but it will as speedily lose it. As a Ship at Sea Running swiftly thro the Waves leaves behind a Track, which is almost as soon lost as made, so that no sign can be found of its passage thro that fluid Element.24

Lemnius observed that drinking in the morning before having eaten was dangerous because, without the tempering effect of food, wine “dulls the

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vigour of the mind, clouds the understanding, and hurts the nerves.”25 Elsewhere Lemnius comments that wine should not be given to children because it will overheat their bodies and “filleth their heads with fumes, and bringeth great annyoyance to their mindes.”26 Adolescents should be permitted to drink sparingly because alcohol induces anger and “licencious lusts, and inordinate affections, and also duleth and troubleth that part of the minde which is rationall.”27 The inhibiting effects of alcohol upon cognitive processes were not always thought of as negative. Hart observed in 1633 that wine might be prescribed to the elderly to cheer their spirits; moreover, its “mild fumes and vapours so irrigate the braine, that it may procure them quiet and comfortable sleepe.”28 Hart’s comments were in line with those of most other Galenic physicians who saw the value of alcohol, not in stimulating the brain, but rather in calming it, or at least in shifting the mind’s morbid fixations. In this regard, the principal therapeutic use of alcohol was in the treatment of melancholy. Central to Galenist medical thought was the belief that melancholy arose from an excess of black bile, commonly caused by some disturbance of the spleen, believed to be the site of black bile’s production. Lemnius observed that the effects of wine are like those of an effectively functioning spleen: For when the blood is sincerely purified [by the spleen], and from all grosnesse and feculency purged, the spirits consequently are made pure, bright and cleare shining: Whose purity and cleareness causeth the mind to rejoyce, and among merry companions to laugh and delight in pretty devices, merry conceits, and wanton fancies. Which thing likewise commonly hapneth to them, that moisten and whittle themselves with Wine.29

Accordingly, wine is prescribed as a remedy for those who are “of nature, sorrowful, lumpish and sowre.”30 Appropriately administered, wine would compensate for the spleen’s failure and even help restore its function and so rebalance the humoural system and remedy the operation of the spirits. But just as one person might have excessive black bile, so it might be deficient in someone else according to one’s respective temperament. The particular quantity or type of wine that might alleviate melancholy for one person might, therefore, have deleterious effects upon another: Wine produceth and causeth sundry, and the same very ridiculous fashions, according to the severall nature of every man, and according to the effect of

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the operation of the Wine it selfe […]. And hereupon in the Dutch phrase of speech there are reckoned up certaine conditions and delights of Drunken men. Some being cupshot, are contentious and brawling; some still, and never a word but mumme; some very babblative and keeping a foule coyle: Some weeping, and howling, and heavy couraged. Yea some of this beastly Crue we see to be threatners, cruell, bitter, fierce, spightfull, arrogant, self-­ glorious, proud, wanton, lascivious, toying, full of foolish gesture, unquiet, unstable, given to carnall lust, and loves desire.31

In the Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton cites various authorities who held that drink is “a most easy and parable remedy […] against fear, sorrow, and such troublesome thoughts, that molest the mind; as brimstone with fire, the spirits on a sudden are enlightened by it.”32 He notes that the Persian physician much admired by early modern Galenists, Avicenna (Ibn Sına, 480–1073 AD), asserted that the melancholic should be urged not only to drink wine regularly but also be occasionally drunk.33 The seventeenth-­ century medical writer Nicholas Culpeper recited familiar Galenic prescriptions of wine for those of phlegmatic or choleric complexions and for melancholics and sanguines as well, although with cautions for more moderate drinking.34 It is important to notice here that for Lemnius, Burton, Culpeper, and other early modern Galenists, wine altered mental states in a way that was very similar to the natural balancing of black bile with the other humours. Although its effects might vary given the quantity consumed and the temperament of a particular drinker, alcohol undeniably changed cognitive capacity, emotional states, and forms of behaviour. All of these medical writers urged moderation in the use of alcohol when treating mental health problems because it was a potent, deleterious agent that could profoundly affect the mind. Such ascriptions of the powerful effects of alcohol upon cognition, emotional states, and comportment may appear to have been highly problematic in the context of prevailing orthodox early modern views of the relation of the soul to the body. Since Pythagoras and Orphism, many pagan and later Christian writers had developed a complex conception of the soul’s relationship to the body. The soul animates the body and is the site at which or means by which mental states arise. At the same time, the soul was also seen as constituting the essential self that, as an immaterial, immortal entity, might transcend the body.35 Emily Michael has observed that throughout history the conception of the relationship between these two aspects of the soul has shifted, but it is not until the emergence of new

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ideas in Renaissance natural philosophy that there arose serious, sustained disputes over their compatibility.36 Such disputes inevitably centred on the means or even possibility of the interaction between the immaterial soul and the body as a material substance. Galenic accounts of intoxication were not, however, much concerned with this problem. Although alcohol was a material substance clearly affecting mental states, cognitive impairment from intoxication was not seen as undermining a drunken person’s capacity as a moral agent, nor was it held that their personal identity might be disrupted such that they might not be held culpable for their actions. This was because the conception of the self in the period’s medical writings was not cast within the post-Cartesian dualistic framing of the mind and body. For late medieval and early modern Galenic physicians, conceptualising a unified relationship between mind and body was, for the most part, not problematic. As several scholars have demonstrated, until the mid-seventeenth century, whatever dilemmas or conflicts particular individuals experienced as tensions between their own personal spiritual interests and corporeal desires, the general conception of the self was essentially undivided.37 Jacques Bos has observed that the Galenic humours and temperaments were understood within a system connecting all aspects of life, through which selfhood was created: “in the Renaissance, the humouralist doctrine of the temperaments had a central position in the connections that were constructed between microcosm and macrocosm, human beings and the universe.”38 In this view, explanations of an individual’s behaviour, and its meaning for one’s virtue or identity, would depend on neither a single decision nor the effects of a particular psycho-chemical substance. The self was constituted not just as a unified mind and body, but also through its wider engagement with the world. Intoxication was not understood as an isolated physical condition precipitated by the consumption of alcohol alone, but holistically in terms of an individual’s temperament, humoural balance, character, spiritual condition, and social status. While Platonist conceptions of the self as a conjunction of the discrete substances of body and soul were current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Galenic physicians more closely adhered to Thomistic and Aristotelian views wherein persons were held to be unitary subjects, conceiving of the soul as the form of the body.39 Thus, for early modern physicians it was neither easy nor natural to speak of the soul, or its attributes and actions such as cognition, affect, imagination, and so on as separate

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from the body. They spoke of the state of the body and the mind as interconnected or inseparable. Physicians talk of the effects of intoxicants on mental states, but did not see these as undermining the autonomy of the soul as the essential centre of the self. Something like this Aristotelian construction of the soul has been identified by Philippa Maddern in several late medieval texts, including Langland’s Piers Plowman, in which it is clear that “it was the indissoluble bond between soul and body that alone constituted individual identity.”40 Maddern suggests that in literature featuring debates between the soul and body, the essential characteristics of one are ascribed to the other, thus further suggesting their fundamental unity. Maddern cites an early fifteenth-­ century commentary on the Ten Commandments, Dives and Pauper, wherein “spiritual and physical matters were so closely equated that it seems the author made no distinction between them, in defiance of the weight of tradition that defined the physical and spiritual as essentially different.”41 None of this is to suggest that some late medieval and early modern theologians, physicians, or popular moralists thought the distinction between mind and body entirely negligible. But it is clear that the construction of the self and the interaction between mind and body was very different from the dualistic thinking that would emerge in the seventeenth century. This sense of the self was key to the Galenic understanding of intoxication. In this view, drunkenness was not simply a matter of a psycho-chemical substance interfering with the physiological processes underpinning perception, cognition, and motor control. Rather, intoxication within a discourse of humours, spirits, and temperaments was connected with a broader, more integrated sense of the person. The significance of this integrated construction of the self is revealed in the extent of its contrast with the medical paradigms that would succeed Galenism. The iatrochemical and iatromechanical thinking that emerged over the course of the seventeenth century turned away from the speculative character of Galenism and began to privilege observation and reason in conceptions of the body as a vascular and mechanical system. This was a kind of extension of the “Scientific Revolution” into medicine: Harold Cook has observed that the “natural philosophical foundations of physic had become less like a learned debate about the causes of things, as in the early sixteenth century, and more like an active and close description of the material world.”42 One of the new medicine’s most influential proponents in England, the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave, wrote that medicine could only explain those things “which are purely material in the human

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Body, with mechanical and physical Experiments.”43 Boerhaave maintained that the physician could know nothing about either the particular workings of the mind nor the nature of its connection to the body.44 This shift to the new practical, empirical medicine was neither swift nor absolute. While Galenist anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics more rapidly gave way to iatromechanical and chemical medicine, elements of Galenism, especially its terminology, persisted and were woven into the new medical thinking about mental states such as choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic temperaments. When writing about the effects of alcohol, Boerhaave described how highly volatile spirit of wine rapidly rose to the head where it would “disturb the motion of the humors” causing “delirium.”45 Yet Boerhaave’s employment of humoral language in his writing presenting an iatromechanical, vascular conception of the body effectively reduced Galenic notions of the humors to chemical interactions. Thomas Willis’ The Soul of Brutes (1683) describes the animal spirits simply as matter functioning by chemical means within the mechanical system of the body.46 While the terms “humors” and “spirits,” together with some of their functions, were retained, they were detached from the ecological scheme of Galenism wherein the self was constituted through the interaction of naturals and non-naturals. Moreover, because the humours, natural animal spirits, and “spirits of wine” (alcohol) were not readily observable, physicians of Boerhaave’s orientation increasingly had less to say about how and why intoxication arose.47 Although physicians continued to observe and comment on the physiological effects of drinking, they did not provide effective accounts of how and why people became intoxicated or drank habitually. This medical separation of the mind and body, together with the diminished role of the humors in accounts of behaviour, led to the chronic drinker’s condition being understood as a wilful moral failing. As the new medicine predominated in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was moralists, rather than physicians, who came to speak with authority on the problem of drunkenness.48 Over the course of the eighteenth century, iatromechanical medicine gradually gave way to “neurological” understandings of the brain, nerves, and their connection to cognition and emotion.49 This new medical thinking retained the iatromechanical rejection of the general Galenic schema, and its pathological and clinical discourses went much further in abandoning humoral nomenclature. David Hartley began the development of this

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new neurophysiology with the publication of his Observations on Man (1749). The iatromechanical vascular system through which Galenic animal spirits flowed was replaced by a conception of the nervous system rooted in Newtonian physics and Lockean ideas about sensation and perception. In general terms, the new neurological view held that the transmission and vibration of minute particles conveyed sense perceptions, constituted ideas, and gave rise to states of consciousness. By these means nerves were stimulated, producing pleasurable or painful responses. Within this framework, Hartley and others provided accounts of cognition, emotion, behaviour, and mental illness.50 With respect to the effects of alcohol, Hartley wrote that “[t]he common and immediate effect of wine is to dispose to joy, i.e., to introduce such kinds and degrees of vibrations into the whole nervous system or into separate parts thereof as are attended with moderate continued pleasure.”51 Medical writers such as Erasmus Darwin and John Coakley Lettsom were describing how chronic alcohol drinking damaged the nerves or artificially induced pleasure so gripping, compelling, and persistent that the exercise of the will was impaired.52 William Cullen’s account of how neurological damage produced defective patterns of cognition and perception paved the way for a new science in which it was thought possible to assist the chronic drinker without having to understand and repair actual neurological mechanisms. It was thought enough to focus on defective patterns of cognition.53 By the end of the eighteenth century, physicians such as Thomas Trotter believed that “[t]he habit of drunkenness is a disease of the mind. The soul itself has received impressions that are incompatible with its reasoning powers.”54 The appropriate medical response was to treat the physiological damage caused by excessive alcohol consumption paired with the cultivation of new habits and behaviours intended to reduce the temptation to drink. Terms like “melancholy” or “choleric” might casually appear in the period’s pathological discourse, but this was no more than an occasional echo of the core concepts of Renaissance Galenism. With the advent of the neurological models of the eighteenth century, the humors and spirits were replaced by new substances and processes, effectively driving Galenic language from formal medical discourse on intoxication. Throughout early modernity, physicians writing about intoxication and chronic drinking made use of the language of humoralism, but the epistemological shifts across the period’s changing medical paradigms gave it differing meanings and significance. Galenism’s conception of intoxication utilised humoral language in way entirely consistent with its roots in

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Aristotelian natural philosophy. While it dealt in causation and interactions of observed phenomena, its project was fundamentally different from the approaches that emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than provide an empirical account of particular observed phenomena, the Galenist’s aim was to explain the condition of a patient’s body, mind, and environment as these constituted the whole self. Galenist writers expounded on drunkenness and chronic drinking as commentaries on the interaction of temperaments, humors, and spirits with the circumstances of an individual’s life (non-naturals).55 Thus, alcohol was not simply seen as interfering with the brain and causing faulty reasoning—as might be the case in iatromechanical or eighteenth-century accounts of intoxication.56 Rather, for the Galenist, the state of the drunken body, malfunctions of cognition and perception, distortions of emotions, and strained social relations were all distinguishable aspects of a singular disturbed condition of a given drunkard. In this view, drunkenness was not something that happens to the body and the mind, but a moral, social, and physiological state of cognitive impairment. The seventeenth century’s iatromechanical medicine retained elements of Galenic discourse, but its new empiricism limited discussion of drinking to a much narrower scope, taking cognisance only of what could be observed or directly inferred from observation or tentative descriptions of the physiological effects of intoxication. In this sense, now detached from their Galenic origins, the humors and spirits became less significant focal points in the later discourse of intoxication.

Notes 1. Wear, “Medical Practice,” 294–302, and Cook, “Medicine and the New Philosophy,” 397–436. 2. Brooke, Ugieine, 138–39. 3. On this subject, see McCrady and Epstein, “Introduction,” xix–xx; Fraser, Moore, and Kean, Habits, 3; and Kushner, “Taking Biology Seriously,” 115–43. 4. By the late sixteenth century, most university-trained physicians held to a synthesis of ideas appropriated from a range of ancient texts and their subsequent medieval Christian and Muslim commentators. The term “Galenic” is a convenient reference to the prevailing, orthodox medical paradigm of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and which, for the greater part, was derived from Galenic writings. See further Temkin, Galenism, 103.

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5. For accounts of the humoral system in Renaissance, see Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 14, 88; Groebner, “Complexio/Complexion,” 365–66; Vidal, Sciences of the Soul, 34–35; and Cook, “Medicine and the New Philosophy,” 397–436. 6. Kusukawa, “Medicine in Western Europe in 1500,” 8. 7. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, I:375. 8. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, I:374. 9. Brooke, Ugieine, 224. 10. Brooke, Ugieine, 224–25. 11. On this subject, see Sydenham, Dissertatio Epistolaris, 135–37, and Sugg, Smoke of the Soul, 3–4. 12. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 11. 13. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 11, 12–13. 14. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 15. 15. Lemnius, Secret Miracles of Nature, 118–19. 16. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 187. 17. Lemnius, Secret Miracles of Nature, 119. 18. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 187. 19. Hart, Diet of the Diseased, 124; Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 188. 20. For instance, see Smyth, Pleasing Sinne; O’Callaghan, English Wits; Earnshaw, Pub in Literature; and Shrank, ‘“Beastly Metamorphosis.’” For an interesting, comparable situation in Germany, see Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, 67. 21. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, II:31. 22. Brooke, Ugieine, 138, and 86–88. 23. D’Assigny, Art of Memory, 39. 24. D’Assigny, Art of Memory, 28–29. 25. Lemnius, Secret Miracles of Nature, 122. 26. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 79. 27. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 78–79. 28. Hart, Diet of the Diseased, 123. 29. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 221. 30. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 222. 31. Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, 237–38. 32. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, II:245. 33. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, II: 244, 245, 246. 34. Culpeper, Galen’s Art of Physick, 54–57. 35. See, for instance, Martin and Barresi, Rise and Fall, esp. 9–108. 36. Michael, “Renaissance Theories,” 147. 37. Amongst literary scholars, see Paster, Humouring the Body, and Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves. For a view that disputes the materialist reductionism of

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these works see Gowland, “Melancholy, Passions, and Identity in the Renaissance.” 38. Bos, “Rise and Decline of Character,” 29–50, 37. 39. On this subject, see Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.75.4, 381; Harvey, The Inward Wits, 54; Vermeir, “Imagination between Physick and Philosophy,” 119–37; Haldane, “Soul and Body,” 300; McCracken, “Knowledge of the Soul,” 798–99; Schmaltz, “The Science of Mind,” 138; and Yrjönsuuri, “Identity and Moral Agency,” 484. 40. Maddern, “Murdering Souls,” 29. 41. Maddern, “Murdering Souls,” 32–33. 42. Cook, “Medicine,” 408, 432–34. See also Cook, “Medicine and the New Philosophy,” 399–400. 43. Boerhaave, Academical Lectures, 1:63. 44. Boerhaave, Academical Lectures, 1:70. 45. Boerhaave, Academical Lectures, 6:322–23. 46. Willis, Soul of Brutes, 46, 93. See also Sugg, Smoke of the Soul, 308–9. 47. See Temkin, Galenism, 174–80; Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, 47. 48. Clemis, “Medical Expertise,” 41. 49. See further Smith, “Brain and Mind,” 15–28; Rousseau, Languages of Psyche; and Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason. 50. See Hartley, Observations, and Darwin, Zoonomia. 51. Hartley, Observations, 1:393. 52. On the subject, see Darwin, Zoonomia, and Lettsom, Hard Drinking. 53. Cullen, Materia Medica, 2:258–59, 2:273. 54. Trotter, Essay, 172. See also Rush, An Inquiry; Macnish, Anatomy of Drunkenness; Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 311–12; and Clemis, “Medical Expertise,” 44–47. 55. See Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 133–35. For the place of narrative in modern accounts of addiction, see Poland and Graham, Addiction and Responsibility, 16. 56. Clemis, “Medical Expertise,” 42–47.

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Vol. 19. Translated by Fathers of the Dominican Province, revised by Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954. Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum: Or a Naturall Historie. In Ten Centuries. London, 1627. Boerhaave, H. [Herman]. Dr. Boerhaave’s Academical Lectures on the Theory of Physic. London, 1744.

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Bos, Jacques. “The Rise and Decline of Character: Humoral Psychology in Ancient and Modern Medical Theory.” History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 3 (2009): 29–50. Brooke, Humphrey. Ugieine or a Conservatory of Health. London, 1650. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932. Reprint. Edited by William H.  Gass. New  York: New  York Review of Books, 2001. Clemis, David. “Medical Expertise and Understandings of Intoxication in Britain, 1660–1830.” In Intoxication and Society. Problematic Pleasures of Drugs and Alcohol, edited by Jonathan Herring et  al, 33–51. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Cook, Harold J. “Medicine.” In Early Modern Science, edited by Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, 407–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cook, Harold J. “Medicine and the New Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century England.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C.  Lindberg and Robert S.  Westman, 397–436. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cullen, William. A Treatise of the Materia Medica. Edinburgh: London, 1789. Culpeper, Nicholas. Galen’s Art of Physick. Translated by Nicholas Culpeper. London, 1652. Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life. London, 1796. D’Assigny, Marius. The Art of Memory. 3rd ed. London, 1706. Earnshaw, Steven. The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Fraser, Suzanne, David Moore, and Helen Keane. Habits: Remaking Addiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Gowland, Angus. “Melancholy, Passions, and Identity in the Renaissance.” In Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, edited by Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis, 75–93. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Groebner, Valentin. “Complexio/Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250–1600.” In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, 361–83. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Haldane, John. “Soul and Body.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Robert Pusnau, 293–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hart, James. 𝛫𝛬𝛪𝛮𝛪𝛫𝛨 Klinike or the Diet of the Diseased. London, 1633. Harvey, E. Ruth. The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1975. Kushner, Howard I. “Taking Biology Seriously: The Next Task for Historians of Addiction?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 1 (2006): 115–43. Kusukawa, Sachiko. “Medicine in Western Europe in 1500.” In The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1500–1800, edited by Peter Elmer, 1–27. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

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Lemnius, Levinus. The Touchstone of Complexions. London, 1633. Lemnius, Levinus. [Occulta Naturae Miracula.] The Secret Miracles of Nature. London, 1658. Lettsom, John Coakley. History of Some of the Effects of Hard Drinking. London, 1789. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Penguin, 1997. Macnish, Robert. The Anatomy of Drunkenness. Glasgow, 1827. Maddern, Philippa. “Murdering Souls and Killing Bodies: Understanding Spiritual and Physical Sin in Late-Medieval English Devotional Works.” In Conjunctions of Mind, Soul, and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment, edited by Danijela Kambasković, 25–45. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Martin, Raymond, and John Barresi. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2006. McCracken, Charles. “Knowledge of the Soul.” In The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 796–827. Vol. 1. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McCrady, Barbara S., and Elizabeth E. Epstein. “Introduction.” In Addictions: A Comprehensive Guidebook, 2nd ed., edited by Barbara S. McCrady and Elizabeth E. Epstein, xix–xx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Michael, Emily. “Renaissance Theories of Body, Soul, and Mind.” In Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, edited by John Wright and Paul Potter, 147–72. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. O’Callaghan, Michelle. The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Poland, Jeffrey Stephen, and George Graham. Addiction and Responsibility. Philosophical Psychopathology: Disorders of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Porter, Roy. Flesh in the Age of Reason. New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2004. Porter, Roy. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Rousseau, G. S. The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990. Rush, Benjamin. An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body. Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790.

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Schmaltz, Tad. “The Science of Mind” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Donald Rutherford, 136–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shrank, Cathy. ‘“Beastly Metamorphosis’: Losing Control in Early Modern Culture.” In Intoxication and Society: Problematic Pleasures of Drugs and Alcohol, edited by Jonathan Herring et  al, 193–209. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Smith, C. U. M. “Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century.” In Brain, Mind, and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, edited by Harry A.  Whitaker, C.  U. M.  Smith, and Stanley Finger, 15–28. New  York: Springer, 2007. Smyth, Adam. A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Sugg, Richard. Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Sydenham, Thomas. Dissertatio Epistolaris. London, 1682. Temkin, Owsei. Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. Tlusty, B. Ann. Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Trotter, T[homas]. An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness and Its Effects on the Human Body. London: Longman, 1804. Reprint. Edited by Roy Porter. Abingdon: Routledge, 1988. Vermeir, Koen. “Imagination between Physick and Philosophy: On the Central Role of the Imagination in the Work of Henry More.” Intellectual History Review 18, no. 1 (2008): 119–37. Vidal, Fernando. The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Wear, A[ndrew]. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wear, Andrew. “Medical Practice in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-­ Century England: Continuity and Change.” In The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Roger K. French and Andrew Wear, 294–302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Willis, Thomas. Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which Is That of the Vital and Sensitive of Man. London: Thomas Dring, 1683. Yrjönsuuri, Mikko. “Identity and Moral Agency.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Robert Pusnau, 472–83. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 5

Performing Pain Michael Schoenfeldt

I suffer, therefore I am. (Slavoj Žižek)1

You cannot see another’s pain. You certainly can see the evidence of it— the contracted brow, the distorted mouth, the twisted limb, the bleeding wound. But you cannot see the pain itself. And a lot of pain is ineffable, neurological or emotional, or even social. The ineffability of tacit pain presents a problem for actors, who must convince an audience of the authenticity of a pain that is feigned. The Shakespearean corpus famously inflicts damage on the bodies and minds of most of those who cross the stage. Drama emerges from, and precipitates, conflict, and conflict invariably produces physical and emotional trauma. It has been something of a commonplace of Renaissance criticism, moreover, to explore the relationship between judicial punishments and the agonized tableaus of early modern theater. As the editors of the challenging collection Staging Pain argue, “Required to fashion new ways of staging pain and defining its meaning, the theater of the period did so in constant dialogue with (and often in direct competition with) the M. Schoenfeldt (*) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_5

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various public spectacles of pain that proliferated in the period, from martyrdom to flogging and hanging.”2 It is hard to know what to make of this truly perverse dialogue among the various exhibitions of suffering bodies, but it does seem that early modern audiences loved watching others suffer. Jonas Barish remarks, “Something about physical injuries inflicted on human bodies seems to exercise a kind of mesmerism, both over Shakespeare’s generation and our own.”3 Even contemporaneous antitheatrical polemic, which attacked the purported immorality of the theater from almost every conceivable angle, has little to say about its indulgence in spectacles of suffering. Stephen Gosson, for example, is obsessed with the way that the stage “ravish[es] the sence” with “wanton speache to whette desire to inordinate lust.”4 But he says nothing about the noxious moral impact of scenarios of promiscuous cruelty. In the Anatomie of Abuses, Philip Stubbs does question the viciousness of those who find pleasure in the blood sport of bear-baiting: “What christen heart,” he asks, “can take pleasure to see one poore beast to rent, teare, and kill another, and all for his foolish pleasure?”5 But the corollary cruelty of the stage, and its incommensurability with a Christianity purportedly centered on acts of mercy, was rarely addressed. It is worth remembering nonetheless that Shakespeare in Macbeth and King Lear explicitly likens the suffering of his tragic protagonists to the supposed sport of bearbaiting.6 He certainly glimpsed a chilling analogy between his own plays and the blood sports that filled the theaters when no plays were shown. But while Renaissance criticism has explored the ways that judicial punishments, animal blood sports, and theatrical suffering produced rival spectacles of physical agony, we have often elided the very real differences between the feigned pain of the early modern actor and the all-too-real pain of the early modern animal or tortured prisoner. And in the case of the dramatic representation of pain, we have not given a lot of thought to the ways in which the bodies and visages of actors might be deployed to represent and exhibit their pain for an audience. By making physical pain and emotional suffering central to their mission, these plays repeatedly call on the actor’s skill to do something that elicited great anxiety in early modern England in other contexts—faking pain. This particular culture went to great lengths to establish protocols for discerning the differences between real pain and performed pain. Indeed, the discrimination of the “deserving” poor from those who only feigned injury was central to the enforcement of the so-called “poor laws” that determined who merited charity.7

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The stage performance of pain was probably made even more complicated by the proto-medical fear that performing a pathological state too convincingly could actually induce the effects of that pathology in the performer. As the antitheatrical writer John Rainolds argues in Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599): Seeing that diseases of the mind are gotten far sooner by counterfaiting, then are diseases of the body: [. . .] diseases of the body may [also] be gotten so, as appeareth by him, who, faining for a purpose that he was sick of the gowte, became (through care of counterfeiting it) gowtie in deede. So much can imitation [. . .] doe.8

Rainolds’ worries about the potentially deleterious effects of pretending to be in pain emerge from a psycho-medical paradigm dedicated to the physically transformative power of imagination and illusion. Because body and mind were so closely linked, theatrical illusion threatened both its audience and its performers with genuine physiological hazards, which were intimately linked to the moral hazards of inauthenticity. Certainly, pain is as close to a universal sensation as one can imagine. The actor may not always be able to assume an audience that knows what it is like to be a murderer or a cuckold, but he can count on an audience that has itself experienced pain in its mundane and spectacular forms. Yet the grammar and syntax of expressing agony in all its forms can vary widely across classes, genders, periods, and cultures. This produces a particular challenge for the actor, and for the director, who need to do all they can to convey a sensation that is at once ubiquitous, impalpable, and culturally specific. This dilemma is captured well by Kimberly Huth, who argues: “The universal nature of physical pain provides a potential foundation for audience engagement with tragic drama, but the highly subjective nature of pain experience presents major challenges in the expression or communication of its effects on the bodies and minds of those who suffer.”9 Actors, then, must call upon their own myriad experience of pain in order to be convincing. Pain, accordingly, is at once a fleeting illusion and an omnipresent trope on the Renaissance stage. Its physical devastation can frequently be apprehended through the physical evidence of wounds and blood and screams. Similarly, distorted or dismembered limbs, disembodied heads or headless torsos, along with other props, are used to generate the illusion of what is invariably a private sensation.10 As René Descartes asks, “is there anything

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more intimate or more internal than pain?”11 The actor must make this intimacy public and must manifest outwardly this profoundly interior sensation. The actor should manifest the physical symptoms of damaged and contorted bodies, listening with the attention of a doctor to the testimony of the afflicted, in order to imitate convincingly the screams of inarticulate agony that Renaissance scripts frequently represent feebly with a string of “O’s” or “howls.” In her influential The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that intense suffering invariably provokes such a “pre-language of cries and groans.”12 According to Scarry, this results in a loss of the capacity to project “the facts of sentience into speech.”13 Indeed, the sounds of pain can be very hard to interpret. Ecstatic pleasure can sound like pain. As Steven Connor remarks in Beyond Words, “‘Oh’ can signify longing, pain, excitement, rapture, intensity of bliss, precisely through the temporary ebb or overcoming of the articulate voice.”14 In a brilliantly edgy reading of Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling, Marjorie Garber has shown us just how a dramatist can play on the ways that the sounds of pain can resemble those of its ostensible opposite, pleasure. Interpreting Beatrice-Joanna’s “O, O, O,” Garber asks: “Are these the sounds of enforced sexuality, of rape and injury? Or the voice of a woman moved beyond control?”15 A considerable level of interpretive complexity comes into play when dealing with the inarticulate sounds of pain and pleasure, in part because both physical agony and erotic ecstasy involve events of great neurological and corporeal intensity. The challenge for an actor, then, is to manifest overtly an inherently private sensation in ways that others can apprehend. The plays are rife with hints about the ways this might have occurred, including sporadic stage directions, scattered descriptions of strained behavior, and scripted howls of pre-verbal agony. But in most cases, the actor must locate physical and verbal correlatives of a highly subjective internal sensation. The actor is in this regard something like the mythical figure of the nightingale that so fascinated Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers—deliberately intensifying its experience of pain by pressing its breast against a thorn in order to better communicate its internal agony. The rest of this essay will meditate on just what it might have meant to perform pain on the Shakespearean stage. The singular details of the performance of pain, I want to argue, may have depended in part on the early modern medical understandings and practices. Humoral physiology in particular tended to describe inner states in material, even physical terms; as such, it provided convenient

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physical correlatives for various emotional states. This made it a particularly hospitable reservoir for gestures, expressions, and poses that represent outwardly complex internal states. This essay, then, aspires to explore various possible relationships between the myriad suffering bodies and minds exhibited on the Renaissance stage and the grammar of physical suffering made available by contemporaneous medical interpretations of the causes of and cures for pain. When I refer to pain, moreover, I will invoke both emotional suffering and physical pain. As Jennifer Jacquet has recently argued, shame in particular is painful; “shaming punishments,” she asserts, “may be nonviolent, but that does not mean they are not painful.”16 Moreover, the vast lexicon of early modern agony made even less effort than we do to distinguish between physical and emotional pain. The common phrase “grievous wounds” attests to this usage. In the period, grief was thought to have profound physiological effects. It was as deadly as cancer or the plague. Indeed, as David Cressy notes, in the London bill of mortality for 1665, 46 deaths were attributed to grief.17 This is because, as Thomas Elyot observes in his popular manual, The Castell of Helthe (1541), “There is nothynge more ennemye to lyfe than sorowe, callyd also hevynes, for it exhausteth bothe naturall heate and moisture of the bodye.”18 Because grief attacks the very principle of life, which in the early modern paradigm resides in light and heat and moisture, it is a particularly mortal sensation. Recent developments in fMRI [functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging] technology, moreover, support the early modern elision of a firm distinction between physical and emotional pain; social and physical pain apparently produce similar neurological responses in comparable sections of our brains.19 An elaborate negotiation between inner state and external physiology, acting is in part a process through which, as John Bulwer remarks in his Chironomia, “By gesture [the actor] makes the inward motions of the mind most evident.”20 Thomas Wright similarly suggests that “By mouth the actor telleth his mind; in countenance he speaketh with a silent voice to the eies.”21 In order to glimpse how pain may have been portrayed on the Renaissance stage, it is important to note the detail with which characters talk about their own, and others’, pain. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, Northumberland remarks of York’s emotional torment: “Had he been slaughter-man to all my kin,/I should not for my life but weep with him,/To see how inly sorrow gripes his soul” (1.4.169–71). This fascinating utterance singles out a remarkable moment of empathy, whereby one

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character’s internal suffering reaches out and touches another. This implies a kind of contagion surrounding suffering. It also indicates that inly sorrow is something that violently ceases one’s core being. Finally, it suggests that such inner sorrow has external symptoms, whose harrowing presence can be seen and felt by others. But how? In King John, Constance questions the Earl of Salisbury’s behavior in ways that let us glimpse how the actor might have successfully conveyed dejection: What dost thou mean by shaking of thy head? Why dost thou look so sadly on my son? What means that hand upon that breast of thine? Why holds thine eye that lamentable rheum, Like a proud river peering o’er his bounds? Be these sad signs confirmers of thy words? (3.1.934–39)

The actor must use “sad signs” such as shaking the head, pounding one’s chest, and crying, in order to project outward feelings of inner despair. In Henry VIII, Norfolk describes the physical manifestations of Wolsey’s internal discomfort, suggesting at once the symptomology, and the mystery, of another’s motives: “Some strange commotion/Is in his brain: he bites his lip, and starts,/Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground,/Then lays his finger on his temple” (3.2.113–19). The description reads almost like an actor’s notes for one consumed with anxiety. Yet without words to articulate the source of suffering, the commotion remains as mysterious and inscrutable as other humans invariably are. Other moments in the plays indicate a character’s betraying an emotion that he is trying to hide unsuccessfully. “How now! why look’st thou pale? why tremblest thou?” (26–27), the King demands of Suffolk, who has discovered the dead Gloucester in Henry VI, Part 2. Such statements function like covert stage directions, telling an actor what physical correlates and gestures might best represent his inner state. Hamlet is a play obsessed with the relationship between inner emotion and outer behavior. Hamlet famously announces that he has “that within which passeth show” (1.2.85), but it is perhaps easy to forget that the dramatic success of these plays demands the opposite; the actor must show outwardly what he does not have within. Ironically, Claudius is inadvertently saved from Hamlet’s sword by adopting the guise of prayer, however insincerely. Because Hamlet mistakenly thinks he can judge Claudius’

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spiritual state by reference to his devotional posture, Hamlet passes on his best, and only, opportunity to safely kill the man who murdered his father in order to marry his mother. Claudius’ probing question to Laertes takes on an ironic pertinence in this context: “Are you like the painting of a sorrow,/A face without a heart?” (4.7.113–18). The consummate hypocrite, Claudius questions the authenticity of another’s suffering, wondering if it is real, or only put on like makeup. Even more perversely, Claudius subsequently demands that Laertes render proof of his inner grief in murderous action. The play of course introduces us to the character of Hamlet through his disingenuous denial that his outward demeanor can properly register his inward suffering. We are, though, brought into his confidence in this admission. Even while denying that his outside matches his inside, the speech provides a kind of promptbook for the actor tasked with performing a character suffused with melancholic angst: Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.78–86)

Indeed, the proper performance of real grief is one of the central questions of the tragedy. What actions, what shapes, what forms, the play asks, might be adequate to represent the wrenching emotional sorrows that the play explores? Later in the play, Hamlet is stunned to discover that a mere actor could, in the reciting of a speech, move himself and others to tears. How, Hamlet wonders, could he But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, [...] force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! (2.2.522–27)

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Hamlet’s language registers with surgical precision the physical marks of the actor who is moved to authentic emotion by the grievous passion he is trying to convey. Like Quintilian’s successful orator, who must feel an emotion in order to convey that emotion successfully to others, the player is moved by the words he speaks and so moves others. As the words he speaks touch his heart, they also touch the hearts of his audience. But unlike Quintilian’s orator, the actor certainly does not want to have to experience actual physical pain in order to project the successful appearance of a pained expression. The situation, of course, is substantially more complicated in the situation of emotional pain. For all of its exacting attention to the proper manner of performing passion, then, Hamlet’s speech to the players says nothing specific about the representation of pain. Hamlet’s speech to the players suggests that the actor should “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action” (3.2.18–19). Hamlet, moreover, indicates that the actor should “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (19–20). But what happens when the word and the action are completely out of sync? When nature is embarrassed at the impassioned falseness of the overdone emotion? Indeed, representations of pain can go horribly awry if perceived to be insincere. I will never forget a production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women I saw at the National Theatre, London, in 1995. Directed by Annie Castledine, the production was based on an earnest and noble concept: the governing idea, which I found promising, was to translate this play’s unrelenting suffering into the terms of the myriad atrocities that twentieth-century history has divulged. Such updatings of classical plays have often worked brilliantly, moving audiences to grasp the common humanity in violence and suffering. But in this case, it did not work; the importation of more modern expressions of agony into a classical text only aroused giggles. Hecuba’s repeated ad-­ libbing “Oy Vey,” along with other kinds of strutting and fretting, gestured diligently but badly toward real suffering. Such moments incited nervous giggles rather than profound sympathy, making the unskillful laugh, and the judicious grieve. The play was truly painful to watch, unintentionally imposing a kind of aesthetic suffering on its unfortunate audience. Mercifully, it closed in a week. The performance of pain, then, needs to be situated in a syntax and vocabulary that makes it plausible and persuasive, and that allows it to dodge the dangers of something like the burlesque suffering of the

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updated Trojan Women. I would argue that one of the ways that the performance of agony on the Renaissance stage managed to be convincing derived from its deliberate effort to deploy lessons from the period’s medical understanding of the physiology. In Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, for example, those watching a scene of torture react bodily to the scene before them; one witness, Parthenius states, “my sinews shrink, / The spectacle is so horrid” (3.2.82–83).22 The lines indicate an actor who instinctively draws back from a horror that rivets and repels at once. But the lines also depend on a physiology that imagines sorrow and horror as producing a kind of physiological and psychological withdrawal into the self. We can glimpse this physiology in A Treatise of Melancholy, where Timothy Bright offers a remarkable phenomenology of sorrow: The forehead lowreth after a paraliticall fashion, being destitute of his spirites, and all the former partes filled with that excrementitious moisture of teares [...]. The lipe trembleth, because the spirite which should uphold it in his right position, is now in greatest measure departed: so that the weight of the lippe, striving with the imbecilities of the parte, causeth a trembling, which is betwixt erection, and plaine declination: as if a man hold a thing too heavy till he beginne to be weary [...]. The upper lippe remaineth steadie and still, because it hangeth, and requireth no proppe of erection.23

This memorable description of the symptomology of sadness offers not only the specific physical expressions by which one might convey an internal emotional state but also a kind of methodological explanation for these particular actions. The actor who attended to these details might have, at least for an early modern audience, of convincing them of the authenticity of his inner agonies. We observe a similar set of physical symptoms depicted in the play Edward IV (1599), probably by Thomas Heywood.24 There, the Duke of Burgundy is described as a “deep melancholist,” who exhibits Disturbed looks and rivell’d front; Saving that now and then his boiling passion, Damn’d up as in a furnace, finding vent, Breaks through his sever’d lips into short puffs. (1.6.16–19)

The “rivell’d front” is a common image of melancholy. The physician and natural philosopher John Bulwer explains the physiology behind such expressive gestures, suggesting that in

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sadnesse [...] the front is cloudy and contracted [...] we use to wrinkle or to bend the Brows [...] the reason is, for that Sadnesse, is a certain Contraction of the heat and spirits towards their Principle, in regard of the apprehension of some ingratefull object […] the Forehead being deprived of the Heat and Spirits, is wrinkled. The material cause being a melancholy humor affect and kindled with much heat, which sends up a salt vapour to the Face, which pluckes the Muscles of the forehead.25

This profoundly physiological understanding of the disturbances caused by intense emotional states bestows upon an actor a repertoire of ways to represent inwardness. The geyser-like eruptions of the Duke’s “boiling passion” manifest his internal turbulence precisely. Indeed, this expressed tension between containment and release, between hiding an emotion and expressing it, suffuses much discourse about the passions. Shakespeare in particular was fascinated by this notion of passion as erupting within the individual and needing pneumatic release. In Shakespeare’s bloody early revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus, for example, Marcus, confronted with the maimed and raped Lavinia, observes that that “sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped,/Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is” (2.4.36–37). Shakespeare’s erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis articulates suppressed grief in strikingly similar terms: “An oven that is stopped, or river stayed,/Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage./So of concealed sorrow may be said, /Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage” (331–34). In Macbeth, Malcolm urges the distraught and stunned Macduff to utter rather than to suppress his extreme grief over the brutal slaughter of his wife and children: “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak,/Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break” (4.3.210–11). Sadness and grief are envisioned in terms of a pressure that builds up in the suffering subject, and that must be released hydraulically, through the salutary deployment of speech. Passion that finds no such outlet is corrosive to the mental and physical health of the subject. In order to convey such half-contained passion, the actor must convey not just passion, but the only partially unsuccessful effort to suppress passion. For my final example, I want to look at what is probably the most famous scene of physical suffering on the Renaissance stage—the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear. I would like to use this episode to think not so much about humoral physiology and its requisite purging of toxic emotion but rather about a very different kind of medical practice that may

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have infused scenes of particularly intense agony. Cornwall speaks some truly harrowing words as he blinds Gloucester—“Out, vile jelly!/Where is thy lustre now?”(3.7.101–2). These words invariably affect vehemently; as Jonas Barish notes, these lines “mak[e] us feel our own eyes being enucleated.”26 I want to suggest, though, that these lines not only make us feel the pain in our own eyes, but also force us to experience however briefly the torturer’s sensation of rendering another’s living eyes into mere gelatinous substance. Indeed, they make us see and feel the tortuous agony as well as the torturer’s vicious action. As shocking as this scene must have been (and still is), I would like to suggest that there may have been some unexpected but recognizable correlatives in contemporaneous medical practice. Cornwall’s various commands to his servants about how to control Gloucester: “Pinion him like a thief […]. Bind fast his corky arms. [...] To this chair bind him. […] Fellows, hold the chair” (3.7.25, 40, 46, 72)—may have reminded the audience of the terrifyingly mundane need to hold someone down for what the period called surgery. Indeed, in one of the most popular manuals of surgery in early modern England, A Prooued practice for all young Chirurgians (1588), William Clowes writes of one patient who needs to have a limb amputated (probably the most common surgical intervention because of the widespread danger of infection every time the skin was punctured in a world without penicillin): You shall have in readiness a good, strong and steady form, and set the patient at the very end of it. Then there shall bestride the form behind a man that is able to hold him or her fast by both arms. This done, if the leg must be taken off beneath the knee, let there be also appointed another strong man to bestride the leg that is to be cut off, and he must hold the member very fast about the place where the incision is to be made, and very steadily, without shaking, drawing up the skin and muscles; and [he] that doth so hold should have a large strong hand and a good fast grip.27

Instead of the gratuitous cruelty exercised by Cornwall, the surgeon and those who help hold the patient must be cruel to be kind: There must be chosen another skilful man that has good experience in holding the leg below, for the member must not be held too high for fear of staying or choking of the saw, neither must he bear down his hand too low, for fear of fracturing of the bones in the time it is a-sawing or cutting off. Then boldly, with a steady and quick hand cut the flesh round about to the

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bones without staying [...]. All this being orderly performed, then set your saw as near unto the sound flesh as well as you may, and so cut asunder the bones.

If the parallel was recognized, even subliminally, by an early modern audience, it would work to underscore the inordinate and unjustifiable savagery of Cornwall’s vicious actions. Instead of the theoretically salutary infliction of pain for the greater good of the patient in Renaissance surgical procedures, Cornwall’s imposition of pain and damage on Gloucester’s body is cruelly gratuitous, designed only to damage another human while producing optimal suffering. This essay has suggested that one of the possible resources for conveying pain effectively on the early modern stage may well have been the period’s medical literature. Perhaps it is ironic that a discourse theoretically dedicated to soothing and healing would provide the vocabulary of stage pain. But when read from a certain angle, Renaissance physiology and natural philosophy offer almost a promptbook for the dramatic representation of suffering. It can be hard for us to comprehend how pain might have been experienced in a world lacking ether, chloroform, and aspirin, much less the elaborate pharmacopoeia we now possess for treating pain. It is perhaps important to remember as well that behind these plays is a Judeo-Christian discourse privileging pain and linking suffering inextricably to salvation. The etymology of the word pain, moreover, betrays much of the culture’s attitude to suffering; deriving from the Latin poena, indicating a penalty or punishment, the etymology of the word implies that a person’s suffering is appropriate, a penalty due to some wrong for which one is being deservedly punished. Perhaps this is why the stage and the scaffold have so much in common. Ironically, though, a source for Renaissance stage agony is not just the execution designed to end life but also a repertoire of medical practices theoretically designed to extend life and ease suffering. In our focus on pain, we might want to ask ourselves why some of our purportedly highest cultural achievements involve watching others suffer. If nothing else, we should in our analyses of the English Renaissance stage—this primal theater of extreme cruelty— turn our attention at least as much to the suffering the stage represents as to the violence that causes it, and perhaps even speculate a bit about the medical sources for the expression of suffering.

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Acknowledgments  I would like to thank the participants in the SAA seminar, the editors of this collection, and Courtney Scuro in particular for their extraordinarily helpful comments on this essay.

Notes 1. Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 281. 2. Martin and Allard, Staging Pain 1580–1800, 7. The depraved rivalry between theater and state-sponsored cruelty, moreover, probably went both ways. As Sarah Covington, one of the contributors to Staging Pain, remarks, “It has long been a commonplace notion that spaces of punishment in premodern Europe were theatrical in nature, containing elements of performance, ritual, spectatorship, and a dramatic repertoire of cultural meanings.” See Covington, “Cutting, Branding,” 93. 3. Barish, “Shakespearean Violence,” 101. 4. Gosson, School of Abuse, 22. 5. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4.225. 6. I am thinking here of Macbeth (5.7), and King Lear (3.7). All citations of Shakespeare are from Norton Shakespeare. 7. See Schoenfeldt, “Lessons from the Body,” 1:795–802. 8. Rainolds, Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, D2v. I want to thank Darryl Chalk for this reference. 9. Huth, “Figures of Pain,” 171. 10. See Sofer, Stage Life of Props, especially chapters 2 and 3. 11. Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” 189. 12. Scarry, Body in Pain, 6. 13. Scarry, Body in Pain, 172. 14. Connor, Beyond Words, 51. 15. Garber, “Insincerity of Women,” 33. 16. Jacquet, Is Shame Necessary, 13. 17. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 393. 18. Elyot, Castel of Helthe, 64r–64v. 19. Boddice, Pain, 89. See also McCaw, Rethinking the Actor’s Body. 20. Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, 139. 21. Wright, Passions of the Minde, 176. 22. Massinger, Roman Actor. Quotes from this edition. 23. Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 153–54. 24. Heywood, First and Second Parts of King Edward IV. Quotes are from this edition. 25. Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, 147. 26. Barish, “Shakespearean Violence,” 102. 27. Clowes, Selected Writing, 85, 86.

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Bibliography Barish, Jonas. “Shakespearean Violence: A Preliminary Survey.” In Violence in Drama, Vol. 13, edited by James Redmond, 101–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Boddice, Rob. Pain: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Bright, Timothie. A Treatise of Melancholie. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586. Bulwer, Henry. Pathomyotomia, or a Dissection of the Significant Muscles of the Affections of the Mind. London, 1649. Chambers, E.  K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951. Clowes, William. Selected Writing 1544–1604. Edited by F.  N. L.  Poynter. London, 1948. Connor, Steven. Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations. London: Reaktion, 2014. Covington, Sarah. “Cutting, Branding, Whipping, Burning: The Performance of Judicial Wounding in Early Modern England.” In Staging Pain 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater, edited by Mathew Martin and James Robert Allard, 93–110. New York: Routledge, 2009. Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Descartes, René. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Elyot, Thomas. The Castel of Helthe. Edited by Samuel A.  Tannenbaum. 1541. New York: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1937. Garber, Marjorie. “The Insincerity of Women.” In Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Regina Schwartz, 19–38. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Gosson, Stephen. The School of Abuse. Edited by John Payne Collier. London, 1841. Heywood, Thomas. The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV. Edited by Richard Rowland. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005. Huth, Kimberly. “Figures of Pain in Early Modern English Tragedy.” Renaissance Drama 42, no. 2 (Autumn 2014): 169–90. Jacquet, Jennifer. Is Shame Necessary: New Uses for an Old Tool. New  York: Pantheon, 2015. Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Martin, Mathew, and James Robert Allard, eds. Staging Pain 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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Massinger, Philip. The Roman Actor. Edited by Martin White. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. McCaw, Dick. Rethinking the Actor’s Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience. London: Methuen, 2020. Rainolds, John. Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes. London, 1599. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Schoenfeldt, Michael. “Lessons from the Body: Moralizations Explaining Disability and Deformity.” In The Cambridge World Encyclopedia of Shakespeare: Shakespeare's World, 1500–1660, Vol. 1, edited by Bruce Smith, 795–802. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare [Based on the Oxford Edition]. 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Edited by Thomas Sloane. 1604. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

CHAPTER 6

A “Dummy Corpse Full of Bones and Entrails”: Staging Dismemberment in the Early Modern Playhouse Amy Kenny

“There must be a dummy corpse full of bones and entrails,” The Mystery of the Arts of the Apostles instructs when describing how to stage a human flaying.1 According to the manual, the actor performing the role of St. Barnabas should fit himself with detachable pieces of skin to enrich the illusion. Likewise, in his treatise on witchcraft, physician Thomas Ady coaches readers how “seemeth to cut off his boy’s head” by “the very bone and marrow of the neck” so that the “false head [will] delude beholders.”2 In his exposé of stage magic and witchcraft, Reginald Scot describes the process of simulating dismemberment using a paste board “according to the fashion of your belly and breast: the same must by a painter be colored cunningly, not only like to your flesh, but with paps, navel, hair, etc. so as the same (being handsomely trussed unto you) may show your

A. Kenny (*) University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_6

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natural belly. Then next to your true belly you may put a linen cloth, and […] betwixt the plate and the false belly you place a gut or bladder of blood.”3 The proof, it turns out, is in the pooling. Crucial to the success of these dismemberment illusions was the specific type of stage blood used: the “blood must be of a calf or sheep: but in no wise of an ox or a cow, for that will be too thick.”4 The viscidity of the blood, along with the texture of prosthetic properties is described by Reginald Scot as part of ensuring the trick is effective in convincing audiences of its authenticity. To enhance the spectacle, Scot recommends using “a little dough kneaded with bullock’s blood, which being cold will appear like dead flesh.”5 Focusing on the consistency of the flesh substitute reveals the emphasis on naturalism when prescribing the mechanics of staging violence. Yet focusing on these textures is not unique to Scot.6 Contemporary descriptions often draw attention to the viscosity of specific materials used to cultivate naturalistic wounds, prosthetic limbs, and bloodshed on the early modern stage. It is clear that pre-modern theatre companies were invested in making these violent moments appear gory, gooey, and grotesque by utilizing particular materials. Their inventories suggest they spent considerable financial and temporal resources on dismemberment scenes to make wounds and prosthetics appear naturalistic to playgoers, so much so, in fact, that manuals such as Scot’s and Ady’s were written to disprove the use of the supernatural when staging these mutilation scenes. This focus on the materiality of the prop raises a number of questions about staging dismemberment that previous scholarship has largely ignored. What materials were used to manufacture these dismemberment prostheses and props? How did the materials affect the humoral body of the actor during performance? What meaning did their materiality produce (or accumulate) in the playhouse over a series of performances? Prosthetics of dismemberment are worn by the actor in a fashion similar to clothing; instead of signifying social class or gender, however, they evoke trauma, violence, and injury. While the properties’ meaning shifts in tone and aesthetics, they retain a type of material memory across performances. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have convincingly argued that early modern clothing leaves “a ‘print or character’ upon observer and wearer alike.”7 In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, they demonstrate how the act of putting on—or taking off— coronation robes conjures the monarch for both onlooker and wearer.8 Memories of subordination, collegiality, love, and identity become

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inscribed on the player through the act of putting on clothes with codified meanings. Thus, the danger of clothing is that it is detachable, able to confuse social categories when redistributed because it retains the memory of its (previous) wearer’s identity. Sumptuary laws attempt to regulate this fluidity by rendering social status legible, external, and perceptible to the spectator through prescribed class aesthetics. Yet if clothes preserve meaning about the status of the wearer, the clothing itself possesses a type of material memory of identity. Stage properties, like clothing, are (re)moveable and can be attached, detached, and reattached to different actors in any given scene. Dismemberment properties are affixed to the actor using various techniques involving semi-solid materials: a sheep’s bladder concealed beneath clothing to secrete blood; a counterfeit ear affixed to the actor’s face with wax and glue; or a painted pigskin fastened to the actor’s body to appear as wounded flesh.9 These semi-solid materials blur the boundary between liquid and solid, and in doing so, cling to the actor’s body during (and after) performance. If we read properties of dismemberment as an extension of Jones and Stallybrass’ clothing argument, wherein props retain meaning, then corporeal properties imprint their trauma and humors on the body of the actor. The actor self-fashions his wounds through these props, and they preserve the potential to have an impact on the actor long after they are used in an individual scene. Over 60 extant plays from the early modern period call for mutilated body parts to appear on stage.10 Decapitated heads, dismembered hands, severed legs, detached noses, excised tongues, a cleaved heart, and even false eyes are listed in contemporary stage directions to heighten the gory spectacle. Scholarship has largely been interested in how the fragmented body is reduced to a moveable physical object, exploring the relationship between part and whole, self and Other, and subject and object, but has not yet fully considered the materiality of the disarticulated prop in the early modern playhouse.11 Bruno Latour’s premise that materials are meaningful components of artefacts that cannot be separated from their representation is central to the materiality of props. Literary scholars such as Peter Stallybrass and Evelyn Tribble use a similar methodology in describing particular objects as endowed with their own cognitive life, while Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Vin Nardizzi have probed the often blurred boundary between organic and inorganic matter, creating a vital materiality of things.12 This paper will trace the substance of severed body parts, considering how dismembered properties listed in the inventories

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such as “Argus’ head,” “Phaeton’s limbs,” “Old Mahomet’s head,” and “Hercules’ limbs” were assembled for companies such as the Lord Admiral’s Men.13 The props are described through their connection to a certain role (or actor) in the catalogue, which suggests that they retained their material memory after their initial performance. The properties become grafted to the actor or role, preserving this association long after the play is performed in repertory. Many of the materials used to generate violence on the early modern stage blur the boundary between solid and liquid, offering a semi-permanent state that adheres to the body of the actor. Making these properties required semi-solid materials such as paste, plaster, wax, oil, paint, and animal intestines, all of which were endowed with humoral properties in the early modern context. The contents and construction of severed body parts create a humoral exchange between actor and prop, and alter our perception of staging amputations, dissections, and beheadings in the early modern playhouse. Recovering the humoral basis of artificial, severed body parts draws on Jane Bennett’s work interrogating objects as “animate things rather than passive objects.”14 My essay builds on this interdisciplinary work on material culture and the ecology of things by arguing that the humoral life of prosthetic body parts is central to their dramaturgical agency on the early modern stage. Actors were likely aware of the humoral agency and the influence that various materials could wield over their bodies. Consequently, the playhouse becomes a microcosm for the broader humoral exchange between subject, object, and environment. In the early modern period, understanding of the body was predicated on Galenic naturalism, which encouraged practitioners to perpetually balance the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—in order to maintain psychological and physiological health. All bodily systems were understood as part of this regime, which situated the body as continuously in flux and therefore requiring regulation through the non-­ naturals: sleep, diet, exercise, weather, excretion, and the passions. The humoral body was considered porous, adaptable, and susceptible to innumerable changes in the climate, season, region, or age, even when healthy.15 Part of maintaining well-being was regulating the four humors and any outside forces—including inanimate objects—that might cause fluctuation. Early modern psychological materialism did not originate in the individual subject, but in the biological connections among animal, plant, and human life.16 To understand humoral subjectivity, we must explore the relationship among the various inhabitants of the early modern stage and

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consider their interplay. The materiality of the stage properties, then—the wax, glue, paint, and animal products—are highly malleable, yet their material memory persists in the influence they wield over the actor’s humoral balance. The materials might shift in their slimy essence, but they retain the humoral mark of trauma long after they are worn. Any artificial, dismembered prop would have interacted with the actor’s humors on stage and affected the regulation of his bodily fluids. While now often assumed to have passive status, in early modern texts, everyday objects were typically bestowed with a quasi-sentient influence, which draw on scala naturae, the notion that all forms of being exist in a continuum of virtues, motion, and action. All matter was a combination of the four elements—air, fire, earth, and water—and therefore had the ability to affect the balance of humors in the surrounding environment. Objects were believed to contain animation relative to their position in the great chain of being, where even stones were equipped with “mineral souls” capable of influencing their adjacent environs.17 Early modern authors write about objects using humoral discourse generally reserved for the body in modern vernacular. Wood was thought to include veins, bone marrow, humors, blood, and complexion; wax was often described as resembling flesh because of its hyper-malleable nature; and paint recipes were used by alchemists as medicinal potions with curative potential.18 Objects, then, exert humoral influence, not only because of how they were endowed with dramaturgical import within the scope of the play, but because of the materiality of the object itself. It is not merely that properties are bestowed with theatrical meaning or symbolism during a performance, but that they possess humoral potency on stage within the scala naturae framework. Agency is not subject-oriented during this period, as English physician William Bullein records in The Government of Health: the “four complexions” of the humoral framework were present in “beasts, fish, foul, serpents, trees, herbs, metals, and every thing sensible and insensible.”19 By “agency” here, then, I mean something that exerts power or influence, an instrument or tool of action, rather than an entity that is acted upon.20 In a modern context, objects are frequently dismissed as inanimate, and therefore, not understood to enact any influence over sentient subjects (outside of the symbolic realm). However, I wish to reconstruct an early modern paradigm of objects wherein all matter contains humoral properties capable of influence and, by extension, to reconsider the greater materiality of decapitation and dismemberment on stage. The

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material memory that objects retain can be understood as their capacity to influence a human subject’s humors. Stage directions and dramaturgy offer one window into identifying the previously uncovered inventory of the copious amounts of stage blood and dissected body props that are called for in the early modern period, which scholars such as Lucy Munro have already mined for clues about performing violence.21 This essay extends Munro’s focus outside of the plays themselves and into other contemporary records of performance, including mystery cycle performance accounts, theatre property inventories, and medieval theatre ledgers, in order to survey contemporary methodologies for constructing these properties for the stage. Wax, paint, animal products, and blood were frequently used to conjure naturalistic dismemberment. Detailing how to make an actor’s body double, one manual describes, “then he made the heads, hands, and feet with wax of greater thickness, but hollow within, portrayed from life, and painted in oils with all the ornaments of hair and everything else that was necessary, so lifelike and so well wrought that they see no mere images of wax, but actual living men.”22 Wax also served as a preventative means to delay the release of blood until its appropriate cue on stage. For example, it was often used to plug hollowed knives filled with blood or liquid vermillion before it could seep out.23 In The Passion of the Christ, Peter cuts off Malthus’ ear to prevent Jesus’ arrest, which was performed by “Malthus wear[ing] a mask with a fake ear glued with wax, which serves as a container with blood.”24 Wax was malleable enough to adhere to skin and be ripped off without harming the actor in the process. Its semi-solid materiality offered a porous and impressionable quality beneficial for mimicking skin. Wax allowed for these corporeal props to appear to be naturalistic during performance. Many of these materials are gooey in nature, creating a slimy film when stagecraft demanded reproducing the illusion of wounds on stage. Wax, animal skins, blood, vermillion, and paint all exist in the liminal space between solid and liquid, often generating a colloidal mixture of the two consistencies when appearing on stage. The viscous nature of the properties creates an exchange between the body of the actor and the prop in a visceral way during performance. The props themselves are a type of humoral residue because they are made from gelatinous materials that leave behind a slimy deposit on the body of the actor. While the materials are no longer extant, the tactile imprint of them is preserved in these records, which we can use to imagine the slimy quality of performing

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dismemberment. The stuff of the human body—blood, guts, skin, flesh— can only be recreated through manipulating gross materials’ physical states. These products must exist in the space in-between solid and liquid in order to mimic grotesque replicas of the human body that is undergoing physical trauma. Such gelatinous materials suggest that the humoral body is malleable and even composed of various mediums when replicated for theatrical effect. Pigskins and sheep bladders were frequently used to simulate human skin as well.25 A manuscript from staging medieval passion plays describes “A set or two of bowels from a sheep” are tucked into actor’s shirt to produce stabbing and dismemberment scenes.26 Likewise, a 1580 Modane Antichrist play explains the process of dismembering body doubles: “rip up or saw through the middle, from which shall come out entrails and blood and which will look as much as possible like the two Jesuits. And the officials will supply the flesh of the said bodies and the pig skins and shall take back the flesh afterwards.”27 Theatre companies often used animal bladders as containers for stage blood during decapitation scenes. A stage direction in The Rebellion of Naples instructs, “he thrusts out his head, and they cut off a false head made of a bladder fill’d with blood.”28 After St. Paul’s beheading in the Bourges cycle, “the head will bounce three times, and from each bounce will spring up a fountain from which will flow milk, blood, and water.”29 False heads were manufactured with wax, paint, and sometimes even sheep intestines filled with liquefied ingredients for gory effect.30 The property list for performing St. George in Turin calls for “Item: for 4 clean and large sheepskins to make the body of St. George, full length, to seem naked, and for the making of the said body.”31 These animal products carried vestiges of that animal’s humors into the scene. Pliny and Albertus describe stones that are “formed in the bodies of fish or animals, or in the nest of serpents” containing properties of those respective animals long after their constitution.32 Despite the lengthy process of forming stones, they retain humors from their source animal, which suggests props using pig or sheep products would likely do the same. Pigs were “of a hot temperament, and for that cause it cometh to pass that they do no lose their winter hair, for by reason of the fat, near to their skin, there is abundance of heat which keepeth fast the roots of the hair.”33 Sheep were generally found in “moist and hot countries,” which would likely produce a more sanguine effect in the actor.34 Objects made from animal skin and intestines had the ability to affect actors in their proximate environment. Uncovering these sanguine and choleric properties of props

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allows us to discover the early modern playhouse as a microcosm of the broader humoral interaction between self and environment. In order to create verisimilitude between actor and prop, severed body parts were frequently painted to resemble the actor. Philip Henslowe’s inventory records various body parts that were crafted for the Lord Admiral’s Men, including “Argus’ head,” “Old Mahomet’s head,” “the Moor’s limbs,” “Phaeton’s limbs,” “Hercules’ limbs,” and “one pair of bodies for Alice Pierce.”35 Copious amounts of paint were used by theatre companies, with one record specifying two pounds of white paint were required for just one performance of St. George in 1429.36 To prepare “the pigment called flesh-color,” Benedictine monk Theophilis instructs, Take ceruse (i.e., the white which is made from lead) and put it without grinding, just as it is, dry, into a copper or iron pot; set it on blazing coals and burn it until it turns a yellowish tan color. Then grind it and mix white ceruse and cinnabar with it until it looks like flesh. Mix these pigments to suit your fancy: for example, if you want to have red faces, add more cinnabar; if white, put in more white; if pallid, put in a little prasinus instead of cinnabar.37

It is clear that “flesh” is synonymous with whiteness here, as Theophilis instructs readers how to change the complexion by adjusting the ingredients. Ian Smith has shown how coal, bitumen, textiles, and animal skins were used to manufacture prosthetic Blackness on the early modern stage.38 Many of the properties used to paint dismemberment props—white lead (ceruse), bitumen, coal, and mercury (sublimate)—were considered choleric in nature, and therefore produced hot qualities in wearers.39 Quicksilver or mercury sublimate created “a touch like fire [that] destroys whatsoever is near: with inflation, burning of tongue, and swelling of the mouth, fainting, stoppage of urine, difficult breath, body-flux, and death.”40 The properties of sublimate were often described as “scorching,” “devouring,” or “scalding,” language which reveals its corrosive nature and ability to wither the body.41 Anti-cosmetic tracts frequently warn women about the potential dangers of sublimate, positioning its eroding properties as an emblem of the immorality of face-painting. Predictably, these tracts proclaim that the visible disfiguration caused by sublimate was mirrored within, scalding the body’s organs and soul in an analogous fashion. Virtue-signaling aside, anti-cosmetic tracts

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demonstrate the pervasive idea that these painting materials contain hot humoral qualities capable of harming the body’s humoral balance. Likewise, Albertus Magnus summarizes the “humors in the metal” in his Book of Minerals, outlining the respective alchemical properties and cosmology latent in each metal based on its moisture, heat, and temperament.42 Hot minerals were generally considered more dangerous because they “kill more speedily than cold, for that they are more speedily actuated by the native heat.”43 Symptoms such as vomiting, sweating, burning sensations, fainting, (temporary) paralysis, abdominal pains, and shallow breathing were known to occur simply from formulating painting materials, let alone wearing them.44 The cultural connotation, production, and side effects of these painting ingredients is significant because these objects have the ability to overpower the human subject’s humors while on stage. Wearing detachable heads and limbs coated in choleric-inducing paints would certainly influence the actor’s physiological response during a performance. Individual subjects could temper their humoral balance through the Galenic non-naturals, many of which inadvertently interacted with the actor’s body while on stage in the playhouse. The actor’s humoral temperament was impressionable to the passions of the groundlings, the weather from the celestial spheres in the heavens, and any excretions from stage properties. Yet the actor’s most direct form of control over the humoral impact of props came in the form of adjusting his diet to counteract potential detrimental side effects. Medical practitioners used Galenic theory to develop nutritional antidotes, proposing that the moist, cooling properties of phlegmatic foods could counteract the scorching attributes of choleric substances. Classical medical texts encourage coating the stomach with milk or cooling oils to purge the fiery attributes of ingesting corrosive poisons. Under a list of treatments for hot poison, physician Daniel Sennert advises, “give milk,”45 and barber surgeon Ambroise Paré suggests, “the antidote thereof is woman’s milk, asses’ or cow’s milk drunken warm, in large quantity.”46 Milk and other dairy products become an antidote to hot, choleric materials because of their cooling, phlegmatic qualities. This serves as just one example of how dietary remedies sought to rebalance the humors and suggests a broader pattern of exchange between body and object within a humoral framework. The actor must seek to offset any excess humors by mediating his contact with the non-naturals found in the playhouse. Before performing a scene involving noxious materials, actors would “first swallow a great deal

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of butter” in order to counteract the physiological impact of ingesting toxins.47 This practice derives from the tenet that the body was another instrument in the production of a performance, permeable and subject to tempering from any external materials. In this case, the actor attempted to quell the superfluous yellow bile produced from ingesting hot toxins by consuming the cold, soothing properties of butter. Perhaps actors took a cue from contemporary metal workers, who were known to eat bread and butter to prevent metallic fumes from permeating their porous bodies in workshops.48 This process is indicative of the humoral balancing workers attempted to ensure their bodies were not detrimentally affected by the fumes in their proximate environment. By eating bread and butter, workers prevented the hot, wet qualities of the metal from generating hazardous vapors in their bodies, since food could counteract these elements. Actors developed a similar practice of eating butter before performance, suggesting they learned to temper their humors when acting in a scene that required them to absorb mephitic materials. Diet, exercise, and expulsion were all a part of habitual maintenance to balance the humors. By eating butter or drinking milk, actors counteracted their exposure to the choleric qualities of stage properties. This interaction between body and environment is already at the core of understanding early modern humoral subjectivity and demonstrates the humoral effects of severed body parts on stage actors performing on stage. According to a pre-­ modern understanding of animal products, wax, and blood, these props enacted a humoral exchange with the body of the actor, capable of shifting his bodily state. The humoral temperaments and elemental qualities coalesced in a way that reconstitutes our modern understanding of agency and subjectivity, displacing the human subject as primary actor in the scene. Early modern stage directions contain a wealth of dismembered props, far too numerous to list in the scope of this essay. Many of these stage directions instruct a specific body part be brought on stage: Enter a Messenger, with two heads and a hand (Titus Andronicus, 3.1.234). Gives her a dead man’s hand (The Duchess of Malfi, 4.1.53). They pluck out his tongue and triumph over him (Antonio’s Revenge, 5.5.33). Enter Giovanni, with a Heart upon his Dagger (’Tis Pity She’s A Whore, 5.6.235). These severed body parts were likely manufactured with wax, animal products, and paint, all of which contain their own humoral agency able to influence the actor’s body. Each of these scenes, and dozens more, can be seen in light of the humorality of early modern props. Scenes with severed heads and dismembered body parts alter the humoral temperament of the actor,

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de-centering his agency and allowing for the humoral life of the inanimate object to influence the performance. This shift in perspective in these scenes is reliant on revealing the way the body was affected by its surrounding environment in pre-modern understandings of the world. It disrupts our categories for animate and inanimate by redistributing agency across a humoral plane, instead of a sentient one. The severed prop becomes an agent that exerts its own humoral temperament onto the body of the actor and shifts the performance away from a subject-oriented agency informing theatrical practice. These everyday objects of wax, paint, and animal products become imbued with an agency over the body of the actor that underscores the lack of distinction between subject and object. Staging these plays invites a tension between human and non-human matter that focuses on the materiality and humorality of these objects overpowering the human subject. Here I have been working with an object-oriented ontology to reconsider the humoral exchange taking place on stage during early modern performance. Instead of relegating humors to bodies alone, my examples uncover the temperament and agency of dismembered properties discernible within early modern notions of scala naturae. If objects are endowed with agency, we might consider what it means to be human, while also addressing the way humors are dispersed across a variety of objects, bodies, and environments within this medical framework. Such analysis prompts a series of questions about how this humoral exchange produces meaning on stage. Unsurprisingly, dismemberment and gratuitous violence are most often found in the genre of tragedy. While this tells us little about the tone of these scenes during performance, it does offer a mechanism to analyze the intertheatricality of properties across a specific genre. In William West’s definition of intertheatricality, he argues, rather than seeing different patterns and forms of performance as variations on a fixed type—the braggart soldier, the clever page, the plain speaker—it [intertheatricality] understands them as belonging to a horizontally organized repertoire, never completed and slowly changing, of lines, gestures, characters, situations, genres, and other smaller elements that cumulatively allow for new performance and new concatenation of actions.49

Does tragedy, with its excessive bloodshed and gratuitous dismemberment, offer a certain intertheatrical aesthetic or sensory experience that

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was noticeable to early modern audiences? Or, to put it another way, does tragedy have a certain humoral quality? Or even a particular smell? How can we explore the phenomenon of dismemberment on stage in a way that considers the theatrical life of props and their intertheatricality across different plays? More work must be done to address the humoral exchange taking place in these scenes. In West’s account, no movement or prop in the theatre can ever be truly spontaneous, but carries with it a number of theatrical associations based on past performances with similar features. Each gesture becomes mimetic, recalling a theatrical history of other similar movements, and offers a cipher for audiences to explore past performances within the current theatrical moment. While much of this undoubtedly occurs subconsciously, West’s notion of intertheatricality offers a framework to explore the intertheatricality of props in humoral terms. When the audience watches any dismemberment take place on stage, it subconsciously recalls other moments of mutilation that have occurred in previous plays performed by the same company of actors in the same playhouse. Plays then become sites of intertextual memorial reconstruction, not merely of a play-text’s lines, but of an implicit catalogue of humoral properties that make memetic meaning on stage. Acknowledgments  My thanks to Kaara L. Peterson for her heroic efforts in editing my essay with precision and kindness, and to the participants of the “Performing the Humoral Body” seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2018 for their insightful questions on the topic.

Notes 1. This describes how to make it appear as though St Barnabas is bound to a cartwheel and burnt. From Meredith and Tailby, eds., Staging of Religious Drama, 102. 2. Ady, Candle in the Dark, 39. 3. Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft, 197. 4. Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft, 198. 5. Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft, 197. 6. See Veronique Plesch’s discussion of MS X 29, fol 18v, 19v, 20v at the National Library Turin, in “Notes,” 82; Webster, Displaying, 308; and Gatton, ‘“There Must Be Blood,”’ 86. 7. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 4. 8. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 2–3.

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9. The props also retain a material memory as they are attached to their initial role on stage. The heads can be recycled for numerous performances and become that actor’s head double, regardless of who is subsequently using the prop. Hercules’ limbs are connected to Hercules long after Brazen Age is performed, yet this notation suggests the company recalled their use in Heywood’s play for future performances. The material memory of the initial performance survives in the records, even after the play and prop’s preliminary role was completed. 10. Munro, “‘They eat each others’ arms,’” 86. 11. For instance, Rowe, Dead Hands, 52; Owens, Stages of Dismemberment, 187; and Hillman and Mazzio, eds., Body in Parts. 12. For more on this subject, see Cohen, Inhuman Nature, and Nardizzi, “Wooden Matter of Human Bodies,” 120–21. 13. See the Lord Admiral’s Men’s inventory, 10 March 1598, discussed in Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 316–25. 14. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vii. 15. On this subject, see Paster, Humoring the Body. 16. Park, “Concept of Psychology,” 455. 17. Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, 16–23. For more on stones and rocks, see Robertson, “Exemplary Rocks,” 92. 18. Magnus, Book of Minerals, 232. For more on how wood was thought to have veins and humors, see Christina Neilson, “Carving Life: The meaning of wood in early modern sculpture,” 232. 19. Bullein, Government of Health, 13r. 20. Drawn from Bennet’s discussion of the word in Vibrant Matter, 21–31. 21. Munro, “‘They eat each others’ arms,’” 86. 22. Panzanelli, “Compelling Presence,” 13. 23. See Plesch’s discussion of MS X 29, fol. 18v, 19v, 20v in “Notes,” 82. 24. See Plesch’s discussion of MS X 29, fol. 14v, 4, and fol. 3r, 2–15  in “Notes,” 83. 25. Meredith and Tailby, eds., Staging of Religious Drama, 106. See also Plesch’s discussion of MS X 29, fol. 9r, 14–15 in “Notes,” 79. 26. See Plesch’s discussion of MS X 29, fol. 9r, 14–15 in “Notes,” 79. 27. Meredith and Tailby, eds., Staging of Religious Drama, 105. 28. B. T., Rebellion of Naples, n. 37. 29. See the instructions for “A miracle for the death of Saint Paul” under “An extensive list of feintes for Bourges, 1536” in Tydeman, Theatre in Europe, 318. 30. For Acts of the Apostles, see Gatton, “‘There Must Be Blood,’” 87. 31. See the property list for the St George play performed in 1429 in Meredith and Tailby, eds., Staging of Religious Drama, 112.

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32. Dunlop, “On the origins,” 84. A similar description appears in Magnus’ Book of Minerals, which notes, “in animal bodies, there must be a blending of humors in the material,” 155. 33. Topsell, Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, 516. 34. Topsell, Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, 471. 35. See the Lord Admiral’s Men’s inventory, 10 March 1598, in Henslowe’s Diary, discussed in Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, 316–25. While this “pair of bodies” is usually taken to mean “bodice,” I have included it in the list of potential body parts or doubles constructed for the stage. 36. See Meredith and Tailby, eds., Staging of Religious Drama, 112; for more on painting heads and wounds, 106. 37. Theophilis, On divers arts, 14. Theophilis outlines another process for making white lead: “pour in hot vinegar or urine to cover” lead metal in an oak box, smother with horse dung, and “after a month pry off the lid and remove whatever white there is” before grinding the remainder without water and setting it “on blazing coals,” 14. Once the horse dung ferments, it produces enough acidic fumes to corrode the metal sheets, resulting in a white powder used for portraiture and cosmetics. Fire, produced by the fermentation in the manufacturing process, equipped lead with the ability to burn flesh. Similar recipes can be found in Vernatti, “A Relation,” 132. 38. Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief,” 10–13. 39. See Lomazzo, Tracte, 133, and Cavendish, “Of Painting,” 86. 40. Sennert, Sixth Book, 52. For a similar description, see Ramesey, Life’s Security, 35, and Paré, Workes, 810. 41. Paré, Workes, 810. For more on cosmetics on stage, see Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics. My paper is more interested in the humoral properties of cosmetics. 42. Magnus, Book of Minerals, 155. 43. Paré, Workes, 782. 44. See Vernatti, “Relation of the Making of Ceruse,” 936, and Magnus, Book of Minerals, 132. 45. Sennert, Sixth Book, 37. He also notes, “If sublimate or precipitate be taken, they are cured as corroding poisons by vomit, clusters, and new milk, with fleabane seeds,” 52. 46. Paré, Workes, 806. 47. Cardano, De Subtilitate, 342–33. 48. Smith, “Matter of ideas,” 45. 49. West, “Intertheatricality,” 154.

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Bibliography Ady, Thomas. A Candle in the Dark, Or, A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft. London: Printed for R.  I. to be sold by Thomas Newberry, 1656. B. T. The Rebellion of Naples. London: for J. G. & G. B. at Furnivals-Inne Gate in Holborne, 1649. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bullein, William. The Government of Health. London: Valentine Sims, 1595. Cardano, Girolamo. The De Subtilitate of Girolamo Cardano. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by J.  M. Forrester. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Cavendish, Margaret. Worlds Olio. London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655. Clarke, Mark, ed. The Medieval Painters’ Materials and Methods. London: Archetype, 2011. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Inhuman Nature. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014. Dunlop, Anne. “On the origins of European painting materials, real and imagined.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H.  Smith, 68–96. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Foakes, R. A., ed. Henslowe’s Diary. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ford, John. ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore. Edited by Sonia Massai. London: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012. Gatton, John Spalding. “‘There Must Be Blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage.” In Violence in Drama, edited by James Redmond, 79–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hillman, David, and Carla Mazzio, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Karim-Cooper, Farah. Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Latour, Bruno. “Visualization and cognition: Drawing things together.” Culture Technique 14 (1985): 1–32. Lomazzo, Paulo. A Tracte Containing the Artes of curious Paintinge. Translated by Richard Haydocke. Oxford, 1598. Marsten, John. Antonio’s Revenge. Edited by W.  Reavley Gair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.

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Magnus, Albertus. Book of Minerals. Translated by Dorothy Wyckoff. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Meredith, Peter, and John E.  Tailby, eds. The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation. Translated by Raffaella Ferrari, Lynette R.  Muir, and Margaret Sleeman. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1983. Munro, Lucy. “‘They eat each other’s arms’: Stage Blood and Body Parts.” In Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, edited by Farah Karim-­ Cooper and Tiffany Stern, 73–93. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Nardizzi, Vin. “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E.  Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 119–38. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Neilson, Christina. “Carving Life: The meaning of wood in early modern sculpture.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250–1750, edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H.  Smith, 223–40. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Owens, Margaret Ellen. Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Panzanelli, Roberta. “Compelling Presence: Wax Effigies in Renaissance Florence.” In Ephemeral Bodies, Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, edited by Roberta Panzanelli, 13–40. Getty Research Institute, 2008. Paré, Ambroise. The Workes of that famous Chirurgion. Translated by Thomas Johnson. London: Thomas Cotes, 1634. Park, Katharine. “The Concept of Psychology.” In The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles B. Schmitt et al, 455–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Plesch, Veronique. “Notes for the staging of a late medieval passion play.” In Material Culture and Medieval Drama, edited by Clifford Davidson, 75–102. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1999. Ramesey, William. Life’s Security: Or A Philosophical and Physical Discourse Shewing The Names, Natures, and Vertues of all Sorts of Venemous Things. London, 1665. Robertson, Kellie. “Exemplary Rocks.” In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, edited by Jeffrey Cohen, 91–122. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012. Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

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Scot, Reginald. The Discovery of Witchcraft. London: printed for Andrew Clark, 1665. Sennert, Daniel. The Sixth Book of Practical Physic of Occult or Hidden Diseases. London: Peter Cole, 1662. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Edited by Jonathan Bate. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Smith, Ian. “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–25. Smith, Pamela H. “The matter of ideas in the working of metals in early modern Europe.” In The Matter of Art, edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith, 42–68. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Theophilis. On divers arts. Translated by John G. Hawthorne and Cyril Stanley Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Theophrastus. Enquiry into Plants. Vol. 1. Translated by Arthur Hort. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes. London: William Jaggard, 1607. Tydeman, William, ed. Theatre in Europe: a documentary history: The Medieval European Stage, 500–1550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Vernatti, Philiberto. “A Relation of the Making of Ceruse.” Philosophical Transactions 12 (1677–1678): 935–36. Webster, John. The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft. London: printed by J. M., 1677. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Edited by Leah S. Marcus. London: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2009. West, William N. “Intertheatricality.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 157–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

PART II

Art and Material Culture

CHAPTER 7

Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits Kaara L. Peterson

And sure her majesty is made of the same stuff of which the ancients believed their heroes to be formed: that is, her mind of gold, her body of brass. O foolish man that I am, that can compare La Jupe Blanche to the hardest metal. But in that wherein I mean to compare it, it holds proportion, for when other metals break and rust and lose both form and color, she holds her own—her own pure colors which no other nature can match or of art imitate. (Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, to Sir Robert Cecil, 28 July, 1597)1

In a famous speech to the camp at Tilbury fortified against an invasion of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Elizabeth I reportedly declared her mettle, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England too.”2 Consensus about reasonably reliable contemporaneous sources has determined the speech was in fact likely given by the queen on this occasion, though the details of her appearance and dress have been the subject for much continued debate.3 Her biographer, William Camden, states that Elizabeth K. L. Peterson (*) Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_7

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carried “the truncheon of an ordinary Captaine” or “a leader’s truncheon in her hand.”4 But did the queen ride out to camp on horseback in the dramatic manner related, “as armed Pallas attended by her noble footmen”?5 Thomas Cecill’s c. 1625 illustration of an equestrian Elizabeth depicts her clearly as such, dressed in full martial panoply (Fig. 7.1). This image’s identification of the queen with the warrior goddess so captured the popular imagination (most recently by cosplay historian Lucy Worsley) that Elizabeth’s costuming was regularly taken as an actual biographical fact until scholars such as Susan Frye and Winfried Schleiner began to question the illustration’s historical veracity.6

Fig. 7.1  Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas Cecill, c. 1625. © The Trustees of the British Museum

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Frye examines the potential fictions at the heart of this “myth” of Elizabeth’s battlefield comportment, taking as her premise that “what happened at Tilbury may be unascertainable, but the fictions that surround the queen can help us to construct why, at the end of the sixteenth century, the ruling elites of court and London sought to emphasize her role in the defeat of the Armada.”7 It is similarly unascertainable whether Elizabeth ever really donned the metal breastplate or if Lionel Sharp, the first recorder of the Tilbury events, meant to metaphorize Elizabeth as Pallas when a simile would have been sufficient to state the queen was like Pallas. The purported episode of Elizabeth’s wearing of armor is nevertheless interesting for the way it accomplishes a fairly literalized translation of a trope, the queen’s “feeble” female body into the metallic “heart and stomach of a king.”8 In Cecill’s reconstructed or more likely imaginative design, Elizabeth wears Pallas’ armor as a breastplate that models a feminized version of an ancient Greek bronze cuirass or chest plate (Fig. 7.2).9 Fig. 7.2  Detail from Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas Cecill, c. 1625 © The Trustees of the British Museum

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Cecill’s illustration of the queen translates into visual terms her “feeble” humorally and anatomically female body into the modified “stomach” of a man, what is in effect a metal prosthesis; it also transmutes Elizabeth’s martial mettle into metal. In broader terms, this visual illustration of Elizabeth’s rhetorics suggests an available historical view of what we might term the Tudor queen’s “elemental” perfection, or conceptual models based on understanding Elizabeth’s perfection as like metal or even actually materially metallic in substance and nature.10 The transmutation of Elizabeth’s material body into a metallic substance is a documentable instance of period thinking about the virgin queen, a compelling if odd form of cultural accommodation that shifts the standard notion of fundamentally flawed, organic female bodies theorized by traditional Galenism to a complementary form of metallic perfection gendered male—or perhaps even finally irreducible to gender, like Cecill’s ambiguously gendered, “translated” breastplate or cuirass that adapts the queen’s normatively female body into heroic male “mettle.” Elizabeth’s medallic and metallic images carved out of the precious metals of gold and silver can be seen as part of the catalogue of references or tributes paid to the queen’s superior mettle or substance wrought in metal in perfect confluence. Interestingly enough, Elizabeth’s peers imagine the virgin queen’s body as organic, non-corrosive, elemental perfection—or, in Essex’s words in the epigraph above, with a “mind of gold” and a “body of brass.” I suggest that we can attribute the development of this view of Elizabeth as a precious metal to the proliferation of her image in metalwork, in medallic and metallic objects, as well as to a broader Elizabethan material culture of metals that this essay will explore.

Medallic Portraits A survey of extant coins in museum collections readily reveals what curators observe frequently about European  subjects’ familiarity with the reigning monarchs of any given era: most people’s visual, aesthetic knowledge of a monarch’s individual portrait is conveyed through the medium of engraved metal coinage, the legal tender of a nation’s trade and exchange. Over her 45-year reign, the profile of Elizabeth would have been recognizable by a majority of her subjects for the sheer number and ubiquity of coins minted over four decades’ time—a quick examination of the British Museum numismatics collections reveals hundreds that have survived to today; moreover, “in the reign of Elizabeth the number of

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coin denominations reached its maximum.”11 The Tudor queen was also “the first English monarch for whom there is direct evidence that she sat [in 1561] for the mint engravers who produced these images,” after production was shifted to the Tower of London in 1560.12 A trove of other extant medallic work includes the queen’s “Phoenix” badges and several different designs for medals struck in lead, copper, bronze, silver, and gold, such as those to celebrate the defeat of the Armada in 1588. The “Dangers Averted” medal in the Fitzwilliam Museum collections (another remains at the British Museum) is perhaps the most finely crafted of these portrayals, a nearly three-quarter length image of the queen, cast and chased in brilliant gold, probably by Nicholas Hilliard’s hand (Fig. 7.3). Further types include “Garter” medals, propagandistic medals made in the Netherlands, and other “medallic portraits” (“shells”). The range of metals used for this medallic work suggests an equally broad distribution among the English citizenry, in contrast to the highly ornate and embellished portrait jewels (as distinct from medals) with the queen’s profile in gold, such as the Armada (Heneage) Jewel (c. 1595, actually a locket). A unique example of a portrait medallion of Elizabeth exists in the British Museum’s Phoenix Jewel (1570–80), modeled after but not cut from a “Phoenix” medal, almost entirely in gold

Fig. 7.3 “Dangers Averted” Medal, Elizabeth I (1558–1603), CM. YG.1401-R. Attributed to Nicholas Hilliard (1537–1619), c.1588. Gold medal. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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with edge enameling. More than for other Tudor monarchs, then, an Elizabethan subject’s encounter with the figure of the queen was predominantly through this medium and matter of metal, whether that be lead, copper, bronze, or the “noble metals” silver and gold. Framed in the light of these both widely disseminated medallic objects and more exclusive medallions and jewels, Essex’s conception of a queen fashioned of metals takes on new dimension, for he identifies her with the matter of the medallic works that so frequently illustrate her: the earl characterizes Elizabeth with a “mind of gold” and a “body of brass.” Gold is, of course, the more highly prized element of the two since the “ancients” ascribed particular value to metals and other natural matter.13 As a “noble metal,” gold “was considered a “perfect and uniform elemental mixture,” an attribute that, combined with its “thorough tempering” underground in the earth’s soil, gave it a dense consistency,” leading Francis Bacon to define it as the “only substance which has nothing in it volatile.”14 More pointedly, “the noblest of all metals, gold [was] commended not for its excess of spirit, which one would expect to signify the ultimate in refined substances [for] its minimization of earthiness, but for its uniformity, its perfect mixture of both sulphur and mercury, earthy mettle and volatile spirit.”15 Despite the widespread presence of medallic images of the queen circulating in her realm, surely Essex’s characterization of Elizabeth as made of metals better befits inorganic bodies? As Bruce Smith notes, in a series of passages in Sylva Sylvarum (or Natural History, 1626) that are representative of the period’s conceptual thinking, Bacon describes metals as if they are in fact alive, with animal “spirits” as organic stuff: “Bacon is apt to lose twenty-first century readers […] when he begins to talk about the reasons for the color-producing effects in metals. He speaks of metals as if they […] were living, growing things” within the earth.16 Metals “grow” in the earth where they are “uprooted” or mined and, also like plants, are the products of a kind of reproductive fertilization.17 Smith points out how Renaissance alchemical discourse pervades and renders indistinguishable our notion of typical disciplinary boundaries with “its mercurial capacity to dissolve metallurgy into botany into astrology into magic” and so on; this flexible notion allows for an organic model for the production of gold and other metals, “to the effect that metals ‘are nothing else but the earth[’]s hid and occult Plants, having their roote, their stock or body, their bough and leaves.’”18 In her essay on the subject of “English Mettle,” Mary Floyd-Wilson observes: “Mettle is an earthy matter akin to resilient

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mineral deposits or metallic ore buried in the ground.”19 Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing laments the prospect of marriage accordingly, “Not till God make men of some other metal than earth” (2.1.50).20 The slippage between the two terms reflects a further indistinction of “mettle, mettal, and metal” in the period, as the OED explains: “Originally the same word as metal n., of which mettle was a variant spelling used indiscriminately in all senses. The senses explained below are in origin figurative uses of metal n. and developments of these, but they are so remote from the literal sense that the consciousness of the identity of the word has long been lost.”21 The interchangeableness of “mettle” and “metal” in the early modern era certainly has a long and established tradition of citation in Shakespeare, who uses the word frequently, from Lady Macbeth’s “undaunted mettle” (more wishful praise for a woman made of male stuff (1.7.73)) to the famously “muddy-mettled” Hamlet (2.2.544).22 Given this lack of linguistic differentiation, the queen’s “heart and stomach of a man,” or her mettle in confronting the Spanish Armada, is given embodiment by the metal armor she wears in Cecill’s complementary mode of representation, a still discernibly woman’s body transmuted into male matter. Why should Elizabeth possess a “body of brass”? In a now obscure episode from the annals of English history, the queen was particularly associated with the development of a domestic manufacture of brass in the 1560s, including the Mines Royal, and later with the search for new mines in the New World.23 While Essex’s praise of the queen as brass may call up this specter of national pride, it is focused certainly not on this topical detail but on the perceived special properties of her material body and of brass, “the hardest metal” that “holds proportion” and will not be tarnished by chemical reaction. Brass has long been “taken as a type of hardness, imperishableness, insensibility,” from Job’s laments that he is not composed of brass to innumerable other allusions.24 For Shakespeare, “brass” is as much an imaginative reference point as “mettle” in Richard II to the other instances also cited by the OED. A compound of copper and zinc (originally copper and tin, the latter now distinguished with the label “bronze”), brass does not “break and rust,” or “lose both form and color,” perceived as equally non-volatile and weighty, as stable as gold. Given that “differences among metals had to do with accidents and exposure” to solar heat, based on models articulated by Aristotle’s Meteorologia “rather than any intrinsic differences,” brass and gold are in some ways versions of each other, a tenet of alchemy.25 Yet the relative

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stability of gold or brass metals that define Elizabeth’s “elementalism” as Essex frames it creates a contrast to the usual “fungibility” of humors in the human body according to Galenism, in Gail Kern Paster’s well-known phrase.26 The virgin queen’s body’s incorruptible materiality is thus the essential feature Essex highlights in comparing it “to the hardest metal,” or the unchangeable, non-corrosive nature of her “brass” body, in an age when female virginal bodies were perceived to be particularly prone to humoral disorders and diseases.27 When Essex blazons Elizabeth’s “own pure” color, the queen’s metallic body becomes peerless, the matchless evocation of unfungible, true color-fastness—semper eadem. Smith notes that “the object-like quality of color is never more apparent than in heraldry. Colors in heraldic blazons are not just colors: they are rare and expensive stuff.”28 Essex’s encomiastic praise performs an act of poetic alchemy by changing the naturally mutable female body natural into the “only substance which has nothing in it volatile,” in Bacon’s phrase. In Essex’s colorful characterization, his comparison of “La Jupe Blanche to the hardest metal” collapses the distinction between Elizabeth, “La Jupe Blanche,” and the brass metal or her metallic body—logically it is not her mind of gold but rather her body of brass and the “jupe” that are one and the same.29 According to Janet Arnold’s analysis of the “jupe” or sixteenth-­century riding clothes, Elizabeth wore safeguards [an outer skirt or petticoat worn by women to protect their dress when riding] with doublets, jupes, and cloaks. [….] From the late 1580s onwards, ‘juppes’ seem to replace cloaks to a great extent. The term ‘juppe,’ a name imported from France was used in England in the late sixteenth century for a woman’s upper garment usually accompanying a safeguard […]. There are forty-three juppes with matching safeguards listed in the Stowe inventory. These are in a wide range of colors and materials, including gold camlet [and] cloth of silver.30

When the earl specifies a “jupe,” the upper garment typically paired with a safeguard, Essex also makes this particular wardrobe item into a trope for Elizabeth’s “body of brass”—the body of brass is, in fact, a jupe. His somewhat unusual flourish accomplishes rhetorically what Cecill’s later drawing of Elizabeth at Tilbury portrays in a far more literalized visual depiction, the queen wearing not a jupe or upper garment but a metal breastplate, a body of armor typically made of bronze in antiquity (formerly called “brass,” the OED informs31), here fashioned with small

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fish-scale plates, lorica squamata. In Cecill’s equestrian drawing, the queen also wears what is apparently a safeguard. This item is similar to the clothing article shown in another more important equestrian image of Elizabeth, the reverse of Nicholas Hilliard’s Second Great Seal (1586), where the queen is shown riding side-saddle, wearing what Arnold thinks illustrates the typical fashion of safeguards inventoried in her wardrobe.32 A wax impression taken from the metal seal in the National Archives collection depicts these garments engraved in the seal (Fig. 7.4). Most extant castings in museums or private collections are wax seals, such as the one depicted in Fig.  7.4, taken from the metal Great Seal itself; one in the Victoria & Albert Museum is still affixed to a document.33 What Essex and Cecill share, through their different artistic and rhetorical modes, however, is a vision of Elizabeth’s jupes fabricated of metal instead, rather than wax seals. Possibly, then, Essex’s trope that collapses Elizabeth’s brass body into a “jupe blanche” is in fact an oblique reference to Hilliard’s finished Great Seal, the original object from which the wax seals of Elizabeth’s portrait derive. The Great Seal is in fact made of the other noble metal of silver, a color closer to Essex’s particular allusion to “la jupe blanche.”34 Or perhaps the earl recalls Hilliard’s creation of the brass matrix or model for the Great Seal, this model itself also a molded “body of brass” that is yet another metallic portrait of the queen. In this model for the Great Seal, Elizabeth is engraved, again resplendent in her equestrian portrait, all in brass. The conflated image of the queen’s “body of brass” and her “jupe blanche” Essex calls to mind thus may be found here in the Fig. 7.4  Wax seal, The Great Seal of Elizabeth I, 1586–1603, reverse. The National Archives of the UK, ref. SC13/N3

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seal’s model, in the same brass metal that fashions the matrix or model for her royal warrant. The National Archives identifies the matrix in their collection as made of brass ( perhaps  the same  Essex thinks of), while the Folger Shakespeare Library notes about a bronze casting from a mold that only a “few examples were made and given to” people, indicating these model brass and bronze cast seals were in circulation. Whatever topical example he may have seen personally and be drawing on for his odd blazon, Essex intends his characterization of the queen’s mind of gold and body of brass more materially and more literally than is initially evident. The earl’s rhetorics are in fact highly appropriate to Elizabeth’s person, her body politic and her body natural. As we saw above, Essex’s assertion of the queen’s perfection is based on an apprehension that metal is in fact alive, organic, growing within the earth, while the perfectly “tempered” noble metal of gold is effectively a mirror of humoral refinement. Zirka Filipczak explains the period’s view of the analogical relationship among metals, stars, and mankind: “Gold was ranked as the noblest of minerals, like the sun among planets, and man among animals. In fact, its very origin was believed to depend on the hot-dry sun. […] Of all metals, only gold approximated the sun’s ‘warmth, color, power, and essence,’ including the capacity to dispel humid vapors.”35 Gold is perfectly balanced, analogous to mankind (normatively male), such that it can even act prophylactically upon other bodies or substances. This discourse of metals complements the conventional discourse of Galenic humoralism, which seeks to establish a harmonious balance among humors, or the elements of earth, water, fire, and air, and to arrive at a relative equilibrium within a body or between a body and its environment; it is only more temperate, hotter and dryer, male bodies who achieve this, given the lesser complexion and disposition of female bodies, too cold and wet.36 The complexion or balance of humors in an individual is already rendered sublime in Queen Elizabeth, however, with a body of brass and mind as perfect as “noble” gold, a kind of non-volatile, tempered, temperate elementalism in her very organic essence, in effect a sublime(d) or product of Tudor dynastic stock, a wonderful natural alchemy. In another turn of praise, John Davies’ first hymn, “Of Astraea” (1599), establishes an elaborate conceit of Elizabeth’s perfection such that she is herself enabled to “refine” the “rudenesse” of time or the age of iron “Into the pureset forme of gold,” in fact an “alchymist” who can transmute inferior substances merely by dint of her noble golden essence:

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R udenesse it selfe she doth refine, E ven like an Alchymist divine; G rosse times of iron turning I nto the purest forme of gold; N ot to corrupt, till heaven waxe old, A nd be refined with burning.37

Frances Yates observes, “Astraea has refined the rude manners of the age of iron and ushered in a more civilized epoch.”38 Taken in its more literalized, materialist sense, Elizabeth-as-alchemist transmutes one inferior metal, iron, into another noble one, gold, which Essex also identifies as the queen’s essential cast of mind. As the exemplification of gold itself, Elizabeth can act upon other substances and sublimate them into “purest forme of gold.”39 In both writers’ constructions, Elizabeth is of course already the ultimate refinement of Tudor blood and “mettle”: As Davies’ poem plays on and Bacon explicates further, “metals, like plants and animals, possess souls or spirits,” which can be “birthed” if the latent “spirits” of the right “metall” can be brought alive (“quicken”) when properly heated and sublimed into gold, an alchemical process that is a version of reproduction.40 As the product of a wonderful (rather than adulterated) royal alchemy already, then, Elizabeth-Astraea is also uniquely capable of acting upon the “grosse” iron and refining it “with burning” as an alchemist herself, essentially the terms of Davies’ praise .

Metallic Portraits The identification of Elizabeth with noble metals in Essex’s letter does not seem purely metaphorical in early modern thinking, then.41 This view may help partly to account for a strange episode in English history where the queen’s image was reportedly put to an alchemical experiment. For two days in October 1601, William Harrison was examined by William Waad (Waad writes the report for Robert Cecil) about Harrison’s importation of suspicious goods from France that had arrived in Westminster, namely a wooden box that caused fits of sneezing by customs officials when it was opened and discovered to contain “her Majesty’s picture in metal; and a kind of mercury sublimate which had eaten into the metal.”42 Waad sent the box for further examination by an apothecary, “where it was found to be a very strong poison, and lying with the picture hath so eaten into it as it hath consumed the metal.”43

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During his interrogation the next day, Harrison indicated his interest in alchemy, part of the explanation behind the metal portrait’s peculiar containment: He answereth that it is a picture of a woman, but of whom he did not know, but saith that the metal is of mercury congealed [possibly coagulated or sublimated] with vinegar [acetic acid] and verdigris [here, copper pigment], and was made by Mr. Hillyard about eight or nine years since, and saith the other temperature in the box is mercury crystallined or alcolisated [possibly sublimed mercury chloride] and made by himself, and he further saith that the metal of the picture was made by Mr. Hyllyard, and will with aqua fortis [nitric acid] be dissolved again into quicksilver [liquid mercury] […]. He put the picture in the box with the other mixture […] because they were both of one substance. Being asked if it be not the picture of the Queen that which was in metal, he saith that he thinketh that Hillyard did make it amongst the models that he made for the [Second Great Seal] for the Queen’s picture. [….] Hillyard telling him how he did congeal the same, he required the said Hillyard to give him one piece and so Hillyard gave him that picture, and after he saw the said Hillyard make the metal. The mixture in the box is made of quicksilver sublimed [liquid mercury sublimated] from the feces of vitriol [a sulfate compound or sulfuric acid] salniter [possibly salnitrum, crystallized saltpeter/potassium nitrate] and cinnabar [mercury sulfide].44

Helen Hackett and Louis Montrose interpret this peculiar episode as an example of the queen’s agents’ sensitivity to how royal images might be defaced or destroyed with corrosive “poison” by her Catholic adversaries, something Waad took as possibly a form of attack upon the queen’s person through the vehicle of a talisman.45 Hackett writes, “Waad invested the piece of metal with profound symbolic value, almost equating it with Elizabeth’s physical presence” and thus “implied malice towards her” for placing it within a poisonous compound, given the potential for “superstitious belief[s] that inflicting damage on the Queen’s image could actually do harm.”46 Harrison’s perspective suggests to Hackett that he “saw it primarily as a piece of mere metal,” or “as an artifact, a piece of matter” rather than metal “transformed by the imprint of the Queen’s image into a sacred symbol” and treated with “virtual sacrilege.”47 Yet the highly specific chemistry detailed in Harrison’s account suggests something else is at stake in the episode beyond “mere metal.”

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Given Harrison’s interest in alchemical experiments, it is possible that, in a very different kind of literalized interpretation of the queen’s image, he sought to extract gold from Elizabeth’s metallic portrait: rather than seeking to do her harm through a kind of metallurgical witchcraft enacted with poisonous substances, possibly he was attempting to transmute Hilliard’s model metal image or metal matrix of the queen’s Second Great Seal back into her perceived essence, noble gold, by adding mercury to it like any good alchemist seeking the philosopher’s stone. Mixing mercury with other metals or gold ores into an amalgam is, in fact, the process for separating out gold from the amalgam, and Harrison’s alchemical experiment with the queen’s image somewhat mirrors the process Bacon describes for mixing metals to transmute them into gold–“gold-making or chrysopoetics.”48 The so-called “Sulfur-Mercury theory” of alchemy entails the “basic process of applying chemical sulphur to liquid mercury,” which “produce[s] the coagulated substance cinnabar, and this process form[s] the basis of the analogical, alchemical principles of metallic change.”49 While it is difficult to discern precisely what Harrison’s alchemical procedure with Hilliard’s metallic remnant portrait of the queen was, or which exact metal her portrait is made of here, the customs officials’ account suggests Harrison had some alchemical experiment in progress. As mentioned above, Hilliard’s completed official seal—namely the equestrian portrait of the queen—was made of silver according to Elizabeth’s written instructions to the mint and “Nicholas Hildyard”: As our Great Seal, by much use, waxes unserviceable, we have resolved that a new one shall be made. We therefore desire you to emboss in lead, wax, or other fit stuff, patterns for a new one, according to the last pattern made upon parchment by you, Hildyard, and allowed by us; and by the same pattern to engrave and bring to perfection with speed a new Great Seal in silver, of convenient massiveness, in form as near as may be to the former, and when finished, deliver it to our Chancellor, to be by him brought to us.50

From Harrison’s description of the queen’s metal portrait being among the “models that [Hilliard] made,” it is also not totally clear whether Harrison obtained from Hilliard a metallic “pattern” model or “matrix” for the Great Seal or an actual metal casting made from that mold, which would have resembled the wax imprints of the seal itself. Hilliard seems to have made several models when he was directed by Elizabeth “to emboss in lead, wax, or other fit stuff” to serve as patterns for the final silver seal;

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Hilliard also made different castings from the pattern mold, including the brass and bronze examples discussed earlier. Harrison’s account does not specify which type of model he possessed and plausibly Hilliard’s donated metal remnant could be either metal or even lead or some “other fit stuff,” though it cannot be a wax mold or seal given that the Calendar record distinguishes the metal substance of Hilliard’s portrait from the application of quicksilver mercury to it: “the metal of the picture was made by Mr. Hyllyard, and will with aqua fortis [nitric acid] be dissolved again into quicksilver.” In any case, if he sought to achieve the philosopher’s stone by experimenting with Elizabeth’s metal portrait, Harrison’s alchemical trial disappointingly did not resolve into gold, the imputed essence of the queen. Arguably, Essex’s blazon achieves this feat of rhetorical sublimation instead, translating a Tudor queen into metals that “hold proportion” and endure, a pointed contrast to the Renaissance’s conventional view of fundamentally flawed, mutable female bodies, as well as a window into the period’s perception and culture of metals. To conclude by returning briefly to Hilliard’s Phoenix Jewel—the engraved counterpart in metal to his Great Seal— in this medallion, Elizabeth’s profile is engraved in gold. We might say that here the former goldsmith Hilliard also performs a successful form of alchemy as he turns the silhouetted figure of the queen fully into the gold Phoenix Jewel, returning her image to the constitutive noble metal Essex describes for her material essence.51 The phoenix Elizabeth claimed as her emblem is itself famed for rising from its own ashes, a version of purification and rebirth through immolation and sublimation depicted on the medallion’s reverse—an image widely circulated in her other medallic badges and coins. Bruce Smith comments that alchemy’s apparent logicalness as a phenomenological possibility yet elusive realization in the material world accounts for its enduring appeal to creative artists and their works of art.52 Writers, too, reveal “a fascination with the phenomenon of transmutation itself—mineral, botanical, spiritual—that explains why images out of alchemy suddenly glint in writings by so many diverse Renaissance” individuals.53 While I am not suggesting that Hilliard engages in the pursuit of classic alchemy (akin to whatever Harrison may have been up to with Elizabeth’s portrait in metal), his creation built on goldsmithing skills is an artful alchemy of its own kind. If Cecill’s possibly highly fantastical illustration presents us with an Elizabeth in metal armor as a reflection of her “mettle” invoked at Tilbury, then through his craft in gold—the mirror of

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Essex’s praise paid to the immutable body of a virgin queen—Hilliard leaves us an image of Elizabeth in her “own pure colors which no other nature can match or of art imitate.” Acknowledgments  Thanks are owed to Gail Kern Paster, Amy Kenny, James Bromley, and Lesel Dawson for their thoughtful feedback on drafts of this essay and to Miami University for a grant to defray fees associated with reproduction of the images shown here—the essay is stronger for these contributions. A majority of the research for the essay was done at Oxford University, St. Anne’s College, thanks to the invaluable support of a Plumer Fellowship.

Notes 1. Letter from the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, to Robert Cecil transcribed in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 335. 2. Elizabeth’s “Armada” speech at Tilbury, 9 August, 1588, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 326. 3. The speech exists as a letter eyewitness account by Dr. Lionel Sharp some time after the event and also as “an undated manuscript draft of the speech.” See Montrose, Subject, 148, and also Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 325, n. 1. 4. William Camden’s comment appears first in the initial English translation of his Annals in 1625, quoted in Frye, “Myth,” 112, and the second phrasing appears in the 1630 edition, slightly altered: “the Queene with a manly courage tooke view of her Army and Campe at Tilbury, and walking through the rankes of armed men placed on both sides, with a Leader[‘]s trunchion in her hand, sometimes with a martiall pace, and sometimes like a woman” (Ss3v). 5. Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 326, n. 1. As the editors note, the comparison of the queen to Pallas derives from Sharp’s letter, contained in the Cabala compendium, Mysteries of State, in Letters of the Great Ministers of K. James and K. Charles (1654): “The queen the next morning rode all through the squadrons of her army as armed Pallas attended by her noble footmen,” when she made the “Armada” speech. Of course, Sharp may be suggesting only that her demeanor is like Pallas, not that she is accoutred as Pallas. 6. For succinct overviews of the scholarly controversy surrounding Elizabeth’s Tilbury appearance, see Frye, “Myth,” and Schleiner, “Divina Virago,” and for a response to Frye, see Montrose, Subject, 282, n. 12, n. 14. 7. Frye, “Myth,” 96. 8. Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 326.

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9. We cannot see if Elizabeth’s armor has a back to it, which would make it a cuirass as opposed to merely a breastplate. A closer examination of the armor shows apparently Roman-style scale embellishment (lorica squamata). Lorica Squamata is typically made of bronze or iron and bronze. Somewhat of a classical pastiche, then, Cecill’s fish-scale-like armor design is Roman in origin rather than Greek, though Elizabeth is not Minerva but Pallas. The Artserve site shows these antique items: http://artserve.anu. edu.au/raid1/student_projects97/armour/scale/scale.html 10. Mary Floyd-Wilson explores male mettle in Shakespeare’s Henry V in “English Mettle.” 11. See Grueber, Handbook, xxxvi. 12. See the catalogue entry by Barrie Cook, the curator of medieval and early modern coinage, British Museum, in Cooper, Elizabeth I and Her People, 75. 13. Evans, Magical Jewels, comments briefly on Essex’s letter, “Essex’s ‘ancients’ would have included the Greeks and the Babylonians, who, “attributing terrestrial events to sidereal influences, found a connection between the planets and the metals that reflected their rays. Gold, they thought, corresponded with the sun, silver with the moon, lead with Saturn, iron with Mars, and tin with Jupiter,” 24. 14. Ahmad, “Technologies of Mettle,” 53. Ahmad also quotes Bacon on volatility. See Bacon, Works, 525. 15. Ahmad, “Technologies of Mettle,” 10–11. 16. Smith, Key of Green, 58, and quoting Bacon, 65, 66. 17. Smith, drawing from a 1591 text, 67. 18. Smith, drawing from Girolamo Cardano, 67. 19. Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” 132. 20. All quotations from Shakespeare plays derive from the Norton Shakespeare. 21. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. “mettle.” The entry goes on, “The graphical differentiation is recognized in Kersey’s Phillips, 1706, and in all succeeding [dictionaries], but was not always observed by writers of the eighteeenth and early nineteenth c[enturies].” 22. For a longer list of Shakespeare’s references to “mettle,” see Ahmad, “Technologies of Mettle,” and Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” and Paster’s Afterword chapter here. 23. In 1567, “the first efforts at making brass in England were taking place at Tintern,” according to Day, “Brass and Zinc,” 134, and also in the New World, according to Ahmad “Technologies of Mettle,” 34, 41. On England’s metal industry, specifically on the Mines Royal and the Mineral and Battery Works that “had the sole right to mine calamine and make brass,” see Rowse, The England of Elizabeth, 153. Likewise, the Calendars of State Papers in the 1570s record various entries concerning the Mines

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Royal. Albertus Magnus first noted the presence of “tutty” or “pure white zinc oxide” sublimed “during the making of brass with calamine,” also called “tuchia,” according to Magnus’ translator, and “tucie” in French. See Book of Minerals, 249. I leave open the possibility that Elizabeth’s wellknown sieve or “Tuccia” portraits register a complex linguistic pun on the queen’s association with the purification of brass. 24. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2018), s.v. “brass,” historically speaking, is “The general name for all alloys of copper with tin or zinc (and occasionally other base metals). To distinguish alloys of copper and tin, the name Bronze has subsequently been adopted (Johnson 1755–73 explains the new word bronze as ‘brass’).” Further, “In strict modern use, as distinguished from ‘bronze’: A yellow-coloured alloy of copper and zinc, usually containing about a third of its weight of zinc. The Old English bræs was, usually at least, an alloy of copper and tin (=Bronze); in much later times the alloy of copper and zinc came gradually into general use, and became the ordinary ‘brass’ of England; though in reference to ancient times, and esp. to the nations of antiquity, ‘brass’ still meant the older alloy [bronze].” While it is not a common label, the OED notes another reference to a “body of brasse” appears in a 1602 work “urging […] [an] anti-parle with the Archduke Albertus,” written by an “English gentleman of very good account.” 25. Ahmad, “Technologies of Mettle,” 7. 26. See Paster, Body Embarrassed. 27. I have discussed this subject widely in my other published work. 28. Smith, Key of Green, 64. See the chapter “Green Stuff” for an extended analysis of Renaissance theories of color and light derived from Aristotelian models. 29. In perhaps the only other analysis focusing on Essex’s letter, Michelle Parkinson, “La Jupe Blanche,” 179, concurs: “Here, Essex summons up imagery which strikingly resembles Sharp’s description of Elizabeth at Tilbury. Here, too, we find metallic, martial imagery suggestive of armor and a reference to a white dress or skirt. Here, however, these images appear with a difference. First, rather than wearing metal armor, Elizabeth’s body itself has morphed into metal. At the same time, the white skirt also works metonymically to represent Elizabeth herself; she is ‘La Jupe Blanche,’” 179. It is debatable whether Essex employs a metonymy or a metaphor to denote Elizabeth, the white jupe, as brass. 30. Arnold, Wardrobe, 141–42; definition of “safeguard,” 371. Variant spellings are “jupe,” “juppe,” “jhup.” 31. See n. 24 above. 32. Equestrian portraits of monarchs are typical of seals of the realm. See the National Archives site for the equestrian image on the seal’s reverse: https:// www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=14&sequence=2

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33. See n. 32 above for the National Archives depiction of the obverse and reverse images of the wax seals made from the “brass” mold. The Folger Shakespeare Library describes its bronze cast on their site: https://collections.folger.edu/detail/-­5BCast-­of-­the-­Second-­Great-­Seal-­of-­Elizabeth-­ I-­5D/a5da135e-­3294-­4159-­8681-­7263082668b3. For the V&A’s wax seal attached to a document, see https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O78688/elizabeth-­i-­wax-­seal-­impression-­hilliard-­nicholas/ 34. Parkinson, “Jupe Blanche,” 179, suggests a similar logic in Elizabeth’s “cloth of silver” clothing. 35. Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, 128. 36. Smith, Key of Green, 59, outlines some of the other schema that map onto or share conceptual models: “It was left to Aristotle’s system-happy disciples to reconcile this [color and light spectrum] with the four elements, the four bodily fluids, and the four temperaments.” See also Evans, Magical Jewels, and n. 13, above. 37. Davies, “Of Astraea,” 129. 38. Yates, Astraea, 67. 39. The sublimation process of metallurgy or theoretically, alchemy, is quite possibly more flattering as a metaphor for Elizabeth’s perfection than what I take to be the analogous Galenic term for burnt substances, or “adust” humors that were thought to cause severe symptoms of various maladies, for instance “adust black bile” afflicting otherwise fashionable melancholics with hallucinations and the like. 40. Smith, Key of Green, 58; summarizing George Ripley’s 1591 text, 67; and quoting Bacon, 65, 66. 41. As Floyd-Wilson, “English Mettle,” points out similarly, “mettle in early modern bodies has more than a metaphorical relationship to the elements of the natural world,” 132. 42. Calendar, 3 October, 1601. 43. Calendar, 4 October, 1601. 44. Calendar, 4 October, 1601. Any error in translating early modern alchemical terms into current ones is my own. 45. See Montrose, Subject, 179–85. 46. Hackett, Virgin Mother, 212. 47. Hackett, Virgin Mother, 212–13. 48. See, for instance, Andrei, Money and Market, 158: “There are at least two main ways to remove gold from its ores. One is to mix an ore with mercury metal. Mercury combines with gold in the ore to form an amalgam. [….] It is heated to drive off the mercury. Pure gold remains.” For early modern techniques for mining of ores, see Ahmad, “Technologies of Mettle,” 23ff, esp. 53, and for “gold-making or chrysopoetics,” esp. 25. 49. Ahmad, “Technologies,” 8.

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50. Calendar, 8 July, 1584. 51. Koos, “Wandering Things,” makes a similar point discussing Hilliard’s technique of painting gems: “Hilliard here shows himself to be an ‘alchemist’ of materials,” 850, though this essay focuses on his metalwork specifically. 52. Smith, Key of Green, 64. 53. Smith, Key of Green, 69.

Bibliography Ahmad, Sabiha. “Technologies of Mettle: The Acting Self and the Early Modern English Culture of Metals.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2007. Andrei, Liviu C. Money and Market in the Economy of All Times: Another World History of Money and Pre-Money Based Economies. Np: Xlibris, 2011. Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. Leeds: Maney, 2014. Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon. Vol. 1. London, 1626. London, 1824. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth I and James I, Addenda, 1580–1625. Edited by Mary Anne Everett Green. London, 1872. Camden, William. Annals. London, 1630. Cooper, Tarnya, ed. Elizabeth I and Her People. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013. Davies, John. “Of Astraea.” In The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, Vol. 1, edited by Alexander B. Grosart, 129. London, 1876. Day, Joan. “Brass and Zinc in Europe from the Middle Ages until the 19th Century.” In 2000 Years of Zinc and Brass, edited by P. T. Craddock, 123–49. London: British Museum, 1990. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Evans, Joan. Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Particularly in England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1922. Filipczak, Zirka Z. Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575–1700. New  York: American Federation of Arts, 1997. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. “English Mettle.” In Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, 130–46. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Frye, Susan. “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no.1 (Spring 1992): 95–114. Grueber, Herbert Appold. Handbook of the Coins of Great Britain and Ireland in the British Museum. London, 1899.

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Hackett, Helen. Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Koos, Marianne. “Wandering Things: Agency and Embodiment in Late Sixteenth-­ Century England Miniature Portraits.” Art History 37, no. 5 (November 2014): 836–59. Magnus, Albertus. Book of Minerals. Translated by Dorothy Wyckoff. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Parkinson, Michelle. “La Jupe Blanche.” Prose Studies 28, no. 2 (2006): 168–83. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Rowse, A. L. The England of Elizabeth. 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Schleiner, Winfried. “Divina Virago: Queen Elizabeth as an Amazon,” Studies in Philology 75, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 163–80. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare [Based on the Oxford Edition]. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Smith, Bruce. The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

CHAPTER 8

Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision in As You Like It Kimberly Rhodes

Writing at the midpoint of the last century about Albrecht Dürer’s magnificent engraving of St. Eustace (c. 1501), the art historian Erwin Panofsky asserted that to most modern beholders the representation of a hunter kneeling before a miraculous stag between whose antlers appears the image of the crucified Christ suggests the legend of the conversion of St. Hubert, the patron saint of hunters up to our own day. Dürer and his predecessors, however, located this miracle, not in the forest of Arden, but in the woodlands near Rome.1

While Panofsky may have been referring in anglicized language to the Ardennes Forest and St. Hubert’s (Fig. 8.1) popular moniker “Apostle of Ardennes” rather than to the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the art historian’s interest in Dürer’s visual representation of melancholy (to

K. Rhodes (*) Drew University, Madison, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_8

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Fig. 8.1  Albrecht Dürer, Saint Eustace, c. 1501, engraving, 35 × 25.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York, Fletcher Fund, 1919. www.metmuseum.org

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which I will turn my attention later in this essay) in his magisterial study of the artist first published in 1943 led him to speculate on Jaques’ humoral disposition in the play, and there are also connections between these two locations that may have caused Panofsky to conflate them. Juliet Dusinberre explains that scholars have debated whether Arden is Shakespeare’s own Warwickshire Forest of Arden, or the Ardennes in Flanders […]. Shakespeare’s play embraces the literary and chivalric resonances of the Ardennes in France, together with a specific Elizabethan association of the area with the Earl of Leicester’s campaign in Flanders in 1585–6 against the Spanish.2

Indeed, Rob Wakeman has recently conjured St. Hubert’s encounter with the talking stag to align hunting and religious culture in his investigation of prosopopoeia and matters of conscience regarding the killing of animals in As You Like It and other early modern texts. What remains provocative in Panofsky’s statement is the possibility of an intentional double entendre, suggesting one might find allusions or resemblances to St. Hubert or his predecessor St. Eustace secreted away in Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, which for Panofsky, as noted above, was a site connected to his studies of both Dürer and melancholy through the character of Jaques. While this post-Reformation pastoral setting may seem unlikely territory for saints, the literary roots of both the pastoral genre from which Shakespeare borrows and bends to his own purposes and the narrative of the soldier Placidus’ conversion to Christianity reside in the soil of ancient Rome. In addition, Shakespeare’s play shares chronology and pictorial ideas about space and vision with religious pastoral painting (in which one can find images of saints Eustace and Hubert) as a discrete genre in Europe, thus closing the gap slightly between the reality and fantasy of Panofsky’s somewhat perplexing geographical proclamation. Finally, Stephen Greenblatt and others have demonstrated what we might call Shakespeare’s “double consciousness,” especially in his own family and Warwickshire community, around the furtive coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism, which we can, perhaps, extend to saints and melancholy courtiers, and stags with crucifixes between their antlers speaking with the voice of Christ and those that, in As You Like It,3 heaved forth such groans That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

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Almost to bursting, and the big round tears Coursed one another down his innocent nose In piteous chase. (2.1.36–40)

Reflecting on reading Shakespeare through the lens of art history, David Rosand notes that the art historian cannot but be impressed by the poet’s visual culture, by its profundity as well as its range of reference. Within the plays and the poetry the variety of functions assigned to the visual arts testifies to Shakespeare’s sure control of his materials and his very knowing use of them.4

Following Rosand (and Panofsky, perhaps), I read Shakespeare as an art historian, detecting in his words visual referents culled from a wide array of incongruous sources, strategies of organizing and populating space akin to early modern visual culture, and ideas about vision and visuality both accrued from a diverse range of knowledge including art theory, science, and religion and productive of such modes of seeing as “melancholic vision” for those both in the play (especially Jaques) and those reading or viewing the play being performed. My modification of vision with “melancholic” is both humoral and affective, designating the specific spiritual properties of vision attributed to melancholics in the early modern period together with a way of seeing that is sensitive to loss and absence, in this case the overt representation of saints. These strains converge in Act 2 of As You Like It, offering a unique opportunity to add visual and humoral dimension to the central theme of conversion, spiritual and otherwise, in the play, especially Jaques’ transformation from melancholy courtier to religious seeker in Act 5. To do so, I summon the iconography, narrative, and early modern visual representation of St. Hubert’s antecedent, St. Eustace, exploring the intertwining of the religious imagination of the period just after the Reformation with melancholy minds and bodies, both human and animal, in the setting of the Forest of Arden—most pertinently in our introduction to that pastoral place in the First Lord’s ekphrastic description of the meeting of Jaques with the wounded stag. In the process I will refer to specific works of art, not to suggest a direct relationship with the scene nor to find its visual source, but instead to create a relational structure for seeing it as an artifact of early modern religious visual culture, which was undergoing dramatic visual and thematic conversions of its own, from flattened to perspectival space, from sacred to

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secular subjects, and, in England, from Catholic to Protestant visual codes. It is not my intention to remove the figure of Jaques from the lineage of Renaissance portraits of melancholic men such as Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man Among Roses (c. 1587–88) or to eradicate readings of the stag as akin to emblem book images, but, instead, to extend its artistic potential into other realms pertinent to the religious tensions of the early modern period. Much like a wooden rectangle placed around the periphery of a stretched and painted piece of cloth focuses attention on the fictive space of the painting and both underscores its realism with its likeness to a window—and undermines the same by creating a boundary between the painting and the architectural space within which it is situated—my approach here serves paradoxical purposes. I seek to both naturalize the scene of Jaques and the wounded stag as part of larger visual tradition of religious pastoral emerging during Shakespeare’s period of theatrical productivity and characterize its distortions of generic conventions, which limit its reading as such, in the context of the period following the Reformation in England. In a sense, this equivocal stance mirrors Jaques’ melancholy, which has been perceived as a ruse by some scholars and authentic by others, including Panofsky, who claims that Jaques “uses the mask of a melancholic by fashion and snobbery to hide that fact that he is a genuine one.”5 In visual culture, the religious pastoral is a sub-category of the pastoral genre inclusive of scenes of the Nativity and the lives of the saints, which has its roots in early sixteenth-century Venetian art, particularly the work of Giorgione and Titian, who transformed the literary pastoral of Virgil and Jacopo Sannazaro into a set of formulaic landscape and figural conventions: “the pastoral landscape tends to be more intimate than panoramic, to feature a dominant grove as either immediate setting for or backdrop to the figures, and a stream is likely to run through its gentle hills […]. In the distance, the buildings of a town or village serve as foil to the natural setting, defining its character of escape, confirming its difference.”6 Our introduction to the Forest of Arden in 2.1 certainly echoes both the physical characteristics of pastoral painting, including the bifurcation of court and country described here. To wit, Duke Senior asks “Hath not old custom made this life more sweet/Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods/More free from peril then the envious court?” (2–4). Albert R. Cirillo has described Shakespeare’s skewed use of the literary pastoral in As You Like It:

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By making the Forest of Arden a temporary retreat from the world of the Machiavellian court, Shakespeare suggests the ideal which should be the foundation of the real; but by consistently undercutting the pastoral convention as a convention [author’s italics], he also suggests that the ideal of the pastoral is not an end in itself—which would be unattainable in any case—but the underlying substance of the real, the world of the possible which should inform the actual.7

My understanding of the evocation and warping of the religious pastoral in 2.1 hews closely to Cirillo in that the religious pastoral, with its references to saints and, therefore, idolatry, is all but impossible to overtly deploy during the period in which Shakespeare lived and worked, as is the crucifix that appears between the stag’s antlers in the stories of saints Eustace and Hubert. Seeking to acknowledge and analyze British religious art in the period 1560–1660, Tara Hamling suggests that a Protestant visual culture emerged at this moment through “complex processes of survival, censorship, assimilation, modification and innovation.”8 Peter Milward detects a similar literary strategy at work in As You Like It, asserting that “Shakespeare looks fondly back to the time before the far-­reaching religious changes had been inaugurated by Henry VIII and ratified by his daughter Elizabeth, a time that had been realized in the old Forest of Arden near Stratford and was still present in the Ardennes overseas.”9 In a related study, A. Stuart Daley finds numerous biblical allusions in the play, and, more specifically suggests that the weeping stag contains multiple references to passages from the Bible that allow it to “simulate the human victim of adversity.”10 As an innocent victim of the aristocratically marked hunt upon which Jaques moralizes, the stag is to Daley, therefore, a marker of corrupt society, much as it is, as we shall see, in the legend of St. Eustace. By considering the visual lineaments of 2.1 and seeing and reading them with a melancholic vision attuned to absence and loss, the spiritual properties of melancholy, and Jaques’ conversion narrative (a type of story he shares with the saints), we can see Shakespeare participating (albeit obliquely, as Hamling and Milward suggests was necessary) in the processes Hamling describes in relation to the religious pastoral. The implication of pointing to the religious pastoral, however subtly, manifests dissatisfaction with the state of religious freedom in England after the Reformation, knowledge of the Catholic past and its conversion to Protestantism in the present, and a bid for a more pluralistic religious culture. Jaques may not be explicitly saintly (or melancholy, for that matter)

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in As You Like It, but he does undergo conversion as a saint does, and one might also say that in the parlance of early modern visual culture and its pastoral idioms he sees and is seen like one, especially if we ascribe melancholic vision to him and attune ourselves to the trope as well. Just as Dürer’s image of St. Eustace ushers saints into the Forest of Arden, the artist’s Melencolia 1 (1514) offers a foundational visual source from the early modern period through which to consider Jaques’ melancholy and its extension to both vision and religion (Fig. 8.2). Stuart Sillars has documented the ubiquity of the print in Shakespeare’s England to establish its connection to As You Like It, noting that Johannes Wierix’s copy of the image circulated as late as 1602.11 Admittedly, the image conjured by the First Lord of Jaques “as he lay along/Under an oak, whose antic root peeps out/Upon the brook that brawls along this wood” (2.1.30–32) bears no resemblance to Dürer’s massive, brooding female angel seated in a cramped interior crowded with strange tools, archaic measuring devices, and unwieldy geometric shapes while a meteor streaks through the sky in the background. Erwin Panofsky has written extensively and authoritatively of the iconography of Dürer’s print, and of melancholy in general, delving into ancient and early modern philosophy, medicine, science, and mathematics to make meaning of the seemingly disparate objects and symbols that populate Melencolia 1. Of his many striking assertions, one stands out here for its correlation of melancholy, vision, and spirituality: Melancholics […] are gifted for geometry […] because they think in terms of concrete mental images and not of abstract philosophical concepts; conversely, people gifted for geometry are bound to be melancholy because the consciousness of a sphere beyond their reach makes them suffer from a feeling of spiritual confinement and insufficiency.12

Correspondingly, in the play Rosalind ascribes Jaques’ melancholy to an excess of vision and lack of tangible possessions resulting from his nomadic life: A traveler! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands. (4.1.19–22)

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Fig. 8.2  Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia 1, 1514, engraving, 24  ×  18.5  cm., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943, www. metmuseum.org

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Shakespeare’s text also demonstrates Jaques’ close material attention to the object of his gaze and his affective response to it as a product of his humoral state, but what of the metaphysical consequences of melancholic vision as prescribed by Panofsky through Dürer? Is Jaques’ melancholic manner of seeing the stag akin to St. Eustace’s spiritual one, and does it therefore connect to his conversion at the end of the play? In depictions of saints and their conversion stories, animals often play a pivotal role as divine avatars, and they are conferred affective and sensory agency by their representation as feeling and seeing creatures. In this way, in relation to 2.1, the deer is not just an object of Jaques’ vision that elicits his torrent of melancholy musings, but also a subject who sees and shares feeling with him. Winfried Schleiner has catalogued a plethora of invaluable references to deer and melancholy in order to connect Jaques’ humoral state to the stag’s and thereby construe the stag as more than simply fodder for hunters and convey the thematic coherence of the scene.13 Considering non-human animals who share both a humoral and divine bond with their human interlocutors also provides the opportunity to explore Gail Kern Paster’s call for scholars to “add a nuanced picture of humoral subjectivity in similar terms—as a form of consciousness that is open, penetrable, fluid, and extended outward to the higher animals with which it shared affective workings,” particularly the intraspecies union of melancholy and vision, which creates sensory subjectivity human and non-­ human animals.14 We need look no further than Shakespeare’s contemporary Edward Topsell, a cleric and naturalist, and the discourses on deer in his Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, first published in 1607, to find, as we do in Panofsky’s explication of Melencolia 1, the convergence of melancholy, vision, and religion. Topsell, however, adds the disapproval of hunting to his commentary, which adds a further connection to As You Like It. Mapping Topsell’s commentary about deer onto 2.1 of As You Like It provides a singular source for the diverse signifiers assigned to deer in the early modern world in a book with religious implications. According to Gordon L. Miller, “Getting at the inner language of nature was apparently analogous, for Topsell, to getting inside a sacred text, where the divine word can speak revelatory truths. With his mind set first on things of heaven, he therefore recommended his accounts of animals to his readers more as a guide to soulful meditation than as a guide for the field.”15 This is useful in establishing the interface between melancholy, vision, and religion in the realm of religious pastoral I am working with here and for suggesting

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another motive for my exploration of the correspondence between Jaques’ encounter with the wounded stag and St. Eustace’s miraculous vision. In the matter of vision, Topsell refers to the medicinal properties of deer antlers to cure maladies of the eye and thereby improve sight or in some cases, cure blindness. He advises his readers to “take the horn and cut it into small pieces, then put it into an earthen pot anointed within with durt, and so set it in a furnace untill it become white, then wash it like a mineral and it will help the runnings and ulcers in the eyes.”16 He also suggests that “the Harts horn hath power to dry up all humors, and therefore it is used in eye salves.”17 As for melancholy specifically, Topsell cautions against the consumption of venison at least twice in his text. In the first case, deer are “beast[s] full of fear, and therefore the flesh thereof although it be very dry, yet will it engender some melancholy.”18 Later in the book he calls upon Galen in cautioning against using deer as food: “Galen adviseth men to abstain as much from Harts flesh, as from Asses, for it engendereth melancholy, yet is it better in Summer then in Winter.”19 Topsell ends his lengthy section “Of the Hart and Hinde” with a description of a vicious stag hunt, concluding that “the best use of these beasts is to keep them tame, as in Helvetia, where they hunt seldom, and to make good use of them for nourishment rather then [sic] for sport, as it is reported of a holy man, who kept a Hinde so familiar with him, that in the Wilderness he lived upon her milk.”20 This passage resonates with St. Jerome’s somewhat pastoral description of living in the country: “let us take this first chance and make for the haven of a rural retreat. Let us live there on coarse bread and on the greenstuff that we water with our own hands, and on milk, country delicacies, cheap and harmless.”21 To Topsell, then, the move from hunting deer for sport to using them primarily for sustenance as in animal husbandry has religious implications that require a conversion of sorts in the way one sees deer as a manifestation of the divine and a reforming of one’s actions as a result. Following Miller’s characterization of Topsell above, one might thus imagine Jaques’ conversion to a religious seeker in Act 5 as linked to his invective against the brutality of the hunt while he gazes upon the wounded, weeping stag: first seeing the inhumanity of hunting, then discerning its spiritual implications of communication with the divine, and finally, at the end of the play, changing his path in life. Returning to Jaques and his conversion narrative, Gabriel Egan asserts that

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if Jaques got melancholic from eating too much stag […] then what follows might be his body’s self-correction of this imbalance. By generating his emotional state of sympathy for the stag, his bodily appetites are altered (he swears off meat) and so the proper balance can be restored. If, as seems likely the ‘ab[h]ominable’ (4.1.6), man-avoiding Jaques seeks Duke Frederick at the close of the play in order to emulate his religious isolation, the monastic life (from the Greek mono—remaining alone) will include vegetarianism that will cure his melancholy.22

Refraining from eating the deer’s flesh and thereby avoiding melancholy, may also help one attain spiritual satisfaction and attunement if, as Panofsky suggests, melancholy and spiritual yearning are related states. The conversion story of St. Eustace was readily available to readers and viewers in medieval England. According to Laurel Braswell, at least thirty manuscripts in English featuring the story of St. Eustace were produced between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, including The Golden Legend, published in English for the first time by William Caxton in 1483, more than two centuries after its initial compilation by Jacobus de Varagine. Braswell has also noted allegiances between the narrative of St. Eustace and the romance of St. Isumbras, which was a medieval touchstone for Shakespeare. Delving into the textual specifics of St. Eustace’s tale, as conveyed in The Golden Legend, reveals some similarities to Jaques’ circumstances as we encounter him in 2.1 with the wounded stag, in 4.2 with the hunters, and in 5.4 when he states his intention to search out the recently converted Duke Frederick because “out of these convertites/There is much matter to be heard and learned” (4.5.181–82). In The Golden Legend, Placidus is a member of the court (“master of the chivalry of Trajan”) who, while hunting, “found an herd of harts, among whom he saw one more fair and greater than the other, which departed from the company and sprang into the thickest of the forest” and asked Placidus why he was being persecuted.23 After being converted both to Christianity and against hunting by the divine stag, Placidus suffers a series of Job-like misfortunes, including becoming separated from his wife and sons, and descends into a melancholic state of wailing and weeping. Fifteen years pass, during which time Placidus and his sons live distant from one another, but in equally pastoral settings, until Hadrian, who has replaced Trajan, sends his army to find Placidus and return him to his former position. Once he is reinstated as a knight, Placidus is, by chance, reunited with his wife and sons, they admit to their conversion to Christianity, and are put

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to death. Thus Jaques, like Placidus, experiences conflict between court and country, encounters a sequestered and tortured stag, lives a nomadic life, reverts back to a way of life he has eschewed, and, at the end, commits to a Christian life (and death). These literary coincidences are compounded by Jaques’ visual resemblances to the saint as manifested in medieval and early modern art, including the religious pastoral. The cult of St. Eustace in medieval England can be confirmed by cathedral inventories enumerating his relics, stained glass imagery, and representation in interior painting. For example, before the Reformation, which forbade the veneration of relics, relics of St. Eustace were available to pilgrims and worshippers in at least eleven religious sites, including an important skull, head, jaw or brain relic (the inventory does not distinguish between them) in the royal chapel at Windsor.24 A late fifteenth-century wall painting of the life of St. Eustace whitewashed with lime during the Reformation is extant at Canterbury Cathedral, whose inventory also includes a relic of the saint (Fig. 8.3).25 This extraordinary wall painting is a reminder of the rich visual culture of saints that thrived before the Reformation and an index of its features. Eamon Duffy observes that “the men and women of late medieval England were busy surrounding themselves with new or refurbished images of the holy dead, laying out large sums of money to provide lights, jewels, and precious coverings to honour these images”; the Canterbury painting seems to confirm St. Eustace as part of this trend.26 The narrative of St. Eustace’s conversion, tribulations, and death is relayed from bottom to top in the painting, rendering his encounter with a stag with an image of Christ between its antlers in a forest setting immediately visible to viewers. The saint wears contemporary hunting garb rather than ancient Roman clothing and is surrounded by animals as he kneels before the stag with his arms outstretched in wonder. An architectural structure to the left of and behind the horse demarcates both the separation of wilderness and civilization (or country and court) and the distance between them, as the building is perspectivally positioned in the background of the scene in an otherwise flattened space. Thus is the iconographic inventory of the St. Eustace story established (hunter, horse, dogs, stag with crucifix, forest, and architecture) together with its typically dichotomous forms of vision: natural (animals, human, forest) and supernatural (image of Christ), flattened and illusionistic, seeing (St. Eustace’s vision of the stag) and being seen (the painting’s viewer is an unseen witness).

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Fig. 8.3  The Legend of St. Eustace, c. 1480, wall painting, Canterbury Cathedral, International Photobank/Alamy Stock Photo

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The First Lord’s ekphrastic description of his off-stage encounter with Jaques and the wounded stag embraces some of the same iconographic characteristics and dualistic modes of visuality as representations of St. Eustace in a context rife with Christian themes, some of which, like the Canterbury St. Eustace, had been lost in the Reformation, hence their melancholy associations. The ekphrastic rhetoric of 2.1 lends itself to comparison with works of art by its very nature, even though the First Lord is reporting in great descriptive detail on an off-stage encounter with Jaques rather than the composition of a painting: Today my Lord of Amiens and myself Did steal behind him as he lay along Under an oak, whose antic root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this wood; To the which place a poor sequestered stag, That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt, Did come to languish. (29–35)

The scene sets up a viewing situation whereby the listener or reader pictures in their mind’s eye a landscape populated with figures seeing and being seen by one another with Jaques positioned in the middle, between his fellow voyeuristic courtiers behind him and the wounded stag in front of him “on th’extremest verge of the swift brook,/Augmenting it with tears” (42–43). The First Lord has, like a painter, composed a vivid scene complete with a viable spatial structure for us while standing on a bare stage, albeit one that cannot be pinned down to a work of art, real or imagined. Michael Bath has seized upon the First Lord’s ekphrasis to closely examine the fragmentary iconography of the scene. He asserts that “it is not difficult to show that all the details of [the First Lord’s] description [of Jaques and the wounded stag] are iconographically heavily loaded in terms of the visual arts of Shakespeare’s time; indeed […] they are embarrassingly so if what we are looking for is a univocal text.”27 Bath successfully demonstrates that there are manifold and sometimes contradictory visual signifiers present in the scene, including Jaques’ reclining posture as one connected to melancholy in visual culture and the weeping stag’s origins in natural history and its subsequent use as a literary and visual emblem. While he is able to successfully fix the representation of melancholy to a coherent set of images, connecting the image of the melancholic to that of the weeping stag is more elusive.

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In response to Bath’s consternation, acknowledging the First Lord’s speech as an imperfect instance of ekphrasis in a body of work that includes many more typical uses of the device to refer to tapestries, paintings, and other works of art does not create iconographic closure or coherence, but does allow for a broad reading of the visual markers of the scene to show how it approximates a pictorial genre such as the religious pastoral rather than mimetically emulates it. In religious pastoral art, seeing like a saint implies the overlay of the natural and the supernatural; Christ appears to St. Eustace and St. Hubert in their familiar hunting grounds, the forest, and in the guise of their hunting quarry, the stag. In addition, the saints are moved by their visions to spiritual feeling. Changing visual conventions that favor naturalism and a more scientific approach to space led artists like Dürer to depict St. Eustace in a more vernacular manner. Thus, seeing the saint involves the calibration of highly descriptive detail with strong feeling and supernatural sights. Accounts of the origins of the religious pastoral genre of art include Dürer as an important figure in the rise of naturalism in depictions of the landscape, but do not count him as significant as Giorgione and Titian in the establishment of the genre. Yet his St. Eustace marks some of the spatial and thematic transitions in early modern visual art noted earlier in this essay and as such makes an apt visual companion to As You Like It. For example, Dürer includes a castle-like building in a background of his print to refer to both the courtly connotations of hunting and Placidus/Eustace’s social standing. As such, it corresponds to As You Like It, in which tensions between court and country are expressed, by Jaques, around hunting. Demonstrating spatial, natural and anatomical realism, the image is also rich resource for early modern principles of perspective and proportion. Indeed, Shakespeare’s contemporary in the visual arts, Nicholas Hilliard, remarked in his 1598 text The Arte of Limning that “the most excellent Albert [sic] Dürer […] hath written the best and most rules of and for painting and engraving hitherunto of any master until Paolo Lomazzo.”28 Most interesting for the purposes of this essay is Dürer’s deploying of these artistically advanced, for the time, and “rational” modes of visuality (perspective and proportion) to represent a Christian mystical vision that is ultimately naturalized by the artist’s handling of space and attention to realistic depiction of flora and fauna. Unlike earlier renderings of St. Eustace such as the one in Canterbury Cathedral, the crucifix between the stag’s antlers is barely noticeable in Dürer’s print. Instead, the artist emphasizes the exquisitely rendered animals in the scene, layering their

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images from bottom (the five dogs) to middle (the horse) to top (the stag), creating a rising line leading to the perspectivally proportional crucifix in the distance. As in the First Lord’s textual description of Jaques and the wounded stag in 2.1, the natural world and supernatural vision in the guise of the weeping stag comingle and the latter is made more convincing by the verisimilitude of the former. Titian’s drawing of St. Eustace (c. 1515) epitomizes the religious pastoral with the stag standing in a grove of trees, St. Eustace below, and a castle-like structure in the background (Fig. 8.4). The artist has artfully blended the figure of the stag with the trees it stands among so that its antlers and the crucifix between them seem to be extensions of the tree branches. Camouflaging the stag as such minimizes the supernatural aspects of vision associated with the scene and emphasizes, instead, the peaceful natural environment in which the saint avidly gazes upon and communes with the stag. By framing the saint between the stag and the horse on the horizontal axis and aligning him with the structure in the

Fig. 8.4  Titian, St. Eustace, drawing, 21.6 × 31.6 cm., © The Trustees of the British Museum

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background on the vertical axis, Titian implies the tension between court and country, and the saint’s need to leave society behind if he is to find spiritual salvation after his conversion. The solitude of St. Eustace, a typical characteristic of saints in the religious pastoral mode, mirrors Jaques’ belief that he is alone with the stag in 2.1, his distaste for company throughout the play, and his conversion to the life of a religious hermit, much like St. Jerome, at the end of the play. The religious is a secondary aspect of the pastoral here, as it is in As You Like It, suggested by the deployment of compositional effects and generic conventions. Martha Ronk has detected an achy absence with spiritual overtones at the core of As You Like It, suggesting that “for all its comic ingenuity, [the play] also conveys a sense of something erased and missing, some deep aspect of character, some golden world: the Robin Hood days of ‘yore’ […] the incarnation of the sacred.”29 For her, ekphrasis provides a vehicle for the verbal expression of visual taboos in the guise of religious imagery during the period following the Reformation through what she calls “pictorial replacement”: the general distrust of images—associated with Catholicism, luxury, idolatry, deception, the whore of Babylon—was coupled with a love of splendor and spectacle […]. So divided an attitude impressed itself everywhere: on decisions Queen Elizabeth made about whether or not to hang a crucifix, on the destruction and reinstatement of church statues, and on the decrying of and simultaneous use of images in Reformation literature.30

What Ronk describes here is echoed in Hamling’s account of the complicated and often contradictory process of creating Protestant religious art cited earlier, although Ronk notes the pictorial illegibility of such ekphrastic portions of the text as found in 4.2 of As You Like It: “The passage […] seems an announcement of ‘that which we are not to look upon,’ although I am uncertain as to what it refers.”31 While I, too, cannot claim to know precisely what transgressive imagery one is meant to see in the ekphrastic descriptions of As You Like It, Ronk’s “bookending” of 4.2 with 2.1 suggests that the theme of conversion might be useful in moving us closer to speculating which pictures are being replaced by off-kilter verbal descriptions, and where those pictures originate. The characters featured in both texts—Oliver and Jaques—undergo spiritual conversion in the play, as do saints, who existed in textual form in hagiographies before appearing in visual imagery. Visual artists seeking to represent saints in the mode of religious pastoral therefore often converted the verbal—stories of

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the lives of saints taken from Holy Scripture and other sources—into visual language. The distortion that ensues as the verbal is transformed to the visual and then back again to the verbal through Shakespeare’s ekphrasis is thereby obfuscating of its religious lineage, perhaps by design, considering the dangers of making overt references to saints and remnants of Catholicism outlined by Ronk and others. Michael O’Connell has tracked the physical and visual dimensions of Catholic worship in England before the Reformation, including the representation of saints and veneration of their relics, together with the impact of accusations of idolatry on Elizabethan theatre. He concludes that the theatre of Shakespeare’s time impresses us with its difference from the recently banished medieval stage. But from a cultural perspective we are more likely to see continuities, a mending of the rents in the social and religious fabric. What would it mean to our sense of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, one wonders, that from this anthropological perspective it could be viewed as a competing—idolatrous—religious structure?32

In consideration of this challenging question, the word “saint” occurs more than one hundred times in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, appearing in twenty-eight of the plays, although not in As You Like It.33 Many of the references are to place names or feast days, but some notable discursive passages featuring the word thematize deception and deceit, in agreement with Stephen Greenblatt’s suggestion that Shakespeare “did not entirely understand saints, and that what he did understand, he did not entirely like.”34 Thus, while the word “saint” is not spoken in As You Like It, the thematic context in which the word is often used is similar for, as Ronk has noted “the genre of pastoral itself is designed to deceive […]. As You Like It not only acknowledges the deceptive nature of the pastoral but creates a larger deception by barely mounting the pastoral at all.”35 Take, for example, Iago’s characterization of women in Othello as pictures out of door, Bells in your parlors; wildcats in your kitchens, Saints in your injuries; devils being offended, Players in your housewifery, and hussies in your beds. (2.1.112–15).36

Iago’s references to the idealized versions of themselves that women present to the world outside their homes pivot on “pictures” and “saints.” Women may seem as beautiful as paintings and as virtuous as martyrs who

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endure pain without complaint, but it is all an act to disguise their base, animal nature. Similarly, in The Comedy of Errors Luciana appeals to her sister’s husband Antipholus to shield his wife from his “disloyalty” and “false love”: “Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted./Teach sin the carriage of a saint” (3.2.15–16). In these instances, Shakespeare explicitly suggests that one who lacks virtue can disguise oneself as a saint to deceive others, a sentiment in line with Reformation views on the dangers of idolatry and the deceptions of Catholicism. However, in this essay I suggest that the reverse operation is also possible in Shakespeare (particularly in a play in which a woman (Rosalind) takes on the persona of a man (Ganymede) and is revealed to be a woman at its finale), whereby one disguises one’s “saintliness” and it is revealed surreptitiously, without overt use of the word but with other verbal and visual signifiers, in a move similar to Ronk’s idea of “pictorial replacement” and O’Connell’s suggestion that medieval religious practices live on in Elizabethan theatre. Through the humoral and affective mechanism of melancholic vision it is possible to see the religious pastoral at work in As You Like It, as we are converted, like Jaques, from secular observers limited by physical vision to spectators of the sacred empowered with the all-encompassing mystical vision of the melancholic in Shakespeare’s deceptive drama. The text anticipates this move to seeing in its totality in 4.1, when Jaques defines his malady as “a melancholy of mine own, compounded of/many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed/the sundry computation of my travels” (15–17). Here, Dusinberre’s decision to use “computation” rather than “contemplation,” in the Hobbesian sense of “either to collect the sum of many things that are added together, or to know what remains when one thing is taken from another” facilitates our ability to ascertain the Catholic in the Protestant, the saint in the courtier, and the divine in the animal.37 Thus, just as the painting of St. Eustace remained unseen, but intact under a layer of lime at Canterbury Cathedral until the nineteenth century, As You Like It preserves an earlier form of spirituality beneath its dramatic scrim, partially revealed by deploying melancholic vision. Acknowledgments  The author extends thanks to Kaara Peterson and Amy Kenny for including her work in this volume, and to Louis Hamilton, Rita Keane, and Jesse Mann for sharing their expertise on medieval religion and visual culture. Reproducing works of art was made possible by a Drew University Faculty Research Grant. Finally, this essay could not have been written without the encouragement, curiosity, enthusiasm, and affection of Jeff Haddorff.

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Notes 1. Panofsky, “Dürer’s ‘St. Eustace,’” 2. 2. Dusinberre, “Introduction,” 48. 3. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 102. All quotations from As You Like It are taken from Dusinberre’s edition. 4. Rosand, ‘“Troyes Painted Woes,’” 79. 5. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 166. 6. Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight, 48. 7. Cirillo, “Pastoralism Gone Awry,” 19. 8. Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household, 5. 9. Milward, “Religion in Arden,” 121. 10. Daley, ‘“To Moralize a Spectacle,’” 153. 11. Sillars, Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination, 213. 12. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 168. 13. See Schleiner, “Jaques and the Melancholy Stag.” 14. Paster, Humoring the Body, 137. 15. Miller, “Fowls of Heaven,” 68. 16. Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts, 104. 17. Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts, 104. 18. Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts, 92. 19. Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts, 103. 20. Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts, 107. 21. Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight, 66. 22. Egan, Green Shakespeare, 102. 23. Caxton, Golden Legend, 83–84. 24. Islwyn, “Cult of Saints’ Relics,” 398. 25. Islwyn, “Cult of Saints’ Relics,” 398. 26. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 156. 27. Bath, “Weeping Stags,” 14. 28. Hilliard, Arte of Limning, 69. 29. Ronk, “Locating the Visual,” 276. 30. Ronk, “Locating the Visual,” 260. 31. Ronk, “Locating the Visual,” 273, n. 37. 32. O’Connell, “Idolatrous Eye,” 307. 33. These numbers were generated by searching digital texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library. 34. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 110. 35. Ronk, “Locating the Visual,” 269. 36. Citation is from Norton Shakespeare. 37. Dusinberre’s editorial note appears on 287, n. 17.

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Bibliography Aston, Margaret. Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350–1600. London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1993. Bath, Michael. “Weeping Stags and Melancholy Lovers: The Iconography of As You Like It, II, i.” Emblematica 1, no. 1 (1986): 13–52. Bennett, Robert B. “The Reform of a Malcontent: Jaques and the Meaning of As You Like It.” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 183–204. Berry, Edward. Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Braswell, Laurel. “‘Sir Isumbras’ and the Legend of Saint Eustace.” Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 128–51. Cafritz, Robert, Lawrence Gowing, and David Rosand. Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1988. Caxton, William. The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton. Vol. 6. Edited by F. S. Ellis. London: Dent, 1935. Cirillo, Albert R. “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry.” English Literary History 38, no. 1 (March 1971): 19–39. Daley, A.  Stuart. “To Moralize a Spectacle: As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 1.” Philological Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1986): 147–70. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Dusinberre, Juliet. “Introduction.” In As You Like It, edited by Juliet Dusinberre, 1–142. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. Hamling, Tara. Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain. New Haven and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, 2010. Hilliard, Nicholas. The Arte of Limning. Edited by R.  K. R.  Thornton and T. G. S. Cain. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1981. Islwyn, Thomas Geoffrey. “The Cult of Saints’ Relics in Medieval England.” PhD diss., University of London, 1974. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1964. Kronenfeld, Judy Z. “Shakespeare’s Jaques and the Pastoral Cult of Solitude.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 451–73. Miller, Gordon L. “The Fowls of Heaven and the Fate of the Earth: Assessing the Early Modern Revolution in Natural History.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 9, no. 1 (January 2005): 57–81.

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Milward, Peter. “Religion in Arden.” In Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, 54, Shakespeare and Religions, edited by Peter Holland, 115–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Montrose, Louis Adrian. “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form. English Literary History 50, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 415–59. O’Connell, Michael. “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anit-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater.” English Literary History 52, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 279–310. Panofsky, Erwin. Albrecht Dürer. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948. Panofsky, Erwin. “Dürer’s ‘St. Eustace.’” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 9, no. 46 (1950): 2–10. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Ronk, Martha. “Locating the Visual in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 255–76. Rosand, David. “Pastoral Topoi: On the Construction of Meaning in Landscape.” In The Pastoral Landscape, edited by John Dixon Hunt, 161–77. Hanover and London: National Gallery of Art, Washington, distributed by the University Press of New England, 1992. Rosand, David. ‘“Troyes Painted Woes’: Shakespeare and the Pictorial Imagination.” In Shakespeare and the Arts, edited by Sean Kellen and Stephen Orgel, 215–43. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Sannazaro, Jacopo. Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues. Translated by Ralph Nash. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966. Schleiner, Winfried. “Jaques and the Melancholy Stag.” English Language Notes 17 (March 1980): 57–79. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Edited by Juliet Dusinberre. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare [Based on the Oxford Edition]. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Sillars, Stuart. Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Thron, E. Michael. “Jaques: Emblems and Morals.” Shakespeare Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 84–89. Topsell, Edward. The History of Four-footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects. London: E. Cotes, 66. Uhlig, Claes. ‘“The Sobbing Deer’: As You Like It, II.i.21–66 and the Historical Context.” Renaissance Drama New Series 3 (1970): 79–109. Wakeman, Rob. “Shakespeare, Gascoigne, and the Hunter’s Uneasy Conscience.” Exemplaria 29, no. 2: 136–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041257 3.2017.1305603. Wilson, Richard. Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 9

Humors, Fruit, and Botanical Art in Early Modern England Amy L. Tigner

In Eating Right in the Renaissance, Ken Albala recounts how most European dietaries of the early modern period proclaimed that fruit was humorally cold and wet, thus generally detrimental to the health of the body: “There is a fear of fruits bordering on the pathological.”1 Girolamo Cardano, in De sanitate tuenda (1580), “believed that there was no place at all for apples in a healthy diet.”2 Similarly, sixteenth-century England held fresh fruit in low esteem, as multiple dietaries indicate. In The Castel of Helth (1534), Thomas Elyot considered that before the fall, mankind subsisted only on fruit; however, afterwards, the body changed, and “now all fruites generally are noyfulle to man, and do engender ill humors and oft times the cause of putrified fevers.”3 Nonetheless, Elyot’s specific guidelines indicate that many fruits were regularly consumed, even if they were not recommended. During plagues, regimental prescription became more stringent and likely heeded. Elyot’s contemporary, Thomas Moulton,

A. L. Tigner (*) University of Texas, Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_9

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proclaimed that to avoid the “pestilence” one should not eat fruit, for it “gathereth and engendereth unkindly heats and so bringeth a man to an ague.”4 Indeed, during the 1569 plague, fresh fruit was banned, for it was thought that it might cause contagion in the air.5 During non-plague years, both raw and cooked fruit were continuously consumed at the banqueting tables by the elite and sourced from the wild by the commoners6; nevertheless, physicians and dietaries continued to hold fruit in very low esteem, citing its injurious effects on mind and body. By the turn of the seventeenth century, change was afoot, and fruit started to gain in popularity in England and lose its negative reputation as a health hazard. But what caused this paradigm shift? When we investigate the modification of fruit’s status and its perceived unhealthfulness, we dig into a complicated story that reflects changes in politics, economics, science, medicine, technology, class, gender, and aesthetics. As Kimberly Coles and Gitanjali Shahani observe, “To examine the subject of food is to examine human history and the human in history.”7 The seventeenth century ushered in a new spirit of scientific inquiry, botanical exploration, and a growing interest in the classification of plants. The arrival of plants from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas engendered a passion for gardening, including the acquisition of species and plants for display by aristocrats and wealthy merchants. The demand for exotic plants and novel varietals in large estate gardens and in the growing market gardens surrounding London spawned a new class of professional gardeners and nurserymen to supply these burgeoning botanical enterprises.8 Additionally, with the development of print technology, England experienced an explosion of books in the marketplace, giving rise to the popularity of household manuals, husbandry and gardening books, herbals, and recipe books.9 Horticultural books advocated the planting of fruit trees and vines, and the subsequent consumption of the fruits. As practical handbooks, husbandry or gardening manuals targeted and educated women and men how to plant, cultivate, and harvest orchard fruit that heretofore would have been only grown in rarified estates; by the mid-seventeenth century, the middling class was encouraged to plant orchards for financial gain, constituting a fruit-tree movement. Recipe books serve as evidence of the growing taste for fruit, especially preserved fruit, while also instructing readers about the fashion for serving fruit and how to prepare it for various dishes ready for the table. Evidence of the growth in the status of fruit also appears with a new fad for still-life paintings featuring fruits and vegetables as their centerpiece,

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thereby highlighting their aesthetic qualities along with their ephemerality. Also popular were “market” and “kitchen” paintings: works that feature fruit emphasize the variety and beauty of the fruits with their appealing colors and argue implicitly for the beneficial humoral aspects of the fruit for human consumption. In addition, these paintings also function as a memento mori, highlighting the brevity of life both in the vegetal and human worlds. The confluence of exploration; the scientific inquiry of botany and the classification of plants with the publications of household manuals; and the burgeoning of botanical, kitchen, and market paintings altered the perception of fruit’s effect on the body’s humors in the seventeenth century. Essentially, emphasizing fruit—in the garden, on the table, and in books and in art—modified how physicians, dietitians, and the public conceived of fruit as no longer detrimental but rather salubrious for the human body. The consumption of fruit, because it is perishable and requires arable land, marked a person’s social status. Gifts of fruit from the country to those in London were particularly valued. Representations of fruit in paintings, because they involve the visual replication of color, thus also become significant indicators of fruit’s growing prestige. The beauty of a fruit’s color makes a tacit argument for its salutary humoral benefits, fit for human consumption. Given that a person’s color or complexion is an indicator of his or her particular humor or health, the color of the fruit, so the paintings suggest, could be transferred to the human body through what is consumed. Unlike the fruit itself, paintings of fruit retain perpetual color and beauty, thus becoming a continuous reminder of fruit’s (and therefore human) vitality. No doubt fruit is also inevitably a reminder of Eden and of that object of desire that caused humanity’s downfall, yet these paintings, along with the other developments in gardening, horticultural manuals, and the scientific world, revised fruit’s status. In the sixteenth century, both commoners and the gentry consumed fruit, though the intensification of planting orchards and growing fruit on a grander and eventually commercial scale did not really occur until the seventeenth century. In 1500, wild fruit grew, especially in the south of England, in hedgerows, uncultivated plots, and river banks, so that commoners had access to apples, pears, quinces, medlars, wild cherries, and sloes; in the woodlands, they could collect wild strawberries, whorleberries, and other regionally specific berry varieties in their season. Such abundance supplemented their diets with much-needed nutrients (although they did not think of fruit in this manner); the fruit would have

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likely been small and quite sour.10 The fruit produced for the gentry on their estates, however, would likely have been larger and sweeter, as the upper classes were in the practice of obtaining particular cultivars and hybridizing them for particular characteristics, such as sweetness. Apples and pears were frequently made into cider or perry, so that a crop could be preserved in its fermented form for a longer period of time than the fruit itself and provide the locals with mildly alcoholic beverages. Pre-Reformation monasteries regularly planted more formal fruit orchards for both consumption as food and for fermentation into drink. In 1629, John Parkinson remarks how “grapes of the best sorts of vines” to be pressed into wine are often found “especially where Abbies and Monasteries stood.”11 The oldest-known monastery orchard was planted in the year 597 when St. Augustine built his monastery in Canterbury. This early example served as a model for other monasteries, which also planted similar orchards, across the country.12 With the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, aristocrats who acquired these church properties often incorporated the orchards into their own estates, following Henry VIII’s lead when he appropriated the fruit trees of Syon Abbey for Nonsuch Palace in Surrey.13 Perhaps because he had as a young man traveled in the Mediterranean, where fruit cultivation and consumption were more prominent, and then married the Spanish Katherine of Aragon, King Henry had developed an appreciation for fruit and orchards, so much so that he employed his own fruitier, Richard Harrys (Harris). In 1533, at the King’s estate at Tenham, Kent, Harris “planted by his [the king’s] great cost and rare industrie, the sweet Cheerie, the temperate Pipyn, and the golden Renate.”14 For this 105-acre orchard, Harris also imported many new fruit trees “from beyond the Seas and furnished this ground with them so beautifully, as they not only stand in most right line, but seem to be of one sort, shape, and fashion, as they had been drawn through one Mould.”15 This garden thus became an early inspiration for other nobles who began planting fruit trees on their own estate grounds. A maker of fashion, Henry VIII influenced the taste for gardening that increased throughout the sixteenth century. Garden historian Margaret Willes calls many of the aristocrats in Elizabeth I’s circle “gardener courtiers,” but the fruit tree craze did not really escalate until late in Elizabeth’s reign.16 In the 1590s, at the Lyveden estate, Thomas Tresham planted in his upper, lower, and moated orchards some 600 fruit trees, including seven varieties of apple, seven of pear, and two of plum, plus various medlars, peaches, raspberries, and strawberries. Tresham also asked his

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gardener John Slynn to create two walks, one of black cherries and one of walnuts. An admirer of Tresham, Robert Cecil declared that Lyveden boasted “one of the fairest orchards that is in England” and had asked his own gardener, Mountain Jennings, to see the Lyveden orchards before he laid out his own at Hatfield House; Cecil’s later estate at Theobalds was also influenced by Lyveden’s gardens and orchards.17 Discussing her husband’s orchard with Cecil, Lady Tresham exclaimed that he took “great delight” cultivating fruit trees and found them readily acquired: “Nor is there any fruit of not but he had itt if it could be conveniently gotten.”18 Lady Tresham’s expression about her husband’s penchant for fruit-tree acquisition marks a broader, growing mania for botanical collecting that occurred in the seventeenth century. Quantity and variety of fruit trees (and other plants) became a status symbol for members of the English upper class, thus slowly changing the perception of fruit as humorally beneficial to the body. By collecting and then planting many varietals of trees and plants in their botanical gardens, estate owners and gardeners were striving to recreate the Garden of Eden, which, from a biblical standpoint, had contained all the plants that God had created. Early moderns believed that when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, all its seeds scattered across the world; thus by collecting and planting roots, seeds, and plants from all four corners of the globe, they were now in effect reproducing paradise.19 This notion of paradise regained transfers to ideas concerning the human body: eating the fruit of the Edenic garden cannot but help balance the humors and thereby obtain the original health that Adam and Eve enjoyed. John Parkinson makes this argument in his comprehensive herbal, first by naming the book Paradisus in Sole Paradisus Terrestris and second by including a woodcut frontispiece that shows Adam and Eve in paradise. Contained in the frontispiece is a little inscription that argues that all of the flowers, vegetables, and fruit-trees are those “fit for our Land together,” thus illustrating the re-creation of Eden in England.20 At the beginning of his “Orchard” section, Parkinson writes that it contains “all sorts of trees bearing fruit for mans use to eate, proper and fit for to plant an Orchard in our climate and countrie”;21 under each fruit section he includes the uses of the plants, providing their humoral qualities for the human body. Unlike sixteenth-century dietary writers who warn of the dire consequences of eating fruit, Parkinson generally only speaks positively about the consumption of fruit. Even when he does mention some negative effect, he still lists its redeeming qualities. For example, he says of peaches,

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“Those Peaches that are very moist and waterish […] doe soone putrefie in the stomacke, causing surfeits […] yet they are much and often well accepted with all the Gentry of the Kingdome.”22 Here, Parkinson makes a class argument that the gentry eat peaches seemingly without adverse effects. Although writers certainly address differences in the constitution of the lower and upper classes (the lower classes are suited to eat gruel rather than finer food), Parkinson’s contention here makes the ordinary reader desire to eat like the gentry and to enjoy eating peaches as a dietary choice, despite their ill effect. Thus, his invoking of the aristocratic capacity for eating peaches endorses their consumption generally and even shifts the view of fruit from a harmful to salubrious foodstuff. Gender, along with class, also plays a part in the legitimization of eating fruit for the health of the body given that the early modern woman of the household was in charge of food preparation and the general health of the family and retainers. In his discussion of the “uses” of quinces and their humoral benefits, Parkinson writes that “being preserved in Sugar […] not only as an after dish to close up the stomack, but is placed among other Preserves by Ladies and Gentlewomen, and bestowed on the friends to entertaine them, and among other sorts of Preserves at Banquets,” noting that they are “chiefly for delight and pleasure, although they have also with them some physicall properties,” which include binding and loosening the bowels, healing women’s nipples, and serving as an antidote to a certain kind of poison.23 Indeed, it is the “Ladies and Gentlewomen” who make the preserves, and, in essence, act to preserve the body, since fruit that is cooked and then preserved in sugar were considered to be both food and medicine according to Galenic thought. Thus, the consumed preserves function medicinally to improve the health of the human body.24 Sugar, which is believed hot in temperament within the humoral system, was considered to be a corrective for the cold fruit; preserves and conserves were a balanced food therapeutic for the human body that is out of balance. The act of preserving through sugar prevents the fruit itself from decay, and it also helps to avoid putrefaction in the stomach because it is more digestible.25 As Wendy Wall writes, “astonishingly, the word preserve is used in recipe collections as much in reference to humans suffering from ailments as it was to fruits and vegetables.”26 Wall continues, “In medical recipes, ‘preserving’ could indicate three different aims: maintaining life by warding off disease, keeping people energetic, and eradicating the effects of aging.”27

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By far, recipes for preserving fruit are the most common ones found in recipe manuscripts and print books, and nearly all have at least one recipe for quince preserve or conserve. In their recipe book manuscripts, Jane Baber has a recipe “To Preserve Quinces”; Mary Granville a recipe “To make Quince Marmelade with Jelly white, or Red”; Constance Hall a recipe “To preserve Quinces Amber Colour”; and Lettice Pudsey a recipe “To preserve whit quinces.”28 In her diary, Lady Margaret Hoby relates that on 6 August, 1600, “I was busied about preserving sweetmeat [preserved fruits].”29 Although neither Hoby nor the recipe manuscripts writers provide information about the benefits of the fruit preserves, yet such abundance indicates both that the preserves tasted good and that generally were thought to be healthful. Upper-class women of estates with gardens and their female servants would spend significant time in the summer preserving fruit so that it would last throughout the year for the household’s health and welfare as well as make enough for gifts. Those who lived in London often had fruit sent to them from the countryside, as did the Sidney family. In a letter dated 30 May, 1594, Robert Sidney writes in a letter to his wife, Barbara Gamage Sidney, “I hope you have had the stra[wber]ries, the peascods, and the artichokes [I] did send you. When any cherries come I will send you of the first.”30 Such letters, recipes, and journal entries all indicate the pervasive consumption of preserved fruit and their connection to aristocratic women in early modern culture. Because female gentry usually ran the household—controlling how and what the family ate and also serving as the primary medical advisor not only for their own family but also for the surrounding community—what appears in their pantries, namely fruit preserves, had widespread effects on all of the English classes. One of the biggest changes in the English diet had to do with the Little Ice Age that ravaged Europe in the 1590s, when extremely cold weather ruined grain crops, causing hunger and starvation. The English solution to the problem was to plant urban market gardens to feed London’s populations, particularly the poor, increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables to replace grains in their diets.31 Two publications spurred the planting of kitchen gardens as a way to help stave off the lack of food: Hugh Plat’s Sundrie new and Artificiall Remedies against Famine (1596) and Richard Gardiner’s Profitable instructions for the Manuring, sowing and planting of kitchen gardens (1599). A series of new market gardens were planted in and around the suburbs of London. Neat House Gardens was started around 1600  in Westminster; other gardens were cultivated in open

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grounds north of Grays Inn, in Clerkenwell and in Shoreditch, and more were found across the Thames in Lambeth, Southwark, and Kennington, to name only a few. These gardens were greatly needed for London’s population of about 200,000 at the turn of the seventeenth century, as very few houses (rich or poor) had private gardens. The wealthy Londoners, however, had greater resources, especially if they had country seats that could send them produce, such as Robert Sidney did for his wife. The lower classes, however, benefited greatly from the new market gardens, which primarily cultivated root vegetables that could withstand cold weather and were thought to be the most nutritious for the poor. The gardens also grew cabbage, artichoke, green beans, turnips, and peas. Often situated in sheltered areas, these gardens were near enough to the city to benefit from the warmer urban temperatures, and gardeners developed various techniques to keep the produce from harm, such as the use of protective walls, straw mats, and glass bells. In warmer years and to take advantage of the market, gardeners increased the kinds of vegetables they sold, such as asparagus, cauliflower, cucumbers, and also introduced melons, berries, and fruit trees. Some of the change in dietary attitudes towards fruits and vegetables thus had to do with the necessities imposed by climate fluctuations rather than choice. Addressing another necessity, experiments using citrus as a prevention for scurvy on ships appear as early as 1607, when Hugh Plat writes, “Here I may not omit the preparation of the juice of Limons […] because it hath of late been found by that worthy knight Sir James Lancaster to be an assured remedy in the scurvy […] and so likewise of the Orange.”32 Between the change in climate and newly available dietary information, more people became accustomed to consuming fruit with no ill effects, such that fruit became more generally accepted as humorally efficacious. Perhaps due to the financial success of the market gardens, others began to see the economic opportunities of cultivating fruit orchards. Two of the most influential texts popularizing fruit growing, its usefulness as a saleable crop, and its subsequent consumption, William Lawson’s The Country Housewives Garden (1618) and A New Orchard and Garden (1618), were aimed at the more middling reader than was Parkinson’s Paradisus, whose readership was of a wealthier class. Lawson, a Yorkshire clergyman, argues for the fitness of fruit for the human body and also the eternal soul, given that he links gardening to godliness. If a person hires a “fruiterer, religious, honest,” then “God shall crowne the labours of his hands with joyfullnesse, and make the clouds drop fatnesse upon your trees”; later in the book, Lawson remarks that “The benefit of your Fruit, Roots, and

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Herbs, though it were but to eat and sell, is much.”33 Lawson often connects godliness with profit. His clear instructions about how to plant and maintain an orchard supported a new class of people who were interested in participating in the growing market for fruit for the general public. In 1623, Lawson’s books were reprinted with the inclusion of two treatises, both of which contain significant information about the growing and harvesting of fruit: A Most Profitable new treatise, from approved experience of the Art of Propagating Plants and The Husband Mans Fruitful Orchard. These additions, especially given the interest in the “profitable,” speak to the growing trend in establishing orchards as commercial ventures. Out of this burgeoning fashion for gardening and cultivating fruit arose the professional nurserymen. Professional gardeners, such as Richard Harris, John Slynn, and Mountain Jennings, held different though often overlapping functions from the nurserymen, who were in the business of acquiring and cultivating plants specifically for their later sale. The most prolific nurserymen and gardeners to gather and propagate fruit were the John Tradescants, father and son. Penelope Hobhouse proclaims that they “probably did more for the development of English horticulture than anyone else in the first half of the [seventeenth] century.”34 Tradescant the Elder began his career as a gardener to the nobility, working as head gardener at Hatfield House for Robert Cecil, for whom Tradescant set about acquiring “any strang sorts of any a seede that is rare” from his various contacts throughout Europe.35 After Cecil died in 1612, Tradescant was working for Lord Edward Wotten at his house in Canterbury, which was the converted monastery of St. Augustine (mentioned above) with the very first known orchard in England. While in Wotton’s employ, Tradescant traveled with English explorers and ambassadors on a trip to Russia to collect many plants unknown in England. In 1620, Tradescant joined a pirate-hunting voyage in the Mediterranean, where he discovered, among other plants, the “Argier Apricocke,” which is “a smaller fruit then any of the other and yellow, but sweete.”36 Tradescant made other various journeys for botanizing, and, according to Mea Allen’s account, he introduced about 75 new plants, including six varieties of fruit tree.37 Parkinson lauds his friend Tradescant for his various contributions to the growing list of plants available in England: “The wild [pomegranate] I think was never seene in England, before John Tradescante my very loving good friend brought it from the parts beyond the Seas, and planted in his Lords Garden At Canterbury,” and he claims,

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the choyest [plums] for goodnesse, and rarest for knowledge, are to be had of my very good friend Master John Tradescant, who hath wonderfully labored to obtaine all the rarest fruits he can heare off in any place in Christendome, Turky, yea the whole world.38

Jennifer Potter succinctly proclaims, “Fruit was Tradescant’s overriding passion.”39 Before his career was finished, John Tradescant the Elder was a gardener for the premier courtier of King James’ court, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, and then for Queen Henrietta Maria at her Oatlands Palace in 1630. Eventually John Tradescant the Younger would take over at Oatlands from his father. Around 1630, Tradescant and his son acquired land in South Lambeth, where they began propagating and growing the many plants that he and his son had collected. From this garden, he likely supplied plants to a select number of friends, nurserymen, and other gardeners, thus both promoting the cultivation of fruit trees and increasing their prestige as foodstuff. Further evidence of the growing popularity of fruit and of the elder Trandescant’s role in popularizing new varietals lies in a series of watercolor botanical paintings known as The Tradescants’ Orchard, which depict fruits grown in the elder Tradescant’s gardens. According to the Bodleian Library’s Bruce Barker-Benfield, who has conducted analysis of the paper, watermarks, and handwriting, these paintings were produced sometime between 1620 and 1630 at the time Tradescant was building up his garden at Lambeth.40 The collection, by an unknown artist associated with Tradescant, was clearly influenced by the long tradition of highly polished and realistic botanical art that conjoined fine art and scientific study. However, these paintings are rather naïve and unskilled in contrast, though nonetheless compelling due to the color and the addition of charming small animals, birds, and insects. Botanical paintings were not unknown in England, though they were not available for most to see. Nonetheless, The Tradescants’ Orchard paintings were likely circulated to the very people who would be planting, propagating, and consuming the fruits. Barrie Juniper and Hanneke Grootenboer speculate these watercolors were possibly created to be used as an early version of a fruit catalog. The signs of wear on individual paintings reveal that they were likely circulated, perhaps when Tradescant or one of his nurserymen promoted their seeds, plants, and grafts to landowners who often spent only part of the year at their country abodes, or to nurserymen who supplied the growing number of orchards in the country. As Juniper and Grootenboer imagine,

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“The plantsman emphasized the attraction of these new fruits, using the paintings to bring attention to the wealth of orchard fruits now within their grasp, and to explain just which fruits, at which period, would be available to the household during their stay.”41 Each painting indicates the date that they would be ready to harvest; for example, “the Tradescant Cherry” reveals its harvest time as “June the 21,” and the watercolor itself depicts delectable varicolored, lighter reddish cherries (Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1  “The Tradescant Cherry” from The Tradescants’ Orchard, Ashmole MS. 1461, f.25r, with permission from Bodleian Libraries

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John Parkinson writes about this fruit, John Tradescantes Cherrie is most usually sold by our Nursery Gardiners […] and because it is so faire and good a cherrie that it may be obtruded without much discontent: it is a reasonable good bearer, a faire greate berrie, deepe coloured, and a little pointed.42

We should not underestimate the significance of color for either the “cherry” painting or its description; its effect on the appetite; and its role in the eventual change in the humoral understanding of fruit. Albala notes, “color and visible form [were seen as] an indication of nutritional value,” which “persisted in humoral physiology.”43 A broader connection between color and the humors is further indicated in Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s A tract containing the artes: Of the colour gold and silver mixt together as yellow, yeelde a pleasurable sweetenesse. Redde, fiery, flame colour, violet, purple, the colour of iron red hote, and sanguine cause courage, prouidence, fiercenesse and boldness by stirring up the mind like fire. Gold colours, yellowes, light purples and other bright colours make a man vigilant, adding grace and sweetenesse. The Rose colour, light greenes, and bright yellowes, yield joy, mirth, delight &c.44

The colors in the watercolors correspond with “rose colour, light greenes, and bright yellowes” of Lomazzo’s tract, and indeed provide the viewer with a sense of “joy, mirth, and delight.” Looking at the watercolor, the past and even the present-day viewer cannot help but want to devour the delightful, rosy cherries. Thus, the persuasive rhetoric of the nurserymen along with the allure of these colorful and appealing watercolors, in conjunction with an increased knowledge provided by the husbandry manuals, fundamentally changed the understanding and acceptance of fruit as nutritious. About the same period that the watercolors of The Tradescants’ Orchard were produced, Nathaniel Bacon, nephew to Francis Bacon, painted a series of kitchen still-lifes that place female human figures next to edible bounty, thereby tacitly comparing the beauty of the produce with the humoral health of the woman. The only seventeenth-century English painter that we know to work in this genre, Nathaniel Bacon was influenced by the Flemish painters Pieter Aertsen (c. 1533-c. 1573), Joachim Beuchkalaer (1533–1574), and Frans Synders (1579–1657), who painted detailed market and kitchen scenes.45 Bacon’s painting Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit portrays a voluptuous cook-maid amidst an

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Fig. 9.2  Nathaniel Bacon, Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, c. 1620–25, Tate

extravagant cornucopia of garden produce, with the garden itself visible through the window in the background (Fig. 9.2). The color scheme of the painting, depicting the human figure and examples of natural produce, makes a tacit argument associating the sitter’s complexion and humorality with the fruits and vegetables that share the pictorial space. Bacon’s colors alternating between warm and cool lead the eye around the painting in a circular motion, correlating the human subject with the vegetal. The visual comparison is furthered in the way that the maid’s milky white breasts mirror the shape of the ripe melon she holds and the one cut on the table; her glowing cheeks duplicate the blush of the ripe peaches; and her vermillion lips echo the succulent red apples and cherries. Even the colors of the fruits are reflected in her clothing: her sleeves glow with the gold of the squash and the melons, her blue bodice picks up the hue of the grapes, and her blouse repeats the white of the turnips lying across her arm. Not only do these shared colors and shapes heighten her beauty, but they also indicate that her humors are in balance. As Angnolo Firenzuola explains in his Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (1552), the colors in facial complexions indicate the physical health of the human body:

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For, just in a body whose humors are well balanced and whose parts well arranged one finds health, and health produces a bright and lively complexion that outwardly reveals its presence within the body, so too the perfection of each specific part united in the creation of the whole will spread the color necessary for the perfect union and harmonious beauty of the entire body.46

This painting thus argues that eating these particular fruits and vegetables imbues the body with perfect beauty and health. As Romana Sammern observes, “Merging the fields of medicine, cosmetics, and painting, the colors of beauty intersect in early modern writings on art and beauty at the convergence point of the human body.”47 She continues, “Different color worlds (i.e., of humoral medicine and of painting) thus meet at the junction of the human body.”48 In Bacon’s painting, the color palette of the salubrious fruit recomposes itself on the figure of the sitter, thereby making her beauty a direct result of her consumption of the harvest. Broadening this perspective, Bacon opens the kitchen scene into a garden landscape running through the center, thus directly connecting the edible bounty with its cultivation in the garden. Visually, the exterior landscape provides depth to the interior, but the background also reminds the viewer of the relationship between kitchen and garden, and between humans and plants. Likewise, the gargantuan cabbages in the painting’s foreground are apparently growing in the garden rows beyond, while the fruit stored in baskets within the kitchen also hangs from the garden’s vines and fruit trees, just visible. Thus, the viewer is reminded of the necessity of the garden for the health of the body. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the humoral status of fruit had completely changed. Notable agricultural authors and visionaries such as Samuel Hartlib, Ralph Austen, and John Evelyn campaigned for the country to grow fruit for the economic welfare of England and the bodily health of its people. In his 1670 Royal Society publication Pomona, Evelyn advocates the growing of apple and pear trees to produce cider as a way to improve one’s financial well-being and the general “industry” of England, while creating a healthful beverage for general consumption in place of unhealthful beer (which requires hops, the plant that “transmutes our wholesome Ale into beer” and that requires the cutting of timber to grow) and expensive imported wines.49 Along with the healthful benefits of the trees themselves providing fresh air and housing singing birds, Evelyn argues that native-produced cider is specifically beneficial to the English body—as opposed to the Italian, French, and Rhenish wines

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suited to the European body or coffee preferred by those in Africa and Asia—concluding that “If Health be more precious than Opinion,” then the upstanding Englishman should say “Give me good Cider.”50 In this way, Evelyn and like-minded thinkers initiated a fruit-tree movement that came to alter the humoral classification of the fruit, ultimately changing how the English populace ate and viewed their diet: we see the convergence of scientific, economic, and aesthetic concerns all directed at the health of the body. Perhaps no clearer evidence of this positive transformation of fruit’s status lies in Ralph Austen’s A Treatise of Fruit Tree, which proclaims “when fruits are not onely healthfull but also pleasant to the tast, there is a doble worth in them.”51 Acknowledgments  I would like to thank Peter Parolin, Judy Tigner, and the editors for their insightful readings and for the many fine suggestions that made the essay better. Any remaining errors are mine.

Notes 1. Albala, Eating Right, 8. 2. Albala, Eating Right, 38. 3. Elyot, Castel of Helth, 19r. 4. Moulton, This Is the Myrrour, 14r. I would like to thank Rebecca Totaro for telling me about this source. 5. Porter, Plagues of London, 38. 6. Albala, Banquet, 82–83. 7. Coles and Shahani, “Introduction to Special Forum,” 21. 8. See Thick, Neat House Gardens. 9. See Smith and Kesson, eds., Elizabethan Top Ten. 10. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 295. 11. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 566. 12. Masset, Orchards, 7. 13. Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 295. 14. Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 264. This story about the Henrican gardens of Tenham was not in Lambarde’s original publication of 1570, but rather appeared in the 1640 third edition of the text that appears 39 years after Lambarde’s death. 15. Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 264. 16. Willes, Making of the English Gardener, 39. 17. The quotation is from MS.  Lansdowne, 89. For information about Lyvenden, see Eburne, “Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham” and Willes, Making of the English Gardener, 39–42.

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18. Lady Tresham’s comments recorded in Eburne, “Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham,” 122. 19. For instance, “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew” (Gen. 2.5). For information about the connection between botanical gardens and Eden, see Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, Chapter 4. 20. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, frontispiece. 21. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 557. 22. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 582. 23. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 590. 24. One of the earliest scholars to discuss food and medicine in women’s recipes is Field, “Many Hands Hands,” especially Chapter 2. 25. See Tigner, “Preserving Nature.” For information about sugar and its connection to slavery see Mintz, Power of Sweetness; Hall, “Culinary Spaces”; and Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery. 26. Wall, Recipes for Thought, 173. 27. Wall, Recipes for Thought, 173. 28. Baber, “Booke of Receipts,” 9v; Granville, “Cookery and Medicinal Recipes,” 18; Hall, “Cookbook of Constance Hall,” 3v; Pudsey, “Cookery Book,” 35v. 29. Moody, Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady, 104. 30. Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan, eds., Domestic Politics, 51. 31. See Thick, Neat House Gardens. 32. Plat, Certaine Philosophical Preparations, 25. Most historians credit James Lind, Treatise of the Scruvy, with the discover of using citrus to prevent scurvy, but Plat and Sir James Lancaster predate Lind by nearly 150 years. 33. Thick, William Lawson, 9. 34. Hobhouse, Plants, 111. 35. Tradescant [the Elder], “Letter to William Trumball.” 36. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 579. 37. Allan, Tradescants, 101–5. 38. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 430, 575. 39. Potter, Strange Blooms, 220. 40. Potter, Strange Blooms, 224. 41. Juniper and Grootenboer, Tradescants’ Orchard, 34. 42. Parkinson, Paradisus in Sole, 574. 43. Albala, Eating Right, 80. 44. Lomazzo, Tract Containing the Artes, 112. 45. Hearn, “Sir Nathaniel Bacon.” See also her Dynasties and Nathaniel Bacon. 46. Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, 15. 47. Sammern, “Red, White, and Black,” 139. 48. Sammern, “Red, White, and Black,” 139.

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49. Evelyn, Pomona, Preface, 1. 50. Evelyn, Pomona, Preface, 4. 51. Austen, Treatise of Fruit Trees, 39.

Bibliography Albala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Allan, Mea. The Tradescants: Their Plants, Gardens and Museum 1570–1662. London: M. Joseph, 1964. Austen, Ralph. A Treatise of Fruit Trees. Oxford: Thomas Robinson, 1653. Baber, Jane. “A Booke of Receipts.” 1625. MS 108. Wellcome Library. Coles, Kimberly, and Gitanjali Shahani. “Introduction to Special Forum: Diet and Identity in Shakespeare’s England.” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 21–31. Eburne, Andrew. “The Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham: New Light on the Gardens and Lodge at Lyveden.” Garden History 36, no. 1 (2008): 114–34. Elyot, Thomas. The Castel of Helth. London: Thomae Bertheleti, 1539. Evelyn, John. Pomona, or an Appendix Concerning Fruit-Trees in Relation to Cider: The Making, and Several Ways of Ordering It. London: John Martyn and James Allestry, 1670. Field, Catherine. “Many Hands Hands: Early Modern Englishwomen’s Recipe Books and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self.” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2005. Firenzuola, Agnolo. On the Beauty of Women by Agnolo Firenzuola. Translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Gardiner, Richard. Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens London: Edward Allde, 1599. Granville, Mary. “Cookery and Medicinal Recipes of the Granville Family.” MS. V.a.430. Folger Shakespeare Library. Hall, Constance. “The Cookbook of Constance Hall.” 1672. MS. V.a.20. Folger Shakespeare Library. Hall, Kim F. “Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century.” In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 168–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hannay, Margaret P., Noel J. Kinnamon, and Miachael G. Brennan, eds. Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.

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Hearn, Karen. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, Exhibition Catalogue, Tate Gallery. London: Rizzoli, 1995. Hearn, Karen. Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentleman, Gardener. London: Tate Gallery, 2005. Hearn, Karen. “Sir Nathaniel Bacon.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Last revised September 25, 2014. http://www. oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.uta.edu/view/article/999?docPos=2. Hobhouse, Penelope. Plants in Garden History. London: Pavillion Books, 1992. Juniper, Barrie, and Hanneke Grootenboer. The Tradescants’ Orchard: The Mystery of a Seventeenth-Century Painted Fruit Book. Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2013. Lambarde, William. A Perambulation of Kent: Conteining the Description, Hystorie and Customes of That Shire. 3rd ed. London: R. Hodgkinsonne, 1640. Lansdowne MS. 89. British Library. Lawson, William. A New Orchard and Garden. London: I.  Haviland and G. Purslowe, 1623. Leith-Ross, Penelope. The John Tradescants. London: P. Owen, 1984. Lind, James. A Treatise of the Scruvy. London: A. Millar, 1753. Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo. A Tract Containing the Artes. Translated by Richard Haydocke. Oxford: Ioseph Barnes, 1598. Masset, Claire. Orchards. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Mintz, Sidney W. The Power of Sweetness and the Sweetness of Power. Amsterdam: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1988. Moody, Joanna, ed. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605. Thrupp: Sutton, 1998. Moulton, Thomas. This Is the Myrrour or Glasse of Helth. London: Robert Wyre, 1531. Parkinson, John. Paradisus in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris. London: Humfrey Lownes and Robert Young, 1629. Plat, Hugh. Certaine Philosophical Preparations of Foode and Beverage for Sea-Men. London: Wellcome Library, 1607. Plat, Hugh. Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies against Famine London: Peter Short, 1596. Porter, Stephen. The Plagues of London. Stroud: The History Press, 2005. Potter, Jennifer. Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants. London: Atlantic Books, 2006. Pudsey, Lettice. “Cookery Book of Lettice Pudsey.” 1675. MS. V.a.450. Folger Shakespeare Library. Sammern, Romana. “Red, White, and Black: Colors of Beauty, Tints of Health and Cosmetic Materials in Early Modern English Art Writing.” In Early Modern Color Worlds, edited by Tawrin Baker, Sven Dupre, Sachiko Kusudawa, and Karin Leonard, 109–39. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

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Sheridan, Richard B. Sugar and Slaver: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. Smith, Emma, and Andy Kesson, eds. The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Popular Print in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Thick, Malcolm. The Neat House Gardens: Early Market Gardening around London. Blackawton: Prospect Books, 1998. Thick, Malcolm, ed. William Lawson. A New Orchard and Garden with the Country Housewifes Garden (1618). Blackawton: Prospect Books, 2003. Thirsk, Joan. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760. London and New York: Hambledon Continuum. Tigner, Amy L. Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Tigner, Amy L. “Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s the Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet.” In Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer and Rebecca Laroche Munroe, 129–49. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Tradescant, John [the Elder]. “Letter to William Trumbull.” Quoted in Penelope Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants. London: P. Owen, 1984. Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Willes, Margaret. The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspriation 1560–1660. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 10

The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern English Domestic Tragedy Ariane Balizet

Play pregnantly proveth passions: for pride, choler, and covetousness, commonly wait upon great gamesters. (Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General)1 I’ll fetch Master Arden home, and we, like friends, Will play a game or two at tables here. (Arden of Faversham (14.103–4))2

Game play is one of the most recognizable features of early modern domestic tragedy, staged at the very center of domestic conflict and laden with symbolic significance. Games appear as props and stage business throughout all genres of early modern drama, alongside references to off-­ stage leisure activities such as hunting, hawking, bowls, and tennis. In domestic drama in particular, however, game play is materially linked to characters’ physical and emotional well-being, revealing their embodied response to domestic conflict and tragic action. Domestic tragedies emphasize passionate responses to gaming as fundamental to domestic A. Balizet (*) Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_10

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conflict, whether manifest in games of pure chance, as in the match of “cross and pile” in A Warning for Fair Women (1599); games of pure strategy, as in the chess game in Women, Beware Women (1657); or games that rely on both, as in the card games in A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607). Other forms of domestic drama similarly stage game play as a means of raising the emotional stakes, for instance the game of backgammon that enrages Mistresses Goursey and Barnes in the eponymous Two Angry Women of Abington. In the climactic fourth scene of Thomas Middleton’s 1608 A Yorkshire Tragedy, a young boy’s spinning top serves as a prelude to a spectacular display of domestic violence and bloody infanticide. The boy’s father is a gamester himself and, having lost his fortune to dice, rages in self-­loathing. Tearing his hair, he laments, “My riot is now my brother’s jailor, my wife’s sighing, my three boys’ penury, and mine own confusion” (4.79–81).3 The unsuspecting “little son” enters “with a top and scourge” (93+sd) and then addresses his father: What ails you father, are you not well? I cannot scourge my top as long as you stand so; you take up all the room with your wide legs. Puh! You cannot make me afeared with this; I fear no vizards nor bugbears. (94–97)

Scoffing at his father’s grimacing face (“vizard”), the son bravely asserts his intent to play with his toy. In response, the father grabs the child and draws his dagger. The child pleads, “Oh, what will you do, father?—I am your white boy” (99), evoking a cruel joke from his father, who stabs the child and retorts, “Thou shalt be my red boy; take that!” (100). Thus begins the protagonist’s rampage, in which he succeeds in murdering two of his three sons and a maid, as well as gravely wounding his wife. Middleton’s domestic tragedy, like the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1592), dramatized real-life murders as violence against the physical and ideological space of the home as well as its inhabitants.4 Based on the case of Walter Calverley, who was pressed to death in 1605 for the murders of his two children and assault on his wife, A Yorkshire Tragedy renders the family and home abstract, populated with characters whose names are simply “Husband,” “Wife,” “Son,” and “Maid.” The child and his top emblematize the innocence destroyed by the Husband’s profligacy, as the play juxtaposes the simple pleasures of a child’s beloved toy with the father’s maniacal response to the delinquency brought on by his own “play” at dice. In the following scene, we witness a maid cradling the

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younger child and bitterly condemning the Husband’s gambling: “Thy hopes might have been better; /’Tis lost at dice what ancient honour won: /Hard when the father plays away the son” (5.3–5). Within the space of two brief but brutal scenes, Middleton shows that the domestic space can accommodate one kind of play but not another. In Arden of Faversham, the tense game of tables between Thomas Arden and Mosby, his wife’s lover, concludes with Arden himself being “taken,” like one of his game pieces, by his opponent. Mosby’s triumphant exclamation to win the game—“Now I can take you!” (14.238)—is also the watchword that triggers Arden’s murder. Games help to articulate the generic contours of the domestic tragedy, as they register locality (in the particular names and rules of popular games); illustrate household and neighborly dynamics (anchored to specific rooms, thresholds, and the interaction of family members and their peers); and manifest social positions (since tables, cards, and dice were valuable and valued goods available to the “middling sort”).5 Scholars of early modern drama have identified many of the ways that games anchor domestic life onstage. For Emily O’Brien, games and play materialize the apparently quotidian habits and practices of the household, inviting the audience to recognize their own daily rhythms in the lives of characters made vulnerable to violence and betrayal. In A Yorkshire Tragedy, O’Brien argues, a “normal moment of family life is brought into being through [the Son’s] entry with his spinning top, and the individual boy becomes representative of the small, ordinary world that is shattered by the Husband’s actions.”6 Part of the texture of this “normal” world is the opportunity for leisure, a quality of experience that Joachim Frenk, in his assessment of games as part of early modern popular culture more broadly, considers in terms of the “increasing regulation of time” in the sixteenth century, during which games “became markers of the distinction between a public/professional time and a private time.”7 The range of physical and social approaches to games in early modern drama comprising a child’s wooden toy, a pair of silver dice, and an expensive set of tables reveals the heterogenous status of the household members as players—to each his or her own form of play. Gina Bloom’s extensive work on games in early modern drama addresses the “ludic competencies” at work in the reproduction of one form of leisure (cards, board games, tops, or dice) through another (playgoing).8 For Bloom, the nature of games on stage—especially the degree to which an audience can understand the rules, follow the action, and imagine or

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anticipate what cannot be seen—invited early modern audience members to take an active, participatory approach to spectatorship. Bloom argues that games “are not something we simply read about, but something we and early moderns alike do with and through our bodies and our embodied minds.”9 Games are not only “an important technique for producing a sense of the domestic,”10 but a means of intensifying the audience’s embodied experience of that domestic “sense.” Despite the centrality of bodies—those of children, husbands, wives, servants, neighbors, and spectators—to early modern concepts of play, scholars have not yet examined the relationship between games and domestic dramas in terms of their humoral dynamics. This essay aims to do just that: by reading the appearance of toys and games in domestic drama as events in which characters’ humoral balance is at stake, I argue that games operate on the early modern stage as instruments that expose and manipulate the humoral body within the domestic order. Ludic endeavors include the promise of stimulating or settling the mind and body; game play thus represents an opportunity to manage the passions or inflame them. As experiences uniquely related to time, space, cultivated skill, and chance, games can meaningfully organize or disrupt the experience of the humoral body within domestic environments. Much of humoral thought is rooted in domestic practices. The “things natural” which governed the humoral body—including an individual’s humors, complexion, members, and spiritus—were largely up to chance. Yet one’s humoral balance might be positively or negatively cultivated through the “non-naturals,” a category of humoral experience that Nancy Siraisi describes as the “mixture of physiological, psychological, and environmental conditions held to affect health.”11 As advocated by John Johnston in The Idea of Practical Physick (1657), “[n]on-natural things which are done, are passions of the mind, motion and rest of the body, sleep and waking, which are of great moment towards the preservation or violation of health.”12 Typically, the non-naturals included Johnston’s list as well as air, food and drink, and “repletion and excretion.”13 Though conceptually rooted in Galenic physiology, the non-naturals were in practice directly connected to the habits of domestic life, for an individual’s diet, sleep patterns, elimination regimen, and access to exercise and recreation were determined by the household order. Manipulation of the non-­ naturals offered early modern subjects not just a “method of preserving health,”14 but also a technique for regulating and publicizing the body’s humoral response to the world. In her analysis of the social value of

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purgation, Gail Kern Paster describes “the allure of mastery,” in which “the host body’s internal habitus was enlisted experimentally as a new kind of social space for the intensification, enactment, and exhibition of desire.”15 As Paster demonstrates, one motivating factor in the culture of cathartic practices was the view that bodily health depended on a “regimen of cleanly solubility […] attained through the regulated promotion of physical and emotional flow,”16 amounting to a fantasy of “mastery” over the body’s intercourse with social and natural worlds. In practical terms, regulation of the humors through manipulation of the non-naturals occurred in the home, and belonged to the experience of domestic life. Moreover, as Wendy Wall has demonstrated, the practice of “kitchen-physic”—or concoction of special diets, tinctures, salves, and medicines within the early modern kitchen—endowed the housewife with a particular power over the humoral lives of her family, servants, and neighbors.17 Economical endeavors such as butchery, gardening, cleaning, and cooking supported kitchen-physic; thus healing was also bound up in housework. Some forms of kitchen-physic—such as bloodletting—likely fall outside the basic understanding of “excretion,” although the administration of herbal laxatives and emetics would have been part of the housewife’s duty of attending to the “solubility” of her family and household. The non-natural category Johnston describes as the “passions of the mind,” while fundamental to the work of Paster and others on humoral theory and the emotions, has not received extensive attention in terms of its place in domestic practices. I propose that game play was a powerful mechanism for manipulating the passions in daily life, and staged games reveal the humoral dynamics that define and disrupt domestic order. The purpose of play, as many would have it, was directly related to the regulation of the non-naturals, especially the passions and bodily exercise. Sir John Harington’s 1597 Treatise on Playe asserts: Play, according to the ancient schoolmen[…]is defined to be, Ludus […] A spending of the time either in speech or action, whose only end is a delight of the mind or spirit. And therefore they call it also a remedy against the overburdening and dulling of the spirits.18

Ostensibly, play occupies time with the sole aim of “delight,” although Harington suggests that such delight is not momentary but rather offers a sustained effect, and serves thus as a “remedy” to revive the spirits (spiritus, “manufactured in the heart from inspired air and transmitted through

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the body via the arteries,” was the animating force behind movement and thought19). Thus, the “delight of the mind or spirit” generated through play had health benefits. Thomas Wilcox shares this view in A Glasse for Gamesters (1581): “For all play is appointed for men […] for two ends only: that is to say, either for the exercise of the body, or for the recreation of the spirit.”20 Exercise of body and spirit were both necessary, according to Richard Mulcaster, to cultivate lasting strength and learning. In Positions for the Training Up of Children (1581), he writes, That the exercise of the body still accompany and assist the exercise of the mind, to make a dry, strong, hard, and therefore a long lasting body: and by the favor thereof to have an active, sharp, wise and therewith all a well learned soul.21

Mulcaster ascribes value in humoral terms (“dry, strong, hard”) to the body invigorated by exercise, extending the benefits to this “long lasting” physical habitus to the “active, sharp, wise” soul. Later, Mulcaster meditates on the importance of mental exercise in similar terms: The body which lodgeth a restless mind by his own rest is betrayed to the common murderers of a multitude of scholars, which be unwholesome and superfluous humors, needless and noisome excrements, ill to feel within, good to send abroad.22

A mind in need of recreation is vulnerable to “unwholesome and superfluous humors,” which feel unpleasant “within.” Games and play thus provide and regulate the exercise of body and mind, which, when done properly, purge the body of “noisome excrements.” Yet games posed substantial risk to the humoral subject, a risk that early modern domestic tragedies depicted as fundamental to domestic conflict and violence. Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind in General (1604) observes, Play pregnantly proveth passions: for pride, choler, and covetousness, commonly wait upon great gamesters. Some, when they lose, are so inflamed with ire and choler, that you would take them rather for bedlams than reasonable creatures; they swear, curse, and cry; every word spoken against them, sufficeth to pick a quarrel, or deserveth (in their judgements) a buffet.23

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Games can stimulate and refresh the mind, but they can also inflame choler and violent, irrational passions. The Husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy is emblematic of the swearing, quarrelsome, violent, “great gamester” Wright describes. We see this in his very first lines on stage, a bitter curse directed towards his most recent loss. He enters, grumbling, “Pox o’th’ last throw; it made/Five hundred angels vanish from my sight” (2.25–26). Unable to recover emotionally from the last throw of the dice, the Husband is already steeped in anger before he acknowledges his wife, and his choleric humor will not subside until he has murdered three people. The Husband’s gaming has not purged his unwholesome humors but rather inflamed them, manifesting an indictment of dicing that A Yorkshire Tragedy maintains throughout the play. To this point, Wright in fact cautions his reader to treat games as potent medicine: “[t]herefore in game use the golden mean, play not too much, nor too seriously, nor to great game; take it as medicines, use some attention, play for a trifle.”24 The ability of games to fortify or degrade the humoral body is as central to the domestic tragedy as is their ability to signify “the domestic.” Games dramatize domestic conflict as a humoral imbalance, inviting the audience to feel the emotional disturbance caused by winning, losing, or cheating. Even when we cannot see or closely follow the course of a game—as in the case of the game of tables in Arden—domestic drama details the embodied effects of the emotions or passions resulting from the game. Characters become agitated and anxious in the course of a game and feel satisfied in victory or weary in defeat. In the remainder of this essay, I examine scenes of game play in A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham in terms of the effects of the non-naturals on the humoral body. I focus first on the staging of the top and scourge in A Yorkshire Tragedy to show how a toy operates onstage not (or not only) as the performance of childish innocence, but as a direct challenge to the humoral balance of adult men. Far from demonstrating the rightful place of the child in the early modern domestic hierarchy (as a household subordinate whose leisure time is occupied by trivial play), the top inverts domestic order onstage, and frames domestic conflict as both an ideological and an embodied failure. I then turn to Arden of Faversham and read the backgammon game as the climax of a tragic narrative in which Arden attempts to regulate his body through the non-naturals in a domestic space corrupted by cuckoldry. While the game of tables in Arden is one of the most familiar examples of “sitting pastimes” on the early modern stage, it should be noted that

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my focus on these two plays necessarily omits other famous parlor games in Renaissance drama, especially chess. Indeed, Middleton elsewhere places chess at the heart of Women, Beware Women and A Game at Chess. Arden and A Yorkshire Tragedy, however, both dramatize the juxtaposition of pastimes that require varied levels of chance and skill, thus emphasizing the particular embodied effects of gaming on individual players. Drawing upon modern game theory, Bloom notes that “chess can be identified as a game of perfect information, as it is played on a game board seen by both players and their spectators equally at all times. Because there are no elements of chance internal to the game, chess is less risky than a game involving cards.”25 Games based on chance—either partly, as in backgammon, or entirely, as in dicing—present a higher level of “risk” to the social and material fortunes of the players. This risk, as I discuss below, is also uniquely tied to players’ embodied relationship to the game and each other. There is more to say, to be sure, on the humoral dynamics at work in Middleton’s “chess plays” and other staged games, such as the card game in A Woman Killed with Kindness. In Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy, however, toys and games organize and prescribe conflict, concluding that domestic life is a competition—subject to both strategy and chance—that is won or lost in humoral terms. John Northbrooke’s 1577 treatise on dicing, dancing, and “other idle pastimes” imagines a dialogue between “Age” and “Youth” in which the elder asserts: “Trocho lude, aleas fuge: play with the top, and flee diceplaying.”26 This maxim synthesizes a crucial value held by early modern taxonomies of games and play. Games of chance, Northbrooke argues, are morally inferior to games of skill, a point upon which Age elaborates, simultaneously articulating the chief purpose of play to be the exercise of the body and mind: For all plays are appointed and liked of men for two causes only: either for the exercise of the body (whereof diceplay is wholly contrary, being a sport of a sort of idle unthrifts:) or else play should serve for the recreation of the mind, and refreshing of our bodies, whereunto diceplay is wholly repugnant and contrary: for therein is no exercise of our wits, but we only stay upon the chance of the dice, while as well he that winneth, as he that loseth, is amazed and unsure of his chance, but always gapeth for the chance of his hap, without any pleasure, but only a covetous desire to gain.27

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Then as now, gaming captured a wide spectrum of activities including “unlawful” gambling and “lawful” pursuits meant to fortify the mind and body; for Northbrooke, it is precisely the element of chance inherent to dice that deprives play of its proper function as recreation for the mind. Wilcox makes the same point in A Glasse for Gamesters: “which we call Alea, that is Cards and Dice, and other plays of lot, and chance, sin against the holy ghost.”28 Games of chance do not provide for any exercise of the wits, and therefore both winners and losers in dice or cards inflame their passions of anger and covetousness. Harington places “games devised for pastime” on a spectrum, distinguishing between “Alearis and quasi Alearis; in which either mere hazard prevails, as at dice; or chance with some use of wit, as in cards and tables; or chance with some sleight, strength, and agility of the body, as shooting, bowling, tennis.”29 The more a game relied on chance, the more likely it was to inflame dangerous passions; the more a game relied on skill, the more likely it was to purge superfluous humors and refresh the body and mind. The juxtaposition of the top with the dice in Northbrooke’s admonition “Trocho lude, aleas fuge” is thus rooted in the clearly defined ludic hierarchy that is radically disrupted by the Husband’s enraged response to his young son’s top in A Yorkshire Tragedy. The top and scourge, furthermore, have a rich cultural history as common material objects that capture the multivalence of childhood play. In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, Falstaff recalls his childhood by invoking the toy: “Since I plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top, I knew not what ’twas to be beaten till lately” (5.1.22–24). The 1605 pamphlet Two Unnatural Murders, which details the Calverley murders and served as Middleton’s source for A Yorkshire Tragedy, includes the boy and his top in its account of the murder, emphasizing the son’s innocence in the face of a monster: And as he was thus tormented in the remembrance of his own folly, his eldest son, being a child of four years old, came into the gallery to scourge his top; and, seeing his father stand in a study, looked prettily up to him, saying, ‘How do you, father?’ Which lovely look and gentle question of the child raised again the remembrance of the distress he should leave him in.30

The gentleness of the child’s words, his deference to his father, and his youth are all on display here in the service of depicting the son’s innocence. While the top conjures images of child’s play, however, it is unlikely

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that such a toy would have been brought onstage with any regularity, as it required practiced skill and space to spin effectively, and, once in motion, could become difficult to control. Children’s tops, to that end, were construed as more appropriate for outdoor play and praised for the vigorous exercise they offered young people. Mulcaster devotes a chapter of Positions for the Training Up of Children to “the top and scourge,” noting that this form of play has its own season and “time”: He that will deny the Top to be an exercise, indifferently capable of all distinctions in stirring, the very boys will beat him, and scourge him too, if they light on him about lent, when Tops be in time, as every exercise hath his season, both in day and year, after the constitution of bodies, and quantities in measure.31

In addition to spring weather, Nicholas Orme suggests that the association of tops with Lent may reflect “an echo of the scourging of Jesus on Good Friday, or of the whipping of penitent sinners, which also took place during Lent.”32 Both Mulcaster and Falstaff draw upon the implicit violence in the whip or scourge, Mulcaster especially acknowledging the potential for young children, finally freed by spring from the confines of their homes, to turn their scourges away from the top and towards others. While tops were powerfully associated with childhood and springtime, then, early modern depictions of top spinning recognized the paradoxical connotations of innocence and violence evoked by the act of scourging. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games (1560), both a catalogue of sixteenth-century games and a complex assessment of childhood characterized by brutality and folly, depicts a group of children playing with tops in the upper-left hand quadrant, framed by the two arches of the loggia. Children’s Games depicts around two hundred figures occupied by eighty different games and pastimes, including leapfrog, hoop rolling, playing with dolls, and blindman’s buff. The children playing with tops are split into two scenes by the central pillar: to the right, we see four children of varying ages spinning and scourging their tops; to the left, a single child, still in the long “coats” of early childhood, raising an arm to scourge a perfectly balanced top. Amy Orrock has observed that Bruegel’s works often “present worlds that are familiar but somehow upside-down, their elevated viewpoints and scurrying protagonists connecting them to the

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classical notion of the Theatrum Mundi, in which man’s foolish actions were contemplated from above.”33 Like many figures in Children’s Games, however, the young child scourging a top under the arch on the left demonstrates both skill and determination; smaller than and separated from the children to the right and unaware of the girl urinating near the wall behind the loggia, the child is absorbed in the act of scourging. Far from being an emblem of folly or even innocence, the top-spinner represents the ambivalence of play as the practice of skill and performance of aggression as well as a ludic endeavor for its own sake. Like, perhaps, the girl relieving herself near the wall, the top-spinner is engaged in an act of “excretion,” as scourging a top “warmeth the body, and […] stir[s] the natural heat either to provoke appetite, or to expel superfluities.”34 (Fig. 10.1). I propose we see in this determined, unbreeched child a glimpse of the young son in A Yorkshire Tragedy, a play that juxtaposes the Husband’s folly at dice with his son’s skillful scourging. In the fourth scene, the

Fig. 10.1  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games (1560), detail. Image credit: KHM-Museumsverband. Reproduced with permission

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child’s ludic competence and humoral balance is set against the Husband’s aleatory gaming and unregulated passions in a competition for domestic space: What ails you father, are you not well? I cannot scourge my top as long as you stand so; you take up all the room with your wide legs. Puh! You cannot make me afeared with this; I fear no vizards nor bugbears. Husband takes up the Child by the skirts of his long coat in one hand and draws his dagger with the other. Husband: Up, sir, for here thou hast no inheritance left. (4.94–98) Son:

In sharp contrast to the “pretty” deference of the Calverley child’s “How do you, father?” in Two Unnatural Murders, here the Son openly challenges his father, first recognizing his disordered passions by sight—“What ails you father, are you not well?”—and then asserting his rightful place in the house, complaining that his father takes “up all the room with [his] wide legs” and demanding space to scourge his top. The Son’s derisive “Puh!”, seemingly in response to the Husband’s silent scowl, rejects—perhaps playfully—his father’s disciplinary authority. He is not “afeared” of his father’s glowering face, which the Son reads as an angry “vizard” put on with the purpose of frightening the child. The son’s diagnostic faculties are faulty, however, because in assessing “what ails” the Husband, the child fails to realize that his twisted grimace is not feigned anger but rather inflamed choler, the “poison” (83) that prompted his father to tear at his hair just before the child entered. Searching for a room with enough floor space to practice whipping his top, the son seeks also to displace his father, whose “wide legs” occupy too much of the child’s chosen room. The child argues that he, not his father, belongs in the room, and the play similarly suggests that the child’s ludic purpose with the scourge and top—and not the Husband’s profligate dicing—belong to the domestic space. When the Husband lifts the unbreeched child by the “skirts of his long coat” and draws his dagger, he casts the assault as a form of disinheritance. The punning that follows on “white boy” (a term of endearment) and “red boy” (as in blood-soaked victim) demonstrates how swiftly the affective relationship between the two is transformed by violence. The conflict between age and youth in this scene is manifest not just in the competition for “room” but in the juxtaposition of the embodied

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effects of the Husband’s dice and the Son’s top. A Yorkshire Tragedy repeatedly refers to the shaking of dice as a “palsy,” as when the Wife laments, “I see how ruin with a palsy hand/Begins to shake the ancient seat to dust” (3.92–93). The Husband similarly marvels at the power his gaming holds over him: What is there in three dice to make a man draw thrice three thousand acres into the compass of a round, little table, and with the gentleman’s palsy in the hand shake out his posterity, thieves or beggars? (4.65–69)

In Middleton’s play, the derelict behaviors associated with aleatory gaming are manifest in the involuntary, uncontrollable movement of an aging, “palsied” hand and the degradation of the Husband’s name, fortune, and bloodline. The top, by contrast, represents balance and symmetry in motion; vigorous exercise; and skilled, practiced movement. While the Husband’s ability to overpower his unbreeched child in this moment reiterates the child’s vulnerability, the juxtaposition of top and dice in their exchange emphasizes the Husband’s unregulated, uncontrolled passions in the face of the child’s ability to maintain balance in his body and spinning top. The gaming habits of householders such as the Husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy—and the potential for inflamed and surfeited humors in certain games—were of particular importance to the early modern domestic ideology that viewed the household itself as a body of which the husband was the head. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton argues that the “Oeconomicall body” cannot function with a “head” debauched by wasteful drinking or gambling: As it is in a man’s body, if either head, heart, stomach, liver, spleen, or any one part be misaffected, all the rest suffer with it, so is it with this Oeconomicall body. If the head be naught, a spendthrift, a drunkard, a whoremaster, a gamester, how shall the family live at ease?35

In Burton’s formulation, the example of a “misaffected” body part spoiling the whole is analogous to a profligate “head” of household; in early modern domestic tragedy, however, this analogy is collapsed such that gaming has the potential to disturb both a “man’s body” and the “Oeconomicall body.” In Arden of Faversham, the game of tables provides an opportunity for the cuckolded husband to regulate his inflamed

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passions in response to confirmed fears of adultery and promises mastery over the domestic body through skill and strategy instead of chance. In the play, the adulterous pair Alice Arden and Mosby are introduced through amorous play. When Mosby sends a dismissive message to Alice in the first scene, she appeals to him with a gift: Bear him from me these pair of silver dice With which we play’d for kisses many a time, And when I lost I won and so did he— Such winning and such losing Jove send me! (1.123–26)

For Alice, the only game worth playing is one in which she can delight in both winning and losing. She is not beholden to the emotional effects of chance when playing for kisses, since the wager and the stakes are always the same and in the service of her pleasure. Arden’s infamous game of backgammon between Thomas Arden and Mosby thus contrasts the diceplay between Mosby and Alice, in which Mosby required neither skill nor luck to win every time. Unlike Alice and Mosby’s kissing games, aleatory games like dice were unlawful partly because they disturbed the passions without opportunity for regulating or purging the surfeiting humors. While John Northbrooke advocated that men should “flee diceplaying,” however, his treatise on pastimes allowed for some games of chance, especially backgammon. He argues, [T]he life of man is like unto the play at Tables. For even as […] in Table play, so also in the life of man, if any thing go not very well, the same must be by art corrected and amended […] as when a cast is evil, it is holpen again by the wisdom and cunning of the Player.36

Offering the opportunity to redeem (through “wisdom” and “cunning”) losses endured by chance, backgammon posed less risk to the passions than did dice and cards. Arden of Faversham’s game of tables brings to a close Thomas Arden’s remarkable ability to escape—seemingly by chance—those conspiring to murder him. In winning the game and capturing Arden’s final “man,” or game piece, Mosby triggers Arden’s death, so that the conspirators’ cunning can make good on a happy roll of the dice. If we consider parlor games as a means of exercising the “passions of the mind” and sharpening the wits, Arden’s willingness to play with

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Mosby—after making his jealousy plain throughout the play—suggests that Arden seeks not only to pass the time before dinner but also to regain mastery of his humoral and household bodies. Indeed, before the game is introduced, Arden spends the play in humoral disarray, seeking in vain to find balance from some of the non-naturals—food, drink, rest, and air. Because the non-naturals belong in large part to the domain of the home, the cuckolded Arden will never find solace or solubility there. The play opens with Arden’s friend Franklin imploring, “Arden, cheer up thy spirits and droop no more” (1.1), suggesting that Arden should consider his newfound fortune and “leave this melancholy mood” (7). But Arden’s melancholy will not be abated, because Alice and Mosby consistently provoke his jealousy and he is frustrated in his attempts to manipulate the non-naturals to regulate his health. His morning meal is poisoned by Alice, and with one bite he laments, “I am not well. There’s something in this broth/That is not wholesome. Didst thou make it, Alice?” (363–64). Franklin’s “box of mithridate”—a purgative antidote to poison—restores Arden, who says, “I’ll take a little to prevent the worst” (382–83). Arden’s troubled sleep is described throughout the play, as when he laments, “My house is irksome, there I cannot rest” (4.27), and then describes a nightmare from which he woke and “trembled every joint” (7.20). Even when far beyond his troubled home, Arden is deprived of wholesome air when he is “almost stifled with […] fog” (11.33). Having endured poison, hunger, purgation, sleep deprivation, and a thick, blinding mist, Arden’s humoral body is depicted as profoundly unbalanced as he pulls up his stool to start the game. The game of tables appears in Holinshed’s account of Thomas Arden’s murder, although the relationship between the game and the murder plot is not as clearly articulated as it is in the play. In Holinshed’s telling it is Arden who first suggests the game to Mosby when he learns that dinner is not yet ready: “‘Then let us go and play a game at tables in the mean season,’ Said Master Arden.”37 Yet the signal to call in the murderers—“now I will take you,” similar to phrases like “checkmate” to announce the winning move—seems to have been predetermined by Mosby and the others: In their play, Mosby said thus (which seemed to be the watchword for Black Will’s coming forth): “Now I may take you, sir, if I will.” “Take me?” quoth Master Arden, “which way?” With that, Black Will stepped forth and cast a towel about his neck so to stop his breath and strangle him.38

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It is possible that Mosby’s foresight in selecting this “watchword” is informed by Arden’s habit of playing tables before dinner, or, perhaps, Holinshed’s account assumes that Arden would have invited Mosby to play in the spirit of a good host even though the game ultimately serves as Mosby’s means of orchestrating a successful attack. In the play, however, it is Alice who, informed of the plan, suggests the game to her husband as a way of passing time until dinner: Arden: Alice: Arden: Mosby: Arden:

Come, Alice, is our supper ready yet? It will by then you have played a game at tables. Come, Master Mosby, what shall we play for? Three games for a French crown, sir, and please you. Content. (14. 227–31)

Arden is most immediately concerned with setting the terms of the wager—“what shall we play for?”—and accepts Mosby’s stakes of “Three games for a French crown,” despite the fact that Alice has granted them time for just one game. In focusing on the wager, Mosby and Arden undermine the purpose of play as a means of recreation, as Wilcox argues in A Glasse for Gamesters: For whereas play was appointed in the beginning, only for the exercise of the body, or recreation of the spirit, these men omitting those ends, make it a mean to gain or get money by, and so change and alter the nature of recreation, into a kind of unhonest and unlawfull game.39

By prioritizing the game over dinner and setting a wager before they begin, Arden has made himself more vulnerable to unruly passions—his own as well as Mosby’s. In most early modern versions of backgammon, players arrange their “men” on opposite sides of the tables (or game board), roll the dice to move men from point to point, and then bear them off the board. Unprotected men are called “blots,” and players strategize to capture or “hit” opponents’ blots, forcing the piece back to a center position and requiring the use of a turn for re-entry to the game. As Bloom has argued, Arden of Faversham dramatizes the plot against Arden’s life as a large-scale game of backgammon, as “Arden spends much of the play wandering without protection toward his home and, like a blot, avoiding capture largely because of luck.”40 I agree that backgammon plays this crucial role

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in Arden’s downfall. But in addition to operating as the symbolic confrontation between an unprotected Arden (the “blot”) and the many “men” of his opponent conspiring to “take him up,” the game also serves as the culmination of a journey throughout the play to treat his “melancholy mood” (1.8). For a period of time, too, it seems that Arden’s skill at the game illustrates some form of mastery over his embodied self and the embodied home. The agreed-upon watchword demands, of course, that Mosby win at least one game; as they play, however, Black Will impatiently complains that Mosby is taking too long, implying that Arden is winning: “Can he not take him yet? What a spite is that!” (14.232–33). In Holinshed’s account, too, it seems that Arden is winning the game given his surprise when Mosby issues the watchword: “‘Take me?’ quoth Master Arden, ‘which way?’”41 Because the staged version of Mosby seems committed to winning the game before issuing the watchword, the play stresses that as long as Arden is successful in the game, his body is safe. In a game that involves both strategy and luck, however, Arden is ultimately undone by a roll of the dice: Mosby: One ace, or else I lose the game. [He throws the dice.] Arden: Marry, sir, there’s two for failing. Mosby: Ay, Master Arden, ‘Now I can take you’. Then Black Will pulls him down with a towel. Arden: Mosby, Michael, Alice, what will you do? Black Will: Nothing but take you up, sir, nothing else. (236–40) Mosby’s throw is exceptionally lucky: two aces (or “snake eyes”) that allow him to “hit” Arden’s blot and “take [him] up.” But Mosby’s dedication to delaying the murder until he has won outright forces the audience to witness not the game itself but its effects on the players, perhaps noting Mosby’s increased agitation as he loses and Arden’s unruffled demeanor, illustrated by his good-natured “there’s two for failing” in response to his opponent’s good fortune. The play invites spectators both on and offstage to participate in a fantasy that suggests Arden might survive as long as he remains in control of the game. Like his frustrated attempts to nourish, rest, and exercise his body, however, this game of tables cannot fully regulate the passions of his mind, nor can a game that includes the element of chance guarantee his security as the head of a domestic body.

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Like the confrontation between the Husband and Son in A Yorkshire Tragedy, the game of tables in Arden stages a conflict between two aspects of play: the skill and strategy necessary to “hit” one’s opponent on the board, and the unpredictability of the dice that, by chance, give Mosby the winning throw and trigger Arden’s murder. Whether or not the dice that give Mosby his desired aces are the same silver dice that he and Alice used in their kissing game, the play has already established that Mosby will play games only if the consequences for losing are the same as for winning; for Mosby, the passions stimulated by aleatory gaming are immediately sublimated into lovemaking or murder. For Arden, the stakes are much higher than a “French crown”; the game in fact represents an opportunity for him to regain balance in his body and mind. Yet the premise of the game— the “equal playing field” that promises to structure conflict upon a neutral, balanced plane—is undermined by the household’s disruptive effects on Arden’s humoral body. The staging of toys and games in early modern drama illuminates the dimension of humoral experience governed by domestic life and ideology. Not only did games reflect status through material goods and leisure time, but the playing of games also worked in concert with other non-naturals to regulate humoral bodies within the domain of the home. Yet the pastime of playgoing—like the smooth surface of the “tables”—was not a neutral space in relation to the embodied lives of its participants. Plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham are not just cautionary tales about the dangers of gaming; they resolve the inflamed passions raised in staged game play through violent acts of bloodshed, purging “unwholesome humors” through tragedy. This form of catharsis depends upon the ability of drama to stimulate the “passions of the mind” as powerfully as other ludic practices. Looking to toys and games, then, can help us understand the effects of play—and plays—on the humoral body.

Notes 1. Wright, Passions of the Mind, 125. I have silently modernized most early modern texts throughout, except where it affects meter or sense. 2. References to Arden of Faversham are from Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies. 3. References to Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy are from Thomas Middleton: Collected Works.

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4. Thomas Arden was murdered in 1551 and an account of the conspiracy that led to his death appears in Holinshed’s Chronicles. 5. See Christensen, Separation Scenes, 4–5. 6. O’Brien, “Children,” 245. 7. Frenk, “Games,” 223. 8. Bloom, ‘“My feet,’” 6. 9. Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 9. 10. Bloom, “Games,” 191. 11. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 101. 12. Johnston, Idea of Practical Physick, 20. 13. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 101. 14. Johnston, Idea of Practical Physick, 24. 15. Paster, “Purgation,” 195–96. 16. Paster, “Purgation,” 198–99. 17. Wall, Staging Domesticity, 164. 18. Harington, Treatise on Playe, 188. 19. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 101. 20. Wilcox, Glass for Gamesters, Ciiiv. 21. Mulcaster, Positions, 22. 22. Mulcaster, Positions, 23. 23. Wright, Passions of the Mind, 125. 24. Wright, Passions of the Mind, 128. 25. Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 14. Italics in original. 26. Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarious Christi, 90. 27. Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarious Christi, 108. 28. Wilcox, Glass for Gamesters, C5v. 29. Harington, Treatise on Playe, 189. 30. Two Unnatural Murders, 312. 31. Mulcaster, Positions, 79. 32. Orme, “Child’s Play,” 54. 33. Orrock, “Homo ludens,” par. 3. 34. Mulcaster, Positions, 80. 35. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 62. 36. Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarious Christi, 112. 37. Selection from Holinshed, Chronicles, 297. 38. Selection from Holinshed, Chronicles, 297. 39. Wilcox, Glasse for Gamesters, A7v. 40. Bloom, ‘“My Feet,’” 14. 41. Selection from Holinshed, Chronicles, 297. See also Bloom, ‘“My Feet,’” 17.

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Bibliography Arden of Faversham. In Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, edited by Keith Sturgess, 55–148. London: Penguin, 2012. Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Bloom, Gina. “‘My Feet See Better than my Eyes’: Spatial Mastery and the Game of Masculinity in Arden of Faversham’s Amphitheatre.” Theatre Survey 53, no. 1 (2012): 5–28. Bloom, Gina. “‘Boy Eternal’: Aging, Games, and Masculinity in The Winter’s Tale.” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 3 (2010): 329–56. Bloom, Gina. “Games.” In Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, 189–211. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford, 1621. Christensen, Ann. Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Frenk, Joachim. “Games.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Andrew Hadfield, Mathew Dimmock, and Abigail Shinn, 221–34. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Harington, Sir John. A Treatise on Playe. In Nugae Anitquae, Vol. 1., [John Harington], 186–231. London: J. Wright, 1804. Holinshed, Raphael. “Chronicles.” In Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, edited by Keith Sturgess, 291–302. London: Penguin, 2012. Johnston, John. The Idea of Practical Physick in Twelve Books. Translated by Nicholas Culpeper. London, 1657. Middleton, Thomas. A Yorkshire Tragedy. In Thomas Middleton: Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 452–66. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Mulcaster, Richard. Positions for the Training Up of Children. London, 1581. Northbrooke, John. Spiritus est vicarious Christi in terra. London, 1577. O’Brien, Emily. “Children, Normality, and Domestic Tragedy.” In Staged Normality in Shakespeare’s England, edited by Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple, 237–58. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Orrock, Amy. “Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 4, no. 2 (2012): 1–41. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2012.4.2.1 Orme, Nicholas. “Child’s Play in Medieval England.” History Today 51, no. 10 (2001): 49–55. Paster, Gail Kern. “Purgation as the Allure of Mastery: Early Modern Medicine and the Technology of the Self.” In Material London, c. 1600, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin, 193–205. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

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Shakespeare, William. Merry Wives of Windsor. In The Norton Shakespeare [Based on the Oxford Edition], 3rd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al, 1463–1531. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016. Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Two Unnatural Murders. In Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, edited by Keith Sturgess, 303–16. London: Penguin, 2012. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wilcox, Thomas. A Glasse for Gamesters. London, 1581. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Mind in General. London, 1604.

CHAPTER 11

Afterword—No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a Sigh Is (Not) Just a Sigh Gail Kern Paster

The central truth about the building blocks of the early modern cosmos is nicely summed up by Lorraine Daston, who notes that all objects in early modern nature have “an innate impulse to change.”1 She thus distinguishes oak trees as a natural kind, with their innate impulse to change, from the durable permanence of tables and beds made from them. James Bono agrees: Nature is fundamentally playful and creative; it is, in short, poetic […]. Nature can mimic; it can take natural forms and make them metamorphose into other shapes; it is inherently active, transformative, plastic. […] Such transformations and mirroring, then, display the analogical, metaphorical, and hierarchical structure of the divine system of nature.2

Because Daston’s oak trees possess an agency lacking in beds and tables, we may wish to see the oak tree as an example of what Jane Bennett calls “vital matter,” even though—in early modern terms at least—we must

G. K. Paster (*) Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_11

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also deny that agency to furniture.3 (Bennett would probably not wish to deny agency to furniture, but the early modern cosmos is animated by divine pneuma or spirit in a way that the modern cosmos is not, pneuma inhering in whatever God endows with life, animate or inanimate.) Another way to describe the innate impulse to change—a corollary, in effect—is to describe it as a congeries of appetites and desires possessed by all of creation, animate and inanimate. Those appetites and desires produce characteristic behaviors, all of them arising from self-love, which is the name for those God-given appetites that allow anything to remain itself even while changing. Such behaviors in turn were themselves determined by—and visible to the knowing observer as—the dynamic interaction within a natural object of its unique commixture of the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth and their respective qualities of hot, dry, wet, and cold. An example of such behaviors can be found in Sylva Sylvarum (1627), Francis Bacon’s odd compendium of the experiments he wished to perform on the natural world. There, Bacon distinguishes between those objects having a desire for union with other things and those with a desire for self-continuance. Hard things such as iron, stone, or wood, have a “strong” appetite to resist change, but sticky things, such as pitch, glue, or birdlime, will “partly follow the touch of another body, and partly stick and continue to themselves.”4 Such bodies are usually “ill mixed; and take more pleasure in a foreign body, than in preserving their own continuance.”5 Liquids, of course, betray a constant desire for commixture, water mingling easily with blood or earth. The idea of a “thing” like glue taking pleasure in uniting with a foreign body—however delightful to contemplate—is deeply alien to the modern sensibility, wedded as it is to firm boundaries between subject and object, inside and outside, self and cosmos. And this is true even for sophisticated modern sensibilities attuned to the theoretical extensions of agency advocated by thinkers such as Jane Bennett, Bill Brown, and especially Bruno Latour. We need theoretical help in seeing the world with an estranging, early modern lens. Thus, Latour has needed to argue against a firm distinction between subjects and objects: “things do not exist without being full of people,” the world being full of “quasi-objects” and “quasi-­ subjects.”6 And of course the reverse is true: people are full of things, from eyeglasses to pacemakers to artificial hips to the computers onto which we have offloaded our memories. As Andy Clark says, “the mind is a leaky organ, forever escaping its ‘natural’ confines and mingling shamelessly with body and with world.”7 The early moderns, believing in immortal

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souls but being otherwise wedded to materialism, would have no trouble agreeing with his postulate. The incessant creativity and plasticity of early modern nature, filled with the energy of divine pneuma and an innate impulse to change, has much in common with early modern minds. After all, they were made of the same stuff. Only when we grant the presence of desire, appetites, agency, and behavior to all of creation can we begin to catch a glimpse of how the world may have seemed and felt to our early modern forebears. Daston’s central truth about the early modern cosmos is the source of intellectual coherence for the essays that make up this volume—the truth that unifies the early modern natural world in all its richness and variety from metallic queens to ill-humored fruit, from melancholy stags to impassioned game play, from viscous stage blood to sinew-shrinking stage torture, from addictive alcoholic drinks to hot sighs and iambic heartbeats. To understand the place of every object in this book’s series if we were to draw them from the table of contents, the watchwords would be “analogy” and “hierarchy”—the principles of the “order of things” in the early modern world.8 To know the peacock, says William B.  Ashworth, “you must know its associations—its affinities, similitudes, and sympathies with the rest of the created order.”9 As with peacocks, so with metallic queens and melancholy stags. It is simply not the case, as Foucault asserts, that to learn by analogy meant that in terms of “sixteenth-century knowledge” one knew only “the same thing.”10 The purpose of analogy is to separate out difference and resemblance as ultimate sources of understanding, as the basis for knowing the differences in “continuance” between birdlime and blood. As the essays collected herein make clear, the early moderns endeavored to know many things about their own relation to the forces of the cosmos. It is striking how many of these essays revolve around what we might call the behavior of the elements. Thus, for Robert Stagg’s essay in this volume (Chap. 2), as for Darryl Chalk’s (Chap. 3), it is the movement of breath that is the key signifier. For Stagg, the placement of a caesura in a Shakespearean verse is exquisitely differentiated within the rhythm of the breath—inhaled, exhaled, or held between. The movement of the breath, in turn, is calibrated with the rhythms of the early modern heart, a fountain (rather than a pump) dilating or contracting in response to the vehement stimulus of the passions and sending out aerated blood to thirsty flesh. What aligns the joint functioning of heart and lungs in the body to the rhythms of poetry, as Stagg elucidates, is the action of divine pneuma,

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a force that is also responsible for the heated workings of the productive imagination of the poet. And as we know from countless Renaissance locutions, the passions work within the body as winds and waves work in the world outside. Robert Burton reminds us, “the air works on all men […] when the humours by the air be stirred, he goes in with them, exagitates our spirits, and vexeth our souls; as the sea waves, so are the spirits and humors in our bodies, tossed with tempestuous winds and storms.”11 In the hot or cold humoralism of the embodied Shakespearean character, there are cues for speaking verse and the vocabulary of gesture as well. Such cues, Chalk suggests, are often for characters—pathologically lovestruck—to give vent (literally) to their passions in the “involuntary, circumstantial kind of deep breathing,” which is sighing.12 Sighing, in the humoral mind-set, is always consequential—the “very embodiment of longing,” hence a key metonymy of desire seeking relief or an embodied self in deep distress.13 As such, sighing takes on a new centrality in early modern dramaturgy, especially when it is linked to dramatic physical or psychological change or when it demonstrates the ecological passions of the meteorological self. The performance of pain is therefore—as Michael Schoenfeldt points out in Chap. 5—an ethically and emotionally fraught endeavor for the actor, and no less so for witnesses in the audience. The problem was not merely that performed pain could be fake, but that its meaning was so difficult to contextualize. Pain might be indistinguishable from pleasure, or the violence that (Elaine Scarry tells us) takes the world away from the tortured, or the onstage imitation of the agony endured by the surgical patient who, as Schoenfeldt unforgettably points out, had to be tied down just like Gloucester does when Regan and Cornwall pluck out his eyes.14 It is this resemblance that must have made Gloucester’s pain so resonant for the early audience. The arc of pain at such moments follows the arc of the breath—contained and released. Within the ecologically and ethically fraught confines of Galenic humoralism, no bodily symptom or event—no intake of breath, no articulation of a verse-line, no sigh or scream of pain—is isolated or insignificant. Such an understanding informs early modern theories of drunkenness and addiction in which—as David Clemis argues in Chap. 4—drunkenness was cast as a manifestation not of the effects of alcohol but of the drunkard’s very humoral self. Such an attitude makes perfect sense within humoralism: the excessive consumption of alcohol profoundly altered the humors within an individual and the character of his mind and flesh, thereby altering not only the constitution of his body and soul, but also his relationship

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with the outside world in which, microcosm to macrocosm, he was mirrored hierarchically. It is the profound interrelatedness of the things of the early modern world—their “stickiness” in Baconian terms—that now strikes us. It is just such stickiness, Amy Kenny points out in Chap. 6, that grafts the stage property to the actor’s body, not just physically but mnemonically; that grafts a character to the prop, just as Yorick’s skull returns in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy as the skull of Gloriana (still bearing the skull of Yorick’s traces, perhaps even its earthy smell); or circulates in the form of various heads and limbs (those of Argus, Phaeton, Mahomet, and Hercules) that move from play to play on theater stages. Such props may lack the natural agency of oak trees, but they enact powerful symbolic agency that accumulates from play to play. And many props—like animal blood or body parts, wax, and paint—retain their humoral disposition whether onstage or off. Stage properties may represent the human tendency to colonize the natural world for our own symbolic, here theatrical, purposes but, as Kenny notes, sticky materials like wax or blood or lead paint leave their trace on the actor’s body, blackening or even scalding him. Because they possess a natural agency, the minerals in paint were especially dangerous in the theater, as in other places of work. But the overarching potency of stage properties’ agency is to decenter focus away from the actor, blurring the subject-object divide in the effort to make meaning on stage. Games and toys, to repeat Daston’s distinction between oak trees and tables, do not themselves contain any appetites of their own. But, as Ariane Balizet explores in Chap. 10, they are the prosthetic instruments of the passions of their users, indeed often the dramaturgical instruments by which their passions are revealed, and conflict is played out. Balizet quotes Thomas Wright: “Play pregnantly proveth passions: for pride, choler, and covetousness, commonly wait upon great gamesters.”15 Objects live in our memories and, in doing so, physically change the traces of memory itself.16 A difference between the human chess player and the computer he plays against is that the human player cares—indeed cares intensely—about the outcome, a fact that is a source of both strength and vulnerability in the human player.17 The murdering father in A Yorkshire Tragedy may feel remorse, but the agent of his passion, or the dagger he has killed with, will not. It is a telling irony, as Balizet implies, that a top will spin only when it is scourged or whipped, so that violence is its enabling action and, in A Yorkshire Tragedy, violence is indeed the consequence of the boy’s using it, his playful humor met fatally by his father’s choler. For knowing

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playwrights such as the men who wrote A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, with its fatal game of backgammon, the presence of toys and games within the home —and the conflicts which arise from playing with them—become essential tools of tragic dramaturgy. Yet, as Kaara L. Peterson argues in Chap. 7, the metals that adorn the symbolic representations of Queen Elizabeth do indeed have organic properties, innate impulses to change, and masculinized qualities with which the Queen and her counsellors wished to align her. As Bacon might point out, metals have a strong resistance to change and hence become ideal properties for a queen whose motto was semper eadem [ever the same]. Indeed, the attributes of metals and monarchy were exchanged reciprocally, for Elizabeth is famously thought possibly to have said, “I have the heart and stomach of a king.”18 In order to invest herself with the crown’s masculine qualities, Elizabeth need never to have actually worn a metallic breastplate, only to be depicted as wearing one by Thomas Cecill. And it is just this reciprocity—the queen’s majesty-adorning metals, gendered metals adorning and hardening the queen’s female body, and the queen’s fleshy mettle becoming ever more metallic—that also associates Elizabeth with her metallic representation in badges, coins, portrait lockets and miniatures, and so forth. It is entirely indicative of early modern thinking that the words metal and mettle—now differentiating the physical and the immaterial—were the same word in early modern English.19 The queen’s mettle, she wanted her subjects to know, was all metal, semper eadem. Such hot-dry masculine mettle, it should be clear, had little in common with the earthy mettle of the melancholy stags and humans who populate Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. The early moderns had no difficulty extending emotions to animals, humoral beings like themselves with behaviors determined, like those of humans, by the antipathies and sympathies coursing through the natural world, those that made serpents hate the smell of garlic or elephants hate mice.20 A beautiful, noble stag that is nonetheless prey thus had every reason to possess the cold flesh and timid spirit associated with melancholy, just as the disaffected, exiled Jaques has every reason to identify with it in As You Like It. In early modern dramaturgy, as Kimberly Rhodes demonstrates in Chap. 8, a stag is never just a stag. He is rather the bearer of a host of meanings drawn from religious allegory and the rich iconography of pre-Reformation visual culture to which Shakespeare (we are told by many art historians) was deeply attuned. For a play that features last-minute on- and off-stage conversions, the stag

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in As You Like It may thus represent Shakespeare’s nostalgia for a vanished Catholic past replete with saints and their cults, angelic presences, and the richly painted churches with walls not yet whitewashed by Reformation iconoclasts. In early modern cosmology, we now know, the passions of animals are not far removed from the cold-wet humorality of fruit which—perhaps surprisingly—the early moderns regarded with anxiety. Amy L. Tigner’s Chap. 9 charts significant evidence not only for the sixteenth-century suspicion of fruit (especially in plague time) but also for a change in attitude about the foodstuff at the century’s turn. This was due, Tigner argues, to the “new spirit of scientific inquiry, botanical exploration, and a growing interest in the classification of plants.”21 The change did not result in the waning of humoralism per se, but rather (with the explanatory flexibility for which humoralism is famous) in a new understanding of the salutary effects of fruit, in fact a rise in the cultivation of fruit as a status symbol for the aristocracy, along with the aesthetic celebration of fruit in countless paintings of the period. Milton’s Adam and Eve, we should remember, were vegetarians. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tigner makes clear, the age-old practice of eating fruit had aligned with the salutary reasons for doing so. As the essays in this volume tell us in powerful terms, the early modern cosmos reveals itself in the behaviors of creation, animate and inanimate. Each of these behaviors is triggered by appetites, which are themselves a manifestation of the self-love that drives all things and all persons in the early modern world to move towards what they like and away from what they do not. The appetites of humans, even those of animals, are only part of this much larger picture of desire. It is only by paying careful attention to those behaviors in the documentary record of texts and images—in seeing how they order creation, how they display deep structure in visible details legible to the informed eye—that we scholars can begin to understand the early moderns and how they construed the world.

Notes 1. Daston, “Nature of Nature,” 149–73. 2. Bono, Word of God, 184. 3. See generally Bennett, Vibrant Matter, and Brown, “Thing Theory.” 4. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 2:437. For a fuller discussion of this passage, see Paster, Humoring the Body, 31–33. For literary evidence of the human

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appetite to merge with the environment, see Paster, “Becoming the Landscape,” 137–52. 5. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 2:438. 6. Latour, “Berlin Key,” 10, 20. I owe this reference to Brown, “Thing Theory,” 12. See also Latour, We Have Never, 10–11. 7. Clark, Being There, 53. For a useful application of Clark and other cognitive philosophers to the early modern period, see Anderson, Renaissance Extended Mind. 8. The phrase belongs, of course, to Foucault, Order of Things. 9. Ashworth, “Natural History,” 306. 10. Foucault, Order of Things, 30. For an incisive critique of Foucault, see Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 1–3. 11. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:237, also discussed by Stagg, Chap. 2, above. 12. See Chalk’s essay, Chap. 3, further. 13. See Chalk’s essay, Chap. 3, further. 14. See Scarry, Body in Pain, esp. 3–23. 15. Wright, Passions of the Mind, 125. See also Balizet’s essay, Chap. 10, further on this point. 16. See Damasio, Feeling of What Happens, 150. 17. For this argument, see Damasio, Descartes’ Error. 18. Elizabeth’s “Armada” speech at Tilbury, 9 August, 1588, in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 326. 19. For extended discussions of mettle/metal, see also Paster, Humoring the Body, 37, 46–47, 59, 101–02, 223–26. 20. See Floyd-Wilson, Occult Knowledge, 7–8, for an account of what animals like and dislike. On emotions in animals, see Paster, “Melancholy Cats,” 113–29. 21. See Tigner’s essay, Chap. 9, further on this point.

Bibliography Anderson, Miranda. The Renaissance Extended Mind. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ashworth, William B. “Natural History and the Emblematic World Picture.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C.  Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 303–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries. Vol. 2. In Works, edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. 7 vols. London, 1626. Reprint, London: Longmans, 1857–74. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

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Bono, James J. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine. Vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Vol. 1. Edited by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair. 6 vols. 1621. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000. Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1997. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin, 2005. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Daston, Lorraine. “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe.” Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 149–73. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Edited by Marcus, Leah S., Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Latour, Bruno. “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things.” Translated by Lydia Davis. In Matter, Materiality, and Modern Cultures, edited by P. M. Graves-Brown, 10–21. London: Routledge, 2000. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Paster, Gail Kern. “Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in The Legend of Temperance.” In Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., 137–52. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004a. Paster, Gail Kern. “Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism Across the Species Barrier.” In Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, 135–88. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004b. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Mind. London, 1604.

Index1

A Adam and Eve, 151, 195 Albala, Ken, 147, 158 Alchemical discourse, 110 Alchemical experiments, 115, 117 Alchemical principles, 117 Alchemical procedure, 117 Alchemical process, 115 Alchemical trial, 118 Alchemist, 115, 117, 123n51 Alchemy, 111, 112, 114–118 Alchymist, 114, 115 Alloy, 121n24 Anatomie of Abuses, 70 The Anatomy of Melancholy, 53, 58, 179 Animal products, 7, 89–91, 94, 95 Animals, 195 Appetites, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196n4

Arden, 8, 125, 127, 129–131, 173, 180, 184, 194 Arden of Faversham, 8, 167–169, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182, 184, 194 Aristotelian, 59, 60, 62 Aristotle, 47n1, 111, 122n36 Armada, 105, 107, 109, 111, 119n5, 196n18 Armada (Heneage) Jewel, 109 Armor, 107, 111, 112, 118, 120n9, 121n29 Arnold, Janet, 113 The Arte of Limning, 139 Astraea, 115 As You Like It, 36, 125, 127–131, 133, 139, 141–143, 194, 195 Austen, Ralph, 160 A Treatise of Fruit Tree, 161 Avicenna, 58

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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200 

INDEX

B Backgammon, 168, 173, 174, 180, 182, 194 Bacon, Francis, 34, 55, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120n14, 158, 190, 194 Bacon, Nathaniel, 158–160 Baconian, 193 Beer, 160 Bennett, Jane, 88, 189, 190 Bile, 16 Black bile, 53, 57, 58, 88, 122n39 Blank verse, 13 Blood, 2, 7, 33, 36, 38, 48n42, 53, 57, 70, 71, 86–91, 94, 95, 115, 178, 190, 191, 193 Bloodletting, 171 Bloodline, 179 Bloodshed, 184 Bloody, 168 Bloom, Gina, 169, 170, 174, 182 Boaistuau, Pierre, 39–41 Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, 4 Body, 112 The Body Embarrassed, 4 The Body in Pain, 72 Body natural, 112, 114 Body of brass, 7, 105, 108, 110–114 Body of brasse, 121n24 Body politic, 114 Boerhaave, H., 60, 61 Bono, James, 189 Book of Minerals, 93, 98n32, 121n23 Botanical, 162n19 Brass, 111–114, 118, 120–121n23, 121n24, 121n29, 122n33 Brass body, 113 Breath, 6, 14–18, 20, 31–38, 41, 42, 44, 47n22, 54, 75, 93, 191, 192 Breathe, 42 Breathing, 192

Breth, 45 Brethe, 45 Bright, Timothie, 34, 35, 45, 46 Bright, Timothy, 77 Brooke, Humphrey, 51, 52, 54, 56 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 176, 177 Children’s Games, 176 Bulwer, John, 73, 77 Burton, Robert, 16, 53, 56, 58, 179, 192 Butter, 94 C Caesuras, 6, 15–18, 20, 191 Calverley, Walter, 168, 175, 178 Camden, William, 105 Canterbury, 150, 155 Cardano, Girolamo, 147 The Castell of Helthe, 73 The Castel of Helth, 147 The Castel of Helthe, 45 Cecil, Robert, 105, 115, 151, 155 Cecill, Thomas, 7, 106–108, 111–113, 118, 194 Cecill’s equestrian, 113 Ceruse, 92 The Changeling, 72 The Character of the Passions, 41 Chess, 168, 174 Children’s Games, 176, 177 Chironomia, 73 Choler, 2, 167, 172, 173, 178, 193 Choleric, 61, 91–94 Choleric complexions, 58 Choleric humor, 173 Cider, 150, 160, 161 Claudius, 21, 32, 74, 75 Clowes, William, 79 Coeffeteau, Nicolas, 40 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 4, 87

 INDEX 

Coinage, 108, 120n12 Coins, 7, 108, 109, 118, 194 Complexion, 53, 89, 92, 114, 149, 160, 170 Concoction, 54, 55, 171 Conversion, 128 Cook, Harold J., 60 Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, 158 Cooper, Thomas, 33, 37 Cornwall, 79, 80, 192 Crooke, Helkiah, 16, 19 Crucifix, 127, 130, 136, 139–141 Culpeper, Nicholas, 58 Culture of metals, 118 D Daley, Stuart, 130 “Dangers Averted,” 109 D’Assigny, Marius, 56 Daston, Lorraine, 189, 191, 193 Davies, John, 114, 115 Deer, 3, 8, 133–135 Depth model, 19 Depth of a character, 20 Depth of stress, 21 Depth of the character, 21 Depth ontology, 19 Depth psychology, 20 De sanitate tuenda, 147 Descartes, René, 32–34, 45, 71 Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne, 159 Dice, 168, 169, 173–175, 177, 179, 180, 182–184 Diceplay, 174, 180 Diceplaying, 174, 180 Dido Queen of Carthage, 17 A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 40

201

Dismemberment, 7 Doctor Faustus, 17 Du Laurens, André, 40 Dürer, Albrecht, 1–3, 8, 9, 125–127, 131–133, 139 E Earl of Essex, 7, 105, 119n1 Ecology of things, 88 Eden, 149, 151, 162n19 Edenic, 151 Edward IV, 77 Ekphrasis, 138, 139, 141, 142 Ekphrastic, 138 Ekphrastic descriptions, 128, 138, 141 Ekphrastic portions, 141 Elements, 53, 89, 94, 108, 110, 112, 114, 122n36, 122n41, 190, 191 Elizabeth I, 7, 130, 150, 194 Elyot, Thomas, 45, 73, 147 Equestrian, 106, 113, 117, 121n32 Erotomania, 40 Essex, 108, 110–115, 118, 119, 120n13, 121n29 Euripides, 76 Evelyn, John, 160, 161 F Ferrand, Jacques, 40, 41 Firenzuola, Angnolo, 159 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 4, 110, 196n20 Occult Knowledge, 196n10 Forest of Arden, 128 Foucault, Michel, 191 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 23 Fruit preserves, 153 Frye, Susan, 106, 107 Fungibility, 5, 112

202 

INDEX

G Galen, 4, 13, 23n3, 134 Galenic, 4–8, 45, 52–63, 63n4, 88, 93, 122n39, 152, 170 Galenically, 2 Galenic humoral, 2, 4, 5 Galenic humoralism, 3, 4, 114, 192 Galenic humorality, 2 Galenic non-naturals, 93 Galenism, 1–3, 5, 60–62, 108, 112 Galenism stubbornly, 5 Galenists, 54, 57, 58, 61, 63 A Game at Chess. Arden, 174 Garber, Marjorie, 72 A Glasse for Gamesters, 172, 175, 182 Gloucester, 78–80, 192 Gold, 108–112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120n13, 122n48 The Golden Legend, 135 Gosson, Stephen, 70 Great Seal, 113, 117, 118 Greenblatt, Stephen, 127, 142 Grootenboer, Hanneke, 156 H Hackett, Helen, 116 Hamlet, 16, 21–23, 32, 74–76, 111 Hamling, Tara, 130 Harington, John, 171, 175 Harris, see Richard Harrys (Harris) Harrison, William, 115–118 Hart, James, 55, 57 Hartley, David, 61, 62 Harvey, Elizabeth D., 37, 38 Hatfield House, 151, 155 Haydocke, Richard, 158 Heart, 6, 13, 14, 16, 21, 31–37, 40–42, 45, 46, 53, 75, 76, 78, 87, 105, 107, 111, 191, 194 Heartbeats, 13, 14, 191 Hearte, 35

Henry VI, Part 2, 36, 74 Henry VI, Part 3, 36, 73 Henry VIII, 74, 150 Henslowe, Philip, 92 Heywood, Thomas, 77 Hildyard, Nicholas, 117 Hilliard, Nicholas, 109, 113, 117–119, 123n51, 129, 139 Hillyard, 116 Hippocratic, 4, 52 Hippolita, 17 Historie of Four-footed Beasts, 8 Holinshed, Raphael, 181–183, 185n4 Horticultural, 148, 149 Horticulture, 155 Hubert, St., 125, 127, 128, 139 Humoral, 2–8, 32, 35, 39–46, 47n25, 61, 63n5, 72, 78, 128, 149, 151, 152, 158, 160, 161, 170–174, 178, 181, 184, 192–194 Humoral bond, 133 Humoral disorders, 112 Humoral disposition, 127 Humoralism, 5, 7, 9, 62, 192, 195 Humorality, 1–5, 7, 9, 46, 159, 195 Humorally, 8, 108, 147, 151, 154 Humoral refinement, 114 Humoral state, 133 Humoral subjectivity, 133 Humored, 191 Humoring the Body, 4 Humors, 2–9, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24n7, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 45, 52–56, 58–63, 78, 86–96, 97n18, 98n32, 98n41, 112, 114, 122n39, 128, 134, 147, 149, 151, 158–160, 170–173, 175, 179, 180, 184, 192, 193 Humoural, 53, 55, 57, 59 Humouralist, 59 Humoural versification, 23 Hyllyard, 118

 INDEX 

203

I Iago, 142 Iambic pentameter, 13, 14 Iatromechanical, 52, 60, 61, 63 Ibn Sı ̄nā, 58 The Idea of Practical Physick, 170 Idolatry, 130 Interiority, 2–5, 21 Intertheatricality, 95, 96 Inwardness, 4, 6, 20–22

Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 139, 158 A tract containing the artes, 158 Lord Admiral’s Men, 88, 92, 97n13, 98n35 Love melancholy, 39 Lovesick, 40, 42, 44, 46 Lovesickness, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 39 Lungs, 15, 16, 21, 33, 37, 41, 191 Lyveden, 150, 151

J Jaques, 8, 36, 127–131, 133–136, 138–141, 143, 194 Johnston, John, 170 John Tradescantes Cherrie, 158 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 86, 87 Juniper, Barrie, 156 Jupe blanche, 113

M Macbeth, 36, 70, 78, 81n6 Macbeth, Lady, 111 Maddern, Philippa, 60 Magnus, Albertus, 93, 98n32, 121n23 “Market” and “kitchen” paintings, 149 Market gardens, 148, 153, 154 Marlowe, Christopher, 17 Massinger, Philip, 77 Material culture of metals, 108 Materiality, 90 Material memory, 86–90 Medallic badges, 118 Melancholics, 6–8, 35, 40, 58, 61, 75, 122n39, 128–131, 133, 135, 138, 143 Melancholic vision, 128 Melancholist, 77 Melancholy, 1, 2, 34, 40, 57, 62, 77, 78, 125, 127–131, 133–135, 138, 143, 181, 183, 194 Melancholy complexion, 1 Melancholy humor, 3 Melancholy Love, 41 Melancholy stags, 8, 191, 194 Melencolia, 3, 9 Melencolia 1, 1 Memento mori, 149

K King Henry, 150 King John, 74 King Lear, 18, 70, 78, 81n6 Kitchen, and market paintings, 149 Kitchen gardens, 153 Kitchen-physic, 171 L La Chambre, Marin Cureau de, 41 La Jupe Blanche, 105, 112, 113, 121n29 Lambeth, 154, 156 Latour, Bruno, 87, 190 Lavinia, 44, 46 Lawson, William, 154, 155 The Country Housewives Garden, 154 Lemnius, Levinus, 39, 42, 43, 54–58

204 

INDEX

Menzer, Paul, 43, 44 Mercury, 110, 116–118, 122n48 Mercury sublimate, 92, 115 Metals, 7 Metalwork, 2, 108, 123n51 Meteorologia, 111 Meteorological, 36, 38, 44, 192 Metre, 14, 15, 21, 22 Metrical beat, 13, 14 Middleton, Thomas, 72, 168, 169, 174, 175, 179 The Revenger’s Tragedy, 193 Milk, 93, 94, 98n45, 134 Mind of gold, 7, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114 Minerals, 93, 111, 114, 118, 120n23, 193 Mineral souls, 89 Much Ado About Nothing, 36, 111 Mulcaster, Richard, 15, 172, 176 N Nardizzi, Vin, 4, 87 Naturals, 53, 61 A New Orchard and Garden, 154 Noble, 7 Noble metals, 110, 113–115 Non-naturals, 4, 6, 8, 53, 61, 63, 88, 93, 170, 171, 173, 181, 184 Northbrooke, John, 174, 175, 180 Nurserymen, 148, 155, 156, 158 O Observations on Man, 61 Occult Knowledge, 196n20 Occult Knowledge, Science and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage, 4 “Of Astraea,” 114

P Pain, 54 Paints, 7, 85, 88–95, 98n36, 193 Pallas, 106, 107, 119n5, 120n9 armor, 107 Panofsky, Erwin, 3, 125, 127–129, 131, 133, 135 Paré, Ambroise, 22, 93 Parkinson, John, 150–152, 154, 155, 158 Passionate, 43 Passions, 6, 7, 14, 15, 19, 24n7, 31–38, 40, 41, 43–46, 47n25, 52, 54, 75–78, 88, 93, 167, 170–173, 175, 178–180, 182–184, 191–193, 195 Passions of the mind, 171, 180, 184 The Passions of the Mind in General, 14, 167 The Passions of the Soul, 32 Paster, Gail Kern, 4, 5, 8, 19, 22, 23, 37, 47n25, 64n37, 112, 133, 171 Humoring the Body, 195n4, 196n19 “Performing Pain,” 6 “Phoenix” badges, 109 Philosopher’s stone, 117, 118 Phlegmatic, 93 Phoenix, 109, 118 Phoenix Jewel, 109, 118 Pig, 87, 91 Placidus, 127, 135, 136, 139 Plat, Hugh, 153, 154, 162n32 The Player’s Passion, 43 Pneuma, 37, 190, 191 Pomona, 160 Positions for the Training Up of Children, 172, 176 Pre-Reformation, 150, 194 Preserves, 152, 153 The Problems of Aristotle, 31, 34, 41 A Prooued practice for all young Chirurgians, 79

 INDEX 

Properties, 86–95, 97n31 Props, 71, 86–96, 97n9, 167, 193 Prosody, 13, 23 Prospero, 37 Prostheses, 86 Prosthesis, 108 Prosthetic properties, 86 Prosthetics, 86, 88, 92, 193 Psychological materialism, 88 Pulse, 13–15, 23n3 Pythagoras, 58 Q Queen, 194 Queen Elizabeth, 194 Quicksilver, 92 Quinces, 149, 152, 153 Quintilian, 76 R Rainolds, John, 71 Recipe book manuscripts, 153 Recipe books, 148 Recipe manuscripts, 153 Recipes, 152, 153, 162n24 Reformation, 128, 130, 136, 143, 195 Regan, 192 Relics, 136 Religious pastoral painting, 127 Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 86 Reynolds, Edward, 19 Richard Harrys (Harris), 150 Roach, Joseph R., 43, 46 The Roman Actor, 77 Romeo, 38, 42 Romeo and Juliet, 38 Ronk, Martha, 141–143 Rosalind, 36, 131, 143 Royal College of Physicians, 52

205

S St. Augustine, 150, 155 St. Eustace, 8, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133–141, 143 St. George, 91, 92 Sammern, Romana, 160 Sanguines, 56, 58, 91 Scala naturae, 89, 95 Scarry, Elaine, 72, 192 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 4, 6, 7, 19, 45, 64n37, 192 Scot, Reginald, 85, 86 Scourged, 193 Scourges, 168, 173, 175, 176, 178 Scourging, 176, 177 Second Great Seal, 113, 116, 117 Semper eadem, 112, 194 Sennert, Daniel, 93 Shakespeare, William, 8, 32, 36, 39, 40, 42–44, 46, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 111, 125, 127–131, 133, 135, 138, 139, 142, 143, 194, 195 Shakespearean, 191, 192 Sharp, Lionel, 107 Sheep, 86, 87, 91 Sidney, Robert, 153, 154 Silvius, 36, 37, 42 Smith, Bruce, 110, 112, 118 Spirites, 34, 40, 42, 43, 77 Spirits, 15, 16, 19, 22, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 53–55, 57, 58, 60–63, 78, 110, 115, 171, 172, 182, 190, 192 Spiritus, 37, 170, 171 Stag, 125, 127, 129, 130, 133–136, 138–141, 194 Stage properties, 2, 6, 7, 87, 89, 193 Stallybrass, Peter, 86, 87 Still Life, 159 Still-lifes, 148, 158 Stubbs, Philip, 70

206 

INDEX

Sublimate, 92 Sullivan, Erin, 4, 23, 24n7 Sundrie new and Artificiall Remedies against Famine, 153 Sylva Sylvarum, 34, 110, 190 T A Table of Humane Passions, 40 Tables, 167, 169, 173, 175, 179–182, 184 Teares, 77 Tears, 32, 34, 36–40, 44, 75, 128, 138 Temper, 94, 110 Temperamente, 42, 43 Temperaments, 5, 6, 53, 57–60, 63, 91, 93–95, 122n36, 152 The Tempest, 37 The Theator or Rule of the World, 39 Theatrum Mundi, 39 Theophilis, 92 Thesaurus, 37 Thesaurus Lingae Romanae et Britannicae, 33 Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, 71 Tiefenpsychologie, 20 Tilbury, 7, 105, 107, 112, 118, 119n2, 119n4, 119n6, 121n29, 196n18 Tis Pity She’s A Whore, 17, 94 Titian, 129, 139–141 Titus, 44 Titus Andronicus, 44, 78, 94 Tops, 8, 168, 169, 173–179, 193 Topsell, Edward, 8, 133, 134 The Touchstone of Complexions, 39 Tradescant, John, 155, 156 Tradescant, John the Elder, 155, 156

Tradescant, John the Younger, 155, 156 the Tradescant Cherry, 157 Tradescante, John, 155 The Tradescants’ Orchard, 8, 156, 158 A Treatise of Melancholy, 34, 77 Treatise of the Passions, 19 Treatise on Playe, 171 Tresham, Lady, 151 Tresham, Thomas, 150, 151 The Trojan Women, 76, 77 Tsentourou, Naya, 35 Twelfth Night, 42 Two Angry Women of Abington, 168 Two Unnatural Murders, 175, 178 U Ugieine or a Conservatory of Health, 52 V Venus and Adonis, 78 W Waad, William, 115, 116 Wall, Wendy, 152, 171 A Warning for Fair Women, 168 Watercolors, 156–158 Wax, 7, 87–91, 94, 95, 113, 117, 118, 122n33, 193 Weeping stag, 134, 138, 140 West, William, 95, 96 Wilcox, Thomas, 172, 175, 182 Wines, 53, 55–58, 61, 62, 150, 160 A Woman Killed with Kindness, 168, 174

 INDEX 

Women, Beware Women, 168, 174 Wood, 89, 97n18, 190 Wounded stag, 128, 129, 134, 135, 138, 140 Wright, Thomas, 14, 73, 167, 173, 193 The Passions of the Mind in General, 172

207

Y Yellow bile, 53, 88, 94 A Yorkshire Tragedy, 8, 168, 169, 173–175, 177, 179, 184, 193, 194 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 69